Recruiters, Part II
Okay, first off – I am happy in my new job. Things can be stressful, but the pay and atmosphere is good, it’s a small company without overhead, meetings, red tape…everything that makes working for a Fortune 500 a royal pain. And being a small company, there are nice perks, easygoing management, and a chance to work at my own pace. Maybe there are some tiny issues with insurance or 401k plan choices – but overall, I get paid a lot to do something that I enjoy and can do easily.
However, being that I am now officially entering my late 20’s (I turned 27 last weekend), I am always open to options. I would love to work in the banking/financial industry, and being here in Charlotte, I have some excellent opportunities headquartered here (Bank of America, Wachovia, etc). I also know that healthcare companies are always looking for people with wide-scale experience, and now that I am approaching possible project manager age, I figured it would do no harm to update my resume with what I have been doing for the past 5 months. Of course, I made those small changes on Monster, as well, where my resume is stored.
Almost immediately, the calls started pouring in. Recruiting companies, headhunters, consulting firms, and emails from Monster searchers. The weird thing is, as soon as your resume is active, it hits everyone’s searches – and over the next few weeks, it propagates out to call lists for cubicle-based headhunters at every firm you can think of. Sometimes they are calling you with an opportunity in mind; sometimes they just call you to talk. Sometimes they email you a position that doesn’t fit your location, experience, wage, etc. For instance:
Feb 14th: Chase Staffing services emails me a position for Application Programmer, Unix/Perl. I am not sure what in my resume screamed ‘Unix Programmer’…maybe it was the Business Analyst position, or the PL/SQL programming experience. I told her that I no longer work with recruiters; I only negotiate with employers directly.
Feb 27th: Sadanandan (real name) emails me from Tek Systems, a contract position as an analyst in real estate. I don’t work contract, and I don’t know squat about real estate. She doesn’t even include numbers. I told her to not contact me unless it is something a) in my field of expertise, and b) in my wage range. Otherwise, I will ignore her emails. “If at all possible, I don’t work with recruiters. “
March 3rd: I get a call from Scott, Sherpa Technologies. He looks over my printed resume for a while, then finally comes out with “So why are you looking to leave your job?”
“I’m not.”
Slight confusion. “Oh. Well….then…”
“Scott, it appears every time I update my resume, it gets farmed out to recruiters and firms that automatically assume I am desperately looking for a new job. I’m happy in my current job. I just updated my resume. I haven’t applied anywhere or asked to be contacted by anyone.”
He was slightly taken aback, but these people don’t have normal social skills; they’re after dollar signs. “Well, let me gather some information about you, in case we can find something that will fit you in the future.”
March 4th: This was one of the best. I got an email from a recruiter; the email address said ‘Sarah Sullivan’. She was looking for someone to fill a 1 year contract-to-perm position at Wachovia, with Mercury ITG and Oracle experience – a perfect match. And in the financial industry…this was one I couldn’t let go. So I sent Sarah an email, saying I was happily employed, but depending on the circumstances I would be willing to listen to the details, considering my strengths were a match.
I immediately got a call from a woman with a thick Indian accent. “Hello, Michael?” she said. “This is…” looooong pause. “This is Sarah, from Genesis 10. I’d like to talk to you about the Wachovia position?”
Sarah? Sarah Sullivan? Oh my god, I had been hosed by the grade-school-girlfriend sounding name! I was really talking to Sabhukan Ranamaddadan. This wasn’t Sarah. She had to take a few seconds and shuffle papers to remember she was ‘Sarah’. Why did I feel like I was talking to a hooker? Hey, Big Boy….my name is whatever you want it to be.
Isn’t this a bit demeaning, to our Indian phone representatives? Can you imagine a boss saying “Sorry Rajnandhini, our surveys find that your name is just too hard to pronounce for stupid Americans. You are now ‘Suzy’!”
I just got another one, an email with horrible grammar, from ‘Johnson Joshua.’ That’s not just email reversing the names; the email address is ‘johnson@ stupid_consulting_firm.com’. Looks like another outsourced one trying to use generic names, only they got the family name reversed. Great!
Once again, I think the amount of consulting, recruiting, and staffing firms for IT jobs simply boggles the mind. IT people are supposed to be tech-savvy; they are the ones who should be able to post their resumes on the right websites, go after the jobs that have their skillsets, and talk intelligently about whatever skills and roles they are comfortable with; why is this fluff-level making such an increasingly large impact in our industry? And why is one loser updating his resume with a few catch-phrases generating hours upon hours of emails and calls for these agencies? Isn’t there something more productive that humanity can do with it’s time? Are there recruiters out there for other job fields – do doctors get harassed by calls from Hospital Placement Agencies? Do construction workers get hounded by Girder Staffing, Inc?
Why on earth are so many companies paying premiums over and above already outrageous IT payrolls, for some English-impaired cube farm worker to go out and send their job posting to anyone with an email address and a keyword in their resume? Why is this such a booming business that 5 different companies can contact me about the same job from the same company, in the same day? Is the revenue from these referrals really enough to keep an entire company afloat, from the big boss to the cube worker? If so, we have some serious issues with the economic structure in this country.