Recruiters are really beginning to bother me.
My contract expired in mid-February of this year; I am still a full-time employee, but I am no longer contractually bound to stay at my current job. At the time, my work atmosphere was very poor, morale was low, and despite raises from my boss, I was thinking of looking elsewhere. So I updated my Monster resume, and sure enough, the calls started pouring in.
First of all, apparently IT recruiters don’t care where you
live; the city, the state, the general region of the
Many of the recruiters that call me are not from the state
where the job is. Most of them are not
even familiar with that state, and the general distances involved (“I’m sure they can offer you a per-diem or
something to commute from
“Do you have
experience with ADL in a current SDLC environment with RAD?”
“Hmm…I think so. What does ADL stand for, exactly?”
“…I…well, I don’t
know. All it says here is ADL.”
They literally read from a set of job requirements;
there is no higher cognitive function going on, just simply into-eyes,
out-of-mouth processing. So I find that,
if IT departments are looking for employees with knowledge of Mercury IT
Governance, you can simply list on your resume a fascination with the planet
Mercury, and you will still get calls
from idiotic recruiters.
Don’t expect the details you list on Monster, CareerBuilder, Jobs.com, or Dice to matter; Careerbuilder lets you explicitly list any area you are
willing to relocate to, or interested in receiving offers from. I picked
Kudos to the two that were in the same state as one I preferred.
Even your resume doesn’t matter. The very first thing that any call or email from a recruiter will involve is, “Can you please email me the latest version of your resume in a Word format?” I have done this probably thirty times. It began to dawn on me – why even have an online resume? They might search on it, but only to find you and demand that golden Word doc for their internal collection. Your online resume is really just bait. They won’t transcribe it, or copy and paste it, or really pay attention to it aside from the initial bite.
I would like to assume the best; they want to see your resume and experience in your words, to see how you present yourself, organize your skills, check for basic organizational and grammatical proficiency. But that’s not important for most IT jobs. Apparently, it’s not all that important for careers in recruiting, either.
I have now been officially offered my own job, by one recruiter. It was a one-year contract, for about a $15,000 increase in pay, so I sent in my resume and got a follow up call. Only during our conversation did the recruiter realize that my resume included current employment under the company he was recruiting for. Do these people get paid?
Even after finding this information out, he still eagerly pursued me, trying to convince me to become a contractor with his firm and abandon my full-time position. I mulled it over – packing all my stuff from my desk one Friday, walking out and waving goodbyes, then returning the following Monday as the new contract hire. “No, no need to send me to training classes. I’m a fast learner!”
It really scares me that so many companies don’t have functional HR departments, or don’t trust their own judgment enough to take care of these hiring duties themselves. It is causing a huge market for recruiters, contracting companies, and other IT staffing services that are performing as worthless middlemen. As a prospective employee, they will ignore your resume and experience, ignore your salary requirements, talk ignorantly about topics you understand, and give you job offers on the other side of the country. As an employer, they will refer anyone your way in the hopes of making a buck, they will charge you extraordinary amounts for sub-par contractors, and they will not represent or understand your needs in any real way.