Yakoob on 20/1/2012 at 21:12
So as some of you may know I am back in LA and, since I only have a part time job and my side projects leave me with some time, I figure I can pick up on some extra work. So I decided to update my web/programming resume and profile on CareerBuilder. Dear lord, I opened the floodgates of hell.
I've been routinely getting 3-5 calls and equal number of emails from recruiters *every single day*. Which would be quite awesome as far as prospects go, if it wasn't for the fact none of them seem to be even remotely literate. So far I got a bunch of:
* Jobs I am very clearly not qualified for (job states "2-3 years of mobile game development on iPhone and Android" whereas my resume clearly has none)
* Jobs in fucking Massachusetts despite me stating I am not willing to relocate (this happened with other states too)
* Recruiters asking me if I currently work anywhere (protip: "2010-Present" does not refer to Christmas)
* All the jobs are full-time, despite my CareerBuilder profile quite clearly stating I am NOT interested in full-time but *only* part time.
The last point is especially driving me insane because they are just wasting my time. I had a conversation go like this yesterday:
:cool:: "blah blah blah so it's a great position for you!"
:erg:: "Is this a part time job?"
:cool:: "No"
:erg:: "I am only interested in part time jobs at this time, sorry."
:cool:: "How come?"
:erg:: "I already have another part time job I'd like to keep"
:cool:: "Well why don't you get a full time job?"
:erg:: "..."
Erm ok, thanks for telling me what I should be doing with my life mom.
Also, is it just me or are there like five billion IT Staffing/Recruitment agencies out there? Like I said, several calls/emails a day for the past week or so and I have yet to see a repeat. And of course all of them have terrible/borderline scammer reviews online. I guess lesson learned: "shotgun approach - not only for hitting on girls!" Oh and, of course, half of them are all indians. "Headquartered in New Jersey" my ass...
Yakoob on 21/1/2012 at 02:54
Just to clarify before people call me ungreatful, nobody actually offered me a job. I am talking hear about those middle-man recruiting agencies (usually outsourced abroad when I google them) that simply offer to *submit my resume* to a random company somewhere in massachusets which I am 3 years under-qualified for and which tenure does not match my availability, while getting a 15% cut of my salary. Multiple times over (with varying details). Since they usually get pay on comission, they dont give a crap how accurate they are, they just wanna meet their monthly quote (which I guess answers my question)
Thanks, but I can spam my resume to every single job posting on CareerBuilder/Monster all over the US too if I wanted. And I can do it without involvement of ScammyTech™ Inc.
Sg3 on 21/1/2012 at 05:03
Not exactly the same thing, but this somehow made me think of Monty Python's "Job Interview" sketch.
ANTSHODAN on 21/1/2012 at 12:35
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Just to clarify before people call me ungreatful,
nobody actually offered me a job.
Well I did nearly post last night "It's hard to be sympathetic when you've been unemployed for 9 months"...:laff:
I know what you're saying about these recruitment guys though. I'm registered on a whole bunch of job sites, and I keep getting offers from recruitment agents - however they have exclusively turned out to be some kind of scam or another, or at least, they ask for money 'for training'. Makes you sick really.
Sg3 on 21/1/2012 at 14:54
Quote Posted by ANTSHODAN
they have exclusively turned out to be some kind of scam or another, or at least, they ask for money 'for training'. Makes you sick really.
Aye--it's always those who can least afford it who seem to be the targets of this sort of thing. Impoverished college students, the senile elderly, etc. Grr. When I am King, there shall be justice.
heywood on 21/1/2012 at 17:43
I would think twice about posting your resume to sites like Monster or Career Builder. In this job market, most legit companies have stopped trawling through resumes from these sites. Instead, they post their openings and let the applications come to them. So your resume & profile information is worth next to nothing anymore and that's why only these bottom feeders buy it.
The worse part is they don't just spam you. They also liberally spam companies and legit recruiting agencies with your resume, and the unscrupulous ones even submit online applications without telling you. It's not uncommon for companies to receive resumes/applications from multiple sources for the same applicant and the same position. In fact, it's so common that at least one company I worked for used it as a filtering criteria to automatically weed out the spam and the shotgun job seekers, so it's conceivable you could have your perfect match dream job application bit-bucketed without even a look because some recruiter has already spammed the same company with your resume.
Another scourge of these employment sites is recruiters who repost positions that a company has already publicly posted (sometimes on the same board!) with the company name removed and the position description slightly altered or paraphrased to fool people into thinking it's a different job.
Rug Burn Junky on 21/1/2012 at 19:03
I'm incredibly suspicious of recruiters, based on a number of experiences.
For one, during the 90's tech boom, my gf at the time worked as a recruiter fresh out of college. It was a straight sales position. They were salaried just barely above minimum wage for the first 6 months, most of them burned out, and the ones who didn't were put on a straight commission. (She lasted about a year and a half. Right after I broke up with her, she opened her own shop, made a mint, sold the company just before the bubble burst, and opened a restaurant upstate. Every woman I dump goes on to financial success.) But it means that the trainees were out there trying all sorts of incompetent shit, including shotgunning resumes, and as heywood mentions: even doing so without your permission.
In the legal field it's a bit different. A lot of the same dynamic exists, but there are a few who actually do provide value. During my whole career at a firm, I would get recruiter calls constantly trying to poach me for various positions, and most of these guys are purely cynical salesmen.
The height was in '07, when the legal market was still hot, but my firm - a fairly elite niche corporate finance firm - started offering buy-outs to the attorneys. They announced it at a firm-wide meeting that morning, before I even got back to my desk I had multiple messages waiting for me. Word travels fast, and like it or not, resumes are the products they sell and ours were a sudden trove on the market It took me a couple of weeks to weed through them and find one I trusted. I kept a spreadsheet on every one who contacted me, so I knew what they were offering and I could compare them in one place.
A good recruiter working with you is like having an agent as an athlete or entertainer - they'll actually advise you and be a strong advocate for you. They'll have relationships that they can use to your advantage.
He didn't end up getting me my next job, but he got my foot in the door at several firms for interviews (including two that I submitted on my own, based on his advice, for which he would have earned no commission), and during my last gap in employment in '09-'10, he gave me some good networking advice that eventually led to my getting my next job (again, no commission for him). Unfortunately, during this time another recruiter torpedoed my shot at a firm in which I was interested - he fired off my resume without my knowing, and when I followed up, they let me know that they dinged me because they weren't about to get involved in an argument between two recruiters.
For the most part? Heywood has good advice. Guard your resume, and make sure that they know what they're doing before you commit. I won't send my resume to a recruiter until I know I want to work with them. If a posting or position is too cagey about either the agency or the underlying job, I'll take a pass, even when I was out of work for over a year.
The other thing is to ask questions - find out what kind of relationship they have with the places to which they're submitting your resume: do they have an exclusive? have they ever placed anyone there before? Find out their own experience: did they work in your field before they became a recruiter? How long have they been doing it? Remember: you're the product that they're selling, so they're trying to "buy" you cheaply - even in a buyers market like this you have some leverage, so you should use it to get the best deal possible, and that means only committing to recruiters you trust.
Ironically, my worst experience with a recruiter actually ended up getting me a job - though it was one that I ended up hating. But beyond that, they wasted my time for two days scheduling a prep session for my interview. These can be really helpful - if they give inside details about what the employer is looking for. Instead, they kept rescheduling and when they finally met with me, they spent a half an hour telling me to "be enthusiastic" and couldn't answer any of my more specific questions. I mean, really? That's all the advice you have? She even left the room to bring in her manager ("He's the one with the relationship with HR") and he basically told me the same thing. Fucking christ, you could have just sent me a txt message as a reminder and it would have done the same thing.
I actually cut it short early, and to this day it kills me that that bitch got $30k out of my placement for a job for which I completely sold myself without her help.
demagogue on 21/1/2012 at 19:07
The whole business of looking for a job, period, is bad mojo. It's like adding insult to injury, you feel like you're treated like some kind of criminal that just got out of jail, people you need suspect you of being tainted and people you need to stay away from want to prey on you and leech off your weak position, and all the while you're not doing what you want to be doing, forced to do what you don't want to be doing, and not making a penny for it the whole time. This is of course why I loath the idea of ever dropping a job to look for even a better one, and why it's unfortunate that international law is such a sporadic field & has an unnatural tendency to offer positions as Fellowships and year-long contracts, which make them look like non-serious "temporary" work, and even while you're working you're still job searching for the next thing... Ugh, I have fatigue from the whole thing.
Edit: Re: Recruiters for public law and international law (which means federal gov't lawyers or int'l organization lawyers [e.g., UN lawyers], academics, & legal NGOs, and a few firms ... all of which I've done at some point) are beyond useless. All US federal gov't jobs & UN jobs have their own board and applications are standardized. Schools have their own system, like some fellowship or clinic that's their own thing with their own rules; they care mostly just about who (what professor) you've worked with before & what you've written. And for NGOs, the field is small and a lot is done just by personal networks (half the jobs are probably when the employer already knows you from a previous position, or they know someone you've worked for and ask that person for people, and the announcement is buried on some website if at all). There's pros and cons for it... You know the field of your competition is small & you've got a special path to employers through your past employers, but if something in your narrow field isn't opening up you can get kind of locked out until something does, and you can't just take some random other legal job (except for document review, called "shitlaw" for good reason). It's different from the way more traditional law firms work I think where there's a little clearer "career path" and when you move laterally they know more where you're at (in terms of years of experience). But for public law, every job is it's own thing so it's a total mixed bag. Even if the jobs are cool individually, the way they look lined up can be a big question mark.
But anyway recruiters can't expect any commission for public law employers in any event, and if you ask them about the field they wouldn't have the first clue about it. I tried talking to a legal recruiter once, and very quickly figured out she couldn't say a single thing to me about my field.
