Thursday, August 28, 2008

An Eternal Recruiter's Hook & Bait

S.S. of Burlington, MA sends me this boilerplate hook & bait:
I recently came across your online resume and after reviewing your qualifications, I feel you would be a great fit for an application developer opportunity we have available. Please feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience and we can discuss this opportunity in further detail.
Three cheers to this: no location, pay rate or even job description. A conversation opener as they call it. I hate when they send me such useless e-mails.

-ulianov

A Recruiter Misfires on an Ottawa Job

Z.L. of Newton, MA writes:
I hope this email finds you well. My name is Z.L. and I am a Technical Recruiter for Deleted’s engineering team based in Newton, Massachusetts. I saw your skills and experience on Dice.com and wanted to reach out to you to see if you would ever consider a web developer position with Deleted. The position entails working with Javascript and PERL. We have a number of exciting projects going on in our Ottawa branch and your skills match up really well with the caliber of candidates we are looking for right now. If you are interested in learning more please don’t hesitate to contact me.
The only thing he got right is my love of Perl but he did not catch my dislike for LAMP jobs, be them Perl or PHP. What's worse he did not read one line of my Resume.

-ulianov

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Micr0soft is at it Again!

B.A. of WA who works for a a recruiting agency that subcontracts for Micr0soft HR sent me the following note:
I found your resume on the internet. After reviewing your skill set I thought you may be interested in our upcoming recruiting event. Please review the description below and let me know if you would be interested.

Have you imagined yourself working for one of the largest software development companies in the nation, and working on cutting edge technology?

....

Thank You and I hope to see you in Redmond.
There are a few things that annoy me: he sent me the e-mail from an address that is not @micr0soft.com (which is already blocked in my e-mail server) and he's fibbing: the e-mail address he used is one that I planted only on monster and dice so he did not pick it off the Internet.

-ulianov

P.S. He got stuck in the e-mail validation step. Gosh it's so good to have that. Nevertheless altho the e-mail sent by these creeps bounce [and they see it as "Not Sent"] I do save a copy so I know who called ;)

Monday, August 25, 2008

A Recruiter that is a Useless Tosser

C.B. of NC wanted to hook up with me on LinkedIn with the following pickup line:
I hope this finds you well. My name is C.B. and I am a Technical Recruiter with the Deleted Group in Raleigh Durham, NC. I wanted to contact you, not for the initial intent of asking to be in your network, but because your resume is impressive and reflects a lot of what we are looking for in an Embedded Software Developer. We actually have a direct hire embedded position with a GREAT company that is new to the Raleigh area. I have the job description but they are too long to include in this memo. Is there an available email address I could send them to? Thanks, I appreciate all your help. Thanks in advance, C.B.
Mind you, the lack of line breaks and the churning of words (not unlike James Joyces' stream of consciousness) belong to her.

I connected with her and sent her an e-mail and learned that she has a f/t job. Bah.

-ulianov

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

A Super-Stingy Employer in California

M.M. of Burbank, CA sent me this funny piece (in a e-mail that uses many font colours):
The ideal candidate will be someone who only has a couple of years exp. a real go-getter, they DO NOT want to see candidates with more than 4-5 years of exp. they would like to mold this person and looking for candidates who are interested in growing with the Company into a Director level at some point. Must be very FLEXIBLE. Needs a “trainable” type person. Culture is Jeans & T-Shirts, no sandals or shorts. Interviews will be conducted of a panel of managers & leads in the group.

The position will pay a base salary between $80-100K and this is based on salary history. We offer a base salary, bonus (not eligible this year), Stock options and matching 401K. Local candidates are preferred but a great candidate with all the intangibles would be worth taking a look at from out of state. They do an EXTENSIVE criminal background check.
The requirements are on the hacker side (e.g. SoftICE, 2+ years of MS-Wind0ws drivers), yet they are exquisitely, bitterly cheap for California.

Such stinginess gives me the creeps. The company makes forensic analysis tools sold to law enforcement. Must be making lots of money for them... And to add insult to injury they do EXTENSIVE checks on you; I bet they even fingerprint people. Yuck, yuck, yuck!

-ulianov

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

The Most Annoying E-mail Subject from a Recruiter So Far

M.S. of Andover, MA sent me an unsolicited e-mail with the following Subject line:
Urgent: Read Carefully - Immediate need for experienced blah-blah Software Engineers
So this creep is looking actually for ASP/C#/.NET and ActiveBatch. Of course he did not pass my e-mail validation with such idiotic requirements.

-ulianov

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

A WinCE Job in Montreal?

B.B. of Farmingdale, NJ wants to send me to Montreal, QC to work on a Wind0ws Mobile drivers & stuff for a Smartphone. This bloody creep did not read a line of my Resume or he would have effing noticed that I have no SDL, UML and Wind0ws crap.

-ulianov