"Season's Greetings" From Recruiters

This year there's a new fad among them recruiters: they carpet-bomb everybody with "greetings" e-mails.

This is pointless as:
a) one does that only to the fellow employees in a professional environment;
b) coming from a recruiter this looks like spam -- maybe I corresponded with 20 this year? I get 20 greetings then?

-ulianov

Another Attack of the Resume-Grabbing Drones

This is an agency that ping-ed me once about a job. I was not interested. Apparently they have fished my e-mail address from Monster and have started this new & improved spam campaign.

Foobar Placement Services, LLC has just launched their new and improved website. It has some interactive features you can take advantage of today!

Foobar Job Alert - Simply register your search criteria in our Job Alert function and you will be notified via email whenever a job is posted to our website that fits your criteria. You will also be entered into a quarterly raffle to win tickets to the See Science Center just for registering.

Email a Friend - If you happen to be searching our jobs and see a position that could benefit a colleague, you can easily forward that job posting to them.

Polls - There will be new poll questions and results every month on hot topics related to the current employment market.

Timecards - Easy access to our standard timecard that can be printed for contractors currently on our payroll.

Please visit our site www . foobarplacement . com and allow Foobar to start working for you!!

Regards,
The Staff at Foobar Placement Services

-ulianov

Job Posting on Crāigslist/Tōrōnto

Here is a mock job posting on behalf of the typical agency I found on the list:

[...] Our tense, open-concept, uninsulated work environment, emphasis on work-life balance (90%-10%) and tepid rewards help make us nearly indistinguishable from the rest. Founded too late in the tech boom, our state-of-the-warehouse-art headquarters is located beside a busy stamping plant.

We are looking for developer wannabees to restock our demoralized developer pool and be another faceless cog in our digital sweatshop.

The Softheaded Engineer is mainly responsible for generating billable hours. If the customer complains, the Softheaded Engineer is then responsible for the lack of technical specifications, technical design, code, unit and integration tests, despite the insane schedule and zero budget. He/she will also be subjected to ridicule at unscheduled occasional design and code reviews, none of which results in high quality software services and offerings. The deliverables are expected to pacify, or at least confuse the customer, by at least seeming to meet the statement of work. Softheaded Engineers are also responsible for continuous post-release fixes to bugs that were hidden from the customer. Softheaded engineers rarely participate in initiatives to improve processes, standards and practices. [...]

• The ideal candidate is a programming whiz with low self-esteem, with degrees in Confuser Science, Election Engineering, or Behavioural Physics.
• 1 - 2 years industry experience desired, max. Any more and you'd know enough to avoid shops like ours.

I think the best bit is «The deliverables are expected to pacify, or at least confuse the customer.»

-ulianov

A Call from a Finnish Recruiter

Last year I talked to a Finnish agency and that ended up with a job offer from Nokia, so this things are for real. Yet this guys wrote to me from a .hu e-mail adress. His name is Finnish tho. Strange.

I did find your contact info from the Romanian Bestjobs website. Consequently, I would like to inquire your initial interest in co-operation in a field of IT consultation in Finland/other Scandinavian countries as we are looking for the contractor/consultant to work in our customer projects.

[...]

Mainly we are looking for consultants to a project based assignments. Projects duration vary from 6 months to a year.

May I ask you what would be ideal position for you?

The last question sounds interesting or it may be this guy's wobbly English.

-ulianov

An Annoying Piece of Virāl Mārketing

I got in the e-mail this piece of personalised "new-medium" marketingspam from an agency I had interacted with in the past:

You've trusted Ant & Bee with your resume over the years
and our Recruiters have been working hard to help you with
your job search. I would like to personally thank you for
working with us and also take this opportunity to extend a
new service too you:

Control your own career.

”Worker ants. Busy bēes.®” is our recruiting engine at work
on Faceboōk. Using the exponential power of referrals, you
can now tap into Faceboōk's 300 Million users to help you
find a job. Just like Wikipēdia transformed encyclopedias,
we believe social networking will revolutionize your ability to
post your resume and find a job.

As the President of Ant & Bēe, I am extending you an
invitation to join me in revolutionizing the Recruiting industry.
I encourage you to send me a friend invite on Facebook
(Find me as Alecō Bōrba, http://www.facebook.com/aborba?ref=name)
and to post your resume too (http://apps.facebook.com/antandbee).

You and your friends get the benefit of referral fees paid
directly to you, and employers get the benefit of hiring
someone that was referred by a friend.

See you online!

Alēx Bōrba (aka Alecō)
President
Ant & Beē Corporation
facebōok@antandbēe.com

These creeps will use any medium or channel to advertise their inept slogan and ineffective [for me] services. Somehow this "ant" metaphor (and the knowledge of the nature of ant hills) suggest a sweatshop to me. Just an impression tho.

An their use of the (R) character in a piece of spam is sweet!

-ulianov

P.S. I use "funny" characters to shield this page from being indexed by a search engine for the wrong reasons.

When Spammers Read^H^H^H^HRip Off Job Boards

Monster is magnificent at letting spammers harvest e-mail addresses. I had to change my Monster e-mail address thrice so far.

But what do you do when you address is myaddr@mydomain.com and spammers send you mail at myaddrdd@mydomain.com? Well make up a fake MTA and pick it up and see what they wanted.

The most shameless spam I got this way had a "confidentiality" notice attached to it which read:

                No part of this newsletter may
                be reproduced in any form or by
                any means, electronic or
                mechanical, including
                photocopying, recording or via
                any other information storage
                and retrieval system, without
                our written permission.

And the spam was even copyrighted!

Cool! You have to admire their gumption.

-ulianov

An Annoying Trait of Character

K.DE. of Burlington, MA called me about a contract at a company (A) that had called me before. Last time A was looking for a Principal Eng. but was quite unwilling to pay the market rate so I did not waste time engaging them.

So I knew what to expect of A.

The recruiter e-mailed me than talked to me and promised to submit my Resume to the company. All fine. Early next day he calls asking if I am "sure" about my pay rate. As a matter of fact I am and I am charging exactly the amount required for my skill level and experience.

Don't you find that recruiters keep bugging you asking whether you are "sure" about your rate? Maybe you have doubts and are willing to work for less? How about 60% less?

I find this to be a very annoying flaw in the recruiters' characters. What irks me is that after I secure the contract the recruiter becomes a humongous parasite that makes $15-20 for each hour I work. So for a week this guy makes $800. For six months say $19,200.

Not bad at all I say. And as he's pushing you to charge less he will get more which in my book is unacceptable.

-ulianov

Being on the Other Side of the Fence

My current employer uses us chickens (aka. contractors) to evaluate potential new hires [other contractors].

So I got to see how hard is to recruit a new hand. The fact that the company is located in a forsaken hole in Upstate NY does not help either.

So I got to talk over the phone to "embedded Linux" programmers. About four of them. Three were beyond hope, having no idea about the topic at hand.

One of them was such a retard that was not able to parse our technical questions an kept droning on and on and on how "we" (i.e. people at a former company) did this. His blabberings had no bearing on the current question being asked of him.

And I find that when a candidate says "we did this and that" he actually did not do any of that and is taking credit for some other people's work. This is just WRONG because a candidate is evaluated based on his own skills and accomplishments.

Coming back to the fourth potential hire: they guy gave half-decent answers to technical questions but (and this is a big one) his past six positions read literally "Some Company in Some Place in MA or NH".

This just does not smell right to me. Queried by the hiring manager he stated that he did that because recruiters would keep calling him and asking about openings at past companies.

In my experience this is a lie: a recruiter would not waste his time this way (as he knows contractors come and go and don't maintain links to the powers-that-be at past companies). Also in my experience a recruiter asks only about whether the current company is hiring [which stands to reason].

On a different note I started asking questions and challenging a candidate's answers. I must admit that I was a bit unprepared at first (I did not have a mental list of things to ask) but lately I quite enjoyed it.

-ulianov

The Worst Formatted Email from a Mor^H^H^HRecruiter

This is the ad (click on it to see better):
And the prize goes to K. who inflicted a horrendously formated piece of spam upon me (see below). Note the miss-speleling and the funny looking vertical bars that showed up real nice in my Yahoo mail.

What's worse this clueless recruiter wants .NYET, Visual Basic (the horror!) from a Linux developer.

-ulianov

On Being Idle

I got a job in NY in Dec 2008 so I am busy with that. I stopped taking calls from recruiters or checking their e-mails. Anyways their memory is short so this has no implication for future "relastionships". (Have you tried talking to a wall? Did it talk back when you were not stoned? ;)

I must say that I do keep in touch with those recruiters I like (only a handful of them). A polite refusal of a job offer goes a long way.

-ulianov

P.S. I see that most of the hits on this blog come from people googling for "What makes a good resume?" [which BTW I am not answering]. This is boring. I want controversy!; I want to be in the recruiters' face!

Unusual Job Ad in Phoenix, AZ

M.C. sent me this ad for a "Direct Embedded Position" (up to 95K):

You'll be writing C/C++ code for Diagnostic Equipment
OOD and UML Technologies
Experience with Graphical User Interface

Desired Qualifications
- Embedded Linux
- .NET and C#
- JAVA
- HTLM ,XML and SOAP technologies
- Development experience using networking protocol (TCP/IP, UDP, SSH, SSL)
- Experience with low-level driver development
- ClearCase / ClearQuest tools
- FPGA/CPLD logic using VHDL code

Alas at this moment I am busy professionally but...

I simply love Phoenix, I am a total groupie when it comes to Phoenix [and I am a male] and I'be been looking for something there for two years.

The sour grape in this is the C# which is the very last thing I would do, the second to last would be working for Micr0soft [I shall blog about my interview there one day].

Other than that it looked great, especially the dollar figure (jobs in that area have a ceiling around 80K). I did not answer this call.

-ulianov