Monday, March 21, 2011

A 'New and Improved' Torture Implement for Recruiters

Years ago I wrote a weeding system for recruiters who carpet-bomb me with emails. Now the time has come to do it for my gvoice numbers.

This was sparked by me wasting one minute on my cell phone [which I pay by the minute] while driving in traffic to respond to a query by a recruiter who want me to work in San Jose, CA for $45/h and who asked whether I am 'sure' about my rate.

Mind you I have SPELLED CLEARLY and in red what my rates are and for what US IT hubs at the top of my Resume as published on Monster and Dice.

Now that I refreshed my Resume on these job boards I expect more dumbarse calls.

So I put in place a little 'screening' (aka. 'torture implement') to weed out some of these types. The crux of the yes/no questions is:

I have a database of people who have cleared the screening or need not to.

-ulianov

P.S. I block all calls from overseas, period. Offshoring has its limits: I strongly object to an overseas agency taking a $20 cut on top of my rate.

Monday, March 14, 2011

The LinkedIn Question

Many recruiters (many of which I've never even talked to) and their brothers wish & demand to connect with yours humbly on LinkedIn.

I use LinkedIn to keep in touch with former colleagues (work-only). It's a convenient tool to do the thing known in the past as networking.

Yet recruiters don't work for me and there are very few I've worked for. So there is no point to stuff my LinkedIn account with people whose modus operandi is basically "don't call us, we'll call you [when we have a need]".

-ulianov

P.S. Lately I took to purging my account of recruiters I've allowed in in the past. So went off the names I did not have a face for.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

On Skills that I am Not Very Fond of

Sometimes one has to do professional things (shameful things) and then deny doing them to no end. Paul Venezia enumerates such a trait:
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 8: We know more about Windows than we'll ever let on
For me things that I know but would never list on my Resume lest swarms of recruiting drones would fall upon me [their cognitive abilities/reading proficiency extend only as far as looking up buzzwords by hitting Ctrl+F in Word] are:
  • Perl scripting on Win32
  • Java, Swing and servlets
  • LAMP webapps (P is Perl in this case)
  • PHP
  • GUI apps in general.
In a pinch when I want to secure a job (maybe it's 5 minutes from home) I may elect to flog such skills and sweeten the deal for my clients.

-ulianov