I just got this email, apparently designed to make me want to work for Company X, but it had the exact opposite effect.
I am a recruiter with Company X and I sourced your resume from the Internet. Company X currently has several opportunities available. Please visit: http://www.companyx.com/careers.htm and view our current opportunities. (You man [sic] have to copy and paste the link into your browser.) Once you have found a position you are interested in create your profile and apply online.
Upon completion kindly send me an email letting me know which requisition number you applied for so I can follow up with you.
Thanks for your time and interest in Company X.
Where should I begin with this?
- You "sourced" my resume? Is that lame recruiter speak for "I was punching buzzwords into Google when I ran across your resume..."?
- You were impressed enough with my resume (found on my own web site) to send email (with an obvious typo in it, no less), yet you felt it necessary to warn me that cut and paste might be necessary to find your web site? How insulting!
- Your jobs site sucks. I looked. Have you even tried it yourself?
- Why do I have to do all the work? You've read my resume and contacted me. Yet I'm supposed to start from scratch, search your listings, create a profile, and then contact you. Are you kidding? You interrupted my day in an attempt to get me to switch jobs. You've certainly wasted no time trying to put me to work!
- I never expressed an interest in Company X.
Here's a helpful hint to all Big Company recruiters out there. Before you contact someone, try putting yourself in their shoes first. Do your tactics even make sense?
Posted by jzawodn at September 11, 2006 12:23 PM
Just another example of the disconnect between employers and candidates.
Recruiters don't understand that 1) they're not trusted, and 2) people want to be recruited. If a recruiter can't figure out what job you'd be good for at their company, then why did they contact you?
This is becoming a perfect storm - low unemployment, inefficient job boards like Monster and Hotjobs (sorry, but it's just recruiter spam and Yahoo is probably happy with the revenue from that), and content providers looking for another way to monetize their sites through niche job boards. All these things will soon change the way employers recruit.
Here's a good article:
http://blogs.ocregister.com/gadgetress/archives/2006/09/tech_worker_sho.html
You're too kind in not pasting it verbatim, with the name.
That said, did they actually reference your resume URL somewhere, or could this be random spam that 100,000+ people got, and you just assumed they actually did it halfway manually?
Gosh, now that'd be impersonal, wouldn't it?!
I'd *really* feel loved it I was part of a "select group" of 100,000 being spammed.
I've started to get more of these kinds of contacts via email but to be fair, most have been legit and interesting - stuff that actually makes sense for me and a recruitment attempt that was very personal. However, phone calls are a different thing. I have a policy not to answer my phone if I don't recognize the number or if I'm not expecting a call from someone. So it seems it's become a weekly thing to find voicemail messages from recruiters who have lowballed my value, lowballed my desired pay for a contract position that is outside of my skillset by two-to-three years. It's unseemly.
I love it when I get mails like that where the recruiter claims to have "seen my resume on the net".
No, you didn't. Thank you for playing.
> Do your tactics even make sense?
When, in the entire history of mankind, has this *ever* stopped *anyone* from doing *anything*?
I'm just sayin'.
I always find it amazing when they send me Word documents for positions I cannot possibly match. For example it will be for an Oracle dba. The words Oracle, Database and Administration do not even occur on my resume. I even put what positions I would be best at in the first paragraph!
On my resume it clearly says that I prefer small companies/startups. I have to wonder what the recruiter from a $200m company thought when mailing me in a very similar style to what you got (ie no specific position, URLs for me to do their work etc)
To be fair, or to offer insight, recruiting is set up at some Big Companies, in an unnatural way: Sourcers, Interviewers, Closers. Don't blame all the recruiters, when it's management that is at fault. I suppose some engineer contributed linear thought into what would make a great recruiting process. Ugh.
As a full life-cycle recruiter, I couldn't be more appalled, by the Mickey Mouse recruiting by some Big Companies. There are even smaller companies emulating the Big Guys. And then there are good recruiters, who have to deal with the aftermath.
Understand, most sourcing specialists don't even get to spend time with internal engineers nor the hiring authorities.
Someone thought recruiters needed a career ladder; that's part of how the model was sold to management.
They "sourced" your resume? If they read it, that means they had to "open" it with a software application. Does that make your resume "open sourced" now?
*rimshot*
:-P
As an independent consultant that has to endure connecting to clients thru third party firms (thanks to IRS laws that can't define what an employee is), all I can say is, “welcome to my world”. I recently put up a post, “Recruiter Etiquette - Resume Trawling”, http://donxml.com/allthingstechie/archive/2006/08/23/2898.aspx that explains a similar issue I have with recruiters and how I’ve tried to handle emails like the one you received. Basically, don’t put your daily email address on the resume. Instead put a unique one there for each public site you place it (if you put it on more than just your site), and just have it bounce the emails back to the recruiter. Then, in your resume, have a section that gives the details on what types of positions you are interested in, and in that section let the recruiter know that they should contact you via your contact page on your website. This way, you can filter out the recruiters that just do keyword searches from the ones that actually read your resume. And, yes, I do get recruiters from Fortune 500 companies sending emails to the bogus email account. One day I’d like to just publish the names and email address of all those recruiters, but I know that would be career suicide. I've already been contacted by recruiters that know me, and were really pissed at my resume trawling post.
Don, I'll be your atta girl. Heck, if I ever do publish I'll credit you as a source. It's a study on the industry and it makes a strong case for change. It also contains solutions that I was hoping to share competitively with an employer as a shining example. It's carmkelly [@] cox [dot] net. Share please? I love analyzing the recruiting field and problem solving.
It's getting worse and worse every week at Y! - I'll be in the middle of writing code or having a discussion with my manager in my cube only to get interupted from a recruiters phone call telling me how exciting their company is and that I would be a huge success bla bla bla. Please, just leave me alone as well.
What's the deal with the Sony logo at the top of this blog post?
Hi. As a sincere, caring recruiter who has made it my career to help people find jobs, I just have to say - IF YOU DON"T WANT TO BE CALLED BY A RECRUITER THEN DONT POST YOUR RESUME ON THE BOARDS. POSTING YOUR RESUME FOR SOME REASON, MAKES US THINK YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A JOB. duh!!!!!!
I haven't posted a resume to a job board for many years. WTF?
This is a fine example why corporations should outsorce to a trusted, professioanl search firm.
As a professional recruiter, my job is to make it as easy as possible for both the candidate(s) and the clinet(s) to connect, while I do most (not all) of the work.
