Claiming to be “Technical”, but technically not knowing anything
If they claim to be a technical recruiter, they shouldn’t say a Java position is a “perfect match” for me, because I had JavaScript listed on my resume.

Not knowing anything about the job.
“I’ve got a great opportunity for you at a company here in town. You need to know PHP, SQL, CSS, HTML, and it looks like you have those qualifications” I’m not sure if they expect me to say “Oh great! Sounds like my dream job!” from that much, but 9 times out of 10 when asking “What does the company do?”, they can’t tell me anything. “Software”, one said.

Pretending we had a conversation, when we didn’t “Hey Jeff, sorry I didn’t call you back sooner, but this is…”, or “Hey Jeff, this is Phil from XYZ Recruiters, we talked last week”. That’s low.

Calling after successfully matching you with a job, to see if you want to change jobs.
Now that their commission has processed, and they’re not bound by a contract with the company they hooked you up with, why not try to get another commission out of you? Loyalty.

Not respecting my calling preferences. The last time I was job hunting, I listed my resume on monster, and had loads (5+ a day) of recruiters call me as early as 7am. It became annoying to have the same conversation with them over and over, especially since I listed clearly that I only wanted to be contacted via email. Which brings me to the reason for this post: When I ask to be removed from your call list, respect that.
I had a run-in with a recruiter a earlier this year, and have been slacking a bit on posting about it. First, I got the following voicemail:

Hey Jeff, this is Tony with [Recruiting Company] out of Milwaukee. I don’t think you’re familiar with our company, so I’ll tell you what we do exactly. We’re the fastest growing program placement search firm in the world, and we work with a lot of Electrical-Controls Engineers. I have an exciting opportunity for an experienced Electrical Controls Engineer, down in the Carolinas. It’s for an OEM equipment manufacturer, for high speed packaging. I’d love to tell you more, though, my number is [#]

While perfectly polite, there are a number of things wrong with this:
1. I don’t live near the Carolinas
2. I have never marked the “I’m willing to move for employment” checkbox on any resume listing service.
3. I haven’t worked in the Electrical/Controls since 2004.

So rather than continue to receive calls offering jobs I’m not interested in, in areas of the country I don’t live, I called back and simply asked to be removed from their call list. The guy I talked to, Kevin, seemed a little confused, but after I politely said no to a few guilt-enriched questions such as “Are you sure you don’t want to stay on our list, so you can improve someone else’s life by helping them find a job?” he reluctantly agreed not to call me again.

The next day I received the following email from Tony, the recruiter who originally called me.

Subject: Sorry I wasted your time

Jeff:

It obviously bothers you to network with a professional that specializes in your industry. It also seems to bother you that what I was calling about could possibly improve the quality of someone’s personal and professional life. Well, if that’s the case, trust me, you’ll never hear from me again. Your ego is so large that you have to call us back and berate us to take you “off our list”? Well, if calling you on 6/5/06 and then again on 5/19/08 is too often, buddy, you obviously don’t have much to worry about in your life.

Wow! That paragraph crescendoed, no?

I’ve debated whether or not to post the full content of the emails on this blog, here, and have decided that yes, I will. Part of me feels like it’s information overload, bordering on you thinking I’m trying to display my email zinging prowess, but I’m not. These emails tell a story of a sad, sad, recruiter, desperately avoiding the realization that the career he chose is a complete sham.

Also, I had some pretty good zingers that are worth sharing.

Anyway, my retort to his first email:

Dear Tony,

I’m failing to understand how my simple request for you to remove me from your list of possible job-seekers was out of line, and further how it warranted such an unbelievable response from you. Apparently I hit a nerve. Did removing me from your list leave you with no one else to call? I suppose I should welcome irrelevant phone calls? Under that same logic, maybe I should start signing up for spam.

The fact is, your call was yet another example of recruiters taking blind stabs at possible job applicants instead of doing the necessary research involved in producing a quality match. I’m sure my name got added to your list in 2006, either from a site I voluntarily listed myself on, or a recruiter I had spoken to. At that time I was looking for a job in the “Electrical/Controls” field, but since then I have switched careers to Software Engineering, moved states, and worked 3 different jobs. When providing my information to the aforementioned sources years ago, I am sure I specified that I was only looking for jobs in my local area, so the fact that the “exciting opportunity” you were calling me about was not in my current field and over 1000 miles away makes it unbelievably irrelevant.

Further, my resume isn’t even listed on any resume sites currently, as I’m *not looking for a job*. I’m satisfied with my current job, and in the future when I’m seeking other employment, I will relist my resume on job seeking sites, so that I can be contacted. However, when I’m happily employed, I have no interest in hearing about your job opportunities for a field I’m no longer in, in a place I don’t live. Is that so unreasonable? I felt that your snarky subject line “Sorry I wasted my time” was absolutely true–which is why I asked to be removed from your list.

So thanks again for your professional email. I’m glad to see that you’re improving the already impeccable reputation of recruiters.

Jeff

His response:

Jeff:

I’m not going to get into an email war with you. I am simply trying to do my job and that is attempt to network with industry professionals who want to either enhance their career and/or have the common courtesy to point me toward someone they could help. Jeff, I have found that overhwhelmingly, the best people at what they do are currently doing what they do. They are not sitting on Monster.com and catching up on the Flintstones in the afternoon.

Thanks for the tip on how to do my business, but quality matches come from meaningful conversations, not “blind stabs”. If our last “meaningful conversation” was in 2006 and your career objectives have changed since then, I can apologize for a lot, however, I will not apologize for my lack of mind-reading skills. The vast majority of our candidates come from good, old-fashioned phone calls, networking and the subsequent conversations, not job boards or the internet. That is the “necessary research involved in finding a quality match.”

Apparently, I also hit a nerve with you and unwittingly called a guy who has absolutley no clue of how this all works, but is ready, willing and able to dispense advice. To be fair, I’ll explain rather than only take a shot at you… The “research” also entails finding “quality matches” that have personality, communication and chemistry. It’s not solely about a verbatim match of skillset to job description. I’m sure that you’re in a good job right now and regarding that, I’m happy for you. But to treat us like lepers because we are trying to help our client find the best? Should I also aplogize for contacting “irrelevant” people that seem to do exactly what my client is looking for? Scratching my head on that one, Jeff…

Bottom line: It’s all about helping people and improving the quality of their lives, but if those darn trees weren’t in the way, that forest would be much more visible. Or, is it just plain selfishness? Not sure and I don’t really care to find out at this point because you will not hear from us again. And I stand by my “sorry I wasted my time” statement, however snarky it may be viewed by you. Dang, now I did it a second time! My bad.

Did that even make sense? I don’t think so.

The final reply:

Harassing people via email is also part of the job, I see. Does everyone who dares to request to be removed from your call list get a verbal beating? The level of professionalism you show is impressive.

This email conversation ends here. I have gone from being annoyed at your rude responses and your inability to understand simple logic… to pitying you.

Good luck with your future career, and your anger management classes.

I might have been a little harsh at the end there, but man, he had it coming.

The big news is that since you last heard from me, I moved out of New York. This didn’t really work out as smoothly as I had hoped, but I trust in several years I’ll look back on it as a great character building experience.

Here are some decisions we made, what we thought, and what actually happened.

Instead of taking a Penske Truck and driving all of our stuff to Texas, we decided to sell most of our furniture, and ship the rest.

We thought: Shipping our furniture would save us the hassle of driving a moving truck in the snow (I hate to point fingers, but my lovely wife was actually the one who was pushing for this one). With high gas prices, we’d actually save money by shipping.

Actually: Selling enough of our stuff to sell was tough. The feeling we imagined and the feeling we felt seeing lamps, tables, favorite old couches, and everything walking out the door for pennies were vastly different.

Further, shipping was a fucking nightmare. Instead of simplying packing up our shit any old way and stuffing it into a truck, we had to pack it securely to ship, and then rent a car to get it to DHL and the post office. Both companies completely trashed our stuff. Lots of wedding gifts are now shattered messes in the garage, and due to New York’s shitty supply of sturdy cardboard boxes and our own stupidity, it’s doubtful we can get the insurance we paid extra to compensate us for any of the damages. Further, of the 7 boxes of books and CDs we sent via USPS Media Mail, only 5 arrived. An entire box of expensive nursing textbooks and 250 CDs have disappeared. We got a message from the post office a month ago with the address portions of our cardboard boxes neatly cut out and sent to us along with a note stating that “these were found loose in the mail”. Perfect.

As nice as it sounded to replace our old random furniture with things we both like, the feeling that we’re just hemorrhaging money right now without any income is not a good one.

Further on the spewing money front, we agreed to go to South Africa with my brother and cousin in a couple of weeks. While this technically works out well (I wanted to go with my bro, since he remembers more of it than I do), it’s unfortunate that we’re spending another giant chunk of change without having a steady income yet.

We thought: Driving a minivan stuffed with crap across the country would be fun
Actually: It was a pretty fun, I guess, in a painful sort of way. One thing that did work out well, is that while we were leaving New York, Maggie’s Aunt (in Minneapolis) offered to give us her 2002 Ford Escape. This threw a scheduling problem in the mix with our rental, which we solved by doing the unthinkable: driving back to Minneapolis after we had arrived in Austin. Total, we drove 4500 miles over a 10 day period. That’s a lot of driving, folks. Our honorary trucker certifications are in the mail, supposedly.

We thought: It would be easy for Maggie to get a job
Actually: It was. The job she’s at now didn’t exist before she whipped out her resumé with Columbia on it. Maybe the massive debt is worth it?

We thought: We’d go crazy about how cheap everything is compared to New York
Actually: Everything is so frickin’ cheap! Everything from huge spacious apartments, to drink prices, to pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream. All so cheap!

We thought: Having a car would be great, here.
Actually: While it has been great to be in control of my own travel plans, Austin is a shitty place to drive. Traffic is bad, road are poorly designed, and drivers are idiots. Everything from tailgating, nobody obeying the speed-limit, hanging out in your blind spot, and running red lights — these drivers are unbelievable. Coupling that with lanes that change into turn-only lanes without warning, and completely inadequate street lighting at night, the accident rate here is through the roof. I already got rear ended by some jackass while I was trying to change lanes, and I have seen more crazy accidents in the last month than I’d ever seen in New York. The other day I saw two cars smashed beyond belief with police, fire, and medical on the scene…in a parking lot!

Other good things:

• I think my expectations of customer service are so low from living in New York, I am constantly amazed by how nice and helpful people are here. I don’t get attitude at Starbucks, and grocery store workers actually know where their products are located.

• We’re moving out of my Cousin’s house at the end of this month, which I’m really looking forward to. As well as we get along with him, there’s really nothing like our own space.

• Maggie started working today, and I have a second interview at a pretty hot sounding startup company. Hopefully I’ll get that job.

Speaking of, I should really get back to doing some work — I have to study up a bit for that interview tomorrow. I’ll update you again in the next 6-12 months. (I’m setting the bar low.)