Never underestimate the stupidity of some recruitment companies.<p>Get a phone call one day, the usual "we have a great opportunity for you"....<p>Sounds great: it's in the same city I work already, same industry, same sort of work, same...... hang on a minute.<p>After stringing them along for a while, I finally ask them to compare my name, phone number and location to that of the person who submitted the job spec only an hour earlier.<p>I only wish I'd seen their face when they realised they were trying to offer me the job <i>I</i> had advertised with them. Especially considering they had grossly inflated the salary expectation.
I once responded to a tech recruiters question of if I was a JavaScript programmer with "so like, on a computer?". Conversation ended quickly.<p>I want to keep a list of recruiters who call me, then suggest each of them as possible hires
<Insert mandatory rant about how we're not all that bad><p>It's recruiters like this that remind me I'm fighting a losing battle.<p>Interestingly, I would be <i>very</i> surprised if 'Steve' and 'Tina' were in fact their real names. They obviously aren't native English speakers. Are recruiters that desperate in the US that they will go to the extent of adopting a more American sounding name simply to increase their chances of picking up business?<p>If these kinds of emails are the norm then it's no wonder the HN community despises our kind.
I always wanted to add a section to the bottom of my CV titled "Technologies I know nothing about" listing everything I can think of, say .NET. Then wait for recruiters calling / e-mailing with messages like "I noticed you have experience working with .NET"...
I am very surprised that many of these recruiters can stay in business. Even if internal HR departments are lazy, how do they get candidates that actually pass interviews? Sometimes I wonder if it's a field with a low barrier to entry, that just weeds people out. It's relatively easy to be a stock broker, but hard to stay in it and make money. Similar with Real Estate.<p>The one caveat on this... Recruiters are also people working for a dollar. One day many of us will need them too. Burning bridges with anyone in the hiring process has limited upside, and potentially large downside. That said, if someone rejects both the polite "I'm not interested" and the less polite, "I mean I'm really really not interested" then it does become fair game.<p>In this case, it's hard to imagine they're much more than a quarter step up the food chain from the folks spamming me about viagra.