recruiting

The Recruiting Nightmare #9 – Spamming Speed!

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OK all your hard work as a recruiter, all that effort, all that time . . . and then you find a lot of potential recruits are getting spammed by bodyshop agencies or less-than considerate recruiters.  So of course your responses can get lost in the mail, and you’re competing with these bozos.

It’s gotten ridiculous and it’s getting more ridiculous over time.

I get spam in my inbox for things I haven’t done for years – like programming and engineering.

I get spam from people for geographic areas I told them I’m not interested in.

Lately I get spam on jobs that are so unrelated to what I do, I think someone twigged onto one keyword in my resume.

I’m not alone. A lot of my friends get strange things, and if you did a wide-ranging job search, chances are your resume ended up a lot of databases.  A lot of databases poorly matching you to jobs.

Recruiters have to compete with this.  They can be made to look bad.  They can get real requests lost among the BS.  They have to just plain go up against the spammers.

It’s almost a joke in a way, because of the way people dump resumes left and right.  Now they’re getting spammed as well.

It’s not the worst thing recruiters face, but it’s annoying.

JOB SEEKER TIPS:

  • Make an effort to get “spam recruiters” to back off.  It’ll clear your inbox.
  • Learn to recognize recruiters you trust.

HELP OUT RECRUITERS:

  • Helping recruiters find people via networking is a good way to dodge spam-recruiting snatching people.
  • Also help recruiters craft good response letters so they don’t get written off.
  • Try not to use less ethical agencies where you work.

GEEK EXTRA:

  • I’d like to see a list out there of spammy recruiting companies that people could pass around.

– Steven Savage

Steven Savage is a Geek 2.0 writer, speaker, blogger, and job coach.  He blogs on careers at http://www.fantopro.com/, nerd and geek culture at http://www.nerdcaliber.com/, and does a site of creative tools at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/. He can be reached at https://www.stevensavage.com/.

The Recruiting Nightmare #6 – Here Comes The Resume Storm

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Some recruiters don’t get enough resumes.  I’m not going to cover that, because that’s part of the larger problem of finding people.

Some recruiters get the right amount of resumes.  Great for them.

Then there’s the resume storm, where a flurry of potential employees floods some poor recruiter’s inbox, website, profile, whatever.  Then this “fortunate” person with “many” options has to sort through them.

This is another part of the challenges facing modern recruiting. 

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The Recruiting Nightmare #5 – Networking Nuttiness

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Fine, fine, so making job postings, evaluating them, and getting them out is kind of hard and challenging.  So a recruiter can rely on networking, correct?

It’s easy to assume that.  We hear all the time that networking is the solution to us finding jobs – and in many cases it’s right (well, partially).  So it has to be the solution for recruiters as well.

Not exactly.

Networking relies on you connecting with other people who connect you with other people and so on to finding the right recruits.  Sounds simple enough, right?

The problem breaks down in that whole “other people thing.”  Networking only works if the people in your network do it as well, and do it well enough.  As is noted endlessly in job searches, seminars, books, and my own writing, a majority of people aren’t too hot at networking.

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