Lately, since I refreshed my resume on the job boards, I have been receiving duplicate calls from recruiters who are outside of US borders and obviously are not speaking English as their first language.
I do not harbor any ill toward those hard working individuals, but I cannot understand them given my impaired hearing. They are given the task of doing all the cold calling to potential recruits based upon scans of the job boards and matches of keywords.
It seems that many big name agencies in the US have now resorted to doing this in order to compete in the recruiting business. It is drudgery and very unpopular among young recruiters.
The problem is a “Freakonomics” problem where the analysis of the money stream finds conflict with the purposes of recruitment. The callers are paid by contacting the potential recruit, confirming answers to basic questions on a script, and getting the recruit to send a confirming email with the latest resume attached.
This would be innocuous if it were not for the redundant calls made to the potential recruit and if it was communicated for what client or customer. The clients or customers want to be withheld until the cold caller secures the confirming email and resume. That is their guarantee of payment for the work. The problem is the candidate has no idea if they are being resubmitted many times to the same job; which eliminates them from consideration.
If that hurdle is cleared by the candidate, the recruiting agency that hired the cold caller then calls and wants to discuss the job when the candidate has not been told that someone else might call. This is often made worse by having the cold caller’s “manager” call to verify the contact or to ask even more scripted questions. At this point you may have had three to five phone calls and spoken to total strangers that have no idea about your true capability or experience.
Once these challenges are met the recruiter then wants a couple of things to make their job easier. First they want the recruit to talk to the account executive that has the requisition from the client. Again a nontechnical stranger does a filtering of your resume details and experience. Second they ask to have your resume modified to a shorter length and to only discuss details pertinent to the job offering. The reasoning is that the “hiring manager” doesn’t read long resumes.
At this point I often look at this circumstance as impossible as I may never get to talk to an individual who has the technical moxie to see I have more than enough capability to perform the job requirement. To make maters worse they then often want two or three references from supervisors from previous, read most recent, jobs.
What they may fail to realize is that when one signs on to a contract there is specific language that precludes discussing any details of the contract with anyone outside of the contracting organization and the customer.
They’ll do dumb things like ask “why did you leave the last job after eighteen months?” when it is obvious that contracting jobs last short periods and complete so that you leave and go looking for more contracts.
They’ll ask what you want to do. The employment desired section of your resume is never read.
They will always ask for you to lower your hourly rate. They must not realize that one looks for another job or contract expecting to receive the same or greater compensation than what has gone before. They also could just be chiselers.
Alas I have amassed a long list of blocked phone numbers, do not answer phone numbers, PITA phone numbers, spam email sources, and trash email lists in an effort to not waste too much time on these characters.
Tell me about your experiences please. -BL