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Resume Spamming Redux
wiredog writes "Remember this story about the guy who spammed his resume? Well, now the Washington Post is reporting that resume spamming is a trend. Enough of a trend to have generated a backlash!"
Amusing fallout from an amusing story, and hopefully a lesson for
others too.
Heard about this one on the radio the other day. Same type of thing, for a fee.
Also, my roommate in college shotgunned about 1,000 paper resumes out to IB companies shortly before graduation.
He didn't get any offers.
True resume spam goes to companies whether or not they're hiring and to people inside that may or may not have hire & fire capabilities.
That said, I wish Monster could find me a frigging job here...
GTRacer
- I can do lots of things on a computer
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
You don't understand what spamming is. Posting your resume on job search engines/websites is NOT spamming. That is how you should do it. Better yet, you should find a headhunter and let them do all the work - free for you.
It's when you just stripmine websites for addresses and then create a script to send out thousands of unsolicited emails. It is even worse when you are asked to stop and you continue to do it.
I can testify to the reverse spam. I read an article a few months ago about how spammers get your email address. They addressed a number of ways but the missed the one that got me.
My publicly viewable resume.
I was job hunting and put my resume - full name,address, phone removed - up on Monster.com, hotjobs, dice, ect. I created a new email account, just for recieving responses. Well, the online resume only got me calls from head hunters, but withing a couple months that address was recieving spam like crazy, while my other more guarded address, even the ones I use for online registration and other "unsafe" purposes were still relativly spam free.
This leads me to believe that places like HotJobs and Monster are harvested by bots/spiders for email addresses on a regular basis... If the sites themselves aren't selling them.
Moral of this story is if you post a public resume, keep a seperate mail account for it.
When you're looking for a job, you don't think potentially getting yourself blacklisted, doesn't count as a penalty?! Even if you don't get blacklisted, you still make a bad first impression. Maybe you could have gotten a job there, but not anymore.
When it comes to resumes, I don't think spam is a problem, precisely because it does penalize whoever does it. When someone's selling a make-money-fast scam, they've got no reputation to lose. If you're looking for a job and your resume has your real name on it, you do.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Yes this happened to me. I was stupid enough to use my "main" private email account that was not previously recieving spam (apart from forwards from my friends). Now spam has escalated at an increasing rate, every week it seems my daily rate has incremented.
The humorus side to this is watching the evolution of those who were spamming me. First it was the headhunters and other job-search web sites (blocked some of them), then it sorta moved to "special offers" (ironic they buy their list from those who spam the unemployed); the "make money at home" came soon after that, followed by all the rest of the herbal viagra and diet pill "we spam anyone" stuff. Only now am I getting the good stuff, here's to hot young teen lesbian whores!
Kurdt
I'm not anti-social. Just pro-technology.
I havent posted a resume online in nearly 2 years. Then only to two employment sites, I dont even remeber.
That said I get 1-2 calls a week, half of those from the principals, IBM has called directly, So has MS, they didnt READ the resume apparently, IBM became a nuiscance at one point, I asked where the hell they got my resume, they told me and I tried to track it down but to no avail.
Why are these people who spam resumes getting no response ? Is it lack of their skill sets ? I am a competent programmer on many plattforms and a competent sysadmin when I have to (I hate that part).
I worked at a "Dot-Com" from before they decided the Dot-Com route was the one they would take, when I started there were 10 developers, competent and a total of 17 people, some sales, some clerical. I bolted about 4 months before their crash and burn, it wasnt hard to see the writing on the wall with a burn rate like ours, we were over 100 people in a years time and STILL only had 10 ACTUAL PROGRAMMER, the rest were QA, PROJECT MANAGMENT, All kinds of other made up shit that had no room in an IT company of any worth. We never missed a deadline or dropped the ball UNTIL they started with the project managment crap.
MY point is, All of those 80 people we hired were wholly unsuited for the IT market, those who werent have jobs and had no problems finding jobs, I left for a Higher MUCH salary amongst other reasons.
Did any of these people think theyre not getting hired because theyre better suited to diggin ditches than IT work ????
What they had a taste of the IT glory days and think theyre qualified and dont realize they were just warm bodies ?
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Bottom line - spamming sucks, no matter who is doing it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Anyone use headhunters? I'm skeptical that they aren't as selective as they need to be.
Actually, I'm going to try that when I get laid off.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Apparently there is some passive Zen thing to getting jobs, at least for me: every time someone successfully hired me it was because they were looking for me, not the other way around. By posting to various services like Monster and NOT doing the one-click resume sending thing, I've gotten more calls than I ever did by sending resumes to them actively, even in response to their own ads.
My best success has been from just informing them I'm available, either by website or by listing on job sites. Apparently there's something to be said for the confidence of passivity and not seeming to want it too much.
I'm sure there was a time long ago when aggressive tactics like resume spamming and showing up at offices was appealing (especially in the glad-handling sales world), but now it just seems creepy. It is no longer a benefit to seem desperate.
The REAL problem is the current way jobs are found, or rather, NOT found. And this existed during the peak of the bubble, making it hard for employers to find good people even though many good people existed looking for work even at that time. That problem is that connecting between employer and employee candidates is so ineffective.
Job boards are the rage. But they have only a small percentage of the jobs. Most of the jobs on the boards are posted by professional recruiters and their firms. But the majority of job openings are not listed there because they are not sent to recruiters. These are "less crucial" openings that don't justify the cost of a headhunter, which can be as much as the employee's full first year salary. And most businesses simply don't want to deal with the hassle and cost of posting all their own job openings on all the job boards. It costs a few thousand to post a single job opening to all the major job boards (there are too many of them).
A better designed job board would help. Doing searches on skills, job functions, and other criteria is in many just a cheap string search. And in those few that do more than a string search, they are often limited to listing just skills alone, instead of also other things like what job function roles one is looking for, or needs. I remember getting calls many times for someone to do a programming job in C++ even though I was only open to network management work. The reason was that I have nearly 20 years experience programming in C (not C++), and some board lumped C and C++ together, and never took into account that this was merely a skill and not what I was actually looking to do. I wonder how many potential employers skipped over my online profile just because I looked like a programmer to them (when searching candidates on these boards, employers see profiles first, and have to take extra steps to see the actual resume).
Then there is the fee to post a job. And the fee to view resumes. While the job boards do need to make money these days (especially considering their investors want to see a return on investment), this still remains a big obstacle to getting jobs listed. Some industry analysts say there are nearly a million job openings in high tech even now; a figure I have some doubts about, but I can't totally discard the possibility because I know the vast majority of them won't be posted on the big boards, even if the market was booming (and certainly not during a recession).
It sure would be a big plus to people looking for work if there was a totally free board (free to post a job, free to post a resume, free to search jobs, and free to search resumes). I've even suggested that employers wanting to hire people on H-1B visas should be required to post on the major boards for 3 months before applying to grant the visa, and a free super job board might even make that viable (and get more Americans back to work at American companies ... and maybe similar in other countries, as I hear Germany has a problem similar to H-1B). The problem will be paying for such a board (bandwidth isn't free, now), and advertising probably doesn't cut it anymore.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I used to work for DICE in my younger days, and having supported many a non-techinical technical recruiter I have the following to report...
1) MOST recruiters usually do not care about anything other than adding your resume to their database. This is why the 'Laundry List' job add exists in today's newspapers.
2) Any job that is vague about the position is usually bogus. Look for postings that contain detailed job/project information.
3) If you meet a scummy recruiter (think slimy used car salesman), or someone who does not appear to be on the up and up about the position with you, go somewhere else.
I used a recruiter to find my current job, but I only contacted those that I rememberd being rather reliable people from my contacts in working for the company.
There are a lot of short-term or fly-by-night recruiting agencies created by MCSE's, or programmers who couldn't hack it.
Depends on what he means by "modifying". It's common practice for job seekers to rearrange their resumes to better suit the position they're applying for. If, for instance, they're applying tor a sales job, but all their recent jobs have been non-sales, but they do have sales experience in the past, a resume organized along functional lines would be appropriate. If, however, they want to show length of employment in recent positions, and those positions fit what the recruiter is looking for, a chronologically-oriented resume would be best.
It sucks that this is necessary, but recruiters won't take the time to read an entire resume. I was told that if they don't see something that interests them in the first 15 seconds, they'll toss it and move on, so if what they're looking for isn't near the top, you can kiss that job goodbye.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.