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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.
I remember when I was in the process years back of trying to organise a startup. I would get spammed endlessly for jobs.
I don't mind people sending me an unsolicited résumé, but the key is to know the company. Form letters can work, but make sure that what's actually in the form letter pertains to what we do.
Currently I work for a company specialised in doing mobile entertainment using a Java platform. Don't tell me about your mad web skills with PHP and MySQL, because that's not what we do. Of course, if you hand-crafted a letter properly...
At any rate, I can't figure out why these people think they'll get jobs. I'll buy a ThinkGeek T-shirt for the first person who can prove that they really got a job from résumé spamming.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
There are some websites that offer to send your resume to interested parties. Some of them send your info to employers that have signed up with the service, in standard headhunter style. Some send your resume to newsgroups in the *.jobs.* hierarchies. These ones almost always seem to have bad aim, as regional jobs newsgroups are flooded with postings from other areas. I wouldn't be surprised if other services spam your resume without your knowledge. Although this should reflect badly on the posting service, it is more likely to reflect on the person whose name is in the message. That would be the job seeker whose resume was spammed without his/her permission.
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
My friend who graduated from college last year spammed his resume and was hired by a Department of Defense contractor. He didn't email his resume to random companies, but instead he submitted his resume to every job search engine/website. It worked and now he has a sweet job.
I asked him about the job listing that he was hired for, but he doesn't even remember which website had the listing. People are just trying to find honest work when they send their resumes out. There isn't really a reason to take someone to court just because they sent you an unsolicited resume.
Rangers Lead the Way!
The worst fallout I have experienced from such a tactic is head hunters calling you non-stop: "Hi, I am so-and-so, I have the perfect job for you - call me" IF you call them, they are full of BS and waste your time trying to pimp you out to job positions that you don't want jsut so they get paid. And they never stop. They "follow up" every few months, snail-mail, e-mail - it never ends!
;)
I don't think this is isolated, but if I (and the few other people I know) am in a unique situation, please let me know
There is a huge difference there. Most of the listings on Monster are not real employers but are headhunters listing their clients' open positions. They know full well they are going to receive tons of responses. Also, if they aren't calling you back it's because they don't have a job for your skillset. I had to deactivate my resume because I was getting swamped in emails. Thankfully I used the anonymous option and none of them got my real email address.
... and actually recipients usually like it. I know of several people who have found work this way, and apparently they got no complaint.
IMO it's not as illegitimate as the previous stories seemed to imply, provided you use a sensible list of address (jobs@company.com for example), and not a grep of Usenet addresses.
There's really no comparison between batching a few dozen resumes to somewhat relevants, and sending hundreds of thousands of porno mail ("Do not open this mail if you've below 18!" -- still laughin about this one) to completely random addresses.
The problem with the poor dude that was derided here was that he was a fucking moron; he would not have had any problem had he apologized or just even shut up after being told not to send more mail.
While the true definition of spam is a tricky question that probably few people agree on, I think most people would agree that spam is "unsolicited commercial email" (see the CAUCE FAQ for more info.)
I don't think (at least according to the above definition of spam) that emailing your resume to a couple dozen people constitutes as spam. (It's a really stupid idea, though.) If you send your resume to a company through snail mail, they wouldn't consider it junk mail. If you send it through email (and you're sending it to just them, not to the whole world) they probably won't sue you for sending them junk mail. Just the same, it's probably better to send a real paper resume--it shows you put some effort into it other than point-and-click.
Shifman got no more than he deserved.
Best Slashdot Co
would know better. How often do we (meaning people in the tech industry in general) receive unwanted junk email? All the time. How often do we look at it? I don't know about everyone else, but it goes right into the virtual trash for me.
I don't understand how tech industry people could have thought this would be any different. Perhaps they are fooling themselves about how this relates to physical paper resumes, since some employers will simply take mailed-in resumes and place them "on file" for future reference. As it is, unsolicited emails do nothing more than make the spammer look like a jackass.
Oh, a note to the poster who said they more or less spammed employers through Monster.com. Employers in that system explicitly signed up to receive such emails, thus it can not be spamming.
My sigs always suck.
As spam goes, this seems less pink than grey.
... so how can they evaluate it? Will somebody stick my name up somewhere as an example of serious evilness? (I'm especially worried about the company to whom I accidentally sent a second email 3 days after the first, because I was copying the resume from the email I had previously sent them. THAT sure makes me look like some doofus mailing to a list.)
I recently sent email resumes to the HR email addresses of about 40 companies. I found the addresses by searching miscellaneous job sites for work in a particular, highly specialized field. I didn't apply for any of those specific jobs, though, for a simple reason: I'm looking for telecommuting and/or freelancing work in this field, and no major corporation that I've seen advertises telecommuting or freelance opportunities on a regular basis.
I didn't send to any of the addresses without first going to the company's website to check out their business and their careers page, but I didn't do an exhaustive investigation of their business either.
So, was it spam? Will they think it was spam? There's no way for them to know what my approach was
Incidentally, each email included a link to a detailed online resume, and the first several of them did not include a resume-in-brief within the email itself. Site logs indicate that nobody has visited the resume links.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
I think the article was referring to people who send their resume out to non-job-related mailing lists, random people they see online, or picking a bunch of inappropriate names from a corporate website. Some people seem to be confusing this with sending resumes out to all the job search engines and sending messages to all the jobs/hr@prospective.companies-type addresses. Remember that these lists and addresses are created specifically for this purpose... so it's not abusive to take advantage of them.
(Which reminds me... I may be losing my job in a week or so... wish I could figure out why all the "internet" jobs on the search engines are for the point-and-click-FP-of-website-designer, and none for router jockeys/infrastructure engineers)
Get off my launchpad!
About 2 years ago, I was actively seeking a job. I posted my resume on Monster and some other automated resume service websites. As noted in other posts here, most of the replies I got were from headhunters -- job offers consisting of contract, part-time, or other things I was not interested in. I got NO responses from actual employers, which was what I was trying to accomplish by posting my resume on the net.
IMHO, the best way to distribute a resume is directly to whom you're interested in working for. Can't find anyone of interest to work for? I suggest talking to as many people as possible. Since these resume services cater to headhunters, you'll never get personal interaction. Through talking to people, you can get a good idea of what is available for you.
Presently, I still get an occasional email from my original resume posting 2 years or so back. I find it amazing that although I've taken my name off of the resume sites, I still get offers.
Shouldn't there be some sort of premium service, or at least an option on an automated site to filter out would be head hunters? Just my 2 cents.
After getting very frustrated with my current full-time position (been there for 13 years now) I posted my resume on Monster.com and over the next two weeks, received in excess of 180 phone calls or e-mails, all from headhunters.
The contacts broke down like this:
75% - Calls from recruiters with positions outside of my home state after I had specifically said I didn't want to move.
10% - Calls from recruiters with temporary positions they needed filled, after I had specifically said I was looking only for full-time employment
1 - Call from an out-of-state headhunter who had one local temporary position, but then told me he would probably never have another job for me.
The remainder - Calls from local headhunters who all said that I had the perfect skill set for multiples jobs they were recruiting for, who sent me out on over 40 interviews, from which I received two legitimate offers - one for a marketing company that specializes in developing spamming tools for mass-mailing campaigns and for facilitating tele-marketers calls (which I turned down) and a second for an insurance company on the fifth floor of a non-airconditioned building that required all their developers to wear suits (which I also turned down).
I spent many, many hours filling out applications and modifying my resume for each individiual job, and after more than a month of hassles, I decided that my current job wasn't so bad after all.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing -- Emo Phillips
A co-worker of mine had a similar experiance, except that her name, number and title were listed as a reference on her friend's resume that was posted on the job sites. She was getting flooded with calls from headhunters. Apparently, they try harder on people who are currently employed and not seeking a job change than they do on the un-employed, the theory being that if you do not currently have a job, you must not be very good at it.
I'm surprised that you didn't get any responses. One of my (as Scott Adams says) cow-orkers just updated her Monster.com resume...only to be bombarded by phone calls the next couple of days.
I don't know if it still works, but if you haven't already, add "Linux" somewhere on your resume. When I changed "BSD" to "Linux" on mine last year, the offers at least tripled in volume.
I wonder if BSD is dying...
--saint
If Shifman hadn't been a complete fucking asshole to everyone he contacted, it would have never gone this far. Shifman is entirely responsible for his actions. If he is so unstable as to kill himself, it's no one's fault but his own.
Back in college I worked for a desktop publishing/copy/printing company and one of things we did was prepare resume packages for people, including mail-merged cover letters. We would type and copy the resume with cover letters for something like $30 for 20 copies. We had a guy come in who was graduating from vet school and he wanted to be a Kentucky race horse vet, so he obtained a mailing list of every horse breeder in Kentucky and paid us to type in the list (he didn't have it in electronic format) and generate over 200 resumes with mail merged cover letters then mailed all 200+ of them. It cost him a few hundred dollars and out of 200 mailings, he got like 20 offers and just picked the best one. I think that in my career, I've maybe submitted 20 resumes and got three different jobs from them.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
You owe me a shirt friend. The reality of it is, spamming works. If it didn't work, people wouldn't bother. Notice you get less telemarketers lately?? Telemarketing is not as effective as it once was.
Why is Bernie Shifman any less guilty that AOL, Amazon, or MSN?? I have only been to MSN once, and then I changed the homepage preference, but I get e-mails from them daily. Why?? A hotmail user e-mailed me.
When I did consulting work, I used to harvest directories of local IT managers and send brochures and resumes for our companies services. While I was somewhat targeted in my spamming, I got alot of wrong e-mail addresses.
I am looking over old records, and I made over $27k from "cold calls(S)" (notation for people I spammed) in 1997. I admit it was spam, and I am proud of it.
Of course, realtors look through tax records and find people who bought their houses 5 years ago and contact all of them.
The real concept of Spam vs. Bulk mail seems to revolve around the idea that there is no penalty for the spammer. He doesn't pay for stamps, paper, etc. But to me there is far less of an environmental impact to sending an e-mail than a glossy brochure.
Just look at all of the junk mail you recieve and know that every person in america gets just as much. All of those glossy catalogs and 4.9% credit card offers consuming the landfills oif America.
The effectivness of an advertising message sent via e-mail is just as effective than that sent by snail mail. The real key is to have a good advertising message. If you send a subject "Resume Attached: " your response is not as good as say... "New streaming solutions for multimedia in the Mobile Paradigm" or even "Multimedia pioneer seeks new java-based challenges.". You might read that e-mail, the guy in accounting won't.
Yes, your subject should reflect the body of your message. If you are looking for a job as a Unix admin, put it in the subject! "Unix admin and scripter seeks employment." If they have a Unix job, they'll read it, otherwise, they won't.
I'll bet none of the resumes I sent in 1997 still exist today, but I'm sure that 99% of the paper resumes sent in that same year are still cluttering something up.
I'll spam you and let you know where to mail that shirt.
~Hammy