Slashdot Mirror
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.
Anyone want to hire me? I can do ... Oh nevermind.
Nope, no sig
1. Free Viagra
2. Hi, I took naked pics
3. Programmer For Hire
4. University Diplomas Cheap
5. MCSE seeking Job
I think I'll delete #5 first.
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
.... if these resumes qualify as spam it wouldn't be hard to prosecute. We have the name and phone number of the person responsible.
Job sites like Monster really encourage spamming prospective hirers as well.
You set up an online resume, and can 1-click send it to the employers of your choice. I was laid off in September, and I sent out 200 resumes in 1 day in this way.
How many callbacks from those, and from all the resumes I sent out over the next month? NOT ONE. And I am not surprised, I can only imagine the number of resumes they are recieving.
Although this isn't the same as all-out spamming, employer spam via job sites online is running rampant and is only going to get worse, which is bad for potentially good candidates as they are lost in the sea of Monster.com email notifications...
Mark
Does it strike anyone else as just a little bit foolish to send a message out to hundreds of strangers containing (presumably) your full name, address, phone number and valid email address ?
Identity theft, anyone ? Not to mention that you set yourself up for reverse spam...
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
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!
... 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.
Any sensible employer should refuse to hire a person who chain-guns his résumé to a hundred different people precisely because doing it that way is the easy way out! If you want to be employed, demonstrate that you are willing to go to all the trouble of actually doing it right. Otherwise you're simply telling people, "I'm too lazy to get off my butt and put a little effort into being hired."
--Ford Prefect
After the first guy was publicised on /., I had more than one new entry in my e-mail box from someone spamming their resume.
Now.. I see three possibilities here:
(I'm using "he" as the subject here. Women, typically, are not this dumb.)
1: He formed the idea himself, out of extreme desperation for a job (Been there, done that.. just didnt spam)
2: He got the idea from the original guy.
3: He got the idea from slashdot. THANKS SLASHDOT.
:)
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.
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.
The same applies to this Slashdot discussion. The people who have the technology openings people want are probably Slashdot readers (<SARCASM>who would want to work for someone who wasn't Slashdot-aware?</SARCASM>). Or perhaps you've already hired some outstanding candidate who found a way to get your attention without resorting to spam.
So let's put the question to you:
You know, before I fell in love with computers and the many related disciplines, I spent a lot of years in the restaurant industry, in a variety of managerial and non managerial capacities. The one service lesson that came though again and again was that one bad impression can counter-balance easily a world of good impressions. You had to treat every customer like they were the most important person in the world; and I think that's a good maxim for any business.
That's why it was especially disconcerting to read one girl's comment in the article to the effect that if she got even one good offer, she was unconcerned about pissing off everyone else. If the first maxim is true, that one bad experience offsets a hundred or more good one's then how much exponentially worse must it be to create a hundred bad impressions on the low yield opprotunity of creating a good one. I suspect it might be alright to send someone a resume that is not necessarily solicited. After all, you never know until you try. But this means addressing a personal correspondence to a specific relevant person at your targeted company. I hope nobody gets any ideas from this.
Oops
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.
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........
Resume spamming got me both of my last two jobs when I needed them, and it gave me something to do while I was calling people about jobs and between interviews/job fairs. It may be sleazy, but at least I can pay my rent.
Bottom line - spamming sucks, no matter who is doing it.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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!
"I just didn't have a million dollars to run a commercial," he said.
OK, so go online and submit your resume via the many various accepted methods. Just about every corporation has an ability to accept resumes, there's Monster.com, thingamajob.com, all sorts of others. There are job recruitment agencies all over the place that take online resume submissions... basically, get off your ass and work for it, don't just send your resume out to everyone and their brother and expect a kind response!
PS - most resumes have confidential information in them, it would be great irony if these resume spammers suddenly suffered from "stolen identity."
~ now you know
Actually, I'm going to try that when I get laid off.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
Sending your resume to 28 companies can hardly be considered spamming. I had to send out over 100 during a job search three years ago. Part of the trick is to not make a mass mailing list - I sent out each one individually. It had a form cover letter, but I personalized each one as much as possible.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
Apparently this guy thought wrong:
1. Spam resume
2.
3. Profit!
Maybe he'll figure out 2 someday.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
no matter how you write it, not need for high-ASCII characters.
Are you sure it's not supposed to be curriculum vitæ?
fencepost
just a little off
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
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
>>"Hey baby...wanna f---ok, that's cool...hey you over THERE, wanna f---...no?...ok, how about you, then?"
Ummm, back when I used to drink, I actually did just that. Sort of a drunken pickup spam. Mostly I got smacked, but believe it or not, it actually worked!
--- Think of it as evolution in action ---
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