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.

Comments

Re:Programmer for hire

[Stavr0]

No, no. Do it right:

Anyone want to hire me? IF you don't I'll sue you out of existence you motherfscker!
Ecxpect a call from my lawyers you sh1thead!!!

Hrm...lets load pine...

[wo1verin3]

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.

Spamming for jobs is not good

[bildstorm]

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.

Re:Spamming for jobs is not good

[Rogerborg]

• At any rate, I can't figure out why these people think they'll get jobs

And an important difference is that typical generic spam is a no-risk proposition. If you send out a zillion spams and get one bite, you win. If you get zero bites, you don't lose anything, because these weren't your customers anyway.

But spamming for jobs is self destructive; you're actually closing off opportunities for yourself. Similarly, existing businesses who spam (though arrogance or more usually just stupidity) are cutting their own throats. You really have to wonder if it wouldn't be a better world if we took action to ensure that all spammers become, ahem, eligible for a Darwin Award.

Well at least....

[wo1verin3]

.... 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

[Geeyzus]

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

Re:Job sites

[RazzleFrog]

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.

Re:Job sites

[GTRacer]

True, but at least the companies you're 1-clicking the resumes to are ASKING for applicants. Maybe not in your field, but they ARE looking. And you're most likely sending to the H.R. contact that set up the company account.

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

Doesn't seem wise...

[FauxPasIII]

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...

Re:Doesn't seem wise...

[Courageous]

I'm accepting resumes from potential job candidates. All applications must include resume, social security number, date of birth, and mother's maiden name. :)

C//

Re:Doesn't seem wise...

[KurdtX]

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!

Resume Posting Services

[aridhol]

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.

Why hire lazy people?

[F.Prefect]

From the article:

"Less than 10 years ago, the effort for applying to 100 jobs was as big a deal as sending the invites to a wedding, with all of the paper and stamps," said Marcus Ronaldi, a San Francisco consultant who regularly receives unwanted résumés via e-mail. "Now you are able to apply for many jobs by pointing and clicking with your mouse."

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."

My Monster.com Resume put me on every spam list.

[Confessed Geek]

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.

I got Shifman's resume

[wiredog]

At my home e-mail address. Not work, home. That's why it's spam. Sending your resume out to the hr departments at a zillion companies that may want you is targeted. Sending it to random people at their homes is not targeted, and is spam.

Shifman got no more than he deserved.

Re:I got Shifman's resume

[gorsh]

Shifman got no more than he deserved.

Did he?

it's obvious that Bernie Shifman is a moron asshole spammer, and on that basis I have no sympathy for him. But what Neil Schwartzman has done goes a little too far IMHO. He's posted Bernie's home address, phone number, aerial pictures of his apartment on his Web site. The popularity of that site has now given Bernie the dubious honor of "The Most Hated Man on the Internet" (Bill Gates notwithstanding). Shifman is no doubt the recepient of thousands of harassing phone calls, e-mails, people outside his apartment, etc. He will never be able to get a decent job again, and his life is all but ruined.

And yet he has been proved guilty of no crime.

Is this the best that the so-called egalitarian culture of the Internet has to offer? I don't see any Jonathan Katz articles standing up for the rights of this guy, who's currently getting the electronic equivalent of a lynching.

Yes, Bernie's moronic threats and accusations are highly amusing, but it's important to remember that there's a real person behind them. A person of obviously diminished capacity, who honestly thought he was doing the right thing. If Bernie Shifman were to commit suicide tomorrow, how would Neil Schwartzman and everyone else who took part in making this guy's life hell feel?

(And yes, the case can be made that Bernie did include his personal information in his spam, but does that mean he gave up his right to privacy? How many strangers do I have to send my resume to before I can make the assumption it'll be spread all over the Web? 5? 50? 500? 5000? Where's the line?)

In the end, I think this is really a matter between Bernie and Neil, and those are the two that need to settle it. I hate spam just as much as the next guy, but I think people need to be proven guilty (in a court of law) before being condemmed. Let's not all let ourselves be guided by mob rule. The Internet was built for better things than this.

Funny, but let's try to fix this

[guttentag]

It's a funny article, but it could have gone a long way toward solve the problem if it had offered unemployed readers alternatives to spamming.

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:

What's the best way for genuine, qualified, informed candidates to distinguish themselves from this rabble?

The REAL problem is the current way jobs are ....

[Skapare]

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.