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

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.

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

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."

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.

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?