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Shutting Down Annoying Recruiters?
An anonymous reader writes "My company is under attack by the leeches and bottom-feeders of the IT recruiting world. They call into our company phone directory constantly — hundreds of calls per day — trolling for names, hawking their job candidates, and refusing to hang up or stop calling, even if we curse their mothers. Our attorney says the calls are perfectly legal: there is no 'do not call' list for US corporations, and it's not harassment. Through education, we've gotten our engineering group to stop answering the calls or hang up, but I was wondering if the Slashdot community has any ideas for more creative solutions to make this stop, either through technology, US law, trickery, etc."
Ask if you can call them back... get their number.
Post on /.
All interested slashdotters should then call this company asking about possible job and recruiting opportunities.
Airhorn into the phone? Nah, too harsh...
Act completely insane, or just meow. Works for me. Acting... yes, just acting..
If it's a woman, start talking about how bad you want to drill her ass. Be very explicit. If it's a man, same thing. Just come up with the most vile stuff you can think of. If that doesn't work, bring some animals into your verbal fantasies. Try to make a game of it within the office to see who can come up with the most disgusting stuff or who can get the headhunter on the other end of the phone line to break down and start screaming.
press 1 now.
don't go back. For grins time how long they wait. Waste their time.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
The way I'd always heard it was that it's always easier to pick up girls when you already have a girlfriend. But I guess it works for jobs, too.
Company Memo: All down time shall be spent calling xxx-xxx-xxxx and asking for jobs at twice your currently salary. If you get one, go for it.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Tell them you're looking for work and want an interview/offer and they'll stop calling for sure.
You sir, are brilliant. Yes, every time they call set up an interview over lunch. Preferably somewhere you have no intention of going for lunch. Have everyone in the company do the same. After a week or so of chasing false leads they will turn their attentions elsewhere.
We are all just people.
Or better yet rout their call back to their number (if its local or an 800) It would be great to have them call their own receptionest..
At our company we have a special extension we use for all suspected marketing calls, known affectionately as extension 101.
:o)
This extension is hooked up to a CD player and is programmed to auto answer incoming calls. One of our audio guys has mixed up a CD containing endless "on hold" muzack and promotional messages for our company and this is left to play repeatedly in the CD player.
End result - all unsolicited calls get responded with a "I'll just connect you to the person responsible for that department" and are then transferred to extension 101 where they remain until they hang up. The best bit is that a red LED lights up on the line the marketer has called in on (indicating line in use), making it possible to time how long they spend listening to the 101 CD before disconnecting. The record so far is just over 18 minutes
I suppose if you wanted to be even more devious you could set extension 101 to divert to a premium rate number and make a bit of extra cash for every minute the dumb marketer stays listening to the 101 CD - this is probably illegal though (as most fun things are)...
Wouldn't the universe implode or something?
"We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell 'em stories that don't go anywhere -- like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. 'Give me five bees for a quarter,' you'd say.
"Now where were we? Oh yeah -- the important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones..."
668: Neighbour of the Beast
What's even better than asking for their number? Asking them questions! This is pure gold when it comes to social engineering. Pretend to be open and helpful, but interrupt their script with questions, any kind of questions! Have you ever wanted to ask someone an embarrasing question, but was too afraid to ask? This is the chance. You have their time. Its NOT considered RUDE to interrupt with questions. This shows interest, even if off topic and devious. Ask questions on crack. Take notes, compile the best, and compare with others. Research the physical call center and who runs it. Posting online to your favorite forum of choice is evil and I would never suggest doing such a thing....unless you want the most popular thread of the week! Give them the attention they crave. Stop them cold.
Telemarketers can be fun. I've identified several, got a few shut down, and got retaliated against one (who happened to be the phone company forcing their employees to cold call during idle time.)
I used to do something similar when I had my own business ...
... to bad my current landline provider doesn't provide these kinds of functions.
I had my phone line(s) through a VOIP provider who provided an awesome set of web-based tools for call management. Whenever I got a junk fax, I'd add the offending number to my call-blocking scheme, but instead of simply blocking it (actually, I had the option of having them receive a busy signal, an instant drop, or an endless ring) I would forward the number to the reception, contact number, or "to be removed" number from another previous junk fax. Every time a new junk faxer would get through, I'd add them. Later I started adding telemarketers to the mix.
At one point I had something like 100 junk faxers and telemarketers all calling and faxing one another. The best part was that the CallerID for the forwarded calls would show the originating number - there was no indication it was being forwarded through me.
It was a thing of beauty
Tell them your employees know Fortran, LISP, and Excel macros, they have all completed an A+ course as part of their training, and that many of your employees were part of the Adobe's Adobe Reader optimization team.
Tell them that the employee they're currently after can't be reached because he has been trying to remove spyware from his work computer, or that he's out for a drink because it helps his code "flow".
Or tell them that he'll take your call on the VoIP system he installed, and then just hang up.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
That's always worked for me. Somebody calls trying to recruit me, I tell them "Can you find me a job paying this much that doesn't require me to wear a necktie?" Wonder of wonders, they never call back.
That's pretty sad, now that I think about it... tells you just how much recruiters think (or companies believe) a tie is worth compared to competency.
Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
No she is my Ex because she is a Bitch. Get your story straight before you fire off your pie hole.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
When I was a freshman in college, my dorm phone had call forwarding, which was completely novel to me (my parents didn't have touch tone phones yet.) Being a curious sort, I tried call forwarding to myself. The phone stopped working and I had to call someone (from another phone) to get them to fix it.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
"Hi, Mr. Agency, I'd like to pay you a lot of money to call my employees repeatedly and check whether any of them feel like quitting yet. Please call several times a day so they can't get any work done."
Can you say self-fulfilling prophecy?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
I tell you what, I've gotten rid of more tele-marketers that way. They stop their script dead in their tracks and usually hang up on me without so much as another word. Mission accomplished.
However, if they DON'T hang up after that, be very afraid.
Maybe the solution is to act *crazy* paranoid about this possibility...
This is a trick, isn't it??? You're questioning my company loyalty! You just want to know if I'll bail from the company for a few dollars more or divulge company secrets!! No sir! I like it here. I like what I'm getting paid. I'm completely satisfied! Our boss is great!! I like [him/her] on a professional level!! I am loyal to all levels of management!! I signed the NDA! I don't care if you offer me 50% more!!! Death before dishonor! I'll never quit the company!!! You'll NEVER MAKE ME TALK!!!!
[click]
More likely what will happen is out of work slashdot readers will call in asking if they have any jobs.
And say thank you.
You never know, you just might find a new job!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
There was a story in the UK papers quote a few years ago about a guy who kept getting woken up in the early hours of the morning by repeating computer modem calls. After contacting BT he traced the call to a local supermarket who had incorrectly entered his number in the list to call. Trouble was it only called his number after the first on the list was busy so it only happened a few times a week. He repeatedly contacted them asking them to fix it and after a month of them not doing so he had his mate with a computer hook it up to await the incoming call.
It turned out that the call was the supermarket's stock taking system trying to phone a central depot to order more stuff. Given the simplistic nature of the system the guy's mate fixed the stock levels for lots of items to zero and then told the system to call the next number on its list. The following day they drove past the supermarket to find loads of lorries there trying to deliver things they already had. The supermarket eventually figured out what happened and tried to sue. However, given the very primitive computer laws in force at the time the case was thrown out because the supermarket had initiated the call and so legally it was assumed that they wanted to talk to the computer on the other end. Needless to say the nuisance calls stopped!
What about forwarding them to some random number in North Korea? That'd give them pause.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Rather than block the number, route it to a box connected to the Internet with voice recognition and text-to-speech software. Direct the computer to answer as Alice and proceed to engage the caller in mind-numbingly pointless but realistic conversation.
Full-Featured GPL Web Hosting Control Panel
This reminds me of a company I used to work at.
There was a bug in the internally developed fax software that would cause it occasionally to forget to dial 9 before dialing out. I would see "FAX SERVER" on the caller id window of my phone, so I would just hit the transfer button and hand it off to say... the developers responsible for it. The beauty of it was it would say my name as the originater, then as soon as they pick up "BEEP - SCRATCH - GARBLEGARBLE - incomming fax"
That was quite effective in convincing them to fix the bug sooner rather then later.
I also had an amusing time when dialing someone up and getting their voicemail. You could transfer them back to themselves, giving them a voicemail message that is their voicemail greeting.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
No. no. You messed it all up.
You grab a spool of thread, and stick that in your fax.
It doesn't use up their toner, and it doesn't waste paper. In fact, they often wonder why in the world their fax machine keeps spewing out blank pages.
They might have to replace their "broken" fax machine.
Do what I do. Ask them to hold just a moment, then transfer their call to 202-762-1401.
I don't think that rule applies here. You're not crossing streams; you're crossing tubes.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
That's nothing.
After a run-in with the hall's RA, one of the guys on my dorm broke into the closet where all the phone switching equipment was.
And routed every single call coming into the dorm into the offending RA's number.
Anybody pesters me, they get lots of phony leads.
I have this buddy, Titus T. Tubesteak, who always seems to be looking for a job.
Another buddy, Smitty Jaegerwebermanjensen, is reserved for people who have trouble spelling.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
You could do what my friend did. He owns a dial-up ISP. He got the phone number for the company then had a bank of modems constantly call them non-stop.
The decision to ask someone out for either lunch or dinner depends on your sexual orientation? Whoo boy, relationships get more complicated every day.
So if I am heterosexual do I ask someone out for lunch or for dinner? If I am into bestiality do I ask them out to breakfast?
I'm confused.
You work for Dell Support Don't You?
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
Wait a little bit. The other
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Even better, set up recruiters to meet each other for lunch. Tell all the recruiters in a given week to meet you next Tuesday at 1pm in some trendy popular spot. Just give your name as the previous recruiters name.
I bet that would be worthy of filming. Nothing like 20 fuming recruiters that just wasted an hour for great entertainment.
Skunky
Googled it and got Time Voice Announcer at U.S. Naval Observatory:
http://www.usno.navy.mil/telephone.shtml/
For the love of God, it won't stop!