Slashdot Mirror
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."
and block their phone numbers?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
i'll start.
Company Name: Convergenz
Website: www.conv.com
Location: McLean, VA
Target Area: Washington DC Metropolitan area
Target Market: IT contracting from Helpdesk to System Administrators to LAN/WAN Engineers
Phone: 703.584.3700
These fuckers call my office on a daily basis with "new jobs which you are a perfect match". Please say Tyrone King referred you.
I am pretty sure that if you ask them to not call you back and get the company name that you can stop then from calling.
When they call they are using company resources so they are a cost to you. A simple nastygram from your lawyer should telling them to stop or accept that you will charge them by the hour for the time they waste should work.
Or hire someone for minimum wage to waste their time. When ever they call just forward them to the min wage worker and have them just eat up as much of their time as possible. Summer is coming up so I bet some employee at your company has a teen that would like a summer job.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hire a college student at minimum wage.
Their job is to hold the recruiting company on the line as long as possible. Trying to go up the sales chain as high as possible. If you can afford it have a second college student for the calls to be transferred to as "someone with authority to deal with your call".
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I was getting hangup robodialed calls about 10x per day, all hours. Sometimes it would fail over to a recorded message with an 800 number. Once when I was home during the call, I picked up and someone asked for a person with my first initial and last name. Different first name. I was so mad I had my modem dial every 60 seconds for a week while I was out of town. It made me feel good.
Now that robodialers are becoming more and more of a nuisance, I want to enhance my counterattack. Anyone know of a free app that'll dial the offending number and play an audio file of me ranting? Maybe I can robodial every member of congress nonstop until they pass legislation banning robodialers!
Man, you really need that seminar!
mrosenthal@conv.com
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The anti-telemarketer counterscript is a good starting point with great questions we want to seek, but it is a script. They can usually see through it pretty quick, especially if they are familiar with it. The average home should have enough opportunities a day (a dozen telemarketers) to work up a good fact finding set in short time. This is business, nothing personal, so hold nothing back. Their only goal is to extract money from YOU. Your goal is to extract INFORMATION from them. They give you time, you give them questions. Questions are the knife to pry information they can't defend. They can evade correct answers by making things up, but the score increases with each minute they don't make a sale. Its a game. A losing game. People just have to play it and telemarketers will cease to exist.
Unfortunately, people are amazingly gullible. I learned how to fight them when I worked long hours on the nightshift at a manufacturing plant. They would call all day. I would play them and get email addresses "so I could send them my resume." I was very creative. They were too. One telemarketer was able to convince the powers-to-be to get my phone service suspended. I knew I hit the heart then. And with no profanity or threats either.
It should be feasible to modify some fax software to accomplish this feat with much less effort. Get an open-source fax package like efax and let it rip. For bonus points, you can set the fail-retry timers to 0 so that it will retry again immediately when someone at the other end hits the cancel button, causing the system to hang up.
www.wavefront-av.com
It sounds like a somewhat exaggerated version of something Tom Mabe did here: here
- Make sure you have Asterisk listening for inband (i.e. during conversations) DTMF commands
- When your chosen command is heard, have Asterisk add the callerid number to a database (I just used the internal Asterisk db, but you could use any construct you wished)
- Any time a call comes in, check its CID against that database. If it is found, reroute to the "We don't accept your calls" message. Hang up after the message plays.
Alternately, you can make a webform that puts the input number into the DB. (But the way described above is simpler UI and is nicer because you can say "Did you hear those tones? They mean that you won't be able to call here anymore." You can also be cruel by saying "Oh, would you please hit *371 (or whatever) for me? Great, you just locked yourself out of our system. Thanks! -click-")If you need help, fire me an email.
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
it's nice to be back in a position where job offers are coming to look for me rather than the other way around.
Yeah, but 99.9% of these job offers are low paying gigs where they are targetting H1bs. They all offer less than standard industry wage, and when you follow up, they send you a questionaire where only half the questions are about your experience and the other half of the questions are in regard to your visa status and whether you are able/interested in transferring your visa.
It's nice to get job offers, but it would be better if only the legitimate ones came through and not the crap ones for which you are not eligible because you are a citizen. Paul
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I'll snap.
:)
I called them with IP Relay as Tyrone King and got a snappy response:
"The only jobs available are for web developers for flashdot.org"
I tried to clarify if they meant "Convergenz" and got a dial tone. Go figure.
Apparently, a lot of slashdot visitors took your bait
I called, and as soon as I said "I was referred by Mr. Tyrone King", the guy broke down and lost it... and accused me of "wasting everyone's time". Heh
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
I was getting automated calls on my cell phone I didn't want. So I found a website with recordings of operator tone saying "doo doo doo... the number you have reached has been disconnected". I played that back into my voicemail greeting. When calls came in I didn't want, I'd let them go through to voicemail. It got rid of -some- auto dialers.
Which is precisely why it's so plausible, *particularly* that it happened at a certain large DB vendor.
*Never* underestimate the sheer stupidity that some control-freak managers can aspire to...
The best part about this is that over time as the bot learns from other marketers and their products it will start marketing back to them with combinations of competitors products. It's like the ultimate in comeback technology
Cheers, Chris