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."
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.
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.