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."
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.
And that's that when you need someone to call and offer you a job or at least give you an interview, they don't return your calls. But when you don't want to hear from them, they don't go away?
Tell them you're looking for work and want an interview/offer and they'll stop calling for sure.
i am a soviet space shuttle
and block their phone numbers?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
At one point I worked in IT support for a telemarketer. AFAIK, from what they told me, if a company tells them to stop calling, they're supposed to add you to their own DNC list and they are not to call you anymore for fear of fines. The laws could vary from state to state, so YMMV.
My blog
If your employees are still being poached, then hey, you deserve it for underpaying them.
More likely, the recruiters will stop calling your employees. (But they might ask for a job themselves.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Airhorn into the phone? Nah, too harsh...
Have somebody ask for an interview. And go to it. And explain the situation to the company the leeches are shilling for, and that because they are using such an annoying headhunter, neither they nor anyone else in the company would ever consider working for them. Then just walk out.
> there is no 'do not call' list for US corporations, and it's not harassment.
Correct, there is no Federal Do Not Call list. It's also irrelevant -- if they are told to stop calling, they must stop calling -- period. Anything else is harrassment. If you're a big company, just ring up your legal department, tell them the problem, and they'll craft a nice Cease and Desist letter. They live for that sort of thing.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Recruiters make money by getting candidates hired. Eat up their time, pass them back and forth. They are just like telemarketers. If they can't sell, they don't eat.
It's been successful where I work.
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.
Act completely insane, or just meow. Works for me. Acting... yes, just acting..
Sure you can hang up on them... Or you can waste thier time. Put them on hold. TELEMARKETER: Hi, I'm Calling From ---- Me: --- I'm So sorry, can i just put you on hold for like 2 minutes. TELEMARKETER: Uhh... Then you just see how long they are willing to wait.
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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.
Act interested, put them on hold for 5 minutes. Act interested again, put them on hold for another 5 minutes. Act interested again, put them on hold for another 5 minutes. Then tell them they are suckers and they just wasted 15 minuted of their life on a fruitless venture.
It is fun, rewarding, and it hurts their bottom line.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
At a certain large veteran's hospital, telephone solicitors used to call every phone in the building, one after another, trying to sell stuff to the patients.
As it happens, the local sysadmin looked after quite a number of machines which updated each other via uucp, so he added an aggressive contact schedule for the number the telephone solicitors were calling from.
After a few hours of autodialing by a pool of uupcds, he commented out the new number and called them by voice, to see if they would now agree not to call the patients.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
Recruiters are clients of the companies they are trying to hire for. Ask them about the job, then get the company its for. Call that company's HR department and complain and tell them the recruiters they use are harassers. Ideally, if you expose these bottom feeders as being bottom feeders most rational people would drop them. What kind of candidates are they trying to get by using this method? Probably not very good ones.
These recruiters are incredible. I used a few a few years back and I STILL get a phone call 3 or 4x a month from a breathless desperate guy who really needs to fill soem shit 2-week temp contract. I also submitted a resume or two fairly recently only to find they went through a recruiter who told me that job doesnt exist anymore and offered me to interview for some temp job. Bait and switch?
The industry really needs to take a good look at recruiters in general. I cant see them being more efficient than in-house hiring.
"...and refusing to hang up..."
That's only a problem when YOU refuse to hang up, but I see that you've "trained" your guys to hang up. Problem solved.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
don't go back. For grins time how long they wait. Waste their time.
Nothing is foolproof, fools are too ingenious. - Murphy
The best way to get them to stop is to pay your employees what they are worth and treat them well. They'll stop calling once they realize no one wants to leave your company because they are fat and happy.
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.
The practice of recruiting aligns positions more closely with skillsets. They also assist employees in getting fair market value and job satisfaction. The aggressive recruiting practice that is spoken of is a sign that market conditions are 'correcting' for employees. Further correcting in the job market will eventually make this practice too costly.
That will only encourage them.
Here is what to do. Tell them in no uncertain terms that they are not welcome to call. Now, if you have an ISDN PRI or similar system, you may be able to get the ANI (like the caller ID but not blockable). Then set up an asterisk box to do prefiltering. Have it recognize calls from that ANI, and route into an indefinite hold queue.
Let them have tit for tat and pay back lesing for lies.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
>>...just ring up your legal department, tell them the problem, and they'll craft a nice Cease and Desist letter
Right, that's precisely why they're there. However, OP said "Our attorney says the calls are perfectly legal" which leads me to believe the company attorney is the one who should be looking for new employment!
As you said, Harassment is illegal, and making many, many telephone calls which interrupt business after being told to stop is the very definition. This headhunting company has been instructed, verbally I presume, to stop contacting your company. It is time to put this in writing and start building an evidence chain so they can sue the pants off of the caller for lost productivity, misuse of resources and harassment. I'm sure a competent attorney can think of other charges to bring. But first OP needs to find one. IMO, the current attorney doesn't sound like he's earning his retainer.
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)...
Here's an oldschool fax machine DOS prank that should at least inconvenience them as much as they have you. There's a good chance the company has a fax machine, and since they're a business you should be able to get ahold of that number very easily. Worst case someone may need to pose as a prospective IT hire and get the fax number in order to "send in your resume".
:)
Once you have the fax number just put together about 6 or 7 pages of whatever you like within reason and the bounds of law (i.e. don't send death threats or pornographic images), usually something inane and anonymous, perhaps lolcatz pictures. Tape all the sheets together end-to-end then insert into your fax machine, once the first part of the now super-length page comes through, loop the top around and tape it together, forming a nice infinite paper loop in the fax machine. Let this send all day if you like. On their end it will either eat all their paper, toner, or at the very least render the fax machine unusable!
Important! You obviously want to remain anonymous with this "fax" so be sure to prepend *67 to the fax number, this is the command to block caller ID.
Enjoy!
-- I'm not a pessimist, I'm a realist. It's not my fault that life sucks so much. --
Our voip phone system allows me to add in "blacklisted" phone numbers. that dump them to a generic mailbox. they cant access anything but the leave a message function. If your phone system cant do that, I strongly suggest upgrading as it's a function that is worth it's weight in gold.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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!
"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.)
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.
I hate to be a paranoid, but I wonder if this could be a call from an internally-hired agency... you know, just calling up key people to see if anyone is disloyal? If the employee volunteers information or acts interested in a new job, they are mysteriously dismissed a few days later.
I had heard of this tactic being used prior to the IT Tech Boom but not recently. [IIRC, it was the brainchild of the VP of a certain large database software company and also occurred at a large company which writes OSes and application software. The idea was to remove anyone who wasn't loyal. The result was a huge number of very qualified people were dismissed and morale was crushed. But I'm sure the VPs got a nice bonus anyway.]
In this case, it might explain why the company attorney isn't too responsive, when they're normally over-eager to fire off letters of reprimand.
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
These folks are creeps! Treat them as such!
And when they try to indirectly insult your intelligence (like, "well, the way it's done is ...) it's a red flag that they're an asshole crook!
Watch out my friends! I've been burned a few times and by a few different methods by these smooth talking assholes.
When in doubt, a recruiter is a lier until proven innocent. Sorry, but that's what you have to do to protect yourself.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
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.
*leech
*slimy
*desperate
*phony
*hell
No wonder you had trouble finding work. You can barely type coherently.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
More likely what will happen is out of work slashdot readers will call in asking if they have any jobs.
You had an existing business relationship with the company, so different rules apply to this situation. They weren't trying to cold-call you to sell you something; they were just maintaining their existing accounts.
My blog
I know they were readable. But when you're looking for a job, you don't want to look as if you have the writing skills of a 5th grader. It has the tendency of making people not want to hire you. I know we throw out pretty much any resume that has mistakes that a spell-checker would catch.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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
I've got it. Direct all the calls to this attorney of yours, I bet it turns into harassment really quick.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
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!
- 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.
Billing uses ANI, not CID info -- so no.
Do what I do. Ask them to hold just a moment, then transfer their call to 202-762-1401.
At my prior employer, we had a special extension for Telemarketers on our asterisk PBX.
We would "transfer to our supervisor" which would play hold music for 30 seconds, a female voice would say "Mr. Smith is just finishing a call. It will only be another moment." Then hold music for a minute and a half, then the sounds of screaming monkeys from the Asterisk-sounds package.
Perfect Slashdot Content. Torturing telemarketers with open source!
Ellie
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.
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 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 ]
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!