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.
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
> 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.
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
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.
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.
Mac: All right, how about "Cat Game?"
Foster: Cat Game? What's the record?
Mac: Thorny did six, but I think you can do ten.
Foster: Ten? Starting right 'meow?'
[Mac laughs - they walk up to the car, and Foster taps on the driver side]
Larry Johnson: Sorry about the...
Foster: All right meow. (1) Hand over your license and registration.
[the man hands him his license]
Foster: Your registration? Hurry up meow. (2)
[Mac ticks off two fingers]
Larry Johnson: Sorry.
[the man laughs a little]
Foster: Is there something funny here boy?
Larry Johnson: Oh, no.
Foster: Then why you laughing, Mister... Larry Johnson?
[pause]
Foster: All right meow, (3) where were we?
Larry Johnson: Excuse me, are you saying meow?
Foster: Am I saying meow?
[Mac puts his hands up for the fourth one, but makes an "eehhh" facial expression, as he is considering the last one]
Larry Johnson: I thought...
Foster: Don't think boy. Meow, (4) do you know how fast you were going?
[man laughs]
Foster: Meow. (5) What is so damn funny?
Larry Johnson: I could have sworn you said meow.
Foster: Do I look like a cat to you, boy? Am I jumpin' around all nimbly bimbly from tree to tree?
[Mac is gut-busting laughing]
Foster: Am I drinking milk from a saucer?
[feigned anger]
Foster: Do you see me eating mice?
Foster: [Mac and the man are laughing their heads off now] You stop laughing right meow! (6)
Larry Johnson: [the man stops and swallows hard] Yes sir.
Foster: Meow, (7) I'm gonna have to give you a ticket on this one. No buts meow. (8) It's the law.
[rips off the ticket and hands it to the man]
Foster: Not so funny meow, (9) is it?
Foster: [Foster gets up to leave, but Mac shakes his hands at him, indicating only nine meows] Meow! (10)
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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.
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.
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)...
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.
At my last job, I got a lot of telemarketing calls trying to sell me toner cartridges. I'd always say, "Let me forward your call to the right person," then forward them to a fax machine. If they called back, I'd apologize and do it again - repeat as necessary.
Redundancy is good And also good.
"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.
I thought you were supposed to use black construction paper? Boy...did i ever mess this prank up :( Guess I'll need to re-do 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.
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!
Do what I do. Ask them to hold just a moment, then transfer their call to 202-762-1401.
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?"
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!