• 2022
  • Dec
  • 29

It’s not a job requisition, it’s just spam.

It’s been a while since I’ve made a post. The year end is always a busy time, both with people dragging colds into work and giving them to everyone to several holidays taking up time for preparation and celebration.

I wanted to step slightly aside and make a post about an experience I’m having with a contract recruiter:

There’s a local outpost of a larger global entity that has had a position open since about April of 2022 (It’s now the end of December, 2022.) This is a very senior level position, the person will be a single point of contact for a product line within the United States. Product manager, technician, repair, service, and support. Everything from A-Z. Granted, it’s not a very active product line, but it’s still a fairly comprehensive position where your name is on the paperwork as having said it works.

The reason it’s still open is the company (understandably) wants a laundry list of skills because of the nature of the position - but they aren’t paying enough to match that needed skill list. The pay rate has risen slightly since the position opened, about $2/hour, but it’s still probably 2/3 of what it really needs to be. I’ve sent a couple people their way, one declined the interview saying it wasn’t enough for the requirements posted, the other took the interview and said “It’s too much grief for not enough pay,” and ended up taking a non-managerial PMEL position that will net him about 25% more than this position pays.

Personally, I took a look at it in April when a recruiter I’d dealt with before asked if I was interested in it. I did some investigation, but immediately rejected it due to the pay rate. It was slightly higher than what I was making at the time (about 3%) but starting over as a contractor for not much more money didn’t appeal to me at the time, and still doesn’t. I turned it down in April.

It needs to be pointed out that they were trying to hire in April because the person in the job was either retiring or moving to a new division - I was never really clear on that. I just knew that they had limited run-time with the person currently in the job, and they wanted to get someone in there while this person was still available to train the incoming person. That didn’t happen, the person moved on, and there’s no one really there to be the “product guy.”

So that’s all well and good, right?

Sometime in May, the Indians started calling (or in this case, e-mailing, because I don’t publish a phone number and do not plan on doing so.) A half-dozen recruiting houses have called, all with the same job description and the same pay rate. They don’t take no for an answer, instead replying “How much do you need?” only to tell you that they are only authorized to offer the original rate in the posting. I would get perhaps 5-6 contacts per company before they moved on.

One in particular, however, has simply not let up. A company called Viva-IT (www.viva-it.com) is a company that claims to be based in a suite in Illinois, but is actually just a front for one of the many Indian recruiting houses. They’re calling you from Chennai, not Illinois, as evidenced by their business profile. Since the beginning of December, they’ve contact me at least 21 times, as evidenced by the “I’m not interested, remove me from your mailing list” replies I sent. I’m pretty sure there are more, but I archived my mail fairly regularly and don’t have messages before December.

21 times since December 1. Some days, it’s the same person sending me multiple contacts a day. What part of no don’t you understand? This doesn’t count the other companies that emailed me about this same job.

The last contact was really good. Backstory: I use a different reply-from address for contacts, as I have individual aliases set up for each job board. If I get an email from “myname-monster@mydomain.com” I know you found my resume on monster.com - telling me you found it on Indeed will result in an immediate discard. This recruiter both indicated that they’d called me and left a voicemail (to what number? None are published.) and used the generic reply address, indicating that he had found this address on a profile “on the job boards” and was emailing me about the requisition. This was someone that had contacted me multiple times in the past, and I’m not sorry to say I called him out on this behavior, calling him a liar and an idiot. I didn’t receive a reply of course, and none was expected. Amusingly enough, yet another Indian contract house has started emailing me about this job.

That was really the last straw. I found the hiring company’s contact email and sent them a message asking if they can do something about this particular recruiter and their constant badgering.

I received a reply - a generic reply from someone indicating that if I was interested in a career with the company to check some web page.

My reply was to indicate that this wasn’t about a career, it was about one of their recruiters being a complete ass, and how it reflects badly on them. This garnered a real response from someone, who cc’d me on a request to the company’s HR group, asking if they could investigate this.

HR simply closed it the next day as spam. My only reply was to indicate that I was disappointed that they are apparently ok with recruiters representing them in this manner. No reply here, and none is expected. A person on the inside indicated that they were not surprised either, and gave me some personal anecdotes about their own experiences with the company’s HR people.

I suppose there’s not really a point here - it’s more of a rant. But I have to wonder, does this recruiter even have a contract to represent the hiring company? (Probably not, if experience is any teacher.) Are they really ok with places like this representing them? And even if I did apply, would I even get my resume in front of the hiring manager (again, probably not from word on the inside.)

Recruiters like this are what give the industry as a whole a bad name. Quite possibly one of the many small reasons as to why companies can’t find people to fill these jobs - we’re burnt out from getting dozens of contacts from junk companies that we miss the one that may be real, or don’t care anymore.

It’s not a job requisition at this point - it’s just spam.