No, I’m not looking for a job, but for some reason recruiters are still bugging me almost every week. Personally, I’ve never found a job that was referred from a recruiter so I consider most of them to be a waste of time. Today a recruiter annoyed me just a bit more than usual so I figured I would write about it here.

For some reason, these pesky recruiters find a way to find my work phone number. Honestly I don’t even know what this number is because I never use this phone. I think some people within this company is unleashing this information and it is rather annoying. My manager also hates calls from recruiters so he told me that if anyone calls for him I should tell them to contact HR. Apparently these recruiters just call random numbers and hope to be directed to some hiring manager. Today’s recruiter was named Anne and she called my phone and asked for my manager. The conversation went something like this (I’m replacing my manager’s name with BLAHBLAH):

“Hello, is this BLAHBLAH?” Without giving away my manager’s full name, I could tell you that this woman was pronouncing it like an illiterate fool. My manager’s name ends with an I, and she says it like it ends with an A. This persisted during the entire phone call.

“No, he is not in the office today. Who am I speaking to?”

“Oh, this is Anne. May I have BLAHBLAH’s extension?”

“Hmm, are you from my company?” I was getting a little suspicious here.

“Oh, no, I’m just looking for BLAHBLAH.”

“Are you a recruiter?”

“Why, are you looking for a job?”

“No, I’m not, but are you a recruiter?”

She chuckled a bit and said, “yes, I am.”

“Okay, my manager said to just tell all recruiters to contact HR. I can give you the number for HR.”

“Oh, I know HR’s number, they wouldn’t talk to me because I place so many great candidates and make them look bad. Could I have BLAHBLAH’s number?” Wow, isn’t she cocky?

“Well, that isn’t my problem. I’m a bit busy so…”

“Are you an engineer on BLAHBLAH’s team?”

“Yes”

“How did you get the job?”

“I applied”

“Oh so you didn’t go through a recruiter?”

“No.”

“How did you find out about the job?”

“I looked, and a lot of my schoolmates work here.”

“Oh cool, what school did you go to?”

“Berkeley.”

“Oh haha Berkeley, we used to call them weenies.” Well I guess this idiot went to Stanford. A dozen or so of the core people at my company’s engineering team went to Berkeley, so I don’t think it is a very good move to insult my school when you are trying to recruit for my company.

“Um, look, I don’t have time for this…”

“You are in Palo Alto right? That’s right next to Stanford!”

“No, we are in San Mateo. We moved last year.”

“Oh, I don’t know much about San Mateo, but Palo Alto has my favorite sushi restaurant!” Umm..I don’t care about your favorite sushi restaurant. Just when I was about to say that, she said, “So what do you guys do? Java or C#?”

“Why don’t you go to our website and find out? The location of the company is also on the website. Look, I have to go okay.” I hung up here as I heard her voice stream out of the phone.

So, what did Anne do wrong?

cialis 20mg price- When you are a recruiter you are supposed to know what your client wants. Obviously this woman didn’t even do enough research to call the right number and didn’t even know the location of the company.

cialis 20mg price – Okay, I’m not a hiring manager, but if you are trying to get information out of someone you shouldn’t insult them by calling them a weenie. That’s just excessively stupid.

cialis 20mg price- As I said, I don’t care where your favorite sushi restaurant is, and most other people probably don’t care either. The way she acted was just very unprofessional.

Now, Anne takes the cake for the most annoying recruiter I have ever spoken to, but the following are more characteristics of bad recruiters that annoy me.

cialis 20mg price – A lot of the times recruiters send out emails to potential candidates saying that they’re recruiting for a position that pays a certain number, and then when you do interview or get an offer the number is much lower. That is a classic bait and switch and that has happened to people I know. I think that is borderline criminal.

cialis 20mg price- I think a lot of recruiters search resumes for keywords, and never read the resume afterwards. So they end up spamming a bunch of people who do not qualify for the job they are recruiting for. It takes a bit of time and effort to screen resumes, but the results might be much better.

cialis 20mg price – There are a couple recruiters I keep in contact with because they were professional enough to take no for an answer when I wasn’t looking. If the candidate or client company do not need the services, I think it’s best for a recruiter learn to back off politely instead of annoying the crap out of people.

cialis 20mg price- Bad technical recruiters generally have no clue what their clients need or want in an engineer because they have very little knowledge about technology and thus do not understand the resumes and requisition orders. The best technical recruiters I have met were former engineers that know what to look for.

Anyway, I am ending this rant here. I’ve known people who had good experiences with cold calling recruiters, but most of them seem quite useless. Have you had a good experience with a random recruiter that wasn’t part of a company’s internal HR? I’d love to hear about it.

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