March 3, 2011 IT Headhunters, Ticks of the Industry

I have been in the IT industry for close to 12 years now. In that time I have moved companies for various reasons 4 times. In the early part of my career it was the dot com boom, jobs galore, and the IT headhunter recruiters were the top shots. They were everywhere, they wined and dined anyone who was in IT. Then reality set in and those recruiters went to the wayside with the rest of the dot com bloat.

As time went on they evolved to be more targeted, more focused. I have used recruiter relationships I made to help me move and advance my career. My gripe is not with those corporate level recruiters. Those recruiters and are focused on the professionals and don't have to rely on annoying techniques. They are respected as a valuable resource the industry. I am talking about the other kind of 'recruiters'.

I am posting this about the other kind. The other kind that are like telelmarketers, flood the market and get short term deals into as many companies as they can. These type don't last long in their position. Much like a bill collector, they get in, make their money, get stressed out and move on. In the interim they annoy the rest of us.

There is a situation that pushed me over the edge to write about these bottom dwellers. This afternoon I received an email about a job, nothing new I get about 1 a week. They are mostly consulting gigs for all over the country for 6 months. Not for me. But, today's was so bad, so poorly edited from the information, and such a disgrace I thought I would tell the story.

So first off the email I received was sent to a junk email account that I use for websites I don't care about. Usually sites that sell my email and flood it with spam. I never use my regular email for those sites. Anyway, the recruiter emailed me using my real first name. Odd. Second, the job description looked more like notes from a meeting than a job description. Third was the advertising, phony message format to me as if I was a friend or something. Here's the punchline....

The job posting was for the company I work for now. I recognized it from the job title and technologies, but the bad thing was that it had one of my co-worker's name in the job description. It looked like a side note.

Not only did they not clean up their crappy description, but they didn't research me before they sent it to find out that I worked for their 'client'. They got my name from massive search and flooded out the post.

I work with the department at my company looking for this consultant job. Just stupid. Mass employment, get in get out, throw enough darts and you will eventually hit something. They don't care about matching the right skilled resource for the 'client', they just want to get a body in and get paid. Corporations wonder why they rotate consultants out every 6-9 months. They trust in the service of the hunters and the hunters only care about getting the spot filled and the fee paid. By the time the corporation realizes the worthlessness, the hiring hunter has moved on and the corporation is out a person and productivity.

But like any industry there are always ticks and bottom feeders. You just have to know how to used a burned match to get them off before they give you Lyme's disease.

End of Line.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Posted in: Technology