WTF? Job Spam.

Any tech professional worth their salt is in the habit of updating their resume every once in awhile.  I myself have a quarterly cycle; every three months, I update my info.  Unfortunately, this generates a fresh round of spam from questionable headhunters.

Warning: Rant Ahead

Now don't get me wrong.  I don't think all recruiters are dishonest or deceitful.  There are some really good ones out there that actually do care about doing a good job.  They will actually review resumes, match checkboxes, and generally do a good job of matching up potential talent with employers.

However, there is a growing trend of "recruiters" that appear less than trustworthy, and sometimes just downright shady. If you've been around for awhile, you'll know who I am talking about.

I don't usually name names when I write pieces like this. However, I am going to in this article. There are two that I have the most problem with: Artech and Pyramid Consulting. Yes, these guys just don't seem to have anything better to do than send email all day long. There are others, but these two are at the top of the list, in my opinion. 

I wonder if each "recruiter" gets a bonus, simply for the number of emails sent out. Seems to be so.  I've asked these people for years to take me out of their databases. I get promises of "yes, sure, we'll take you right out."  But the spam continues. 

Ahh, but you say, "Just mark their messages as spam, and you won't see any more!" Right. That will work for some of the more honest ones, but not the hardcore spammers.

For example, I used to get regular (2-3 per week) emails from Farmers Insurance. They wanted me to quit my IT career, for which I have invested 25 years in building, and become an insurance salesman. No matter how the message was worded, that is what it boiled down to.  I don't count Farmers Insurance as shady, merely annoying, since their spam is easily blocked with the mentioned method.

Mastech used to be on my shit list, but they have redeemed themselves in my eyes.  All it took was for me to find the private email addresses of their executives and stakeholders, and perform the ol' executive email carpet bomb. Magically, I received no more emails from Mastech after that.

Recruiters I count as shady and irrelevant, I do so for the following reasons:

• Constantly send you job descriptions for jobs that have nothing to do with your experience, or the job is on the other side of the country.
• Allegedly has a copy of you resume that was just posted, but wants another copy
• Wants you to open a bank account to send your pay checks to
• Want you to quit your current position to take a 3-day printer deployment engagement
• Ignore requests for removal of your info from their systems
• Bad reviews on sites such glassdoor, ripoffreport, and other sites
• Can't use normal methods to block their spam.

Bottom Crawlers

So how do they get their information about you?  Most of these "agencies" utilize a scraper or crawler to pore recruiting sites such as dice, monster, linkedin, indeed, and others.  They scrape your information off the site, and think that gives them license to send you job listings for water buffalo tail cleaning positions in South America.

I've also noticed that most of these outfits utilize cloud-based or proxy-shrouded services such as jobdiva, which seems to be the scraper service that fattens its own database, and then sells it to these "recruiters".

Another thing that stands about these people from Artech and Pyramid Consulting, they all seem from India. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing against indians in general. But it seems to me that that every time I get an email or a phone call from someone who says his name is "Bob" or "Jim" with an east-indian accent so thick a chainsaw could not cut it, and wants to know if I am interested in a position as part time forklift operator in Baton Rouge, LA, well, that's just not trustworthy to me.

Not only have they most likely lied (names probably not "Bob"), but they haven't even reviewed the information in front of them. All it equates to is just going down the list of names and numbers in the phone book, and cold calling.  It doesn't work.  Unfortunately for us, it's much cheaper and faster to send 10,000 emails than make the same number of phone calls.

These people are not only giving recruiters a bad name, but they're doing the same for the indian people.  No matter where you are from, would you want your country to be known as the one that harbors spammers?

If I am wrong in any of this, please feel free to let me know below.

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Posted: 2014-08-16
By: dwirch
Viewed: 4,614 times

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AnonymousCoward posted this comment on 2017-07-25:

I find it interesting that JobDiva claims they don't harvest resume's and that one should contact the sender of the request-my-resume-every-2-hours and have work it out with them but when you click on alot of the "Opt Out"/"Unsubscribe" emails, the following shows up in the content of the Opt-out/Unsubscribe page:

 

	http://www1.jobdiva.com/servlets-examples/servlet/getCompanyLogoServlet?teamid=190">

 

I must not know how to figure out that JobDiva is not only a harvester but an intermediary.......

 

my($0.02)

 

 

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