"Professional Recruiters"?

[Mike]

Michael Butash wrote:
> Anyone else notice anymore an abundance of calls from
> "recruiters" (which I use the term quite loosely) all seem to be coming
> from sweatshop call centers out of various parts of the world?  Being in
> the market for work lately, my res is flapping in the breeze on a few
> job site, and it seems I get quite literally 4-6 calls a day from these
> random *recruiters* that:
>
> a) barely/don't speak english
> b) don't know anything about the technologies they're trying to place
> for
> c) call about the same lame jobs that I myself can find scouring job
> sites
> d) most not even relevant to my held/proclaimed job title or skills
> e) are just plain rude
>
> I've gotten as many as 3 calls in 5 minutes from the same *company* with
> different cannon-fodder reps calling me about the same job, so somewhere
> a predictive dialer software is glitching.  Then they ask if I want a
> job programming asp.net or something silly, just because my resume
> mentions (begrudgingly) having windows skill, or something equally
> asinine unrelated to my actual profession.  Once I'm annoyed and tell
> them no, they practically instantly hang up to wardial/annoy someone
> else.  Rinse/repeate frustration several times a day...  
>
> I figure I can't be the only person having this joy of a time, I'm just
> curious how pervasive this "sweatshop recruiting" has become in our
> field?
>
> -mb
>
>
>   
They've always done this depending on where you stick your resume and 
become more prevalent depending on skill and education levels. One of my 
neighbors was a one man recruiting company and he gave me the skinny for 
how it all works. Its pretty easy, basically if they place you someplace 
they demand a finders fee which is somewhere around 1/8th to 1/3rd of 
your first years annual salary. He says for him to get by all he ever 
needs to do is place about 4 people a year which for him was in 
restaurant and hospitality management. (makes about 45k annually on 
about 4 people under his own company) I think he said he was averaging 
about 6 a year at the time though. Starts every morning making cold 
calls till noon. The rest of the day is for searching job sites and 
returning calls. Its basically resume carpet bombing trying to find 
people to stick in the database in the event that he can match up an 
employee to a job and make ~10k in ransom for him. The initial pass/call 
is not important to him, you are a slab of meat at that point.

Kind of a slimy field IMHO but I guess it works great for some people. I 
always do my own leg work and always set my resume to private. Basically 
I've adopted the mentality that no "great job" is ever going to actively 
scour the job sites looking for me. The only people that would do that 
are going to be HR or recruiters who don't really know how to identify 
me over anybody else anyways. I take it on myself to scour the internet 
looking for them and thus far I've been pretty successful since 
switching to that mentality. I guess its all personal preference though.

-Mike