Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Spam

Want 30 Job Offers a Month? It's Not As Great As You Think 227

An anonymous reader writes: Software engineers suffer from a problem that most other industries wish they had: too much demand. There's a great story at the Atlantic entitled Imagine Getting 30 Job Offers a Month (It Isn't as Awesome as You Might Think). This is a problem that many engineers deal with: place your resume on a job board and proceed to be spammed multiple times per day for jobs in places that you would never go to (URGENT REQUIREMENT IN DETROIT!!!!!, etc). Google "recruiter spam" and there are many tales of engineers being overwhelmed by this. One engineer, fed up by a lack of a recruiting spam blackhole, set up NoRecruitingSpam.com with directions on how to stop this modern tech scourge. Have you been the victim of recruiting spam?
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Want 30 Job Offers a Month? It's Not As Great As You Think

Comments Filter:
  • by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:08PM (#49597857) Homepage Journal

    I get these every damn day. You would think these folks might take the time to look at where I live (it's on my resume) and compare that to where they want me to work. Never happens.

    • by MouseR ( 3264 )

      I get 1 new recruiter request per month. What typically follows is spamming of job offers because one keyword matched in their database. Such as "programming". I've had some pretty interesting offers once in a while. Perhaps not interesting enough to jump ship after all the advantages I have for working 18 years in the same house, but some came very close. But on the average of 10-15 offers a month, most are totally irrelevant to what my profile lays out in terms of specialties and experience.

      The problem bo

      • by rnturn ( 11092 )

        I started receiving office management job ads partly, I assume, because my resume contained "administrator" and "manager". The laugh-out-loud ad was for an administrative assistant. For some reason I'd also started receiving near-daily ads for legal jobs, utility jobs (I used to know the lyrics to "Wichita Lineman" but I doubt that experience counts), and transit jobs (bus driver and cabbie jobs). Idjits.

        It wouldn't surprise me to, one day, receive an email for an urgent job for which my experience with "t

  • by rcrodgers ( 1233228 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:10PM (#49597871) Homepage
    Really? It's an example and all, but as developer born and raised in Detroit (the city proper) and a current resident of the city, is it necessary to kick the place even more? Any way, recruiter spam is a constant pest for me as well; one recent one was trying to get me interested in a "Live Chat Customer Service"' opportunity somewhere... I think I'll be taking a peek at NoRecruitingSpam.com .
    • Agreed! It's a great place, seriously. In fact, I'm trying to get there! I'm having trouble getting responses from there, but ohhhhh boy do the local Bay Area recruiters love calling me five times a day. At least most of the calls are decently targeted, but having to repeat 'no, I'm really not looking in this area' five times on each call is a drag.
    • The Live Chat Customer Service opportunity is probably with Comcast in Philadelphia. Initially, I received the request from some recruiters I trusted. Then, a week or two later, it seems like every other opportunity is an exciting op with them. Like the guy who set up the norecruiterspam.com site, I have been working on ways to screen these dups out as well as identify the harvesters as well as deal with UEC and their requirements as well. Yes, I AM on the job market after my position was eliminated las

    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, 2015 @09:57PM (#49598539)

      Born and raised in South Detroit? And did you recently catch a midnight train to anywhere?

    • Whew, I clicked this article in a hurry, all ready to be incensed about the unnecessary comment targeting "A place you would NEVER move to!" As the Golden Girls say, thank you for being a friend. I cannot speak directly about the job opportunities offered to a tech worker, but, for Bob's sake, it is inaccurate, passe, and just about rude to use Detroit as a whipping boy, especially in a way unrelated to the article at hand. The connotation here is clear, that nobody would relocate to Detroit because Detroit
    • It's an example and all, but as developer born and raised in Detroit (the city proper) and a current resident of the city, is it necessary to kick the place even more?

      Losers need to be made look bad at every opportunity, otherwise the winners might start wondering just what kind of society lets such things happen to innocent people. I mean, they might even suggest government should help pull them up from the ditch, and that's blashphemy against the Invisible Hand and the Church of Free Market.

      Don't take it

  • by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:12PM (#49597875) Homepage Journal

    Same thing happens with doctors and nurses, quite frankly.

  • Get a professional sounding/spelling domain and create your own emails on it. Get creative with your extended addressing and use that address only for job hunting. When you aren't on the hunt, either kill the address until you need it again or just send the mail it receives to /dev/null

  • Find a few local recruiters, make friends with them and touch base every year. When they get tired of your coy nature, rinse and repeat. They need your money and will hang on long enough that if you do ever get laid off, you have at least one starting point. Saved me once.
    • does not work anymore unless you are very generic.

      recruiters now work for THE COMPANY. they are hired by them, often exclusively, and they ONLY hunt for them or a few others. they don't work for you (they never really did, but they used to be more independant).

      I have recruiters I've known for 20 years and yet, when I'm out of work, I call and its 'sorry, nothing to fit your quals right now.'

      does that sound like someone who 'works for me' ?

      you hunt for a job, you apply for that job and the guy-in-the-suit

    • Find a few local recruiters, make friends with them and touch base every year. When they get tired of your coy nature, rinse and repeat. They need your money and will hang on long enough that if you do ever get laid off, you have at least one starting point. Saved me once.

      Unfortunately, the actual recruiters (people) around here have a very high turnover rate.

      The recruiting company itself may endure (or be purchased), but they don't have any retained knowledge of what I might bite at. So I get useless offers, blow them off, then they don't think about me when something more interesting comes along.

  • by Sigmon ( 323109 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:34PM (#49598011) Homepage
    Every... Day.... :-/
    • Re:Almost... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by swillden ( 191260 ) <shawn-ds@willden.org> on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:59PM (#49598143) Journal

      Every... Day.... :-/

      I have a polite canned reply, which basically says that unless the recruiter's client is looking for developers to work 100% remotely, AND that their pay scales are likely to exceed Google's by a significant margin, AND that they do really cool stuff, then I'm not interested. Oh, and I don't do referrals of friends (they get plenty of spam themselves).

      I don't actually mind the recruiter spam. It only takes a couple of keystrokes to fire the canned response, and there's always the possibility that someone will have an opportunity that meets my criteria. Not likely, but possible. I'm not looking for a new job, but if an opportunity satisfies my interest requirements, I'm always open to a discussion.

      However, when they keep pushing even when they know their job doesn't fit my requirements, then I get pissed and blackhole their agency. That also takes only a couple of keystrokes :-)

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I was sitting in training with a couple layers of my management and was getting a ton of recruiting spam that day. I sent out my canned response that I was available for $400k/year. One of my bosses asked if anyone responded. As he asked on of the recruiters stated trying to negotiate with me. Although he only offered to come up to 60K.

      • by itzly ( 3699663 )

        I have a polite canned reply

        I have a Delete button.

  • Only 30? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Sarusa ( 104047 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:43PM (#49598071)

    I get these every day even though I've had the current job for five years. For things that aren't anywhere near anything on my resume. Recruiters are just bottom feeding scum, and it's gotten a lot worse since people in India (and Africa, and Eastern Europe, etc) have realized they can just browse LinkedIn then shotgun resumes to companies. The hit rate is tiny, but all they need is one. Local firms are bad as well, with apparently every single person from TCC contacting me about the same job.

    LinkedIn is no better - 'Jobs you might be interested in: Mechanical Engineering Manager in Baton Rogue'. Really. I'm not an ME, I specifically say no management roles, and I specifically say unwilling to move. Maybe you should contract me to rewrite your jobs candidates engine, because I think I could do better in 2 days with 300 lines of python.

    So why are you still on LinkedIn, you might ask... well, it is fairly amusing, and I can handle one or two a day. And if I ever need a job my profile will be there.

  • by gnunick ( 701343 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:51PM (#49598099) Homepage

    I don't know about the "jobdiva" site mentioned at the "norecruitingspam" site, but I can certainly relate to getting too many unsolicited requests for my latest resume for "amazing opportunities" somewhere across the country. Obviously you didn't read my resume, asshole--it links to my web site, which always features... my latest resume!

    Once I get more than one such email from the same domain, I just add 'em to my Postfix blacklist (surely I can't be the only engineer who still runs his own mail server?).

    Sometimes I'll even add them after the first email (if there's any legit recruiter named "Satish Kumar", I'm sorry about the unfortunate coincidence).

    Here's what my blacklist looks like at the moment:

    panzersolutions.com 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse.
    intellisofttech.com 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse. Satish Kumar.
    intellisoft.com 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse. Satish Kumar.
    adaequare.com 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse. Satish Kumar.
    talentedit.com 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse. Satish Kumar.
    bzm.mobi 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse
    zoniac1.nmsrv.com 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse
    epro-consulting.com 550 Your mail server has been blocked due to abuse (sending the same message twice to the same user on one day). Arunkumar.D

    Also, anyone who clearly hasn't read my resume (I know nothing whatsoever about Informatica... I just worked at a place with "Informatica" in the name) gets blacklisted. If you don't read my resume, you're lazy, and you're spamming. If you do read my resume, you'll also see the bit (in the first paragraph) about having little interest in working outside my city limits, and absolutely no interest in relocating. That alone has greatly reduced the far-away recruiter solicitations.

    I used to work with big outfits like Tek Systems, but I've asked them to leave me alone (unlike the spammers, they will actually listen). Nothing wrong with them; I just decided I'd rather support local businesses. I've found two local recruiters, working for local companies (or self-employed) based here in my city. Both of them have gotten me great jobs. Any persistent out-of-state recruiters (who aren't named Satish Kumar) get a polite response explaining that I'm not looking for new recruiters. Any half-way decent company will respect that. I really don't get that many unsolicited offers anymore, and the ones I do get tend to be more interesting.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, 2015 @10:01PM (#49598549)

      Hi, my name is Satish Kumar and I used to be a recruiter. You got me fired from 5 agencies now. Then my wife left me and took children. Then the bank foreclosed on my house. Now I live under the bridge and give out hand jobs for crack money and it is all your fault.

      • Wheeew, for a second there I thought you had inherited USD 12.53 Million dollars US, and that you very important tax reason to move your US 12.53 Million USD in USA so you could give me 150 USD US USA US Dollars money wiretransfer Western Union. But no. You were just complaining about how some guy you were fucking with ignored you and your shitty boss fired you for being ignored. XD
    • I almost always reply with slightly unreasonable salary requirements and/or relocation bonuses. I have no desire to move but if a place would pay me 50% more than I make now and give me a $50k relocation bonus then I'd probably do it.

      I do the same thing with local stuff. I'm not really interested in leaving my current position, but if someone's willing to give me a 25% raise then I may be willing to move on, so I reply with:

      I'm not actively seeking new employment but would consider anything at $1XXk. If

  • A sister company did recruiting, and a then colleague said "I asked for a MVS and Unix person in a particular state with experience in a package", and got hundreds of names, none of whom knew all those things". The didn't know the difference between "and" (3 candidates) and "or" (3000 unqualified candidates). I still get requests for things I only ever did once, with co-requisites of things I've never done...
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01, 2015 @07:55PM (#49598121)

    I have over 25 years experience, and a lot of recruiters call me or email me. All the time.

    For phone calls, I drive the conversation. I live in the SF Bay Area. Since I'm not willing to relocate (and it says that on my resume and LinkedIn profile), first thing I ask about is the location. If they can't be specific, are not familiar with the Bay Area, or don't live here, I tell them I'm not interested.

    If the caller has a heavy accent, or has trouble understanding me, I tell them I'm not interested. If they can't communicate effectively with me, why would I want them representing me to a potential employer?

    Then I ask them to be specific about the job and the company. If they are vague, or if the job is not in my niche, I'm not interested. Any contract-only position, likewise. Then comes line of business: Anything in eCommerce, banking, insurance, marketing, game development: not interested.

    Then I ask about compensation. If it's below what I'm making, not interested. I don't tell them what I'm making now, or if I do I inflate it by 30%. Some stranger calls me on the phone and starts asking personal questions? None of their business.

    Emails are easy to cull. Anything with a subject line intended to catch me eye or trick me into reading it (like when a stranger sends an email with subject like "long time no see") gets immediatley deleted. Anything which doesn't include the job location, or is a location I'm not interested in, gone. And anything that looks like it was sent by an algorithm (e.g. anything from CyberCoders).

    Remember, there are a lot more recruiters than relevant opportunities.

  • Job Diva is the WORST of all. Hell they don't even hide that they use a harvester [jobdiva.info]. Just Google them [google.com] and there are numerous tales of their horrific nonstop spam. I get Detroit (which is a fine city IMHO), Fort Wayne, Billings and every other place I'd never move. Bravo to these guys for finally doing something, I'm signing up now.
  • by manu0601 ( 2221348 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @08:00PM (#49598149)
    Too many offers remind me of the last months of the dotcom bubble...
    • Too many offers is a result of more demand for programmers than supply of programmers. This can happen because of a bubble, or it can happen for other reasons. You can't automatically conclude it's a bubble.

      Look for valuations to become unreasonable, that is the true sign of a bubble.
      • I left a career in systems engineering for truck driving. When I would apply for IT jobs I would get inundated with software engineer jobs. The infrastructure jobs aren't plentiful and it is a race to the bottom dollar. I pray these roaches never discover the critical shortage in truck driving, so far so good.
    • I question how many people get offers from recruiters. Getting an email from a recruiter saying "we have this great position, pays $75k a year contact me if you are interested" != "We want you and are going to pay you $75k/yr contact us with details of where to deposit the check".

  • I get recruiting spam at my dedicated dice.com email account (a sister site to slashdot). Awkward.
    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I got recruiter spam at my last job's e-mail address at a Fortune 500 company, which was odd because I really only used it for internal communications and didn't submit it anywhere. I actually got on the cases of a couple of them, telling them that it's unprofessional to send recruiting mail to someone's work address. Their response was the same: then add me to your junk mail list. So I did--I blocked it for the entire e-mail architecture.

  • RTFA (Score:5, Informative)

    by mrsam ( 12205 ) on Friday May 01, 2015 @08:23PM (#49598241) Homepage

    The norecruitingspam guy himself spammed news.admin.net-abuse.email [google.com] a few days ago with this. All he's offering is an email filtering service that blacklists the Jobdiva spambags.

    He posted his screed in a Usenet thread that I started over five years ago, that's archived by Google, at apparently has a pretty high ranking when someone is searching for more information about all the spam they're getting from the Jobdiva spam factory. Over five years ago I happen to notice that every recruiter spam that I received turns out to have come from the Jobdiva spam factory. Ever since then, once or twice a year someone finds that thread in Google Groups, and post a "me too" to the Usenet group. Which I find pretty funny.

    After figuring out where all my recruiter spam is coming from, it was a simple matter of adjusting a few settings on my mail server, and, poof!, it was all gone. Originally I never thought much of it, and only posted the first message in that thread as a means of sharing my thoughts, and nothing more, but apparently someone else now discovered effective email filtering and thinks it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. As Benny Hill would've said: biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig.... deal.

    One good thing here is that now that he's got a good link from Slashdot, and, presuming that his web site is still up (haven't checked), because all his web site now only contains a big rant against the Jobdiva sleazebags, this will shine a bit of a brighter spotlight on those vermin, and perhaps shine some well-deserved sunshine on these sleazebags. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

    • As long as it works, who cares? Seriously. What I discovered, especially about jobdiva was that you can't filter it through gmail no matter what and they have about the best spam filters going IMHO. Sounds like some sour grapes because you didn't get a slashdot link. Wahhhhh....
  • It's not just with IT jobs. It's prevalent in other scientific and technical fields, too. I'm a PhD computational chemist and I constantly get bombarded with recruiter spam from addresses like 1000018179_10007281@jobbank301.com that have subject lines like, "JOBOP - Drug Discovery - Medicinal Chemist - Medford, MA". Gmail sends these all straight to my spam folder. Seriously? If there's a 301st "job bank", what's in the first 300 job banks? Does anyone check email send from an email address that starts with eighteen random numbers? I really don't think any of these recruiters know what in the hell they're doing, as I have never gotten a job from one of them. Ever. All of the jobs I've worked at since receiving my PhD have been from direct contacts and personal references. JOBOP emails are completely useless in a job search,. . .
  • by bzipitidoo ( 647217 ) <bzipitidoo@yahoo.com> on Friday May 01, 2015 @08:27PM (#49598263) Journal

    This article is about spam, not real offers. If they were real offers, it would give the lowdown-- location, skills, duties, and pay. It would be an actual employment contract, and all the candidate would have to do is sign up, or not.

    So often, these so-called jobs are fake. There isn't a real job, they're just harvesting resumes. Or maybe there is but they've already settled on a candidate, and everyone else has no real chance, the employer is only going through the motions to satisfy EEOC rules.

  • This asshole cold-called me... AT THE OFFICE.... When I don't have a direct line, and he had to go through the front desk to get to me.

    I told him to never call me again.

    Apparently, the asshole was scraping LinkedIn, because the next day, he called about 90% of the office. You'd have thought he'd have got a clue when the secretary started hanging up on him.

    • And if he had called you with your dream job?

      Calling through reception is OLD SCHOOL recruiting. That is how you did it before linkedIn and CV databases made it relatively easy to find out who had a certain skillset.

      If a recruiter has been given the task to find someone with a certain skillset they will take a number of steps. First is to advertise, this picks up some of the people who are actively looking for a job, next is to contact their networks and people they know from their database, next is to m

      • I agree it is one of those awkward but necessary parts of being in the job market. When working at one place I went on "vacation" to Fort Worth for an interview and then a few months later toGermany for another one. I wasn't open that it was an interview but when I came back with an offer and had my chat with my boss he pretty much said, "yeah I figured, it's a good opportunity you should take it". Anywhere that that isn't the type of response is not a place I want to work, and if they were jerks about it I

  • I deleted my Linked In after getting endless recruiters and head hunters that didn't even read my resume and just blindly sent out requests.

    I have 10 years in industry in a very niche market and I'll get jobs in manufacturing or other random area that just require a Mechanical Engineering degree.

    It got to the point where I'd have boilerplate nastygram about actually reading my resume and getting back to me.

    • Yes. The recruiters who troll LinkedIn must just search for one specific skill and spam everyone who has it. I always get offers for jobs I'm either not qualified for or would never willingly do.

  • Last year I realized that I'd never changed my LinkedIn job profile info to "not interested" after starting my new job a year earlier. I'd been getting a lot of pings from recruiters, and I thought that might discourage them. Nope. Saying I wasn't interested made the recruiters even more interested in me!

    Which would be great if any of them had a job better than my current one, but they never do. Everything is more boring work I'm less qualified for, for less pay.

    • Yeah that really bugs me. Recruiter messages me with a job opportunity at a cool company. After reading for a page I realize it is an entire stack I have no experience with. I think it is reasonable to apply for a job where there are a couple things you need to learn as you go, but when it is completely different (ex. I do db/web services dev and I get one that is all javascript CSS, but hooks me because it is $120k a year to work at Google in the subject) ... very annoying. Heck I get recruiters offering m

  • "Have you been the victim of recruiting spam?"

    I have an account on LinkedIn, so ... yes.

    Which is funny/sad, because there is nothing in my linked-in profile that suggests that I'm particularly qualified for any in-demand jobs. So the spam I get is for garbage jobs, and positions for which I am obviously neither qualified nor interested.

  • Then all people working in SEO and App development must be crap, shoddy and useless.

    Some programmers are crap. Some programmes are excellent. Some system administrators are crap. Some system administrators are excellent. Some recruiters are crap. Some recruiters are excellent. See the pattern?

  • I get hit with 1-2 job opportunities every day or two from LinkedIn alone...

    Some are good, some are cruft... it all becomes noise since I'm not looking for a job right now.

  • Seriously, their 'smart' systems suck balls. CareerBuilder gives me programming jobs from my horticultural resume. Monster gives me retail jobs from my culinary resume. Neither can figure out my IT resume so I get shit from security guard to administrative assistant.

    All they're doing is selling you out to data harvesters.

    • I know an architect who was going nuts over stuff like that. All he got was "computer architect" jobs, and since that became a code word for "IT person not in India", it got completely out of hand.

      I also receive brain-dead harvesting in my inbox. I'm open to remote work, but half the stuff coming in says "No Remote accepted" and half the remainder says "Must be able to work with remote (e. g., offshore) teams".

      So much for "intelligent agents".

      • by Megane ( 129182 )
        Keyword leeches are the worst. I have (or at least had, not sure if I aged it out) some assembly language experience in my resume. One recruitard send me an offer for what I think was an IBM 360 assembly language job because of the way Assembler was used like a holy word in the description, and another time I got an offer for PC board assembly at the nearby university tech labs. Not that I couldn't have done that, and the pay was pretty good for what the work was, and the commute would have been great too,
  • by NormalVisual ( 565491 ) on Saturday May 02, 2015 @12:19AM (#49598893)
    I usually get one or two of these spammy mails every day. My favorite was one I got several years ago, which described an interesting opportunity, but I wasn't (and still am not) willing to relocate. So, I wrote back and asked the guy if the gig could be done via telecommuting. His response was "yes, but they require that you work from the office. Will that work for you?". I wrote back asking if he knew what "telecommuting" meant, and never heard back.
  • Having 30 solid offers per month for even entry level programming jobs would be reassuring if nothing else. These are just generic position postings though, with no special inside track to get an actual job.

    Having said that, I got a new job by replying to one of LinkedIn recruiting e-mails a couple of years back, and got a nice salary hike as well as more interesting project and less stress than my previous gig. After that, I usually reply by declining politely and thanking the recruiter for asking. If some

  • I'm a Salesforce.com developer and am constantly getting hit by recruiter spam. In the last week I have gotten 15 requests, only 5 of which are in my area. The rest? Over 500 miles away at the very least!

    Whenever you are working with a popular technology set, you are going to get hit up by non stop recruiters. The part that drives me nuts is the non intelligent ways that they shotgun blast. In my current position (I work for a major non IT recruiting company), I'm working with a Salesforce based recruit

  • No. Because I don't place my resume on a job board.

    If I did (presumably because I wanted a job), I'd be pleased to be getting 30 offers a month. (Is that all?)

    • They aren't actually offers. Nearly all of them are Companies who will ONLY hire H1B workers, and if you're a citizen AND honest, almost certainly don't have a chance at getting the job. They're just required to "look" for American workers before going the H1B slave route. The law doesn't strictly say that they can tailor their job opportunities to have practically unmeetable requirements, then email exactly what to input to trigger the system to the person they actually want to hire in India or wherever
  • Hell, I've been retired for over eight years and I still get spammed.

  • I usually send a standard reply along the lines of "please take me off your mailing list".

    When that doesn't work, after 3-4 mails from recruiters from the same company I send a longer reply, this time cc'ing the CEO, CTO, etc. of the company, making sure to include the names of the recruiters.

    Works like magic.

  • ...but it seems the author isn't really talking about receiving 30 job offers. I can easily imagine receiving 30 calls about job openings a month. I've gotten as many as ten calls -- not emails, calls -- in one day. Granted, several of those wind up being for the same job but those calls are not offers. They're not even a guarantee that you'll be selected for a phone screen let alone a face-to-face interview.

  • by MoarSauce123 ( 3641185 ) on Monday May 04, 2015 @06:47AM (#49610277)
    ....and you get zero job offers....or jokes like 3 month contracts at the other end of the continent.

Avoid strange women and temporary variables.

Working...