Tuesday 28 October 2008

Headhunters strike out again

A follow-on from my negative experience with headhunters. I've begun receiving exactly the sort of "job offers" that I was fearing. I've got offers (from all over the world, mind) asking me if I'd like to work as (for example) a junior developer on an embedded-kernel contract in Belgium... which'd be nice and useful if I were interested in that sort of thing instead of having only 6 months non-commercial experience (at uni) doing this stuff as a elective subject... or at least held a work-permit that allowed me to work in Belgium.

The end result makes it fairly obvious that their recruiters are just too damn lazy to do more than a quick search on the db... followed by spamming all the results. They've ripped out the db-friendly data (ie my naked skillset) and divorced it from the important stuff (ie what sort of job I'm actually interested in). Leaving me to be spammed by every idiot with a contract to push.

If I were a junior developer, desperate for any job I could get, I'd probably just have to suck it up... but I'm not - and they're alienating an in-demand developer with lots of experience. This doesn't make me feel like responding positively to any of their future offers... even if they do suit my requirements.

What gets me is that it'd be so easy to make this system work. Even if they had a few extra fields in their db for "what type of job is the candidate looking for", they could run these as a filter over their resultset and turn that spam into much-less-despised targetted advertising.

I'd even be interested (possibly even grateful) to receive such a service - instead of so annoyed that I've blogged about it twice.

2 comments:

Igor said...

Seems like Belgium is very popular :)
I've got a few job offers (out of the blue) to work in Belgium too! Never applied, never thought to go there :). From 2 to 12 months contract. Fluent in French :)

Taryn East said...

That last part is not one of my specialities, sadly. ;)