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recruiter nightmare stories

 
lowercase baba
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Not sure if this belongs in MD or jobs discussion, but....

Elsewhere, there was a thread that started to go on a tangent about recruiter stories. I thought it might make a good thread on its own. Here's mine.

about nine years ago, I was looking for work. I went to one firm on a friend's recommendation. They spend a big chunk of time telling me how they were different from other agencies. They pride themselves on being the "ethical" recruiters who don't do the same bad things other agencies do.

that all sounded good...until...

about half an hour later, they were telling me about one opening they were trying to fill, where the ideal candidate would have an EE degree and then shifted into IT/Java. It had come up earlier that my father was a EE professor at a university, and they said to me "We're trying to figure out how to get your father's EE experience on your resume so it can be picked up by HR and you'll get an interview".
 
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A sadder case is a local Fortune company which had spun off an internal recruiting division.

Their principal demanded 5 years Oracle experience. Well, I'd been working at that point for about 7 with SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQL-based FoxPro, plus a little playing around with installing DB2 and Oracle.

That wasn't acceptable. It had to be 5 years "Oracle" experience, so they tried and tried to get me to "adjust" my experience.

I'm not real big on lying about what I do. I've done enough over my career that I'm not insecure about my ability to tackle pretty much anything. So no dice.

I did end up working in someone else's Oracle shop about a year later. Doing advanced Oracle, including some serious performance tuning. I got hired directly by my boss, not according to some arbitrary standard/

HR departments make me itch.
 
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I have a theory. One that I have not yet been brave enough to try out. If I put on my CV "I am really really terrible at Oracle database technologies, like I haven't got a clue what I'm doing", my theory is that I'll be called for an Oracle DBA job interview.

Just to prove that CV's are parsed for buzzwords and not actually read by some agencies.
 
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Went into a recruiter, he looked over my resume, then looked at me derisively and said "This town is full of smart guys." His business card said he was a PhD in something. He had a closet office beside the front door.
 
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Tim Cooke wrote:I have a theory....Just to prove that CV's are parsed for buzzwords and not actually read by some agencies.


I have a theory. Nobody bothers to actually read your CV, till the interview actually starts. "So, tell me about yourself". You moron, all you need to know is already there, if you could bother to actually read it.

Everyone has stories about how they got called for java script positions because of the 'java' word.
Once I got a call about a 'Front desk' job..... because my resume has the words 'GUI / Front end development'. Pity I didn't get a call to star in 'End of days', next to Arnie!
 
Maneesh Godbole
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Guillermo Ishi wrote:He had a closet office beside the front door.


 
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I'm a freelance Java developer, so I probably deal with agents and recruiters more often than people who work as employees.

In my experience most agents and recruiters just match buzzwords and they have no clue at all about what the people they are trying to sell are actually doing and what the job of a software developer consists of. In other words, they are salespeople who don't know anything about what they are selling. It's much better to find jobs yourself and keep the agents and recruiters out of the game as much as possible. They only want to sell you as quickly as possible, don't care about you in any way, and just want to catch money for every hour that you are working for the client.
 
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I'm not sure what exactly is missing link in the process, but mostly it is lack of clarity (either manager not being clear about what exactly is needed, or recruiter/HR makes lot of assumptions).

Apart from automated resume scanning system, I believe that those shortlisted resumes should at least have a single manual reading.

As an interviewer, below happens to me a lot of times:
Requirement is - say Core Java (including expertise on threading, networking etc.). But eventually, a candidate is already called for interview and it turns out that he/she is having experience of Hibernate, Spring etc.
So - he/she was called just because of word 'Java' in resume. Candidate might be good in Hibernate/Spring, but if he/she doesn't know much about threading and networking, its basically lose-lose situation (candidate's and interviewer's time is wasted, and so is recruiter's efforts).

Surprisingly when I was called for interview long time back, I got list of topics which are 'must' and which are 'good to have' for interview.

So - I believe it is possible to fix these issues by increasing clarity.

Just my two cents.
 
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Maneesh Godbole wrote:

Tim Cooke wrote:I have a theory....Just to prove that CV's are parsed for buzzwords and not actually read by some agencies.


I have a theory. Nobody bothers to actually read your CV, till the interview actually starts. "So, tell me about yourself". You moron, all you need to know is already there, if you could bother to actually read it.



Usually, this is done because the interviewer is trying to test the interviewee's communication skills, and also double check if someone is lying on their resume. It;s surprising how many times the answer to "tell me what you did in your last job" is completely different than what comes out of their mouth. Lying on your resume is difficult. Asking them to tell you without referring to it makes it more difficult.
 
fred rosenberger
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I'm pretty sure it has been discussed somewhere else, but the "tell me about yourself" is also an ice breaker. Interviewees are generally pretty nervous. This is a softball question that breaks the ice as much as anything else.

at least, that's the consensus I recall from the other thread.
 
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Jayesh A Lalwani wrote:
Usually, this is done because the interviewer is trying to test the interviewee's communication skills, and also double check if someone is lying on their resume. It;s surprising how many times the answer to "tell me what you did in your last job" is completely different than what comes out of their mouth. Lying on your resume is difficult. Asking them to tell you without referring to it makes it more difficult.



Also, the resume is very terse -- obviously, in order to fit the materials in. If the candidate has deep knowledge on the project, he/she should be able to elaborate to the point of telling stories regarding it. After all, who can spend years on a project (or with a company) and not have interesting stories to tell? It is these stories, and how they tell it, that sometimes give an idea of the enthusiasm (or lack of) for the work.

Henry
 
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