Good news
A bite. I’m waiting for invites to a full loop from one company and another is potentially going in that direction.
Less good
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten a number of “we’ve decided not to proceed with your candidacy” emails from applications I’ve submitted, but one was different. In that they admitted they were closing the role due to company restructuring. This was a well known subsidiary of a tech giant, so it was interesting to see them be that open.
You’d think I would be used to the rejection letters. Still, when a company where I think I’d be a great match says “no,” it’s a little disappointing. That said, when it’s “we decided we don’t need this role after all,” I have a combo of relief that it wasn’t personal with annoyance that they wasted the time of many applicants.
Such are the joys of job hunting.
In the slog
Got a contact from a recruiter, forgot about it, he pinged again, and we set up time to talk. It was only then I checked out the company. It’s a web3 company with a variety of blockchain services from dApps to NFTs to crypto tokens. I’m a web3 cynic. Too much of it is either applying the blockchain to things for which it’s an over-engineered solution or creating collectibles that I view with the same level of suspicion as the penny stock market. Face it, we’ve seen crypto/NFT “pump and dump” schemes.
If I’m not well versed in it, currently learning it, or wanting to learn it, pursuing a role doing Advocacy/Evangelism for it is dishonest. I would be willing to do technical writing, because then I do not have to advocate for it or immerse myself in the related communities dishonestly; I just have to provide documentation and materials to make it easier for developers to comprehend and use.
And while I am a fan of DeFi and moving away from the big banks, I do not think unregulated collectibles markets are currently a place for anyone to be except those with the spare cash for speculative plays.
Bullshit or not??
On the scam side, I posted a resume to Monster, but do not recall requesting their resume evaluation or writing service. Still I got an email from “monsterresumewriting.com,” with the Monster logo on it. It arrived in the mailbox I filter all mail to the email address I created for Monster. It had a notice that it would have gone to spam if not for my filter and I can find no evidence that domain is actually affiliated with Monster itself.
While trying to validate it, I came upon Monster’s BBB (Better Business Bureau) page and saw complaints from people that they had not received any useful inquiries through Monster, but had continued to receive bad ones after they closed their account and pulled their resume down.
If you make your contact info public to recruiters on Monster or CareerBuilder it will not just be used by recruiters who have what they believe to be a match, it will be scraped and added to databases. In some cases, it’s an agency that’s building its own. In others, it’s data brokers who compile huge databases from these services and then sell them to the crappiest boiler-room operations for cheap.
This is why I create a unique address for when I post my resume to a job site like Monster. Not only can I tell immediately where the email came from, but I can shut down the address and have everything sent to it bounce.