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Job Hunt Diary 2023: Three Unwise Recruiters

Posted on January 5, 2023January 5, 2023 by Greg Bulmash

Today I woke to not one but three recruiters contacting me via LinkedIn, all from different agencies, all for the same contract role with the same company.

Two named the company, one played coy, but the anonymized job description was the same as the other two.

All three contacted me because of my history in Developer Advocacy. But was it a role doing Developer Advocacy? No. It was an Executive Assistant position supporting the Developer Advocacy team and the VP in charge. It was titled “Business Manager” but all the duties shouted Executive Assistant.

I LOVE Executive Assistants. The ones I’ve worked with have been amazing people with amazing organizational skills who really took care of the teams they supported. I respect the heck out of them. That’s just not my career path. I told the recruiters I wasn’t interested.

But, if it had been in my wheelhouse, what would I have done? I would have told the recruiters I wasn’t interested.

Why? Because if three recruiters from three different staffing firms hit you up the same morning for the same contract, it’s a cattle call.

Back in 2014, my team at Microsoft was hiring a contract writer to join us. That was put in Microsoft’s open contract system, meaning any approved agency could submit candidates. Imagine this comic from The Oatmeal, but replace the spiders with resumes.

I and another writer were asked by our manager to sort through the pile of resumes HR had handed him. It was a 2-3 inch thick pile of printer paper, and these were the ones that got past the 2014-era filters. So many didn’t meet the minimum criteria.

Every agency had multiple submissions. Agency names were printed at the top of every resume we reviewed, which was good. Any agency that submitted a woefully under-qualified candidate became an automatic toss for every resume after that with the agency’s name on it. But that still meant dozens of decent resumes to review to try to pick a top 5 (a top 3 with two alternates in case one or two were no longer available).

My resume sitting in a big pile of resumes, one of a dozen people the agency submitted, and I have to hope that they didn’t submit a shit candidate who ended up higher in the pile, tainting my resume with the stink of the agency’s haphazard sourcing processes? No thank you.

Coming up on the Job Hunt Diary

Tomorrow I’ll be tearing my home office apart and then putting it back together to make it a better place to make software and content. But I’ll be back next week as I chronicle what looks to be a long and difficult hunt. Wishing you all love and luck.

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