Do I look like a cow? It’s the hair, isn’t it? I need a haircut. — all in this week’s issue of Clueless Recruiters. (Cue theme music!)
There are few things that technical people are more annoyed by than technical recruiters. A very large segment of the technical recruiting industry has made a bad name for the rest of their industry by relentlessly spamming technical professionals after having not done their homework. These people hock job openings the same way that sleazy salesmen hock used cars.
These recruiting companies need to radically change how they do business with the technical crowd, and the Clueless Recruiters series is an attempt to call out clueless technical recruiters who contact me for jobs that are clearly a terrible fit. Everything here is posted from real exchanges between myself and recruiters, entirely uncut. Enjoy!
Here’s one I got this morning from a clueless recruiter. For reference, here is my résumé.
Hope all is well. I wanted to reach out to you in regards to an opportunity I’m working on with [company] located in San Jose.
Hello [name], I am doing well. It’s good to put a face to a name (http://[domain-name].com/about/team). I’m curious, however as to why you’re emailing me about a position in California since I haven’t lived in that state for a few years.
A company led by a team of experienced executives, designers, and engineers from TiVo, Netflix, Vudu, Disney, MTV, MGM, Apple, Best Buy, E!, eBay, Yahoo!, and WebTV. I’m working with [name], VP of Engineering and he is looking for a solid Ruby Developer. The company is backed by blue-chip venture capital firms including NEA, Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital, LA angel investor [name], and independent investors from the entertainment and technology industries. Please let me know if this is something you would be interested in. I have included the job req below.
When you leave Silicon Valley behind, you realize that people find the strangest things enticing about positions. Personally, I’m not even remotely interested in “status” as much as whether or not the work I’m doing will have a positive impact on the world.
[Description of company and their product.]
I know. I’ve played with it. It’s… meh. It tries to be too many things without actually being good at any one of them.
About the Position
We’re looking for a strong autonomous general programmer with great Ruby knowledge and with capacity and will to evolve. We’re currently using a custom Ruby stack with Rails components and a MongoDB backend, but are looking for someone with enough experience to adapt to new technologies as needed.
Well, this clearly doesn’t sound like me. You Googled my name before contacting me, right? To make sure that I was actually a reasonable fit for this position?
Since I know how awesome the overwhelming majority of technical recruiters are about doing their homework before contacting people, let me make sure you’ve seen my resume.
- http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Ryan+Parman
- Click “Resume”
- Read the resume.
Because, I mean, I’d hate to think that a technical recruiter was making a cattle call by sending messages to anybody who had “Ruby” in their resume somewhere. I don’t look like a cow, do I? (Lie to me if you think I do. It’s the hair, right? I need a haircut, don’t I?)
Desired Skills
Ruby proficiency
Somewhat.
MongoDB
Nope.
Other distributed databases (Riak, Memcached, Redis, Cassandra, Hbase, etc.)
Nope.
Strong Traditional SQL Experience is a plus
Nope.
API Design, client-Server communication experience
Yes.
Caching techniques
Somewhat.
Testing (TDD & BDD knowledge is a plus)
Yes.
Start-up mentality
Yes.
Autonomous
Yes.
Desired Interests
* Scala, Go & concurrency
No desire.
Solr & search optimization
No desire.
In memory caching and indexing
Some desire.
Fault-tolerant service architecture
Well, yes. I work for Amazon Web Services. 
Multi-data center and distributed data
Again, yes. The whole AWS thing.
If digital entertainment is your passion, Fanhattan is for you:
Oh really?
an obsession for user experience…
Clearly not. The UX of the app is arguably pretty terrible.
disruptive technology…
WTF does this even mean?
high-profile investors…
Not even a little bit.
and an experienced team of designers…
Yes.
engineers…
Yes.
and executives…
Most executives are buffoons. How are the Fanhattan execs different?
from both the technology…
Awesome!
and entertainment industries.
You mean the broken industries who are attempting to destroy the United States through bogus legislation? No thank you.
[name] | Technical Recruiter | [company]
Engineering, Product, Development, Leadership
Tel: [phone] | Cell: [phone]
[email address]You are receiving this email because you are a member of our private contact database. If you do not wish to receive similar email messages in the future and to see our contact information please click here. We respect your privacy. This email fully complies with the CAN-SPAM Act.
I’ve actually sent unsubscribe messages before on multiple occasions, and my requests keep getting ignored. I actually have Gmail filter “@[domain-name].com” emails directly into the Trash because of it. I only saw this message because I accidentally deleted something and needed to pull it back to my inbox.
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