Recruiters... Chapter 3

Another bizarre encounter of the weird kind with a recruiter (yes—redundant; trebly so, as any encounter with a recruiter is de facto bizarre and weird).

A couple of days ago I received an email from a recruiter for a large security software company. Pretty much out of the blue, saying he’d like to speak with me and what’s the best time to phone?

Before I could reply to give him a convenient time, I got an early morning call—evidently just to chat. He’d found my CV on Dice, but didn’t seem to have anything specific in my line. Wanted to know if I’m wedded to the West Coast (I’m not), reminisced about his time living in Northern Virginia/DC (good times, good times) and finally expressed interest in my qualifications and enjoined me to keep in touch.

Well, the next day it occurred to me to ask a question about entrées into security—you pretty much can’t get hired unless you already have experience and I was thinking that perhaps a somewhat oblique approach might be effective. So I emailed him in the spirit of his “don’t be a stranger” approach. I made my inquiry and asked his advice—usually that’s an invitation for someone to propound on his expertise at great length.

In this case, him being a recruiter, it resulted in resounding silence. Evidently his emailing fingers have been broken since our conversation.

So much for his attempt at bonhomie and sincerity.

On a related front, a job shop recruiter contacted me a couple of weeks ago about a product marketing contract job with an enterprise software company. She didn’t have a lot of information about it, but had found my CV on Dice and wanted to submit my details to the customer.

Well, to cut this one short, on Tuesday I had an initial phone screening with the hiring manager—no further details about the job, just to “get a feel for the cultural fit”.

Only it turns out that she doesn’t even have approval/funding for this contract, and won’t know until month’s end, best case. Only then could she actually start, you know, interviewing.

I suppose it’s a mark of how desperate job shops are to get bums in seats (as we used to say in the UK; and which, now that I think of it, is probably an accurate expression by at least two definitions) that the recruiter is already flinging candidates at the client before there’s even a budget.

The more I work at this the better a convent starts to look. One without any sort of electronic connectivity, much less recruiters.