Recruiters 35

Because I’m upping my job search game, on the advice of a friend I re-activated my Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com accounts on Saturday. To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever had good job leads out of either of them, but on the principle of casting a wider net, I thought, what the hell?

Well, I found out what the hell was—within four hours of posting my résumé on CareerBuilder I had three spams from different “arms” of Farmers Insurance Company, assuring me that I was an ideal candidate for a rewarding career in being an insurance agent.

To tell you the truth—I can’t even think what there is in my CV that would come within the same continent as “insurance agent”. But I was immediately reminded of why I’d let CB lapse—because I’d had these before.

What got really creepy was this one:

No, I did not click on any of the links, nor did I click on the attachment that purported to be my résumé. What I did do was a web search, and found that my BFF Jenni Sims has been at it since at least 2010, sending out an identical email to people who are registered on CareerBuilder. She’s toxic, that Jenni.

I also contacted CB’s fraud squad (officially Trust and Site Security Team), the makeup and location of which I don’t really want to speculate on. And I tweeted, which got some attention from someone with the handle @CareerBuilder. After several DMs, he advised me to hand over to TSST, who would take care of everything.

Well, not so much. After saving the full header information for the JobSerious, three Farmers and one Bankers Insurance (yes, another sales opportunity) emails and sending them over, here’s the reply I got:

(To tell you the truth, I don’t even know what that that ic3.gov URL is there for—since that’s nothing to do with CB, although I suppose they think it looks like at least they’re trying.)

I inquired how, if Jenni isn’t a “registered employer”, she got my contact details? And this was their response:

So, in essence, "Not my yob, man."

The inchoate construction of that reply (along with a different signature block) is one of the indicators to me that CB has probably offshored their “security” operation, and no one’s bothered to give them any kind of pick list for this sort of communication.

At any rate—so far it’s spam/phish 6 and actual job leads 0 for CareerBuilder (now run by AOL, BTW). So I’m closing it down.

Again.

Really—you have to go a long way to underperform Dice, but CareerBuilder’s triumphed in this regard.