Recruiters 38

I may have found a way of stemming the tsunami of spamming from Indian contract recruiters. They find your CV on a job board and send you “excellent opportunity with our direct client”, for underpaid contract jobs that are not “in your wheelhouse” (as they say here in the Valley they call Silicon), and frequently are in other states.

For example:

Or:

(I am not a software developer, systems engineer or program manager. And I reside in a specific part of California.)

Apparently there are no maps of the United States in South Asia.

Now, what is frequently absent from these emails is an option to be removed from their database. As:

In fact, I have received multiple emails in the same day for the same contract job from this Somasoft crowd. Even multiple emails in the same day for the same contract job from the same recruiter.

You’ll notice, by the way, that this particular recruiter shows a San José phone number. But he’s actually located in Bangalore; they almost always are. They use IP phones.

Anyway, I tried replying asking to be removed from their data base, whereupon Ram resent the solicitation, but this time with the unsubscribe link. However, two days later I was getting multiple emails in the same day for the same contract job; some from the same recruiter.

So I dug a little on their website. And—in addition to the usual claptrap about how great they are (an Elite Oracle Global Partner), there were two people listed in their “management” page. One, the CEO, is in India (quelle surprise); the other, their director of business development, lists both his email address and a phone number.

So I forwarded him all four emails I got that second time around and said I did not appreciate being spammed by his recruiters after I’d used their unsubscribe function.

(Although I’ve noticed that a lot of the unsubscribe or remove links on these South Asian emails resolve to the same URL, so I wonder whether it has any use at all.)

The pattern seems to be that the emails stop for a while, but then start up again. Evidently these people have the attention span of a goldfish. So I just keep sending them to the business development guy. However, now that I found the CEO's address, he's getting them, too. Maybe that'll work.