Kirkman Enterprises

Whenever I go through a phase of updating my resume and publishing it to various sites (as I'm doing these days), I'm quickly reminded about how much I find job recruiters to be irritating.  It generally seems to me that recruiters don't care about my time or being straight and to the point in their communications.  Maybe it has to do with there being a lot of people looking for work.  Maybe I'm just being overly sensitive.  I figured that since I have this blog, and my resume links to it, I'd do a little venting in hopes that perhaps recruiters will understand why they are so irritating to me.

Recruiters don't often provide information via e-mail.  I'm an e-mail person.  I manage to stay fairly busy between attending graduate classes, working on class projects and keeping up with readings, my involvement with student government, seminars, and my research job.  I don't often pay a lot of attention to my phone in terms of who is trying to call me.  I don't use voice mail either.  If something is important, a text message or e-mail gets my attention and a response much quicker.  After all, for me it is easier to spend a minute making a response than spending 15 minutes on the phone.  So, it's irritating when a recruiter will e-mail me with this:

Major Corporation hiring a Java Developer that has Wicket Experience San Antonio, Texas
What is a number that I can reach you at to talk to you about this opportunity?

This is the entire e-mail from a recruiter at KForce... sorry, it's a "Talent Identification Specialist".  Quite honestly this gets no response from me.  There is no information about the position or anything about the company.  Why would I want to respond?  

Recruiters don't try to sell me on the job.  I realize that in a way, when applying for work, I am trying to sell myself to the company.  I'll admit, I couldn't sell hot cocoa to an Eskimo, so I'm likely going to be bad about selling myself.  At the same time, I'm looking for a place to spend some time at in a career.  In my opinion, it's just as important for the recruiter and the company to sell me on them.  Why do I want to work for the company?  Why should I respond to your e-mail?  Why should I make the time to call you?  It is incredibly rare that I find a company is trying to sell me on why I should work for them.  Bottom line, I get multiple e-mails a day saying that "I'm great for position they are offering" (not that I always believe that), but they are doing a poor job of telling me why the company is great for me.  With that in mind....

Recruiters promote the company, not the working envirnoment.  I'm surprised that when I do get to hear about the company that is offering the job, I get marketing garbage that is aimed for the company's customers, not the prospective employee.  For example:

XXX Corporation is a global healthcare IT company, in business since 1979, with over 9,000 employees and growing at an unbelievable rate – estimated to double in size over the next 10 years! As you may have been following on the news, there is a strong national focus on Healthcare IT, and XXX is one of the top premier providers. With World Headquarters in Kansas City, MO, they are experiencing tremendous growth and are planning to add 200 more software engineering positions to their staff this year alone.

This seems like something you'd want to promote to your customers to show how much you are working to improve the services you'll be offering to them.  This tells me nothing about the work environment.  My fear in reading they are adding 200 SE positions this year alone and is doubling their workforce over the next 10 years is that I'll find myself chained to a computer in a 2x2 cubical that is required to crack out thousands of lines of code per day like a monkey.  I realize in the initial e-mail you can't explain everything that is great about a company's working environment.  But if you're e-mailing me about a position, surely there is something about that team, department, or campus that you can mention.

Recruiters won't specify a start date.  I'm currently in school and will finish my coursework in December.  I won't be able to start a job until at least December since I won't have time to effectively work a full-time position.  It just isn't right to myself or to my future employer to try to juggle everything I have going on now with a full-time job. I'll respond to e-mails asking when the preferred start date is and the response is "immediately".  If the recruiter had stated that in the first place, it would have saved us some time.  With that in mind...

Recruiters appear not to read my resume.   I've tried to state in my resume and on job sites that I'm not available until the end of the year.  I also put other details in my resume with the hopes of showing what types of employment I may be interested in.  However, I'll get e-mails about positions where the recruiter has clearly not read my resume.  I've been sent e-mails about jobs requiring ten years of professional experience when I have nothing near that much and don't even suggest that in my resume.  I've been sent e-mails about immediate job opportunities or a position "that's going to move quickly".  It is things like this that really make me question whether one of the responsibilities of a recruiter is to waste as much time as possible, mine and theirs.

Recruiters want my resume in Word format.   In the first place, why are you asking for my resume?  It seems odd to me that you are contacting me out of the blue without ever having seen my resume.  If you found my resume at one of the online job sites and think it's out of date, do you really want to hire me?  As for the Word format, I don't understand this either.  I'm a broke graduate student.  I don't own MS Word.  I haven't owned a copy of Word in over 10 years.  I use LibreOffice (and before that OpenOffice) for my office suite.  Yes, they can produce documents in Word format, but I've found that more often than not they get mangled due to Microsoft's desire to have Word be compatible only with Word.  I'll be more than happy to provide a resume in .PDF format.  PDF is an open standard.  LibreOffice, OpenOffice, MS Word, Latex, Java programs, and more can produce PDF documents that look the same in almost all PDF viewers.  Who doesn't have at least one PDF viewer installed on a computer?  If you don't, why not?  It's just another in a long list of things I just don't understand about recruiters.

Having said all this I figure there are three possible outcomes:
1) A recruiter who is researching me will think this is an insightful rant and, assuming they are interested in hiring me, will work to ensure they communicate with me in a "reasonable" manner.
2) A recruiter will read this and think that I'm an arrogant ass and will mark me off their list.
3) A recruiter won't read this, won't care, and will carry on irritating me.

Unfortunately I think the third option is most likely to happen.  It seems to me that recruiters generally don't care about the person they are wanting to hire, so they won't bother to try and accommodate them.  If option 2 happens, I'm not sure I'm really going to worry.  After all, if they think I'm being completely unreasonable then I'm not sure I would want to work with them.  It is entirely possible option 1 could happen (and if it does hopefully they'll tell me, "Hey, I read your blog.  Hopefully this works for you."), in which case life may be much easier for both of us.

In the next few weeks as I put my resume out online on numerous job sites, I just hope that I won't get too exasperated with recruiters.