Posted inExperience / Information Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Why You Suck As a Technical Recruiter – Again

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

It never ceases to amaze me how the most unqualified people tend to become “technical recruiters.” I had a big conversation a while back with the head/owner of a “consulting” company about why he can’t ever find Qt consultants capable of landing a contract.

  1. You only work W-2. Qualified people only work 1099.
  2. Your primary qualification for technical recruiters is that they are “priced right.”

I told him flat out, when someone calls me, or pretty much any qualified consultant I know, and we cannot understand 3 words out of the first sentence. We don’t just hang up, we block the number. If your phone system reports the same number for all outbound calls, that “priced right” technical recruiter just got you black listed on a consultants phone. You will never reach them again.

Oh, you think a follow up email is going to work?

email from technical recruiter

Take a good look at that email.

  1. It has no billing rate mentioned. Already a prime candidate for the bit bucket.
  2. Indiana is a big state! Granted I’m not that far from the border, but, it could be more than a 4 hour drive away, for an unknown billing rate.
  3. C++ Developer, so what? Without knowing the operating system, target platform and type of project, that is just wind through an anus.
  4. Nothing looks better on a resume than a string of 1 month projects. Now, in an embedded systems world, that is _possible_ but it doesn’t look good on the resume. It looks like you keep getting fired.

I didn’t call. I didn’t send a resume. I did send a reply pointing out everything wrong with this email. If they call my cell phone I will hit ignore then add the entry to my black list.

 

 

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.