In the last two days, I’ve gotten two cold e-mails from (apparently) recruiters offering me jobs — contract jobs thousands of miles away requiring experience and skills that are nothing (and I mean NOTHING) like anything reflected on my resume.
I am tempted to reply unleashing all of my displeasure at their obvious lack of due diligence and for wasting the few seconds it took to open the e-mail, but then I thought, what if (by some distant miracle) they could actually help me in the future? I could also just ignore/delete the damn things, but given the suddenness with which this started, I’m wondering if that would just let a trend continue.
What’s the point of any spam? To either 1) sell you a product that may or may not be effective, ethical, or legal or 2) verify your e-mail address is valid so they can then sell that list to a vendor in category 1.
You could Google the recruiter offices and see if something legit comes up. If so, maybe you could take note of them as a future resource. My bet is they’re not, and in that case, mark as spam and delete.
Is your resume out on any of the job boards? If so, at best it’s typo - they were going to send you Job A, but instead put your email on Job B. Remember, sometimes the recruiter is where the company HQ is, not anywhere near the local-to-you office.
Sometimes it’s a lazy recruiter, especially the ones that have, “if your not currently looking or not a fit for this but know someone who is…”
Usually if I’m not interested, I delete w/o giving it a thought; remember that whole ‘burning bridges’ thing. However, one guy was sending me enough crap (& I do mean crap - the closest job was only two timezones away from me. :rolleyes:) that I sent him a blistering email back that he was nothing but a spammer & he should remove me from his list.
I tried responding to a few of these: “This job is not suitable for my needs, but if you are willing to represent me, may I send you a list of my competencies and requirements?”
I wonder if there might be some scam involved - oh, for a slight resume rewriting fee, we’ll get you a job.
When we post jobs on our website, we get flooded with resumes that aren’t even close. If some legitimate recruiter sent out mass spam, and really wanted to look at the responses, he’d really get flooded. No one would ever do this twice.
Emails with random jobs with no relevance to your skills located thousands of miles away fall into exactly the same category as v1agra and low mortgage rates – it’s pure spam. Maybe they got your address off a job board, maybe they used the random address generator. Don’t give it another thought.
When I signed up on Monster it was like I had written “For a good time call Kunilou” on a bathroom wall.
I would guess as well that some subset of those “job offers” will then involve requiring a $2000 training course, prepaid of course, with no refund. Make sure to mail your check with sufficient time to reach Nigeria.
I get a lot of those, mostly for what appear to be sales positions. I can only assume that the job in question is somewhere on the list of Top 10 Absolutely Shittiest Jobs on Earth, if they need to recruit people via mass e-mail.
At least they got your name right. Nothing better than an email that says “We think your credentials would be Perfect for the job” followed by someone else’s first name. :smack:
Then you have to guess if they actually looked at YOUR resume, or the guy whose name is on the email.
Many times I’ve been tempted to reply back & get Their name wrong, but referring to Mohammed-Abdul as “Shlomo” just didn’t seem productive.
I get a few of these due to linkedin (sometimes the recruiter is diligent enough to dig up my email).
I’m usually polite and mention that I’m not looking to change right now. I have responded to a few, and they turned into real offers, but I declined them.
Yeah, if you have ever signed on with Monster or any of the other job boards, you start to get “recruiting” spam after a while. They try to make it look like a real person is contacting you, but, as you noted, the jobs have little to do with your skills or location. I get the idea that they are just generated by some key word in your resume. I found that as time went on they got more and more random.
I’ve never responded, so I don’t know what the game is. It could be just to get you back on the site. Other types of businesses prey on job hunters, too, like insurance and financial product salespeople.
The ones I get from LinkedIn are reasonably legitimate and connected to what I do. The recruiter I work with dug up some names and we went through them filtering out the irrelevant ones (or the ones already working for my company.) The problem as you found is that most people you come up with are not interested, and we moved to another site which has postings by people actually looking for jobs.
It sounds like the one in the OP is not nearly so legitimate. I’ve never gotten any, but I would touch Monster with a ten-foot pole.
Meh, that could be a typo/ cut & paste error. The top line on my resume is my name & some initials. (think ‘Peter Parker, MD’ or ‘Peter Parker, MBA’). Do you know how often I get ‘Dear Mba’ (where they decided to change the capitalization, too)? :smack:
Usually, I can read the first line of an email before opening it. If I see ‘Dear Md’, I don’t even bother to open it before deleting it.
Good point, but what if it was addressed to Matt Murdock, JD? Or Jessica Campbell Jones? Or Dr Bruce Banner? (Good luck trying to forward mail to THAT guy…)