My company keeps getting phone calls. Well, there have been at least two, but we think there have been more.
Confirmed call 1: A man with a British accent of some sort called and asked for “engineering.” When told there was no engineering department, he asked who would “have filled his position.” Not knowing what to do with that, the receptionist asked if she could direct the call, got a weird answer, and ended up putting him on hold. He hung up.
Confirmed call 2: A woman called and asked for someone by name. When told there was no one here by that name, she said she had a card but it must be old. Reception checked with me and I said he used to work here before she arrived and she told the caller so. Caller asked to be connected to “Whoever replaced him in engineering.” When told we don’t have an engineering department, the caller said she was interested in buying our product, then she named a product we really do make. Reception asked for her name and company, and caller said “Jewel” with a company name that didn’t match the caller ID. She was put on hold to be transferred to me and she hung up.
The caller ID shows a background check company. We think there have been a couple other calls from this ID, but we don’t have records going back very far.
Sounds to me like somebody who used to work there applied for a job somewhere else and put down on their resume that they worked in engineering for your company. The background check people could just be trying to confirm that you indeed had an engineering department, though why they’d go about it in such a roundabout way I couldn’t say.
It seems like they could have asked at any time for an employment check and gotten this particular guy’s job title (he was in sales, by the way) or even just asked, “Um, have you EVER had an engineering department?”
I get calls like that from sales departments. They are trying to find the person that they can bug directly to try and buy their products/services/whatever. Could be a background check company that’s doing the selling.
Yeah, I’ve always encountered this to be a sales strategy. Because they know that everyone avoids sales calls, they buy lists of employees. Often the employees are gone, so they ask for someone in that position.
This happens a lot at my company. They always want to speak to someone in such-and-such department, or the head of whatever-other-thing. Being that we’re so small, I advise them we have under 10 employees and that a number of people fill various roles, so I’ll need to know specifically what they want. They’ll hem and haw and try to avoid it, wanting to know which person’s in charge of <increasingly specific things>. Eventually I’ll get bored of toying with them and tell them we don’t accept cold sales calls; they’ll always deny that’s what it is, so I’ll ask them if we have existing business with them. That usually shuts 'em up.
The most aggressive ones are the free magazine people. If they actually get a live employee name, they will never ever stop calling. One was so bad that they called for a person once a week, then twice, then nearly every day, then every single day, and finally got up to calling three to five times a day. They claimed only the person on the list could ask to be on the ‘do not call’ list. My then-boss finally pretended to be the targeted employee (I couldn’t - wrong gender) and ripped the caller a new one very nastily, and told them where to go. I like him.
