Really it’s more of a question of why do I keep getting spammed by garbage jobs from recruiters for positions that have nothing to do with my background in states other than the one I currently live in.
I’m sure I would be an excellent fit for a Salesforce.com (or whatever the fuck…it’s always something different) developer job in Spokane, WA if I actually lived near there and actually developed in anything and wanted to take a 70% pay cut and only wanted to live there for 3-9 months.
It’s actually almost sort of insulting to have these jerkoffs pester me for positions I am clearly not qualified for or vastly overqualified for.
Unemployment in general may be high, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t sectors which have a shortage of candidates. You can’t take the average unemployed retail worker and slot them into a software development job. These are roles that require very specific skills and experience. It’s entirely possible for there to be too few people available with those skills, and too many available without them. In both my current job and my previous job, I spent a large chunk of my time trying to find people to fill openings I had. It was incredibly hard to find people who met the requirements and would be a good fit. Yet I regularly got resumes from people (and friends of friends, etc.) who had exactly zero of the qualifications for the job.
Good Lord, I get those, too. And they’re the same - they want you to move across the country, typically to some town that most people would have absolutely no interest in moving to, for a contract job that is over in (at most) a year, and most of the time doesn’t at all fit my skill set. “Move to Tulsa, OK for 7 months and be a Sharepoint developer at half your normal salary!” Uh, no.
I just assume it’s the act of a desperate and not-very-skilled recruiter who grabbed as many resumes as he could find off the web and fished for responses. Crazy.
Many recruiters use fake or almost certainly filled job opportunities as a trolling mechanism to increase the number of “confirmed” resumes they have in their files.
It’s for the same reason you get spam email of any kind at all–it’s free. If they send out 100,000 emails and place one person in a job, they’re ahead of the game. I get these all the time… “Hey, I saw your resume online and noticed that it had the word “the” on it. Would this job be a good fit for your skills? Please revert with a recent resume and your salary requirements.”
In addition, 95% or better of these positions are commissions- basically you’re working for yourself and paying the company to rent their name. Structured to be little cost and almost zero risk to the parent company. The modern day version of sharecropping IMHO.
True, but you also don’t make any money not placing candidates at jobs.
I think you might be thinking of a different type of job ad. The ones I’m talking about are short-term contract based jobs. Mostly for developers or project managers for jobs of 3-24 months in duration. There are decent jobs like that and a lot of people like doing that type of work rather then spend years working at the same company. But a lot of them are garbage jobs as well. i.e. working in the bowels of some investment banks back office or staff augmentation on a fucked up enterprise application development project at some big company.
I would add that most of these “jobs” do not exist-big job sites like MONSTER allow free listings, as they get paid by hits to their site. A firm can advertise a job as “open”-but (essentially) never fill it.
Its a way for Monster et. al. to make money, and keep personnel/HR departments busy. Right now, firms are placing hiring on hold, as the financial impact of the ACA/“Obamacare” becomes known.
There are a number of companies out there that want to just gather as many resumes as they can, and there are a number of reasons for this. (You can guess them as easily as I can type them). Also, if you happen to have your resume sitting out on Monster.com or something similar, your résumé is open to being searched on by other companies claiming to have jobs. They will search on any keyword, so jobs you see in your inbox are usually sent by a bot, never by a real person.
Companies who are trying to get clients to work with them like to get themselves in front of as many eyes as possible, so sending bogus jobs to you is a way to let you know that the job search company must be relied on by other companies in your particular sector to fill positions. When you have a legitimate job, you may want to let them post it for you instead of another service.
It also keeps you on a passive job hunt, even if you aren’t on one currently. Perhaps you have a bad stretch and the email hits you at the right time. You instantly become a customer or client of the company bombarding your inbox.
I’ve worked with these people at two jobs. They lived in an (expense-paid) hotel or spartment M-F & went home on weekends. All but one had grown kids that were out of the house so they weren’t missing that much by being on the road. Upside is free vacation between air & hotel frequent flyer/stayer points & got to see/live in/learn lots of areas of the country.
The explanation of getting resumes is no doubt correct, but just like regular spam it only takes a few desperate people taking these jobs to make money.
As for why you get them, is your resume on Monster or the equivalent? Mine isn’t, and I never see them. A good percentage of headhunters who call me actually have made an effort to figure out what I do.
I get a lot of calls from recruiters, purportedly to see if I am interested in some job they are trying to fill. I suspect they are actually trying to cultivate me as a client. They think that they may be able to hire some candidates they have for permanent or temporary positions.
On the low-wage end of the spectrum, I applied for a job at Domino’s Pizza three years ago in my old city. I am still getting emails from them informing me of open positions over there. This is why I now hate filling out job applications online.
Recruiters usually take money from the employer, not the employee they place. Usually they get a fee corresponding to 20% of whatever the first year salary is.
Often there are jobs, but they are the kind of crap work out there that almost nobody wants to do, for minimal pay, and terrible working conditions. That’s not to say all of them are; I got my current job through a recruiter. But many times it’s a job where they want a senior-level person for an entry-level salary.
The worst job I ever worked was for a recruiter. I had to make 100 calls a day, and the main focus was getting other people’s names at the company out of the person I called in all these sneaky ways. Many of the jobs listed on our website had been filled years ago, but there were definitely openings we were looking for, she was just lazy about updating the website, I guess. Job made me feel like a slimeball, I left at lunch one day and never returned, only time I’ve done that.
Have you tried unsubscribing or blocking the email sender. Takes less than a minute.
To answer the OP and assuming the the position is real, they can either spend ten minutes or more on each resume and see if there is a good fit or they can just hit a button and sent the email to an entire list of people. If they’re lucky, one of the recipients will be a match or will know someone who is.