Bolding mine.
Just a note to remind everyone they are free to start a thread in Great Debates if they wish to debate things like this. This thread, however, isn’t about it.
I get several e-mails clogging up my mailbox every day enticing me with job offers. Apparently the SearchBots combing the job listings have set the acceptance bar very low, in order to get a large number of job listings. most of these are completely inappropriate for me. Several are RIDICULOUSLY inappropriate for me. I have taken to saving them in a file, with comments. A selection:
Mixed-Signal Engineer – And here I thought that people just got mixed signals by chance. I had no idea they had to be engineered.
Combat Engineer – There are certain kinds of engineering you probably want in combat. Mine isn’t one of them.
Solar System Designer – I guess Slartibartfarst finally retired.
LEGO Engineering – I don’t care that it’s not appropriate, I’d like to apply for this one. Only it would probably turn out not to be what I think it is.
Coagulation Technician – It sounds like they want me to watch things clot. Sounds icky.
Growing New Brains with Infrared Light – Igor and Doctor Pretorius need help in the lab.
Optical Apprentice are you – Yoda needs his Light Sabre fixed.
Front-End Engineer – I suppose it beats being a Rear-End Engineer
Electromechanical Research Assistant IV – Bioinspired Robotics – Building Robots inspired by living things sounds kind of cool, but I don’t like that there would be three levels of Assistants above me before you even get to the researchers. I’d probably end up working on Rear-Ends.
Senior Back End Developer – Dang! They actually did send me that one!
Senior Development Engineer --Upstream Commercial Support – This one sounds as if I’d be helping Salmon to spawn.
The only relevant postings I’ve ever been notified were from, oddly enough, LinkedIn, where I’ve posted only the barest outlines of my resume and a one sentence blurb about my current position. I guess their algorithms are smarter - their 5% hit rate is a hell of a lot better than the 0% that Monster and Indeed have coughed up.
It’s ridiculous from the other side, too - I’m looking for an infrastructure generalist with a degree and a couple of years experience under their belt, and/or somebody slightly more specialized with a solid 5-ish year stretch at a single employer. The staffing agencies are bombing our poor, beleaguered part-time HR lady with dozens of resumes from Devry grads who have spent the last 15 years jumping from one short term contract to the next.
I’m almost ready to give her a formula:
X is the number of years since the start date of the first job on the resume.
Y is the number of positions listed on the resume.
If X/Y < 2, don’t even bother forwarding it to me. If X/Y > 2, I’m interested in taking a look at it, even if the technical qualifications listed on the resume don’t necessarily match the posting.
Indeed.com definitely does this. They simply copy want ads out of newspapers, and when I was job-hunting, I figured out pretty quickly that the reason it looked like there were so many jobs was because each job would be listed 10 or 20 times.
:rolleyes:
Most of my responses were spam too, and almost all of it was insurance sales.
I’ve always assumed that those are the jobs that are so shitty that they need to send mass e-mails in search of people deperate for anything. I never knew that it was all a scam to collect resumes.
I’m not sure what the rolleyes is about. Indeed was specifically built to be an aggregator of job boards, want ads and corporate web sites.