Have IT term dictionary and not affraid to use it
Anyone who has at one time or another have listed their CV on a jobs website will know that your email account will forever be cursed with spam from recruitment agents, or (Blood sucking recruitment vampires) as they are called in our office.
These email are normally about jobs you are not qualified, have no experience off and live nowhere near. anyone looking at your CV could see in a few seconds you would probably not be suitable for a particular job. “Senior Systems Architect £70k+ Cornwall” I remember getting spam like that when i was a wet behind the ears graduate living in Aberdeen looking for my first job.
Mostly these emails the ones I do read normally contain a list of technical buzz words which the agent has no idea about and just lists because the client I once got a email which contained a line like:
Must know Java, EBJ, Oracle,XML and seequal
I had to think about it for a while wondering “whats seequal?” until I released it was SQL they had just written it as the client had said it… I have a further dislike for people who pronounce SQL as “seequal” but thats a post for another time.
Anyway my point of this post is today I received one such email for a agent with the header “Java Developer – 3 month contract – Fife” I’m personally not looking for a job I’m happy where I am (Unless Blizzard or RockStar North want to talk then I’m quite willing to listen) however I have a few friends who have fallen victim to the “Credit Crush” and are currently looking for jobs. I thought I might forward to them until I read the body of the message
My Client is currently looking for an experienced Java Developer to develop a redundant, high available, distributed solution that will enable them to deliver its value added strategy. Skills: Java, J2EE,object oriented design distributed environment, RDBMS
Now I can work out what the client wants but as an attempted sales pitch to get me interested it couldn’t have been a bigger failure. it goes back to the fact the client mentioned some of the things they need or are making the agent then just listed them while also referring to their customer as a “it”
Come on recruitment people if I was the client I would be annoyed that you where attempting to get people interested in my company with a crappy email like that. and worried that I would be missing out on getting the best possible candidates because they didn’t bother to read your spam email or did read it, laughed at it, showed there colleagues who also laughed. posted it on a blog and deleted it.
Just like I did.
I got a call offering a job in Dyce yesterday. I had previously had an email and an SMS from the same recruitment company. I had a good chuckle at my CV I used applying for my current role, so little experience.
I first head “sequel” in a job interview, I had no idea what the interviewer was on about. I didn’t get the job probably because I didn’t know what “My Sequel” was.
Now come on! Not ALL Recruitment Consultants are that silly and we should not all be tarred with the same brush. I do agree that they should take the time to research and find out more about the technologies they are being asked to find and at least learn how to pronounce them properly. It’s so unfair that so many of the bad Consultants give the good one’s a bad name, but just remember, we can be useful and are not always “vampires”!!!