Recruit This!
By virtue of living in Silicon Valley and working at Yahoo!, I frequently get phone calls or emails from recruiters. Their general expertise and cluefulness range is pretty wide: some are knowledgeable and do their research on my background before contacting me, while others expect that Hey, I have a C#/.NET as well as Java positions in New York City, please get back to me as soon as possible will garner some sort of response. And of course there’s the middle ground. But by and large, the scale is definitely skewed towards the not so good side. I received another “hot” email today:
Hi Andrei,
I am a recruiter in software industry and I work with few exciting
start-ups and other big companies in silicon Valley. I got your resume from internet and would like to discuss about some opportunities in Silicon Valley. Please let me know what would be the best time and phone number to reach you.
Where to start… First of all, I understand that English might not be this gentleman’s second language. Still, when you contact people on behalf of your clients, you do want to project a professional attitude, and that involves correct grammar and spelling. But even disregarding that, the email is very, very vague. So I applied my patented DeRecruitoMizer™ algorithm to it:
Original: Hi, Andrei
Decoded: My mail merge software tries to be personable. Nifty!
Original: I work with few exciting start-ups
Decoded: I don’t really care that omitting an article conveys a completely ridiculous impression upon the person I am contacting.
Original: I got your resume from internet
Decoded: I, for one, welcome our Google overlords whose mind-bending search technology put your resume in the top 20 results when I typed in “C#”, even though it is mentioned only once in the text under “secondary experience”.
Original: let me know what would be the best time and phone number to reach you
Decoded: Come on, call me. I know you are desperate for a sucky job in New York City, since you have your resume on the intraweb. You are desperate, aren’t you? Aren’t you? Why won’t you talk to me? Whyyyyyy? <sobbing>
I think that, given the top tech news of the day (hint: the combined service name might be GooTube), I think my response was quite appropriate:
Hi,
Can you still get me into YouTube?
-Andrei
