Her middle name was Welcome, his was Wipe.

[reddragdiva]

It's been the afternoon of IT recruiter idiocy. What on earth is up with the pimps? Why is it I keep getting really junior pimps who, the moment it looks like a company is actually interested in my luscious IT arse, have to refer it to their "colleague," i.e., boss? Oversupply of cheap recruiter labour, undersupply of jobs or what?

(a): Long rambling followup call where the guy takes five minutes to tell me that there's no progress with the client as yet. Um, okay. I have email for that. And you keep dropping random meaningless phrases into your stream of babble, presumably a mechanism you have developed (I hesitate to apply the word "evolved" to one such as yourself) so that people won't notice when you're trying to think of what to say next. It doesn't work. Cross-office solitaire competition palling, then?

(b): I get through the initial pimp screening call. (After I got her to admit she had not in fact read my CV.) She then says "I'll just forward your CV to my account manager." So they now have pimps screening the CVs for other pimps.

Junior pimps ... they're so cute. Like baby cockroaches.

Ofcoursemanyrecruitersarelovelypeopleincludingtheoneswhogotmemylastseveraljobsandofcoursetheoneswhoreadthisjournal. *exhale*

Comments

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

My recruiter, affectionately known at home as "Penny the Pimp", is absolutely fabulous. Next time I see her in the flesh, I *will* tell her the nickname!

But then she's actually a sub-editor herself, which makes all the difference in the world.

[reddragdiva]

Per disclaimer, there are many recruiters who are worth the effort, e.g. the ones who keep lining me up with buckets of cash. And of course the ones reading this journal. Then there are the others.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Who are complete scumbags. Oh yes. I've encountered those, and so has G.

[vampwillow]

You forgot pimpsmaygoupaswellasdownpastperformanceshouldnotbetakenasaguidetofutureactivitylevels

[reddragdiva]

pjardente: errr..ok
pjardente: spray or squash?
DavidGerard: i guess that's not most people's image of cute
DavidGerard: atom bomb them and they're still there
pjardente: not really cute
pjardente: my idea of cute is breasts popping out of a blouse!!
DavidGerard: sex with pimps? that's bestiality that is
pjardente: we could make web site!
pjardente: PIMP sex in Brazil!!
DavidGerard: YOUR KINK IS NOT OKAY

[hellsop.livejournal.com]

With regard to your point b) above, Sir, may I direct your attention to the fact that said Junior Pimp had not, in fact, read the CV at all, and that therefore would Kind Sir be willing to enlighten us as to what operating definition of the word "screening" precisely applies to the situation? Does a phone call to determine whether "Carol" is male or female and to determine the pronouciation of the surname (so the "Senior" Pimp doesn't look like an illiterate moron) count as "screening"?

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

I now have confirmation: not only has Dallas spread across the US like a particularly bad melanoma, but now it's crossed the Atlantic. We've had the same problem here for the last seven years, mostly because those junior pimps are usually workfare cases from the local business and advertising schools. "I'm so stupid that I need people to remind me when to breathe, but my best friend Tiffany from my sorority got me this great job! I don't have to learn to read, I only have to blow the boss once a week instead of the eight times a day I did when I worked for Daddy, and I get to laugh at computer people who aren't as beautiful as I am!"

[reddragdiva]

Not to mention the ones whose idea of screening is to call you, then email you a typo-riddled Word document to fill in and send back to them, because their boss certainly doesn't trust them to just fill in the details over the phone. One just did that and muwahahaha missed getting the chance to send my CV to that company, because someone else did fifteen minutes before.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

That's an automatic dealbreaker for me, because it screams "I'm too lazy to put that material into our proprietary format in the first place." Seeing as how these are always the people who call me up for COOL:Gen jobs when I spent three months five years ago in doing documentation for a COOL:Gen project, I don't even bother to respond any more.

[wechsler.livejournal.com]

ISTR we found the highest level of recruiter competence via Huxley, Mortimer Spinks, Monarch and TechSearch.

What they're like from the other side is another matter entirely.

[reddragdiva]

Huxley have a nasty habit of posting clearly nonexistent jobs so they can add to their CV database (which is what I surmise from the reaction to a followup call).

[redcountess]

MortimerSpinks got Diva his most recent job :-)

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Huxley have worked fairly well for me. Organised and competent on both the pimping and the back-office (payments & Timesheets) side. This is not universally true, even of the biggest recruitment consultancies.

The only other recruiters I'd recommend on the bankery geeking side are MKM partnership and Astbury Marsden.

As for the rest... the annoying (but not the worst) thing about them is the compulsive need to wrap everything in sales-patter - they have no respect for your time, even when you are under pressure for time and ask clear factual questions. This endless dissimulation is a sign of their internal confusion and uselessness.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

I've been seeing roughly the same thing recently...

[wednesday]

Ahgahd pimpcalls.

There aren't any *jobs*, are there? There's just an industry built around CV collection.

*cries*

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

You noticed that, too? How else are all of these brand new MBAs supposed to pay off their coke dealers?

[reddragdiva]

I sense some slight residual bitterness in you.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

After repeated screwings by recruiters both stupid and corrupt, especially from the ones trying to get exclusivity agreements out of every qualified person in the Dallas area in order to tie them up and present the recruiter's best friend from high school as "the best choice"? Naw, not at all.

[gothgeekgirl.livejournal.com]

And the really good pimps quit and go sell real estate instead :P

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

I've had the best results from woman and/or minority owned pimping shops. We've laws here that governments have to do a certain amount of business with WMOBs. If there are similar laws where you are (where local governments must favor certain types of businesses), seek out those businesses and send them your CV.

In my career as a temp ho' I've had only two companies that did more than pad their databases: one sent me to several interviews and the other sent me to several actual jobs. That was how I ended up a full-time employee with the City of Seattle's IT shop. Most people here started out as contractors.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

You know you have become an initiation ritual when...

I thought it was just us...

[paula-angela.livejournal.com]

Well, recruiters have also been very active in the Melbourne market over the last few months. I must have had at least one "updating your file" call from each recruiter & agency I've ever applied to in the last five years. They all claim to be calling about a particular job, but they're all just updating their records. I think they pretend tohave a specific job because most people will quote their rate as higher if it's purely theoretical.