How Recruiters Destroy Themselves with Automated Recruiting

Dear Gene ,
I just finished reading your online resume and I believe that you would be a strong candidate for either full time or part time positions with one of our clients.

Our Basic requirements are:

- An opportunity to check your email several times a day;
- Ability to manage time, prioritize multiple tasks;
- Ability to ensure timely reporting.

- Willingness to work from home, take responsibility, set up and achieve goals;
- US citizenship;
- High School diploma or GED equivalent;
This position demands a high degree of accuracy, strong work ethic, a responsibiliy, interpersonal communication skills, Internet and e-mail skills and the ability to work on your own.

Your income will be $550-$750 per week.

If you want to join our company, please reply to these email

So what's wrong with that? It was sent to a fellow who is a CPA, MBA with 14 years experience in Big 4. CFO of 4 large companies which he took public and last position was CFO/Secretary Treasurer of a publically held corporation. His resume is not on a job board but is on linkedin. Obviously the little dingbat who put her name and company name on the bottom of this email had not read his resume or needs to be sent back to the secretarial pool. This would be why candidates are sick to death of being contacted by automated recruiting on Linkedin or anyplace else.

Think people before you automate any of your recruiting efforts. it wouldn't hurt to check the spelling either by actually reading it.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Amy Ala Miller on February 10, 2012 at 6:38pm

Wow. Just Wow. I had coffee w/ a good friend's husband just yesterday because he wanted to pick my brain about how to work with recruiters. He's an Agile ScrumMaster type guy (read: extremely brilliant and in demand) and we befuddle the hell out of him. He got approached by no less than 30 different recruiters for the exact same job with a very large credit card company. Dude gets emailed and / or called 100 times a week and don't even ask how many actual interviews he's gone on... I wanted to defend my industry but there are no words for some of this crap.

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on February 10, 2012 at 7:08pm

What was even worse about this one was that the subject line said, "Position for Gene". Their automation must throw the name in the subject line and the salutation to try and make it look like a personal note wheich obviously it was not.

Automated tweets are showing some folks rears also. I saw one on Jan 2 that was still wishing everybody Merry Christmas. He went off my twitter list. Obviously for got to turn off or change tweet deck. I love it when i get five tweets in a row from the same person. Dumb nerds.

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Permalink Reply by Bill Schultz on February 11, 2012 at 1:55pm

I took a meeting with the recruiting director of a growing company that we worked with when they were early stage and continue to work with for certain hiring managers.

This guy tells me they have 70 recruiting firms working with them. I said that means you have none.

He looked at me dumbfounded. Anyone know why I said this?

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on February 11, 2012 at 6:07pm

Of course as soon as everybody spams the world with emails and calls, they find out that every recruiter on the planet has the job so why should they work on it. When this stuff gos on every candidate on the planet finds out about it tells their friends and somebody contacts the company directly and gets hired so no fee is ever paid or when candidates are contacted by that many recruiters for the same job they think there is something wrong with it and wrong with the company if there are that many recruiters working on it.

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Permalink Reply by Tim Spagnola on February 11, 2012 at 8:42pm

Wow indeed - that really is a piss poor email. I can only imagine the response from Gene (or anyone for that matter) of his level getting this type of email.

I once worked with a recruiter that spent a good portion of the day crafting a gem of an email like this. The sad thing thing was this one might have been better. He lasted with the firm a week. If only a fraction of that output was placed on getting on the phone he would probably be a millionaire.

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on February 12, 2012 at 1:35am

I placed Genebyears ago, and have placed with him at several companies. He is hilarious. Some firm in Houston offered him a spot as a recruiter last week. He called me to see what I thought. I asked him how he felt about business development. He laughed, said, "why did I know that would be your first and only question, I'm a CFO not a recruiter."

When he got this one above he sent it with a note saying. Should I jump all over this one, is this what social media recruiting is all about.

My note back was, "automated crap from idiots, you should see what I see on a daily basis, the wombats are spamming everything they can find with automated tweets, bulk email, they even spam their own Facebook page with their own automated spam so their face shows up twice on each post on their own Facebook page".

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Permalink Reply by Samantha Lacey on February 14, 2012 at 9:43am

Sandra, I'm getting a lot of this myself at the moment to my personal email. Clearly all automated stuff. I have no idea how these recruiters got my details as I don't have anything on job boards, just LinkedIn. I got the exact same, allegedly personalised, email from the same recruiter (from a major high street agency) twice in one day for a job that admittedly did look quite interesting, when I emailed back asking her to call me about it I got an auto bounce back email saying the inbox was unchecked and I would not receive a reply. I doubt the person who emailed even actually exists. Quite frustrating as it further discredits legitimate recruiters who might make an approach to a candidate over email if they can't get hold of them on the phone.

On a slightly unrelated note, the funniest spam I ever got on LinkedIn was asking me to essentially become an escort to wealthy older men in my area! Needless to say I had a good laugh and then deleted it. Quite the career change.

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Permalink Reply by Sandra McCartt on February 14, 2012 at 1:09pm

I suspect that a lot of this junk is a result of bad advice and training recruiters are getting in social media recruiting by the flim flam gurus who became experts after they failed with real recruiting. Based on your attempt to contact it looks like a phony profile that some of them are so proud of. Interesting you got the exact same note since this one came from a firm in the Houston area. Maybe they went to the same training seminar. It is amusing to me that in the last few weeks all kinds of blogs are popping up about bogus profiles, bogus accounts on twitter. Did everybody think this was new when the flakes have been doing it for years and bragging about it.

Automated anything identifies people and companies as lazy, intelligence insulting spammers in my opinion. Some recruiters think they are "branding" themselves by filling every site they can find with automated tweet posts with links. My take is they did in fact just brand themselves as spammers who clutter the landscape.