Don Xml's Grok This

So, you have read and followed my post Developer Career Tips -2006 and now you are ready to look for a new job.  So, what do most job seekers do when they want to announce their availability?  They post their resume to a job search website.  Well, it isn’t as easy as they make it seem.  Posting a resume on a job search website (like Dice, Monster, Net-Temps) seems like the smart thing to do when you are looking for a new job, but unless you take some steps to protect yourself, it will mostly get you a ton of job search spam.  The problem is that these services are a haven for a small group of unethical or just plain lazy recruiters.  I’m not talking about the majority of recruiters (and definitely not the folks on the Microsoft Jobs Blog), but about the folks that are just trying to throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks.  There are even recruiters out there that specifically put bogus resumes (pretending to be real job seekers) out there looking to steal information about new job openings from other recruiters.  Then there are others that do the same thing (pretending to be real job seekers), so they can try to sell their indentured servants (aka H1B visa folks).

I have two techniques that I use to help nullify these issues (well as much as I can).  The first one I’ve used for years and the second one is something I just recently implemented

When posting your resume on a job search site, remove all your contact info, and replace it with an email address that you use just for your job search.  If you are a consultant, you are always going to be looking, so, make it something that you want to keep around.  If you have your own website, I’d suggest something like jobsearch at your domain name.  Otherwise, use one of the free email services and create an email address that doesn’t have your name embedded in it (to protect your identity).  This way, the recruiter will have to contact you prior to submitting your resume.  You would be surprise to know that there are some recruiters (from recruiting agencies, aka meat markets) that will submit your resume without your knowledge, and will only contact you after the client expresses an interest.  This can cause your resume to be submitted for the same position, twice; since you never knew the other person submitted the resume.  This can lead to the hiring firm removing you from consideration, since they don’t want to get into a battle over who had the right to submit the resume (and make the commission).  Another advantage of having only a specific email address as contact point, you will know exactly how they got your resume.  Because, over time, you will (hopefully) make contacts in various firms, and they will have your real email address.  Any contact via your real address is obviously someone that you have dealt with before.  Warning, when posting a resume, odds are you will have to fill out a profile.  In that profile, you can not put your real info, because the recruiters can get access to it and get around your “filter”.

Now that you have protected your identity, you need to protect yourself from recruiters that just run a query against a resume database and blast an email out to everyone the meets the search criteria.  This is something that has really been annoying me for some time now, since these folks ignore the little things (like your salary and location requirements).  These emails are basically spam (although not in the legal sense).  You also have recruiters that don’t actually read the resume, and only glance over it, looking for key words.  Well, to be truthful, there are even more job seekers that do the same thing, in reverse, and spam the recruiters with emails for spots that they are not qualified for.  To solve this problem, I’ve seen recruiters put up job ads, and give specific instructions on what has to be in an email to even be considered for the spot.  This way, they can weed out the people that didn’t read the entire job ad.  So, what I decided to do is to take that idea and apply it to my posted resume.  At the top of the posted resume, I include all the pertinent info (What types of jobs I’m looking for, where, and what salary range).  I’ve done this for a while, now, but I still get lots of emails and phone calls for positions I’d obviously not be interested in.  To make sure that the recruiter actually reads the resume before they contact me, I’ve gone a step further and added what I call a Contact Code Word.  If someone tries to contact me because of a resume found online, they have to give the code word, otherwise I’ll know that they didn’t really read the resume, and I can ignore this person. 

If you combine contact code words with a job search only email address, the combination of the two should filter out most job search spam.  The problem is that you really have to implement this approach prior to starting your job search.  If you do it afterwards, it will take a while for you to be confident that an email to your real address is something that you have previous contact with.  But, it will still not save you from another form of job search spam, the selling/trading of resumes/contacts between recruiters.  But, odds are that the recruiters that make it thru the filters are the ones that you really want to talk with, and wouldn’t sell their contact list.  If anyone has some better ideas, please leave a comment, as it may help just save the Information Technology recruiting sector.

Side note:  Since implementing the Contact Code Word technique, I’ve actually got calls from recruiters that just wanted to say that they thought the idea was great.  It helps that I used a purposely funny approach to the whole thing (and picked an appropriate, but non-technical contact code word.  One that Kent Tegels would approve of).

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