Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Job Recruiters

I'm never super excited talking to job recruiters. I understand their jobs are hard. But any job where the person is paid based on commissions makes me suspicious of that person's actions. Sales people who work on commission don't want you to buy something and return it, but other than that they get rewarded for selling you things that you keep. It doesn't matter much beyond that. Like whether you need it, whether a cheaper product would be as good or better etc.

So in general I make the assumption that someone working on a commission isn't looking out for me. They're trying to maximize how much money they make for their time.

Job recruiters work in the same kind of commissioned way usually. Some are employees of companies. And that's awesome. But most, at least that call me, work on some kind of commission basis. Maybe they get a flat fee for filling a position, or a percentage of your hourly rate if you're contracting etc. I updated my resume on monster.com today and got a bunch of email and calls from recruiters. Overall that's nice. I like to feel wanted. But a lot of the time the recruiters have no idea what I'm good at, what I like, or sometimes what city I'm in. They just want to fill some position and saw a couple keywords on my resume. It's weird.

Today was my first, I think, experience getting a call from recruiters in India. At first I thought it was just someone with a fantastically thick accent who was calling locally even though his caller ID came out weird looking "+40 890 791 13." The number was intended to look like "+408 907-9113," but my iPhone changed the formatting because of the +. I did a quick Google search while we were on the phone and figured out he was calling from India. Anyway, the job he described sounded good, but overall the experience was a little sketchy. I'm still suspicious of the whole thing. I spoke with him, sent him my resume, and then he had his manager call me. Next I'm supposed to get a call from (I assume another recruiter) at some US-based recruiting company.