I was in our recruiting DB the other day, and came across an old version of your résumé. I am very impressed with your background and think you might be a perfect fit for an opening that we have for a Senior ColdFusion Developer. Please get back to me at your earliest convenience regarding this exciting opportunity. Thank you.

Sincerely,

%recruiter_sig%

Thank you for your interest. I am currently accepting ColdFusion contracts at a base rate of $385/hr.

Thanks, %prospect_name%

(That should cover my therapy bills.)

Why? Because they have an old copy of my resume from before my name change. This also leads to me explaining that I don't work at my previous employer anymore and that I've found a new job that I love. They just don't give a shit about having up-to-date records.

My entire name was changed: first, middle, and last, and my new name doesn't resemble my old one in the slightest. It's very awkward having to explain to them that the name they asked for isn't my legal name anymore (and I'm half-tempted to be glib and say "he's dead", but I won't because that could get me in big trouble if they believe it and it gets back to the authorities that I've been using my name change to fake my death).

It's especially awkward, because it forces me to out myself to them as transgender, since my old name was unmistakeably male, and my new name is unmistakeably female. Hell, I'm very much out and proud, but it's just plain awkward to have to tell a recruiter over the phone when they're not expecting it and when it's my very first communication with them.

My resume has a "note to recruiters" attached. It is very clear if a recruiter has made any effort to read any of that. The clueless ones end up in the list above. http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html

If the guy there had done anything more than scrape LinkedIn for .NET stuff (which I can do and have done), he'd know that I would not need assistance in returning to $FORMER_EMPLOYER.

I'm guessing it occurred due to doing a batch update, and having multiple emails from the same spammer.

Nice catch. I guess that either he doesn't check for duplicates or he is doubly irritated by the duplicate ones :P

The first time I read that, I thought it said "emails like they were from a six-year-old". Which is probably also true.

I am in Brazil, and I accept any tech job that people offer, even if someone offered me to work with MUMPS I would accept (it is better than going hungry at least...)

But I get one or two recruiter calls (as in, phone calls! not e-mail) per year, and usually it is useless (the last one they told me some bullshit about their process needing adjustment and that they would call me later and they never did... another one before that complained I was not experienced enough, but wanted something that is almost impossible to find anyway...)

Since I'm anon, I'll say that I did a few ivy league SharePoint implementations. Thankfully, their IT/IS shops had to inherit the content and provisioning responsibilities.

Btw, anyone needing Exchange or similar implementations should use http://www.coyotecrk.com/. They did Cisco's and Stanford's implementations. They'll charge arms/legs, but they'll deliver something production supportable for real shops.

Ironically (or perhaps predictably) I've avoided adding the same two technologies you mentioned to my own resume.

I never even actually worked with Crystal Reports. A long time ago, I made a bunch of similar resumes that each included one thing extra on them, because I was curious about what I could be learning to get better response rates. The Crystal Reports variant produced a deluge of the worst-sounding jobs touted by the most clueless recruiters. And that was back when I still put my phone number on my resume, so I imagine the unlucky guy in area code 773 that got my old number is still getting calls about it.

And that is why when I got a job with a company that actually used Crystal Reports, I was very careful to not work on those portions of the code, on the off chance that some recruiter would smell some whiff of it on me, chase me down, and sit on me until I coughed up a resume in Word format.

Holy crap. A/B testing résumés? :D

And RPG/400. I took two semesters of that in college, but (thankfully) never got roped into programming in it professionally. I'm honestly not sure you could pay me enough to write RPG code, even if you were Bill Gates. Just thinking about using SEU (Source Entry Utility, IIRC) to program in that column oriented nightmare gives me the heebie-jeebies.

It's very safe to say that if you don't know how to open and edit a PDF document, you have no business being a tech recruiter. Anyone foolish enough to be represented by such a person while looking for software jobs is going to have a bad time.

Most in-house guys accept PDF. I explicitly tell recruiters that my resume is typset, so they have a choice: a PDF or a LaTeX file that nobody will ever make heads or tails out of. I do not even know if LaTeX has a .doc plugin.

Most in-house guys accept PDF. I explicitly tell recruiters that my resume is typset, so they have a choice: a PDF or a LaTeX file that nobody will ever make heads or tails out of.

Having it in the job description is bad, having it in the actual job is a complete no-no for me