totally agree with dec0dedab0de. and recruiters should pay attention - think of how many smart candidates see this nonsense, consider it a reflection of the organization, and opt-out of the recruiting process.

On the contrary, he seems to be trying to help the applicant, most would just not reply to a candidate filtered out because their 'experience tuple' didn't contain a certain keyword (UNIX & LINUX in this case)

He already did his job of intellectually engaging the recruiter. If the other party is not interested, it will not be rude if he update his resume and move on.

If you're looking for someone who has actual high level expertise working on AIX or FreeBSD, having some dude tell you that Linux is the same as Unix or asserting that knowing what POSIX means is equivalent to having production knowledge of AIX/FreeBSD for a production engineering role is not very productive.

The recruiter handled himself professionally and should be commended for not being bullied. Mr. Zhang sounds like a punk, and would probably be better served by pulling the image.

If the recruiter is looking for FreeBSD experience and not just *nix experience he needs to be a hell of a lot more explicit. As is it just sounds like the recruiter doesn't know what he's talking about and is trying to just go based on keywords.

Especially since this is a UX research internship, and the candidate made perfectly clear that that is how the recruiter was coming across, so the recruiter had every opportunity to clarify.

The candidate didn't handle it perfectly, the recruiter however handled it far worse.

Read more carefully. It was a production engineer internship, not UX research.

Early phases of job applications are about following directions and saying what you need to truthfully say. I'm actually surprised that my original comment was voted into oblivion -- its a pretty obvious reality. The recruiter did his best to say "Just write Unix" without crossing a line.

I'm going to leave the image up. It's regrettable, but for accountability's sake I don't want to run away from my mistakes. And yeah - I think it boils down to their having strict requirements and large applicant volume, so my response definitely wasn't appropriate there.

They didn't have strict requirements, unless you mean strict requirements on what keywords appear in the CVs that are submitted.

If they need experience with a specific Unix they should ask for it by name. Having worked with a number 'real' Unix's (mainly Solaris, Irix and Digital Unix/Tru64) I can tell you that it's no easier (or harder) to transfer knowledge between, say, Irix and Solaris than between Linux and Solaris.