Tired of those annoying calls from persistent recruiters who want your business and call, and call, and, you know, keep calling?
Darren Nix, a founder of 42Floors, a commercial real estate search engine, got so fed up with calls from tech recruiters wanting to fill the jobs his startup had, that he turned to, what else, technology for a solution.
Blogging about his answer to the prayers of so many hiring managers, Nix explained:
We get bombarded daily with spam calls and emails from recruiting companies. Most of these we just ignore, but some bad actors decide to contact every person on the engineering team including calling our mobile numbers. That’s unacceptable.
So, it’s time to strike back: if they waste our time, we’ll waste theirs.
His diabolically clever way of doing that was to record a long-winded description of several jobs chosen at random from Indeed.com, occasionally interjecting an apology about the length of the message, which at 11 minutes, begins repeating the job descriptions.
Call (415) 534-6560 and “talk” to Derrick yourself.
Awards Season Stir
We know at least one big company jonsing for a CandE this year. NBCUniversal got outed by media blogger Jim Romanesko when one of his readers forwarded an email asking the reader to help with a survey about his experience as a job candidate.
That alone should have made the nightly news — “Applicant black hole suddenly sees the light, details after we come back.” But it was the fact NBC, by way of The Talent Board (the CandE people), was asking a rejected candidate to complete the survey.
Those in talent acquisition, of course, applaud the effort, knowing that the CandE’s are the leading edge of an effort to improve the candidate experience for winners and losers. The rejected candidate, though, was obviously take aback by the request, writing to Romanesko: “Is this a positive, beneficial step to aid job hunters? Or, is this just adding insult to injury?”
One startling observation about this isn’t that a rejected candidate was asked to opine on the process. It was that the candidate actually had been told he wasn’t in the running. (See “job candidate black hole.”)