I give up!

I give up. Despite my best efforts to improve both the volume and quality of job solicitations from recruiters, the madness continues. The problem is two-fold: a huge volume of job solicitations coming from recruiters incorrectly using the job boards; the second, a fundamental misunderstanding about technology roles involving data management.

Recruiter Armageddon

By volume, I mean many jobs that have nothing to do with me. I now get 6 - 10 a day. I now ask where they got my information, and most say Monster. My phone number has never been listed there, so they are getting that from somewhere else. Could they be purchasing marketing campaign data from another source, and merging it with job board data? Are they that sophisticated now?

Then there are the jobs that are a close match to what I do. I typically get contacted dozens of times, for weeks, by multiple recruiters claiming that the hiring manager contacted that recruiter directly (never true). Sometimes I get a few people from the same company contacting me about the same job, unaware that the other has already done so.

Do recruiters have any value?

I have job agents on the various job boards set to alert me about jobs in my area. I do not intend to have the boards sell my information as a service to be harassed by recruiters about jobs that are in fact posted on the boards. These recruiters have zero value: they are calling and emailing me about jobs I can view on my own. Even worse, they edit the job descriptions, omitting key information like job duties and location, so I am often tricked into reading the same job ad over and over. If they really have inside information about a job that is not on the job boards, and then they use the job board to find candidates like me with matching skills, that would be okay. Unfortunately, I do not believe the latter is what occurs.

I give up.

I give up. I just deleted or shut down my accounts as much as I can on Monster, Indeed and Dice. A decade ago, an internal recruiter used Monster to find my current job, so I do believe that Monster can be used appropriately. That is how I envision the model to work. When I do a job search on the job boards using keywords like “solutions architect” I get a near perfect match. Yet why isn’t the same true for the recruiters who contact me? I don’t know if recruiters are reading my resume before contacting me, or if they do keyword searches and then spam anyone with a technology that appears in a job ad. Nothing in my experience suggests I have ever worked as a DBA, but I am a certified Oracle 8i DBA. I got that over a decade ago and it was many versions of Oracle databases ago (version 12c is the latest). Nor am I an ETL developer. I support ETL teams, but no, I do not develop. Anyone with an understanding of these respective roles and what architects do would understand this.

Is there hope?

The jobs that LinkedIn is recommending for me are about 90% correct in terms of what I do. Most recruiters reaching me through LinkedIn are good matches. Kudos for LinkedIn for getting it right, which is why I have not yet shut it down. The big thing is, I am not getting called by anyone from LinkedIn. I get emailed through LinkedIn.

Glassdoor is interesting. The alert I have for my local area (Twin Cities) sent me 15 project management roles today (not even close to what I do). Yet the same alert I have set for the Silicon Valley area sent me 15 solution architect roles (good match, although the focus area and technologies are not always right). How is that possible? Don’t send me anything if there is nothing. Yet the alert I have set for volunteer board of director opportunities on Glassdoor has yet to send a single position. Instead, I get sent paid positions. A bust.

A Recruiter’s Guide to the Galaxy

I suggest a guide for recruiters and employers to write and understand tech roles. Some kind of simple ontology. The job title is most important, as is the job space (application, governance, database, architecture are examples). Required knowledge should be stated, as are the precise job duties. Finally, location and a range of pay or hourly rate should be clearly stated. I intend to write a future blog with a summary of how to do this at least for data management.

I may have given up, but I am not stupid

As I walk away from the boards and go underground, I am still open to further advancement. As I approach ten years at my company, I am wondering where the time went and if something is wrong with me for being in one place so long. Who does that anymore? No one is loyal to brands or companies. Like, my parents did that. Old people. Thus for now, I will have to rely on the algorithms at LinkedIn and Glassdoor (Silicon Valley at least) to correctly identify the next great opportunity.