I had a long phone conversation today with a headhunter from a national job placement company, and I realized how easy it is to forget what it's like to deal with a genuine professional in the job placement field - which is, infinitely more tolerable than many of the people I deal with as I search for gainful employment. Since 2000, Silicon Valley has hemhoragged much of its chaff - most of the less-than-qualified that flocked to the Bay during the .com boom have gone back to where they came from. But I gotta tell ya - this phenemenon seems to have passed many search firms by.
When it comes to my work, I consider myself a professional. I take it seriously, I've a good track record, and it's reflected in my resume and portfolio. So when a "recruiter" calls, sounds barely out of high school (copious use of 'hella' is a good clue), and acts as though they haven't even looked at my resume - I have to fight back a tendency to suffer fools rather un-gracefully. Most of these people are clueless to what I do, what my craft even is, let alone what "good fit" would benefit from it.
These types aren't limited to search firms - unfortunately they're ensconced as gatekeepers at many of the phone banks and HR departments around the valley. The result being that I send my resume to a position I'm easily qualified for (and there are many), and at the other end of the inbox isn't a hiring manager or an HR professional, but an unqualified steno pooler flipping through and looking for keywords or names that sound 'cute.'
This is out of some necessity - there's a lot of résumés out there. But when the same pefectly-matched job keeps coming up on a job board over and over and over and you get the same Ugg-booted gum-chomper on the phone telling you, "we have your résumé on file and if we feel there's a match, someone will call you," I just wanna yell at them to wake up, smell the caffeine, and do a simple keyword match between their job description and my skills description.
But if I did that then they'd get all huffy and put my name on a little post it with a little grrrr-faced emoticon next to it and then tell the IT guy in the breakroom that "Oh my god, this guy called looking for a job, and he was all, like, 'grrrr', and I was all, 'whatever,' and I so 86'd his e-mail."
You sense my frustration.
