Category: Job Search

Posted on

I’ll give them credit, I still think they’re Indian Scammers.

A while back, I responded to a want ad on one of the job search sites.

Within a couple of days, I got an email from a company called Ace IT.

This company is peopled with nothing but Indians and probably owned by Indians as far as I can tell. It’s located in Austin, TX and after much back and forth, several “pre interviews” and their highly unprofessional cancellation of one of their “evaluations”. They finally got round to admitting that the position I’d applied for didn’t actually exist, but for an undefined “Fee” or fees they would accept me into their training after which I’d be sure to get a job, and they’d help…

In other words they wasted a ton of time trying to lure me into plunking out a bunch of cash to them buying “Training” then would in all likelihood not come through with any real position.

Based on my experience with them, I concluded they were a scam and disengaged.

Jump forward 4 months and they call again. They’re routed to voice mail and within seconds of them leaving a voice mail, there’s an email about the Software Quality Assurance position I “recently” applied for.

The email was addressed to “undisclosed recipients” 

Uh huh… 

The sender was a different person but the game was the same. In the intervening time, I have very specifically avoided anything to do with Ace IT so as not to waste my time.

Later in the day, I got another phone call that went to voice mail from yet another person, followed by the exact same email with a new sender’s name. Again the email was addressed to “undisclosed recipients”.

I was mildly annoyed, and again wondered if I should write a letter to the Attorney General of Texas to report these apparent scam artists.

While pondering what I would put in such a letter, I wondered if this sudden resurgence of Ace IT was due to more or less recent moves within the federal government. Specifically those moves concerning H1B visas.

Then my annoyance turned to a big smile.

Staffing firms have in recent years become overwhelmingly Indian, even those that were known for decades in my industry as being useful and reliable.

I haven’t spoken to a native English speaker at any recruitment firm for at least a decade.

Aerotek, who for years was my “Goto” staffing firm during the 1980s, ’90’ & 2000’s has been overrun by Indian workers. Back in the day, I had a particular guy at Aerotek that kept me working with pretty continuous contracts. We’d sometimes have lunch or meet for happy hour in Irvine. He’s long since gone and I haven’t spoken with anyone at Aerotek for at least a decade. I stopped dealing with them because they stopped being able to get me in front of hiring managers.

If Ace IT is desperate, and it appears that they are, it may mean that the Trump administration’s stance on H1B visas is having an impact. I love that.

If they’re not going to be able to funnel low wage, low quality H1B people from India into American jobs, they’re going to have to become a real recruiter or they’re going to have to close their doors.

I vote for the latter. I really hate people playing bait & switch. Especially when their game pollutes the actual hiring pool and creates postings for jobs that aren’t real.

I know I’m sounding more nationalistic, but the fact of the matter is these firms are nothing more than obstructions to the real job market. I’d like to see them all investigated for fraud and where applicable deportation or criminal proceedings.

The H1B system has been abused for decades and I’m all for it being completely reworked.

Posted on

Scammers to the left of me, Scammers to the right of me

Indian job search assholes!

First off, they’re really hard to understand.

Second off I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that they’re all scammers.

After dicking around with some company out of Austin, TX for 3.5 weeks it turns out that they’re just interested in selling me their training. 

I applied to a position they’d advertised that I was qualified for and they tried the old bait and switch.

For those who may be interested the company name is Ace IT, they’re based in Austin, TX and they’re posting job openings that may or may not be real. I believe, based on my experience with them, they’re posting these openings in an effort to engage with potential workers then sell that worker on buying their training courses. 

Trouble is, the person searching for a job is looking for employment, not to purchase another set of training courses to put on their resume.

I’m looking for a position NOW, not three months from now. I’m not in a position to spend a shit ton of money on some bullshit “training”. I don’t need to be screwed with, and I don’t need to have my time (and money) wasted in endless “mock” interviews that go nowhere.

Is the job available or not? Are you interviewing me for the job I applied for? If either of those two questions is “No,” then we have nothing more to discuss.

They may really be helping some people, but the fact of the matter is the way they go about their business is slimy. 

Be honest! Be direct! Be useful!

Cut the bullshit!

I should have trusted my instincts.

They claim to have gotten 2000 people jobs in the past four years. 55 People per month… Somehow that just doesn’t seem like a lot.

Another LinkedIn bullshit company to muddy the waters. This is why I cancelled my LinkedIn account years ago, and probably why I’m going to cancel it again. What a waste of time!

Now I’m going to get on with the rest of my day, but first an aspirin for the headache, then I’ll block all Ace IT email and phone numbers. They’re obviously not a serious company.

Posted on

Okay, this has simply gotten out of hand…

As I’ve written throughout this blog the job search process is horribly broken.

So broken in fact that companies are appearing whose sole job is to deal with the HR departments of companies that are hiring.

I got this email yesterday offering a service.

Notice what they’re offering, all for a subscription. 

Really? 

So now, for every position you apply for, apparently HR departments expect a customized resume and cover letter. The cover letter I understand, but the resume? 

Doesn’t that muddy the waters? Just how many resumes must one have floating around in the aether? If all of those resumes are consolidated might it not appear that a candidate was lying, (perhaps a better term would be overstating,) their capabilities?

I’ve paid for a resume rewrite. What I got back was almost completely a lie and it was certainly not something I would, or indeed could defend in an interview.

Do I really want 50 variations like that per week?

But there’s another thing, Something like this adds another layer to the already hyper layered hiring process.

Even now, the odds of getting your resume in front of someone that can actually make a hiring decision are extremely remote.

Job search site AI
Corporate HR AI
Corporate HR committee
Multiple “Interviews” with the equivalent of a Prom selection committee most of whom have no idea what the candidate actually does, or is talking about.
Then a Hiring manager gets a crack at the candidate.
The Hiring manager’s choices are sent back for review to HR and goes through committee again.
Then only on approval from the committee based on arbitrary data points like personality, gender identification, hair color, skin color, equal opportunity quotas, and all the rest of the bullshit that’s “important” today does the Hiring manager get to actually have a new employee. Probably not their first second or even third choice.

(HR and Hiring practices have almost reached the level of Douglas Adams Vogons from “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”)

Vogons: They are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy. Not actually evil, but bad-tempered, bureaucratic, officious, and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the ravenous Bug-Blatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, lost, found, queried, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry to you. –– The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Now, along comes this company wanting add another layer of bullshit only they’re selling it to prospective employees as a valuable service for a weekly subscription.

Really?

There have always been professional job search corporations. Some of them charged the candidate upfront, and collected a percentage of the candidate’s starting salary on the back end. Others just relied on the backend fee.

This company seems like their model is to collect the subscription from desperate candidates, bleed them dry, keep them busy with do nothing, go nowhere interviews, and they have zero incentive to actually find a candidate a job. Without the backend percentage why would they? The subscription stream would be more lucrative.

I’m also not sure that I want someone creating resume variants for me that become a game of “Telephone”. This might work for a sales/marketing department, or a director position dealing with “Soft Skills”. But a technical position? The last thing you want is non-technical people writing a technical resume. 

There is ample evidence why that’s a bad idea in the job listings themselves. Tons of jobs listings are filled with technobabble that means nothing and is used just as filler to make the job description “Look” important or impressive to other non-technical reviewers.

Ouroboros icon detailed symbol of snake eating its own tail 2483017822.

I get that these folks are taking advantage of an opportunity. They’re filling a niche that has been created by the hiring process. I don’t begrudge them their business model.

What I do question is the need for this business model. How much of the hiring process has become a “Do Nothing” (Meaning no added value) series of hands in the pot? When did HR itself become an industry and what is fueling this behemoth?

When does the HR hiring mess reach the bureaucratic level of the Ouroboros?

Posted on

God, I hate time wasting people & processes!

Had a first interview yesterday.

Indian woman, who pushed my translation matrix to the max.

And to boot, setting up the interview, she couldn’t commit to an actual time she instead chose to act like a cable TV installer. Will call between 8AM and 3PM. Fanfuckingtastic!

When she did call she actually asked if I remembered that we had an appointment. DUH!

Then there’s a spiel about training and all kinds of other bullshit and Oh, this wasn’t an interview. She’s going to set me up with their HR department to have a “Mock” interview.

But the real kicker was that she didn’t have my resume in front of her and she didn’t have the ability to get my resume in front of her. So this was essentially a cold call.

What the actual fuck?!?

At least I got someone’s attention. So there’s that.

But for fucks sake, I’m supposed to appear or be available for an interview prepared. I’d at least expect that of the interviewer.

Posted on

Gonna try this post again…

I’m wondering if I should get together with a few of my retired friends and create a recruiting company.

We’ve all got computers, management skills, we’ve all been hiring managers, and perhaps we could bring some much needed clarity and professionalism to recruiting.

Based on the recruiters and recruiting agencies I’ve interacted with over the past five years I’m of a mind that we could bring value to an industry that honestly feels like dealing with a bunch of used car salesmen. Dealing with recruiting firms shouldn’t make you feel like you’ve been slimed.

The latest interaction with a recruiter is a real winner. I went to the trouble of creating an interview scheduling template a few weeks ago. It’s worked fairly well although there have been a couple of bumps along the way. (Just a little fine tuning here and there plus sending a couple of feature requests to improve the product.)

For the latest winner, I forwarded the link when they sent the inevitable “What times are good for you for a phone call,” message. My schedule is generally open but there are some things that pop up in my calendar that make me unavailable.

The recruiter, sent back an email saying they couldn’t commit to a particular time and instead picked Monday from 8am to 3pm. Really?

Now we’ve got recruiters that think they’re cable repair people? Super unprofessional!

Why did they send me the question in the first place? If their schedule is so full they have to pick a range of times (essentially their entire workday,) then why didn’t they just say from the outset, “I’ll call you on Monday,”?

Were I to create a company, I think I’d call it “No BS recruiters” maybe “Naked Recruiting” with a tag line “We strip your Job Search process to the essentials“.

I’d structure the process with no cute pictures, no goofball psych testing, no DEI, and automatically choose “Decline to answer,” on all Race, Gender, or National origin questions. The only valid question is “Are you authorized to work in the United States, Will you require sponsorship in the future?”

I’ll bet between the people I know, we could stand up a recruiting business in less than a month. The long poles would be settling on some kind of CRM software and setting up secondary phone numbers on our phones. I’m pretty sure we could have phone numbers up & running in less than 4 hours. The CRM software might be a little more difficult. That’s just because we’d want something that didn’t cost an arm & a leg and that wasn’t providing features we didn’t want or need. In other words, something that worked and didn’t require a whole staff to maintain.

One thing I’d add would be AI evaluation of resumes to catch people who’ve lifted sections from other people’s resumes, then determine who really did what.

I’m talking about a process that would be totally merit based. Something that connected hiring folks, to folks needing to be hired, bypassing all the stupid shit.

Maybe just present resume images instead of forcing the prospective employee to redundantly fill out dumb boxes on a site, then fill out those same dumb boxes on the prospective employer’s site, (because why would there be any data transfer,) in addition to putting in all the work on their resume in the first place.

You know, OLD SCHOOL!

The job search process at this point is more complex than applying for a freaking security clearance. It’s easier to apply to run for Congress than to get through some of the job applications.

I’m talking about applications for simple jobs. Even retail an application these days is often a multipage form. In my first retail positions the test was essentially does the person have a pulse?

I’m curious about this phone interview on Monday. Based on the initial contact email I think this “recruiting” firm is really trying to sell me something and it’s not a job, it’s training to enter the IT field. 

If that’s the case, I’m just pissed off enough to send letters to the initial website that I applied on, better business bureau, Ken Paxton AG of Texas (the company is based in TX), and possibly to President Trump.

If a company is posting a job, then that’s it. They shouldn’t be trying to run some kind of bait and switch. That’s dishonest and begs the question; “Are these folks just trying to steal my identity?“

Why Trump? Because as a businessman who’s trying to get this country’s economy really rolling again, he might see the threat.

What threat? That’s easy. If people are frustrated to the point that they give up entirely, and filling out a welfare form is easier than filling out a job application. America won’t have a roaring economy based on American workers, companies will be able to legitimately say they need foreign workers because all the Americans are on the dole.

For more than 25 years, I’ve said outright the abuse of the H1B1 system by Corporate America is tantamount to Treason.

And don’t even get me started on Presidents Bush.