> Several years ago I was interviewing somewhere and Googled the job blurb. There were over 100 recruiters who had copied the job details from the company website and pretended it was their own client. (I checked with the company - they had in house recruiters and did not accept external ones - all those external ones were charlatans.)
I use LinkedIn, and have a personal website with my CV on it, and I experience this almost daily.
Recently, I've started keeping a list of all the recruiters that spam me or try to get in contact with me. I know quite a few of the companies in my area that are hiring so I usually run these names past people that work there and more often than not these recruiters will just scrape sites like Stack Overflow Careers to find companies that are hiring, only to sell people already on their books.
The worst I've experienced is when one of the large agencies in Bristol were hiring. My company received a phone call from a hurried man saying "Something is wrong, I need to speak to EnderMB". The second I picked up the phone, fearing the worst, this guy told me he was a recruiter and asked if I was happy at my job. After some harsh words he hung up, and then sent me a message on LinkedIn asking me to recommend other developers to him. Half an hour later, the phone rung again with someone saying that they needed to speak to someone else at the company. The boss gave the phone over, and it was the same guy again, doing the same thing to everyone in the company on my LinkedIn friends list. I checked with the hiring company and they'd blacklisted this guy and his company before, but they had tried to sell developers to him under another holding company.
Recruitment is entirely out of hand now. The only recruiters I've ever wanted to deal with are internal recruiters who seem to actually give a shit about getting good talent to their company.
I use LinkedIn, and have a personal website with my CV on it, and I experience this almost daily.
Recently, I've started keeping a list of all the recruiters that spam me or try to get in contact with me. I know quite a few of the companies in my area that are hiring so I usually run these names past people that work there and more often than not these recruiters will just scrape sites like Stack Overflow Careers to find companies that are hiring, only to sell people already on their books.
The worst I've experienced is when one of the large agencies in Bristol were hiring. My company received a phone call from a hurried man saying "Something is wrong, I need to speak to EnderMB". The second I picked up the phone, fearing the worst, this guy told me he was a recruiter and asked if I was happy at my job. After some harsh words he hung up, and then sent me a message on LinkedIn asking me to recommend other developers to him. Half an hour later, the phone rung again with someone saying that they needed to speak to someone else at the company. The boss gave the phone over, and it was the same guy again, doing the same thing to everyone in the company on my LinkedIn friends list. I checked with the hiring company and they'd blacklisted this guy and his company before, but they had tried to sell developers to him under another holding company.
Recruitment is entirely out of hand now. The only recruiters I've ever wanted to deal with are internal recruiters who seem to actually give a shit about getting good talent to their company.