Unemployment Week 3: The Good, Bad and Ugly of Online Job Recruiters

During my brief time being unemployed, I’ve opened up the doors to have recruiters contact me. Additionally, I’ve also applied to job postings with recruiters on them. With that being said, I present to you the good and bad of job recruiters.

The Good

Vitamin TalentThe good job recruiters out there include ones who provide a job that actually exists and lets me know my chances of getting it based on getting to know me. One case is Jessica Lester of Vitamin Talent, a division of Aquent.

We met for an hour, talking about my skills and what I’m looking for. We are still in contact since she submitted my résumé for a Digital Marketing and Ad Coordinator position one of her clients is seeking.

Infinity Consulting SolutionsAnother good example of a recruiter is Mike Ziegelbaum at Infinity Consulting Solutions. Similarly, we also talked for about an hour and got to know what I was looking for.

I’m currently in talks with one of their clients who is looking for an SEO Analyst. I will save these client names for a future post if anything goes further with them.

I wish my experience with others were as good as with these two companies and individuals.

The Bad

JumpStartThere are other recruiters that aren’t as good. Let’s take JumpStart for example. I spoke with Amy Lackie on the phone briefly since she wanted to meet me face to face to get to know me, which was fine.

However, after meeting face to face, it felt as though it could have just as easily been done over the phone. I spent about 5 minutes with Amy with her telling me that I was overqualified for the first job she had and that I had to speak with Dan Meara (a fellow Marist alum from the same year as me no less) since the client was one of his.

I waited in the lobby for about 5 minutes for Dan, spoke to him about the job description for about 2 minutes and he said he would email me the description. Umm… I’m in the office, can’t you show it to me? The most fun part is that I’m still waiting on that job description even after following up.

That’s not the worst of it though.

The Ugly

The ugly of job recruiters are the ones who find your résumé on Monster or Career Builder. Granted, it’s always good to have all of your fields open, but you literally have a 1 in 20 shot of getting any opportunity from it. That’s especially true when you get contacted by 4 of them for the same position (and because of rights to represent, you can only get sent by one company). They’re all temporary gigs with big-name companies.

That isn’t the problem. The problem is when they leave you a voicemail and call you three times within an hour since the opening is so “urgent”. I am at the point of screening calls from numbers that I don’t know because of these recruiters.

The worst one in particular is Artech Information Systems, specifically Mahak Gupta. I want to point this person out by name because we talked about the position and applying me for it. She then called me back the next day saying that she wanted to alter my résumé to be more presentable. I was asked by this woman if she can change my job title. You can’t change a job title you had!

If that’s not absurd enough, she also wanted to add in that I did tasks that I didn’t do to make myself more presentable. I said no to both. She “revamped” my résumé to lump my experience together by town and not by company. She merely combined sections of my résumé. The actions of Mahak Gupta have inspired me to never want to work with Artech Information Systems again.

What has been your experience with online job recruiters? Let me know in the comments below or on Twitter @ChrisKeuling!