another misguided recruiter

[cellio]

Like many others, I get lots of unsolicited email from recruiters who claim to have read my LinkedIn profile and have a great opportunity for me. They're almost always wrong about both. But I usually skim the tech-writing ones when they arrive, to (maybe) learn a little about the state of the field.

The latest one, about a "fast-paced innovative team", started off generic, as most of them do. (Hint to recruiters: if you want me to respond, give me a reason to. I'm not actively looking; you have to show me something interesting.) But the list of responsibilities included "work with architecture and UX teams to understand how best to organize and present the documentation" -- hey, they have a UX team! That's unusual (in a positive way). I kept reading.

Then I got to the requirements, which included:

• Experience with Cobol
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft Office

Ha ha, no.

Also, it's in New Jersey and the ad doesn't say anything about remote employees. Bzzt.

Comments

[gingicat]

Ha - my mom-in-law got to extend her retirement date for as long as she wanted because the company she worked for needed to get them over Y2K and it then took a long time to transition out of the COBOL-based legacy software...

[cellio]

I know some people out there are still using COBOL (on mainframes??). But "innovative"? Maybe yes and I've just never heard about it, but it's not my starting assumption. Especially given the other smells coming from this interaction.

[goljerp]

Hmm... mdlbear and gingicat got me thinking... maybe it's "Innovative" because they have a team working in PHP, trying to replicate in a webapp some COBOL code which everyone knows holds the business logic, but nobody knows what the business logic actually is?

[metahacker]

Oh boy. Recruiter pattern matching, even worse than usual pattern matching...

I got one that started "We see you have experience as $title at $job. Our matching algorithms identified you as a great candidate for $client's open position: Entry Level Positions Open - Immediate Hire."

Um...yeah. Gonna go with "you need to upgrade your algorithms" and also "fix your data scraping algorithms"...

[cellio]

Entry level. *Snort*. I suppose expecting a human to actually review the algorithm's conclusions would cut into their profits too much. After all, bothering large numbers of people who are not your target is offset by a single nibble from one who is. That's why spam, phishing, and other scams work -- only need one sucker per million, or something. :-(

[damont]

COBOL *and* M$ Office? Weird combination...

[mdlbear]

I can think of several adjectives that might apply to a combination of Microsoft Office and COBOL, but "innovative" isn't one of them.

They're looking for someone to document their horrible crock of a COBOL program before the last person who understands it dies?

[cellio]

And they don't want to have *that* person document it, because that would be a terrible waste of a programmer's salary. Nah, we'll just hire a cheap technical writer; we can get one for $20/hr, right?

Geographically Limited

[goljerp]

[sarcasm]Well, you're in PA; PA borders NJ, so you can just commute to NJ, right? [/sarcasm]
[sarcasm]Doesn't everyone want to move to NJ? [/sarcasm]

Use $COMPANY_NAME recruiters! We'll get your job description to $HUGE_NUMBER qualified candidates! (Who will ignore it because we spammed them...)