> Hi Matthew, > > I'm very impressed with your rating/experience. > At the current time, I have a few clients that are looking for experienced > Ruby Rails developers (both contract & permanent) like yourself. There > is > lots of room for creativity and growth at these places. > > So, my contacts are below if you're still looking. Also, if possible, can > you pls forward me > your current resume? > > Thanks much! > > Leslie Doan > ****************** > Managing Partner > MINDSPHERES, INC. > 2570 North First Street > Suite 200 > San Jose, CA 95131 > C: 408.386.7246 > E: leslied@mindspheres.com > W: www.mindspheres.com
Hi Leslie Doan, I know it's tough to be a recruiter. Cold calling is difficult and much of recruiting is a volume game. But you aren't doing yourself any favors with this email. You're starting this relationship with me by lying to me. You say you've looked at my working with rails profile and been impressed. But that can't be true. I've never worked on a real rails or ruby project. I have no ratings or experience, so how can you be impressed.My resume is also clearly linked from my working with rails profile. If I can't rely on you to know that, how can I trust you with my career? I've worked with a lot of recruiters, and I know that high volume folks treat you like a tiny number. They are usually more interested in getting you hired anywhere at any price so they can collect a commission. I smell that big time in this email. If you show any level of familiarity with who I am or any of the many links on my profile, I'm so much more likely to work with you. Hope this helps you, and good luck in the recruiting game, Matt p.s. To make this letter worth my time as well as yours, I'm putting it up for my pals on my website. Don't worry, I don't have a very high readership.
As you might imagine, I haven’t gotten a response from Leslie. I don’t think she’s interested in investing time in my career.
But wait, there's more
This work by MattK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Kudos to you for writing this email – now I suggest you save it and respond to every shotgun recruiting email you get.
Oddly enough I haven’t gotten one of these in a long time – perhaps because I haven’t posted my email in enough places.
Of course, you can also just be mean and string them along – take ten seconds to throw him/her a bone (“Cool – what’ve you got?”) and make the recruiter waste time putting stuff together. Write one-line responses to all emails (“Cool – could you get me more information about that? I’ve been at work a lot lately so I can’t really talk on the phone.”) Then, drop the bomb “actually I know very little about ROR – didn’t you read my profile?”. Total cost: probably about 5 minutes of your time. Satisfaction of wasting a time-waster’s time: priceless.
–Nate