why I hate dealing with recruitment agencies

[waider]

I will readily admit that my resumés are sparse, plain-text efforts, but this hasn’t stopped me from getting a quiet trickle of cold-calls over the years. The agency that the boss put me in touch with, however, feels that I should make it a Word document, put in lots of bold text, and pad it out with crap relating to what I’ve actually done. I can see some reasoning behind this, but to be honest, from my own experience with interviewing, padding is definitely one thing that made me put an applicant on the bottom of the pile or in the round filing cabinet.

update: and, I was sufficiently peeved by the above that I neglected to ask directly, but from other comments she made I am guessing that she has completely ignored my requests to be considered for developer positions as well as admin positions.

updated update: Yes, I was right. When they told us on Thursday that there was plenty of development work out there, apparently they meant "no Perl or PHP jobs" because that’s what "my" recruiter said to me. Or maybe she’s only got sysadmin jobs to offer me, because there are certainly plenty Perl/PHP jobs going on the various recruitment websites.

Comments

[opadit.livejournal.com]

The last time I was out of work, I got no bites at all on my resume until I stripped it down to its current state. I've found that the biggest concern addressed to younger people (that is, don't ever, ever, ever show gaps in employment) is not a big deal once one is over 30 -- it's assumed that you'll take time "off" to pursue child-rearing or some kind of significant volunteer gig, or maybe you just went on a vision quest. Also, a lot of people have to take grunt jobs here and there to pay the bills. Listing them all clutters the resume without adding any useful information and it's hardly a sin of omission to leave out a five-month stint at a coffee shop or, um, a local historical site.

[waider.livejournal.com]

To be honest, and as I admitted to wisn, I'm mostly just irritated to have to deal with recruiters again.