Recruiters who spam resumes part two – SmartMoney article

I was reading an older article from SmartMoney the other day and wanted to share a snippet that really resonated about candidate resumes being mass-spammed and not being  disclosed, since it seems like I’ve been writing about this a lot lately. Perhaps it’s because I’ve seen this happen more in 3 months of 2008 than all of 2007! , but it’s really becoming quite unbelievable – Candidates: ensure you give written/email permission for each submission, and recruiters – if you won’t act ethically, go back to selling cars. Here at The Bivium Group, we pride ourselves on only sending a resume with your explicit, informed, written consent for a job. If that sounds like a person you want representing you here in the Massachusetts software engineering market- I’d love to hear from you!

The article:

“Since contingency firms get paid only if they actually place a candidate, the temptation is to carpet bomb your name across hundreds of companies and hope somebody bites. At their worst, some firms become like “boiler-room operations in securities sales,” according to Scott of TransPacific Ventures.

The result: Your information could be mass-faxed by recruiters eager to make a commission or traded with others who might do the same. It could even end up in the lap of your current employer. “You should know who it’s going to, and for what position,” says Dudley Brown, head of Irvine, Calif., start-up staffer BridgeGate. “If an agency’s reluctant to do that, it should be a real warning sign.”

Even if you’re careful, you might still get burned. Ask Michael Greiche, an auditor at a Wall Street financial firm, who had insisted on prior permission — but didn’t get it, as he found out when he approached a potential employer earlier this year. “They said, ‘Your agency sent your resume here.’ I said, ‘I never gave permission for them to send it here.’…Sure enough, I found out two days later they also sent it to two other firms without my permission.”

If multiple agencies are sending in your resume, a company might decline to hire you simply because “it looks like you don’t know what you’re doing,” warns Brown. Or it might not want to get involved in a nasty fee dispute between competing headhunters who are pitching the same person — even if you’re the perfect candidate. “