Got this classic (pasted word for word) from a Swiss agency drone today. My response was: sounds like a great job; when can I start?

Dear nickatbasel
We are currently searching for a JOB TITLE to work in CITY, COUNTRY for DURATION plus extensions. This is a fantastic contract opportunity for a large multi-national client.
The ideal candidate must have the following skills: SHORT JOB DESCRIPTION.
If you are interested in this role, please reply immediately and we will be happy to send you an in-depth job specification.
Alternatively, if you have any colleagues who may be interested in this contract opportunity; please forward this email to them. If they are successfully placed at our client site, we will award you with £150.00 (220 Euros).
<agency name> would like to apologise if this requirement does not match your profile.
Thank you for your time and we hope to hear from you soon,


Regards
<agency drone's name>
Recruiting Team
<agency name>

Cheers,
Nick

I get a couple of those a week. I've asked to be removed from databases since I have no intention of leaving my current job but the emails keep rolling in.....

Hey! that's my job!

Back of the line Peachy.

I have had some of these. They do an automated search and send you a job spec without even reading your CV with "apologies if you are not a Charity Aid Worker"

dave

Only I've never actually received the unpopulated template.

The hit rate for these must be terrible,

Jobserve alchemy (whatever that is) is crap too, it currently thinks I'm a "BI-SAM professional", and I mean really thinks I am. An email a day for the last week. I had never heard of BI-SAM before this advert.

The job is probably about writing templates for this very agency...

Haha,

I got that one this morning too..

What a terrible mistake to make..

Interesting to note that they don't offer any opportunities other than "fantastic" ones. Mail them and ask them for their indepth job specification template.

dave

My translation of their email:

We'd like you to tell us where you are currently working and send us your CV with all references on so we can do a trawl for openings because we have no leads of our own.

Cheers,
Nick

MBA: a post graduate qualification I don't have.

This is why I set up a temporary email address whenever I am looking for work. When I get a new job I wait for a month or so in case any "real" communications come through about other jobs I applied for and forgot about, so I can give a polite response. Then I simply delete the email address and never hear from the tossers again.

Damn, I even had one agency that would continually send me emails for jobs that where not even close to my skill set, in German, requiring fluent German as a mandatory requirement. My resume clearly stated that I was only able to look at English speaking jobs.

JobServe Alchemy is a complete waste of time. The annoying thing is that if you publish your resume on JobServe, Alchemy is enabled automatically and the only way to stop it is to remove your resume. On the rare occasions I ever did get a useful suggestion from Alchemy, I had already found and applied for the job through normal search before the Alchemy email even came through. Email filters are a good thing. I just automatically binned everything from Alchemy.

A while back there was a thread about recruitment agency "techniques". Here is a live example of one of the more common ones.

Before Christmas I had a UK agent email me saying they have some opportunities in Switzerland and wanted a CV update. Hadn't updated the CV for a while so made use of the motivation to do so and duly mailed it off.

A few days later the double-glazing salesman calls to discuss my CV etc and the conversation went:

Me: long explanation of current role and expectations - sounds of high-flying jumbo jets from the other side....
Me: "so you have an office in Zürich or one of the other larger Swiss towns"
Agent: "Nope. We just fly over when we need to etc"
Me: "So you have somebody on your sales team who speaks fluent Swiss German - or one of the other Swiss languages"
Agent: "No."
Me: "So which industry sectors are you mainly concentrating on? Pharma, finance or telecoms?"
Agent: "Well, if you could give me a list of companies you are interested in working for then that would be a start".

At this point I curtailed the conversation fairly quickly. Basically the guy wants free leads if I read between the lines. Plus the other thing I have learned after hard experience in Switzerland is unless you have a sales person who speaks Swiss German (or French if you are selling over the Röstigraben) you're going to get nowhere with Swiss clients.

Oh well, at least I got my CV updated.

Cheers,
Nick

Good to be reminded about recruitment agency practises! I've dealt with them (in Australia) from both sides and will no doubt need their services when I arrive in Basel next year. Is it naive to hope the Swiss ones won't be the same as the UK one you mentioned?!

Pam

Be interesting to know just how many members of the forum are actually employment agents. Quite a few I hazard.

But anyway, is 40K enough??

The job could've been this one. 12 work hours per month, caretaking a tropical island:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asi...ic/7823812.stm