It's a wonder anything gets done

I got a call from a recruiter Monday night at 9:30 pm. He said he'd seen my resume and wanted to know if I were interested in a tech writing position. I told him I was unavailable but if he wanted to send me an email, I'd take a look at the job anyway, since I'm not guaranteed to be at my present contract forever.

The next day I open my email -- the address I use for job hunts and recruiters. There are two jobs in there from two different people. I can't remember the name of the guy who called me -- from the 916 area code, which is Sacramento -- so I look at both descriptions. Neither one comes even close to what the guy described to me. One is essentially a sales support job and the other says you have to be able to write java code samples.

It could be that the recruiter simply sent me the wrong job, but not only could I not tell which wrong job might have come from the guy I talked to, it's likely he wouldn't even remember talking to me or which job we were talking about. If he was calling at 9:30 p.m he'd probably called 50 people that day -- no wonder he got things mixed up. But more importantly, it's usually true that recruiters don't have any idea what the jobs are really about. They may read off lists of acronyms -- EJB, J2EE, DHTML, XML -- but they don't know what these mean or how my skills might or might not fit. So calling the guy back would probably be a waste of time. I might be more aggressive if I were out of a job now, but fortunately for me I have no reason to chase after phantoms like that.