Recruitment Agents

Update (October 2011): Time passes and companies change. I should point out that this blog post was written a long time ago. I’m assured by Huntress that they have addressed the issues I mention below and are a much better company to work with these days. It’s certainly many years since I received an inappropriate email from them.

[Please read this entry for an update on this situation.]

The Huntress Group are a recruitment agency who seem to specialise in employing the most unprofessional agents that I’ve ever come across. I strongly recommend that you don’t deal with them.

I’ve now been a freelancer for ten years. Over that time I’ve dealt with a lot of recruitment agencies and my contact details and CV are stored in a lot of databases. This means that I’m often getting speculative phone calls and emails from agents asking what my current work situation is and what kind of jobs I’m interested in. This is fine.

Over that ten years, I’ve specialised in various areas. If a job requirement doesn’t involve moving data into or out of a database on a Unix platform (probably using Perl) then I’m not really likely to be interested. The most cursory glance at my CV would tell you this.

However, also over that ten years, the systems that I’ve worked on have interfaced with many other systems. So my CV contains phrases like “worked on interface with SAP system” or “exchanged data with Stratus system”. This is where the problem starts.

If you’re a lazy agent and you’re, for example, trying to fill an SAP role you might do a basic search in your database for CVs containing the phrase SAP. If you’re vaguely sentient then you’d check these CVs before contacting any matching candidates about the role. This simple check would remove inappropriate CVs like mine from the list.

And this is where Huntress go wrong. They seem to specialise in areas of computing (like SAP and Stratus) where I have no knowledge, no experience and no interest. But their lazy employees are constantly matching my CV in searches for roles in these areas and sending me emails asking if I’m interested in the role. I reply politely explaining their error and asking them to remove me from their database. My emails are always ignored.

So this is my next step. Hopefully, my Googlejuice will be good enough to get this page high up in a search for Huntress and people will read about their unprofessionalism and decide not to do business with them.

Here’s a partial list (I don’t think I’ve kept all the emails) of the inappropriate requirements that they have sent me. I’ll add to this list as more emails come in from them. I currently seem to be getting about one every two weeks.