According to the BBB, “We have written to the business two times on your behalf and we have failed to receive a response to your complaint.”

Please, folks, do not do business with this recruiter.

Subject: Company Name specs

I placed the cto.  He’s a great guy and asked me to help with a couple engineering roles. I’ve attached the job specs.

Company Name has been know as Old Company Name 1 and  Old Company Name 2.

would you recommend Current Coworker Name?

any other suggestions?

Ed

Here’s what I wrote back:

I will reply to you now as I replied to you the last time you contacted me, last November:

I have asked your company multiple times not to contact me.

I have even decried your failure to leave me alone on my blog.

One of my friends commented on my blog that at one point his wife told your company that he had died just to get you to stop calling him.

Get the message?

Jonathan Kamens

As for Current Coworker Name, he is currently employed where I work, and he has not chosen to mention to me that he is looking for a new position, so whether he is or isn’t, dropping his name to me was entirely inappropriate.  The fact that you felt comfortable doing that is yet another reason why people should avoid your company like the plague.

Please do not contact me again.

Jonathan Kamens

Idiots.

In a nutshell, Dropbox smartly and automatically synchronizes a hierarchy of folders among any number of Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs and iPhones.  All of the synchronized changes are automatically backed up on Dropbox’s servers, and you can go back into the past to retrieve previous versions or deleted files.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for a Dropbox account, which comes with 2GB of storage for free (you can pay small monthly fees for more storage).
2. Install and configure (i.e., enter your email address and password) the Dropbox client on two or more computers or iPhones.
3. The client creates a Dropbox folder whose contents you can manipulate like any other folder on your computer.
4. Any changes you make to the folder on any of the clients are automatically propagated to all of the other computers linked to your account.
5. The clients are bandwidth-sensitive (e.g., you can install Dropbox on your laptop and it won’t take up all of your 3G bandwidth when you’re tethered to your phone) and supposedly even know how to synchronize between clients on the same LAN.
6. The files you put into Dropbox are also accessible through their Web site, and you can share links to specific Dropbox folders to friends or colleagues.

As noted above, you can get 2GB of storage for free.  Furthermore, you can easily get a 250MB bonus just by spending a few minutes using the service (for details, click on “Getting Started” from the Web site home page after logging in).  You can also get a 250MB bonus by signing up through another user’s referral link (in case you haven’t noticed, all of the links to the service I’ve posted in this blog posting are referral links for my account ) and additional bonuses for referring other people.

There are other services like this one, e.g., SugarSync, but this is the best one I’ve seen, and the fact that it has Linux support is totally sweet.  My only complaint is that it doesn’t (yet) have a BlackBerry client.

At Advent, we offer competitive compensation and benefits, treat our people well, and strive to be a good corporate citizen.  Furthermore, we successfully weathered the recent economic storm, with no layoffs, and came out of it stronger than before.  I love coming to work every day at Advent!

As a Tamale Operations Engineer, you will play a critical role in the development and support of Tamale RMS. Your responsibilities will include release engineering; development and maintenance of the Linux-based RMS appliance platform; tier-2 support for RMS appliances at client sites; and development and maintenance of the mission-critical, 24×7 “Tamale Central” hosted environment.  Your many and varied responsibilities will guarantee a wide variety of challenging, exciting work with plenty of opportunity for learning new skills and technologies.

As a Tamale QA Engineer, you will help make each new RMS release faster, more stable and more reliable than the one before.  A commitment to quality infuses our entire engineering process, from our tens of thousands of unit tests to our ongoing effort to implement automated end-to-end testing of the entire RMS application.  You will work closely with our developers to define, implement and execute comprehensive test suites for new and existing functionality.  The depth and breadth of RMS knowledge you acquire will make you well-suited for other roles at Tamale, if any pique your interest.

As a Tamale Software Engineer, you will design and develop software for some of the world’s most demanding customers.  With our client-focused, streamlined development process and revolutionary application deployment framework, your code will be in front of users practically before the bits have had time to dry.  You’ll be part of a team of brilliant, enthusiastic engineers who delight in hashing out hard problems, love writing good code, and enjoy going out for beer after work.  With ample opportunity to work directly with clients and take the lead on major projects, career growth isn’t merely possible; it’s unavoidable.

Speaking of the world’s most demanding customers… Developing software that makes them happy is hard, but keeping them happy and productive with the software on a day-to-day basis is even harder.  As a Tamale Client Services Specialist, you will deploy and maintain Tamale’s software at client sites all over the world, build long-term relationships with local and remote clients, and often achieve that particular job satisfaction that comes only from delighting a customer.

Some people think building software is the bee’s knees, but others think it’s more fun to tell the programmers what to build.  As a Tamale Product Manager, you will work with our customers, sales team, development team and senior management to design new products and features and validate your designs through direct interaction with clients and prospects.  In addition, you’ll manage the rollout of RMS at new, strategic clients, leading cross-functional teams to define workflows and requirements, design and implement custom solutions, and train and enable users for maximum success and productivity.

If Advent Tamale sounds like the kind of place where you’d fit right in and still stand out, visit our Web site to find out more about our available openings, or contact me for additional information.

If I were looking for a job myself, I wouldn’t use any of these people.  I decided years ago that the way you find a good recruiter to work with is through word of mouth and networking, not through cold calls from pushy, often dishonest people who don’t actually care about you or your career.

If I were looking to hire someone to work at my company, I wouldn’t use any of these people, both for the reasons given above, and because we have in-house recruiters and it is very difficult to convince senior management that a job is sufficiently difficult to fill that external recruiting expertise is needed.  Even if I were going to use an external recruiter to fill a position, it would be handled by my HR department, not by me.

Nevertheless, I get several of these calls per week.  It’s gotten so bad that I don’t answer my desk phone when the caller ID doesn’t show a number I recognize.  If it’s someone I actually need to speak with, they’ll leave a voicemail message.

Today’s annoying recruiter incident was sufficiently egregious that I felt it appropriate to post about it on my blog to warn others off from the perpetrator, Oxford International.

The Oxford International recruiter called not once, not twice, but three times, and the third call was after I actually spoke to him and told him to leave me alone.

1. Recruiter calls.  Caller ID shows no number, so I let it go to voicemail.  No message is left.
2. Recruiter calls again.  Two calls in a row is almost always a sign that someone I know really needs to reach me, so I answer the phone.  As they so often do, the recruiter introduces himself vaguely using a tone of voice which suggests that we’re old friends.  When I ascertain that he is a recruiter, I inform him that I’m not currently hiring and that if I were he would have to talk to my HR department, thank him for calling, and hang up, all before he can waste any more of my time by saying anything.
3. Recruiter calls a third time — I do not answer — and again leaves no message.

Interestingly, I am not the only person who has written on-line about bad experiences with Oxford International.

The other recruiting firm mentioned in the title of this blog entry, High Tech Ventures, found me a job in 1997.  However, I was so bothered by the way they worked that, after thanking them for finding me the job, I told them to please never contact me again.  What bothered me about them was:

1. It was clear that were more interested in earning a commission than in placing me in a position that was a good fit for both me and the company that hired me.
2. A couple years after they place you in a position, they call you up and try to convince you that it’ll be good for your career for you to leave.  Yes, that’s right, they actively try to steal employees they’ve placed from the companies with which they’ve placed them.

As I said, I asked High Tech Ventures back in 1997 never to contact me again.  Nevertheless, I continue to get phone calls and email messages from them, both at home and at work, on a regular basis.  I have repeatedly asked them to stop contacting me, and it does no good.

If you do find it necessary to work with recruiting firms, I suggest you take a pass on Oxford International and High Tech Ventures.

One of the seminars, entitled “The Working Parent,” was described as follows:

This workshop is for anyone interested in learning ways to assess our current lifestyle, set priorities and choose realistic goats. Review tools to help meet the multitude of demands facing the working parent. Topics discussed will include:

• Challenges Facing the Modern Working Parent
• What Matters Most
• Meeting Your Own Needs

I was interested in attending this seminar until I checked my calendar and discovered that it was taking place during the all-but-compulsory managerial training I’ll be attending next week, away from my family at a hotel in Connecticut for two whole days.

My experience in the past with third-party FSA administrators has ranged from mediocre to bad.  However, this time I’m writing to give kudos, because when I went today to submit my first claim through PayFlex’s self-service Web site, I discovered that they have an intelligent, well-designed, innovative claim submission process, the kind that makes you say, “Why the heck can’t everybody do things this way?”

When you log into the Web site and click “Express Claims”, you are immediately brought to a screen where you enter the details of each charge you’re submitting (expense type, date, amount).  The data entry form is intuitive and responsive, and it doesn’t make you fill out the fields that aren’t needed.

When you’re done and click “Submit”, you are brought to a confirmation screen where you can review all of the information you entered and go back to correct any mistakes.

This is cool.  You are entering your data directly into their database, which means that transcription errors and data-entry delays are eliminated.  Furthermore, since they don’t have to pay people to do data entry, their costs are presumably lower, and one would hope that the cost savings is passed on to my employer in the form of lower administrative fees.

But that’s not even the coolest thing.  Once you confirm that all of the information is correct, you arrive at the receipt submission screen.  They offer you the choice between faxing in your receipts and uploading them as a PDF file produced by a scanner. Since scanners are common nowadays and pretty much every scanner can produce PDFs, uploading a PDF is less trouble for many people than faxing.  Furthermore, the uploaded file is linked immediately and automatically to the claim, once again reducing both delays and processing costs.

Of course, PayFlex also offers the option of filling out a claim form on paper and submitting it by mail or fax, so people who don’t feel comfortable using the online process can still submit claims.

For more information about PayFlex’s claim submission process, see their FAQ page.

Nice job, PayFlex!

UPDATE: I received an explanation of benefits from PayFlex via email, indicating that my claim had been paid, less than 15 hours after I filed my claim. Wow!

Administaff uses a “co-employment” model, wherein the employees of Administaff’s clients become employees of Administaff as well, and Administaff handles health insurance, payroll, recruiting, performance management, etc.  Administaff clients don’t necessarily use all of Administaff’s services; it’s a menu from which they choose what they want.  The biggest reason for a company to use Administaff is probably to reduce the cost of health insurance.  Administaff can bargain with the insurance industry for lower rates than a small or medium-sized business can on its own, since they have a far larger employee pool.

Tamale has always had awesome benefits, including great health insurance with 100% of the premiums paid by the company.  But the company and its employees got a little older and more mature (read “got married and/or started having babies;” I must confess that I’m a major contributor to this!), and at the same time the cost of health insurance skyrocketed across the board.  It’s therefore not surprising that Tamale went looking for a way to reduce its costs, and perhaps switching to Administaff was a necessary evil.

Nonetheless, from the point of view of the employees, it was not a positive change.  We went from having all of our HR needs seen to directly by an extremely competent, friendly Tamale employee in our office, to dealing over the phone or internet with nameless, faceless Administaff employees cut out of the “barely adequate customer service representative” mold.

Of course, the Administaff sales people sang the praises of their service team and spoke glowingly about how painless the transition would be.  I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the reality did not live up to the hype.  There were problems from the start, and the problems continued throughout our time with Administaff.  A few examples:

1. When we filled out the HMO enrolment paperwork, we were given the option of specifying primary care physicians (PCPs) on the forms and told that they would be entered into the system with our initial enrolment.  Many of us took the time to look up PCP ID numbers and include them on the form.  Administaff did not bother to enter anyone’s PCPs into the system.
2. When our HR manager contacted Administaff about the fact that they had completely ignored everyone’s PCP designations, rather than immediately admitting the error and agreeing to rectify it, they told her that we would all have to call the insurance company directly to take care of it.  Needless to say, she pushed back until they agreed to solve the problem.
3. With their commuter pass program, it was impossible to know from one month to the next which paycheck the cost of the pass would be deducted from.  Some months it was the first paycheck, some months it was the second, and some months they completely forgot and had to deduct from both paychecks in the following month.
4. They charge a $2 fee per month for the commuter pass program.  No employer I have ever worked for in my entire life has charged a fee for participating in a commuter program.
5. One month they simply failed to process the commuter passes on time, and we didn’t get them until after the beginning of the next month.  We received a letter notifying us that our passes were going to be late and instructing us to buy “day passes” for the intervening days (what about people who live out in yachupitzville where nobody sells T passes?) and then to send in a form to be reimbursed for them.  Wow, what a great time-saver!
6. It sometimes took Administaff as long as a week and a half to deposit 401k money withheld from paychecks into people’s 401k accounts.  Yes, that means that Administaff was making money off of the float in the interim.
7. When we terminated our relationship with Administaff after the acquisition, I applied to have my Health-care Flexible Spending Account (FSA) continue under COBRA, because there was a lot of money remaining in the account and I needed more time to spend it.  Two weeks after sending the premium check to Administaff to continue the FSA coverage, the check still hadn’t been cashed and the FSA provider still had my account marked closed and therefore was refusing to accept new claims.

Everybody makes mistakes, and occasional mistakes can and should be forgiven.  But when there’s a pattern of mistakes, as in the odd-numbered items above, that a sign not only of a lack of quality, but of not caring about quality.  And as for the even-numbered items above, they represent much more than simple mistakes; they represent conscious decisions that are detrimental to the customer.

I did a little research about Administaff and discovered that in addition to the “little” problems (not so little, really!) described above, they’ve had their share of Big Problems as well:

1. In October 2007, an Administaff laptop containing unecrypted personal data on 159,000 current and former employees managed by Administaff was stolen.  Adam Breindel has a great takeon just what this incident says about Administaff (and it isn’t good).
2. Back in 2003, Administaff attempted to intimidate people out of saying negative things on their Yahoo! Finance message board by suing Yahoo! and demanding that they reveal the identities of the people making the comments.  More information at The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford.

I understand that small and medium-sized businesses face incredible pressure to lower costs any way they can, and for some of them, going with a PEO like Administaff might be inevitable.  But I urge any business considering such a move to evaluate carefully the impact on employee morale and the time employees will waste dealing problems like the ones described above, and I urge such businesses to evaluate not merely cost, but also quality of service when choosing which PEO to utilize.

The Green Card process seems intentionally designed to encourage employers to game the system. It is an entirely unrealistic process, in which what employers are ostensibly doing is actually completely different from what they are actually doing. The only people who benefit from the process are the lawyers who guide employers through it.

We have to write a job description for his job. The job description needs to match the skills he had when he was hired two years ago, and cannot include any skills he has acquired or responsibilities that have been added in the last two years (unless we are willing to make the argument that he has been promoted since being hired and/or his current duties are more than 50% different from what he was hired for). Then we have to advertise the job for at least 30 days, running it at least twice in the newspaper and in three other forms as well. The goal of this process is to prove that there are no US citizens qualified for his job, which is plainly and obviously stupid. What really ends up happening is bending over backwards to craft an absurdly detailed job description which no one can fill except the person we’ve already got.

Anyone who takes the time to respond to one of our ads thinks that we’re actually trying to find qualified candidates, but in fact what we’re trying to do is not find qualified candidates, which means that we are by definition being deceptive with candidates and wasting their time.

If anyone applies who can’t be disqualified based on their resume, then we have to do a phone screen. If we still can’t tell whether they’re qualified after the phone screen, then we have to bring them in for our standard interview process, which is quite time-consuming both for us and for the candidate. And if they still seem qualified after the interview, then we have to hire them, and we can’t get a Green Card for our existing employee. Yes, that’s right, if we manage to find and hire a qualified candidate during this process, then we have failed in what we were trying to accomplish.

We can’t tell any of the people participating in the interview process that it’s a sham. We have to somehow make them believe that we’re really trying to hire someone to do the job that the guy we already have is already doing. If they figure out what’s going on and somehow let it slip to a candidate, then the candidate could file a complaint with the Department of Labor that we weren’t honestly trying to fill the position, and we could end up in a heap of trouble.

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Lies, deception, and wasted time and money. All to “prove” that someone who has been contributing significant value to the company for years, and for whom we are willing to spend thousands of dollars in legal fees and application fees so he can keep working for us, is someone who is worthy of becoming a US citizen.

The Democrats should want to fix this because letting pursue the American dream and find a better life here is just the kind of thing that they should be gung ho about. The Republicans should want to fix this because letting the global, free-market economy determine who would make a good citizen is just the kind of thing that they should be gung ho about. Why the system has remained in place, essentially unchanged, for so many years is completely inexplicable.

I am once again faced with the situation of having to take my vacation days for the Jewish High Holidays. Instead of passively standing by, I plan to take this issue up with my company and human resources department, as I am tired of corporate America assuming everyone is of a Christian faith. I am looking for some advice on how to handle this situation, if anyone has dealt with this before and would not mind sharing that would be greatly appreciated.

I think my response is worth blogging:

The best indicator of whether you are likely to come out of this with a reasonable arrangement with your company is your attitude going into it. If the people with whom you discuss this feel like you understand their side of the issue and are just trying to come to an agreement which will be acceptable to both sides, they will be much more cooperative than if you’re all up in their faces about how corporate America is unfair to Jews. Whether or not you believe that is not the point; the point is that it is not a basis for discussion that is likely to yield the result you want.

Your company has a legal obligation to make it possible for you to observe the Jewish holidays, but they’re under no obligation to make it easy. If you are lucky enough to work for a particularly enlightened manager or company, one that understands that you will be a better, more productive employee if you aren’t stressed about missing work for the holidays, then they will find a way to make it easier (for example, the best manager I’ve ever had offered me five extra days of vacation per year, off the books, for Jewish holidays). However, offers for accommodations that will cost the company money need to come from the company, rather than being demanded by you.

You should go into the discussion with a proposal for reasonable accommodations you would like the company to make, using some combination of the following approaches:

• Borrow against vacation to be accrued later.
• Work on some company holidays, in exchange for compensatory time off for the Jewish holidays. I love working on Christmas day – the office is completely quiet, and with no interruptions I get a huge amount of work done. I also frequently work on Memorial Day and Labor Day.
• Work extra hours at night or on Sundays in exchange for compensatory time off for the Jewish holidays.
• Take unpaid leave for some of the holidays.
• Take a reduction in pay in exchange for more annual vacation days.
• During the next compensation adjustment period, ask for extra vacation days in lieu of part of the raise you are offered.

When presenting your proposal, you need to make it clear that you understand that the company is entitled to a certain level of productivity, and you are looking for a way to maintain that productivity level while still allowing you to observe your religion. It’s important that the people with whom you discuss this don’t get the impression that you’re trying to take advantage of the company.

If you work a lot of extra hours already, and if you’ve got a smart manager who knows that, then your manager will almost certainly offer to let you take off some of the holidays off the books. However, in a year like this one, when there are 12 Yomim Tovim on weekdays, any manager is going to be hard-pressed to justify letting you take off all of the holidays without any sort of make-up. Next year isn’t much better, with 10 missed days, but 2009 has only 6, which just about as good as it gets.

Which of these approaches you use, and in what combination, depends on your personal preferences and on what your company is willing to accommodate. Use your best judgment to decide on the initial proposal you present when entering the discussion, and be prepared to adjust your proposal based on the feedback you receive.

If you have a good working relationship with your manager, you should discuss the issue privately with him/her first, rather than going directly to HR. if you don’t have a good working relationship with your manager, then find a different job where you do. That sounds flippant, but I’m serious. If you’ve got a good manager with whom you get along well, it will be easy for the two of you to come to an understanding. If you don’t, it’ll be difficult to impossible. The job market is hot right now, so if this is a serious quality of life issue for you, you shouldn’t be adverse to the idea of finding a job where it won’t be a problem.

Finally, keep in mind that there is still ignorance, intolerance and outright anti-Semitism out there, and you may bump into it when you start down this path. I’ve had to transfer out from under at least one manager because of this. Be aware that the end result of asking for special accommodations because of your religion may be that you end up finding it necessary to switch managers or switch jobs. It’s not fair and perhaps not even legal, but that’s life.

Take a look at http://jik3.kamens.brookline.ma.us/cgi-bin/holidays.cgi. You may find it useful in this endeavor.

Good luck!