So, this recruiter from a company called “SoftHQ” called me yesterday about a position he thinks I’m a good fit for.
The call was screened and I declined it, which means Google played him a message that told him I wasn’t available. Nevertheless, he called back and left a voicemail message. Judging from the quality of the audio on the call and from the fact the caller had an Indian name and a strong Indian accent, I suspect he was actually calling from India.
He also sent me an email, from which I was able to determine that I am not at all a good fit for this job, something which any competent recruiter would have recognized after just a few seconds of looking at my LinkedIn profile or résumé.
All this—contacting me about a job that is not a good fit for me, contacting me by both voicemail and email at once, calling back after being told not to, being likely offshore—was enough to convince me not to do business with either this recruiter or his firm, but wait, there’s more.
Today, one day later, he called back again. I once again screened and declined the call, and he once again called back a second time. I declined the second call without screening it since I recognized the number, then I blocked the number so I don’t need to deal with this garbage anymore.
Then he sent me email again.
At this point I had twice the justification I needed to never do business with this recruiter or his company. But wait, there’s more.
Sometimes when stuff like this goes down and the mood strikes me, I look for a channel to contact the company responsible for the bad recruiter and send them email giving them a heads up that one of their recruiters is alienating candidates and they should clean up their mess. I decided to do so in this case, so I headed over their web site, found their contact page, and emailed the address published there.
THE EMAIL BOUNCED. No joke:
550 5.1.1 <info@softhqinc.com>... User unknownThese people are a joke. 0/10 do not recommend. Avoid SoftHQ at all costs.
UPDATE: A few days later, the SoftHQ recruiter who has been hounding me emailed me again, this time from a Gmail address rather than a SoftHQ address. Presumably he also tried to call me again and discovered that his number was blocked (you would think, would you not, that he would get the message from that to leave me alone!). He was emailing me from his Gmail address either to avoid any block I had put on his SoftHQ address or because he was sending a mass mailing and that’s against his company’s rules so he used his Gmail account to do it. Truly appalling. I replied as follows:
Please ensure that neither you nor anyone else from SoftHQ ever calls or emails me again.
If your company has an internal applicant database, please entirely remove me from it. If you have a do-not-mail and/or do-not-call list, ensure that I am on them.
Your recruiting practices are overly aggressive and amateurish, and your company is poorly run. I will never do business with you as either a candidate or a hiring manager.
I assume I have made myself perfectly clear.
