dointhegeekjobdance.com

When you’re talking to a particular recruiter for the first time, they don’t know that it drives you up the wall to be asked - ( yet again ) :

- how many years have you done C++, how many for Perl, how many for Java
- what do you rate yourself on each language,
- what do you rate yourself relatively on all languages, and which is your favorite ( agonizingly tedious)
- how many years in a Unix environment, and how many in a Windows environment?

But the thing is, they need this information and they haven’t talked to you yet. It’s as simple as that. I used to dread having to return the phone call of an initial call from a brand new recruitment agency, because I’m never in the mood for answering these.

In the past, it’s almost like I had this unreasonable expectation that they should somehow magically know this already. In the same way that you call a Customer Service rep for your Cable TV and you expect that representative to have access to what you told the previous representative, - well, that is close to what I actually wanted from these recruiters. I wanted them to know what I already told the previous company. Pretty fucking silly of me.

Here’s what I did. It’s so Rocket-Scientist of me, it’s amazing. In my c:\jobstuff directory, I created a wordpad file with all of the possible variations of these recruiter questions - and of course thought up the answers for these, once and for all. So I can be practically comatose while talking to the recruiter and answering these questions. (yes, obviously as time progresses, you have to update the time-spent question, but the vast majority of this one-time preparation is done)

I just rattle off the answers to him/her, but I inject some enthusiasm into it when necessary so I avoid sounding bored and irritated.