I got an email from a recruiter with a GREAT OPPORTUNITY today. Since I usually get amused by how poorly they’ve done their homework, I gave her my number and she gave me a call. After trying to qualify how much experience with PHP I had, I just said “Look, you’re going to have to be pretty convincing to get me to stop what I’m doing right now.” So she says, “So why did you post your resume on Monster.com, just to see whats out there?”. Hold the phone, I’ve never even visited monster.com.

I think its pretty obvious that Monster and other job sites are scraping resumes. In fact, its a perfect crime because since they charge to see resumes you can’t even verify if you’re on there or not. If I was looking for a job, I’d post my resume. By scraping resumes you waste my time and the recruiter’s time.

Check this out:

80.132.236.240 - - [01/Sep/2006:18:09:18 -0500] “GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1″ 404 208 “-” “JobSpider_BA/1.1″

However, its asinine to actually do your own crawling for resumes. Google has done the hard work for you, just scrape Google.

Check out this badass job query, it’s even location targeted via Google’s handy .. operator:

.net+%7C+SE3+(developer+%7C+%22software+engineer%22+%7C+architect)
+(intitle:resume+%7C+inurl:resume)+55000..56999+-~jobs+~minneapolis


To you recruiters (who will never read this because you don’t do your homework): seriously do your homework before you call someone. You have my resume. Type my name into Google. Find out a little bit about me. It should be instantly clear that there is only one David Dellanave. All of my work history is right in front of your face. Quite a bit about me personally is there too if you spend a little time.

Once you’ve done your homework, don’t call me unless you’re going to come hard. Don’t ask me how much PHP and MySQL experience I have. Don’t offer me a GREAT OPPORTUNITY at $35k and I’d have to move to the bay area. If you’re going to dial my number, or email me…bring it. Otherwise you’re just wasting my time, and I’m going to waste yours. If you want to take me out to lunch, we can work something out.