This is another position I have right now, alongside my work as a phone support tech, and some independent consulting work I'm doing.
This is a tough job to do well. The clients are competing with companies who outsource to cheaper labor in other countries, our economy is sickly green and deflated and seriously needs some mouth-to-mouth recussitation; that means our clients are watching what we charge them like hawks and since it's the employer's marketplace, they're willing to knock down candidates on a whim, and we're flooded with ridiculously difficult-to-fill job requirements we can't find applicable people to fill.
In this haze of confusion and chaos perfectly suited to the multi-track mind of a multiple, we add in the desperate techie looking for a job.
After having ridden the coattails of the technology boom, now this person sits scrounging up pennies and praying for their next meal. Housing prices haven't dropped, his bank account is a candidate for a cobweb-ridden deserted/haunted mansion, while his debt rises and his credit rating falls through the floor. Forget the lifestyle that one had become accustomed to -- the money you once made is now flowing out of the country as foreigners with fancy tech credentials suck up jobs and cash, and send it home to their families in another country.
This desperado has to somehow get my attention and get him/her self a job.
There's easy ways to go about it and hard ways to go about it.
Some people bet on the side of sheer numbers: If they flood every person looking to hire with their resume, whether or not they fit the job, someone is bound to hire them eventually. These people are understandably desperate, but they're also pitifully lazy, blindly mass-mailing their resume to everyone in the world in the hopes that the technology recruiter has the time to figure out if they fit a job. I can't spend much time on these folks, so they're not getting a lot of my time or attention. We're talking some form letters, a lot of generic cover-letters, and a LOT of empty emails with a resume attachment. That's really disgusting.
The people I want to hire are the ones that have apparently answered the ads I've placed -- whether they've admitted they don't fit the job and hope I have something that *does* fit them, or people who obviously carefully read and responded to my ads who don't happen to fit the job they're responding to -- these are people I'm more than willing to poke at my pile of job reqs for something that *does* fit them. I can't always get them something that fits, but they usually get a hand written response apologizing that they don't fit, sometimes they get another job posting returned to them asking if they feel they fit the bill for a different job, and sometimes I just remember them when I'm weeding through a week's worth of other resumes.
These people are worth hiring.
It's a really tough environment out there, and I try to care and try not to toss too many resumes right into the trash. A Word document is not searchable from my email program, so a good number of the people who just toss a resume at me are going to get nowhere fast. In many ways that's fitting justice. Meanwhile someone who writes a real cover letter, takes the time to put their resume in plain-text into the body of their email, or who responds to the job posting carefully will actually come up when I search my inbox for people who fit a new job.
In any case, I'm overworked and vastly underpaid, but I get to telecommute and have flex time, etc. If anyone is in the NYC area and desires to work for beans to try to do some good in the world or for the economy, please let me know. High functioning multiples with nothing better to do really ought to reply. Others can too.