Two kinds of annoying recruiters
I'm sure there are more, but these are just the two kinds that come to mind right now.
Some recruiters send you a posting for a job that requires some skills you have, and some you don't. You respond to their questionaire about your experience with various skills. You don't have skills A, B and C, and you answer that honestly. Then they call you back asking you to redo your resume so as to highlight skills A, B and C. "I don't want you to put anything on your resume you don't have, but I'm sure you have those." I'm sorry, dear recruiter, that your desire for commission blinds you to my answers to your own questionaire.
Then there are recruiters who try to find out if you are qualified for a certain job position by going through the list of required skills line-by-line and asking you: do you have this? Do you have that? Let's say you don't have skill X, so you point out that you have Y, which is really similar to X. But you can tell the recruiter don't understand your answer. She just continues with her script. And since you hit only 4 matches out of 5, you won't hear from her again. She has no idea how various programming skills are interrelated, and how easy it is to pick up some of them if you have certain others.
But they are picky not because they have too many candidates that match all five requirements. No. Two months later this same recruiter comes to a job club, or a users group meeting, and searches for someone to fill the same exact position. With the same exact list of requirements. Two months of search did not yield a suitable candidate, but they are none the wiser to the fact that they could find plenty of candidates if they understood anything about transferability of skills.
Some recruiters send you a posting for a job that requires some skills you have, and some you don't. You respond to their questionaire about your experience with various skills. You don't have skills A, B and C, and you answer that honestly. Then they call you back asking you to redo your resume so as to highlight skills A, B and C. "I don't want you to put anything on your resume you don't have, but I'm sure you have those." I'm sorry, dear recruiter, that your desire for commission blinds you to my answers to your own questionaire.
Then there are recruiters who try to find out if you are qualified for a certain job position by going through the list of required skills line-by-line and asking you: do you have this? Do you have that? Let's say you don't have skill X, so you point out that you have Y, which is really similar to X. But you can tell the recruiter don't understand your answer. She just continues with her script. And since you hit only 4 matches out of 5, you won't hear from her again. She has no idea how various programming skills are interrelated, and how easy it is to pick up some of them if you have certain others.
But they are picky not because they have too many candidates that match all five requirements. No. Two months later this same recruiter comes to a job club, or a users group meeting, and searches for someone to fill the same exact position. With the same exact list of requirements. Two months of search did not yield a suitable candidate, but they are none the wiser to the fact that they could find plenty of candidates if they understood anything about transferability of skills.