Recruiters

Every career has its annoyances and in the world of Tech and Computing that annoyance is the Recruiter. This sub-Human species performs keyword matching between Resumes and Job Descriptions with a level of inaccuracy that could only be simulated by an Artificial Intelligence vastly more sophisticated than anything which will exist during the life of my great-grandchildren; if I were to have great-grandchildren one day; but that's doubtful; and I digress....

A recent conversation (and by "conversation" I mean that for each sentence, by the third time he had repeated that sentence, I managed to pick out enough word-like sounds that I could construct the general meaning of the sentence) I had with one such Recruiter was fairly typical as first-calls go. After answering "yes" to the onslaught which was The Buzzword List, he proceeded to ask (and this is my rough interpretation based on those word-like sounds):

"On a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate yourself for <skill xyz>?"

While an argument can be made that this question is not entirely without merit, the answer is of such importance to the sub-Human Recruiter, that a question of such non-substance is entirely inadequate. The importance of this answer is more easily demonstrated than explained. And this is not the path I chose (and use your best accent when you read this out-loud):

"I'm probably an 8."
"Ah, well, this position is for someone who is at least a 9."

And that would be the end of it. I expect that nearly every answer is either "10" or "9" but with a self-review style excuse, like, "I constantly endeavor to improve my skill-set". The amusement of asking him to repeat each sentence, twice, was losing its appeal, and I didn't really want to risk being qualified, so I went another route:

"Relative to what?"

He repeated the question.

I repeated my question.

Long silence.

And I continued:

"Relative to what? What does 1 mean? What does 10 mean?"

And for a brief moment I expected that he finally understood. A very brief moment.

"1 is the worst, 10 is the best."

Okay, so, he didn't understand. At all.

We volleyed in vain for a while longer until he finally accepted that he was not going to get a numeric answer out of me.

I love Recruiters.

And that curry smell.