There is still the myth circulating out there that lawyers have lots of money. At least, that is the only reason I can imagine for the strange pseudo-job that is the recruiter. I’ve had a few more odd contacts since the last one I spoke about. Christ, the number of people who contact you once they think they can make money off of you is impressive. Patent attorneys theoretically make a fair bit of money, the USPTO publishes everyone’s name once they pass the exam, so the obvious thing for shysters to do is to spam the whole list and hope they can make some money off of at least one. I have come to the conclusion that there are no legitimate recruiters.
Why would I make such a blanket statement? Well, let me explain how this works for you. You see, in other fields (not the legal field), a recruiter has a job in hand and attempts to find people who can fill that position. In the legal realm, a legal recruiter contacts as many lawyers as possible to get resumes, then with no job to speak of, they spam companies with your resume (minus your contact info of course). So basically, legal recruiters work backwards; or to put it another way, they do it exactly the same way as you could. You know… just by sending out your resume and hoping.
From what I have been able to glean, a great many legal recruiters only do it part time. As in, they claim to be a recruiter, but work out of their basement two hours a week in the hopes of placing a single person and making a commission maybe once every month or two. My feeling is that the only people they place, are people who have a fair amount of experience behind them, but are too lazy to apply online and submit resumes to hundreds of companies themselves.
Check out this awesome website from a recruiter who contacted me. The best of website creation from the late nineties; it just instills faith in the ability of someone claiming to have their finger on pulse of the IP sector to have a website thrown together in 15 minutes about 15 years ago. I did like that they sent me an X-mas card, unfortunately it told me to go check out their website. I had received another note from someone out in California (sadly I can not for the life of me re-find their website). If you did a search for their office address, it seems that they were not just a recruiter… Oh no.. there were at least 15 entrepreneurial ventures he was working on listed at his address.
This all pales in comparison to the phone call I recently received. A recruiter requested I send them my resume thru email, I am a glutton for punishment, so I obviously complied. I keep having crappy experiences with recruiters because I keep hoping the next one will be legitimate (and I am constantly disappointed). Anyway, I get contacted by a recruiter from Amicus search in a round-about way; the recruiter is a friend of someone who is trying to get me to use their real estate services in the area and my name is passed and the recruiter requests I contact her. They end up talking to me for over an hour on the phone, request I send them all sorts of information that I have to pull together and then they make some promises about re-working some of my materials. They end the phone call telling me they are going to send me provisional copies of some reworked materials by the end of the week, but in addition to all the other stuff I am sending to them, could I send them a list of any places I may have recently applied in their area. Huh.. odd. That’s a new request, but hey, this person seemed very positive about getting me a job so I figure I may as well. This person was calling from a geographical market I had just started applying to, so I figured since they actually lived and worked down there, they must be able to do a better job than me who is 1000 miles away and has never stepped foot in the state.
And how I was wrong. I did a quick search to find out more about who I was talking to. Seems as if they had had been working for Amicus for less than a month. Awesome. But again, you never know, maybe this will be the exception. So I fire off all the materials requested, and then before I am about to send out my contact list of places I have applied, I stopped. My spidey sense was tingling. I went back thru it and scrubbed out all the contact information and Point of Contact info of individuals and just send out a general list with names of companies or firms. No need to give a recruiter a nice organized spreadsheet of potential contacts to spam. So the week is coming to a close and I have yet to hear back from the recruiter. I then get a hastily sent email saying I’ve applied to too many places and to try contacting them back again in 4 months.
What?
So me, applying to a completely different city than where I live, for a grand total of 2 weeks, has completely hit every possible employer this recruiter has access to. Really? And what was I supposed to do for 4 months? Not apply to anyone and hope that Amicus would be able to get me something then? If I had gone thru all of their potential contacts within 2 weeks, what did they expect would be the situation in 4 months? It almost seems like she was trying to get a potential client list rather than get me a job. So I fire off an email asking what gives. I didn’t even get the paperwork that was promised to me, I said it was very unprofessional and reflects badly upon the person who recommended her. Apparently recruiters are beyond caring, their response was that they had never gotten such an email before and had no idea where the disconnect had happened. It may have happened when they used me, or lied to me, or told me to go fuck off for 4 months… but hey. Par for the course with recruiters.