You may or may not know this, but headhunters have changed the way they do business. It's a consequence of the Internet, mostly - but it's now almost completely driven by scripts which connect to resume posting sites, slurp them down, and auto-match them against jobs they know about (which they often get from employer's job posting sites).
Many of them are only one step up from penis enlargement peddlers.
Today I received an email from one of these recruiters whose job-to-candidate matching algorithm is horrible. I mean really horrible.
Here's the list of the first four required skills:
- COBOL 74 and/or 85 programming on Unisys 2200 series or ClearPath mainframes
- Unisys ECL
- TIP
- DMS-2200/RDMS
Why is this spam when sent to me? Because my resume shows absolutely no hint of COBOL, ECL, TIP, or DMS-2200. None. I did work at Unisys more than twenty years ago, but since then I haven't even seen a single piece of Unisys hardware, let alone programmed on it.
Oh, and just for fun? The job is in Albany, NY, and I won't relocate - and the site from which they got my resume asks about relocation willingness, so they had access to that information.