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An open letter to a leading London-based recruitment agent who shall remain nameless

Dear Sir,

Regretfully, I won’t be able to take up your kind offer of “forwarding my latest CV” for the position of SENIOR JAVA SOFTWARE DEVELOPER (no need to shout!) at a “Top Investment Bank” which you emailed me about this afternoon. I feel I lack:

the analytical ability to interpret business requirements expressed informally or formally as specs.

It’s not only this crucial analytical skill that I’m lacking. I’ve looked all over but I can’t seem to find my

exacting fastidiousness about programming, documentation and skills development.

Not only that — and this is more than a little embarrassing — but I don’t think I’m

Self-motivated to deliver autonomously in a flexible, business-led environment

either.

I’ve always thought that a “Top Investment Bank” must have impeccably high standards and be a shining example of order and perfection. You couldn’t make twelve billion pounds a year by being anything less! This job specification demonstrates just how high those standards must really be.

To work in a development team that demands such high standards must be hugely rewarding. I’m looking in awe at the skills and experience demanded by these guys. I’ve been a software developer for 11 years and I still don’t have all the skills that these guys can master in three! Expert-level in Java, J2EE, .NET, Web Services, Linux, Windows, Sybase, SQL Server, DHTML (wow!), Javascript, RMI, REST, LDAP, PKI, XML, OpenAdapter, JBoss — that’s just phenomenal. I can’t imagine how overly-complex, slow and un-maintainable these applications must be. It’s no wonder they get paid so much!

I’m also really impressed by the way you’ve edited the job specification to randomly remove punctuation, structure and any grammatical sense. You’ve done a very good job and it’s such a clever way of attracting candidates with equally low standards for written English. You nearly had me there!

Thanks for your time and, really, there’s no need to call. Rest assured I’ll call you once I’ve buttered up my CV.

With very best Rgeards,
Olly

Posted by Olly on January 8, 2007 at 7:49 pm in recruitment
Comments (4) | Permalink

4 comments on “An open letter to a leading London-based recruitment agent who shall remain nameless”

  1. Paul wrote on January 15th, 2007 at 3:00 pm:

    Nice one!

    The best question i have ever been asked by a recruitment “person”: “I see you have a number of years using XSLT, tell me… do you have experience of XSL?”

  2. Daniel wrote on January 15th, 2007 at 4:26 pm:

    The second best:
    - Can you recommend me an employee for a designer position in a bank.
    - Which bank? What would be his Task? Which system should he expert of?
    - I cannot tell you that, its classified.

  3. Andy Stewart wrote on January 18th, 2007 at 6:52 pm:

    Love that deliberate typo at the end.

  4. Dave Aaron Smith wrote on January 23rd, 2007 at 10:37 pm:

    That’s a good example of a pretty slimy technique. Try to convince the developer they aren’t all that great and should therefore work for a lower rate. Then the bank is more likely to hire because you’re cheap, and the recruiter is more likely to make their buck. As an interesting note, several recruiters used the same back-handed-complement, “Maybe you’re a diamond in the rough. Until we know though, nobody is going to pay you much.”