The problem with inept recruiters

I am, with surprising regularity, contacted by recruiters seeking to fill a position. While many of them call out specific aspects of my LinkedIn profile, indicating that they’ve at least taken a cursory glance at it, I am finding an increasing number of recruiters who, quite clearly, has not even bothered to do that. Here are a couple of examples of what I’m talking about (details redacted to protect the guilty):

While this one might seem reasonable enough, given the fact that I do work with desktop support, cold calling a desktop support tech with more than ten years of experience in the field, for a tier one position seems a bit misguided. I’ll also add that, when asked about details about the position, all they would tell me was that the position was remunerated at €125 per day, which is around the base pay of someone who has just finished their apprenticeship…

While I do have both Skype for Business and Windows listed as technologies I work with, it would seem that these recruiters lack a basic understanding of Norwegian geography, seeing how as the Trondheim area is about 500 kilometers drive away from the Oslo area. When I ask about details, they are again very short on detail, and ask me for information which is already listed in my profile.

Despite the fact that it is fairly obvious that they haven’t even bothered to look at my profile, I usually try to engage with them a little, if nothing else than to waste their time. Here is one such example:

IT support engineer, fair enough. The problem, though, is that Aaheim is a village on the western coast of Norway. This means that the recruiter has either not looked at my profile, knowledge of Norwegian geography or (and I suspect this is what’s actually happening here) both. Even so, I engage with them:

This confirms my suspicion that they haven’t bothered to look at my profile; if they had, they would have found my contact details. I repeat my request for details, and they actually respond:

Frankly, this one isn’t actually all that bad. They are looking for skills that can reasonably be expected to be within my skill set, and the terms of employment are clearly laid out. However, they are looking for someone with less than half my working experience (who would expect significantly lower wages than I might reasonably command), for an outsourcing vendor well known for underpaying their consultants, in a location literally across the country.

Now, I get that it’s a rough market out there, but refusing to provide basic information (who is the client, general responsibilities, and terms of employment) really doesn’t help them, particularly when they make it obvious that they haven’t bothered to look at my profile. More or less inevitably, I ignore their request to connect with me on LinkedIn; I neither want nor need bad actors in my network.

My worry is that others are not as critical when evaluating such approaches, and that these recruiters are able to tell prospective clients that they have thousands of resumes in their database, just waiting for the right job. Not only will that hurt those companies who choose to work with them; worse yet, it will also hurt the candidates whose reputations may be marred by this lack of professionalism.