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Admin
I only wish that Mark hadn't padded the story as much as the recruiter padded the CV.
We need to bring back the twitter versions.
Admin
#3
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Yes, generally the words are defamatory or malicious, however the key point in common law (from my understanding) is that what is said is untrue (misrepresents the person) and causes damage. In this case damage isn't limited to real damages (money, property) but also intangibles such as reputation.
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I think he was referring to it being slander as opposed to libel.
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Nope. English Law explicitly states that the words must be defamatory. They must "cause a reasonable person to think worse of [the supposedly-libelled]". Also, an offer of rectification bars litigation, so all the recruiter has to say is "sorry, I was mistaken". Depending on whether one sues for compensatory or punitive damages, malicious intent must also be proven.
Admin
I wasn't. It would be libel, if it were defamatory, not slander. Rule of thumb: slander is spoken.
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See In the UK, if someone thinks that what you wrote about them is either defamatory or damaging, the onus will be entirely on you to prove that your comments are true in court. In other words, if you make the claim, you've got to prove it!
I would truly love to see someone take a UK recruitment "consultant" to court on this basis. I'm almost inspired to do it myself.
And before any of you innocent Yanks start yelling "That's just stupid!" ... Well, yes it is. But we have a Judge Eady here who is (to avoid any connotation of libel) possibly the most well-read and intelligent person ever called to the Bar. (O Lord, I hope he was called to the Bar at some point.)
For further chuckles at the expense of the UK Libel system, please see Simon Singh. I say chuckles. It isn't really very funny.
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In the context of that exact "skill" being in demand for the job? Well, the person to whom the misrepresentation was made most certainly wouldn't think less of someone having the skills he requires, so, no, not libel.
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I've been made redundant twice and have only dealt with two "recruitment consultants" who had scruples and knew what they were doing.
One got me a job, one got me to a third interview before suits higher up in the employing firm decided they no longer had the budget. I got my current job at the height of the recession directly with the employer. I'm still removing myself from job websites I've been added to by agencies without authority.
As well as being woefully ignorant of IT terminology, their geography is frequently exceedingly dodgy. I'm a MS developer in southeast England - "would a Unix job in Aberdeen be commutable?"
They really are worthless on the whole.
Admin
IT recruiters should be killed.
All of them.
Ideally by me. But I'm easy on that.
As long as I get to watch.
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I do a fair bit of interviewing developers in London, some coming through agents. My first question is always: "Is this your CV?", showing them the copy I have. For exactly this reason.
Admin
This article seems to conflate recruiters and headhunters. In my experience, recruiters tend to work closely with or even for the company in question, while headhunters just tend to spam resume's at companies hoping for a hit and a comission or even a fee from the prospective employee (depending on how initial contact was made). I blame websites like Monster.com, they've made it far to easy for "Professional Recruiters" (who are really headhunters) to get peoples resume's and promise them the world. What you get is effectively a bad marketer, they'll "tweak" your resume with horrible formats, or even "embellishments" and cause more problems than they solve. I remember when my dad was going back into banking after several years out where we owned and ran various small companies. Prior to leaving banking (for the opportunities he had for those interviening years) he had 15-20 years experience. But since it had been about 10 years or so he decided to use a "recruiter" that had found him on Monster. Lots of money later, he still had no job (he still had the one company so things were't dire.) Eventually of course it came down to what it always comes down to, he called a friend, who knew of a upstart bank in need of someone with lots of experience, and got the job. Headhunters are a waste of oxygen and DNA.
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Of course they can edit a PDF file. All they have to do is print it out, put it on a wooden table, take a digital photograph, scan it in, OCR it, and then open it in MS Word.
I'm surprised no one has pointed this out yet.
Admin
My husband does this.
When he was looking for a job, he got emails about this.
For the better part of a year, the jobs that recruiters called about in anything like his actual field were the positions that the people he supervises supervise. As near as I can tell, the only job recruiters actually understand anything at all about the requirements or performance of is their own -- and even then, it's pretty dodgy.
Oh, and it's shoo-in. Always has been. Eggcorn-on-the-cob anyone?
Admin
I was in a job for about 5 years, and I had my resume posted, and a recruiter e-mailed me to ask if I was interested in working at the place I was already working. He said it was a 6 month contract, and the real kicker, daily rate was double what I was making as a lead developer there! Go figure!
Btw, is it bad that I didn't notice anything wrong with Shoe-in as opposed to Shoo-in? I am a programmer not a english well speaker guy...
Admin
I am not anal (sorry: IANAL), but it seems to me that British (actually, I assume English, Welsh and NI) libel law is spiralling out of control:
"At a preliminary hearing last month to decide the meaning of the article, Mr Justice Eady ruled that the wording used by Singh implied that the BCA was being consciously dishonest. Singh has denied that he intended any such meaning."
What with the original injunction (still in force, I believe), it's difficult to track down what Mr Singh actually said. The best flavour I can find is:
"The ruling centred on the meaning of the word bogus. In a comment piece for the Guardian, Dr Singh criticised the BCA <British Chiropractic Association> for happily promoting bogus treatments <see original article>. Mr Justice Eady said this implied the association was being consciously dishonest. Dr Singh says he never intended this meaning."
It seems to me that, in the current state of UK libel law (based on countless precedents, rather than statute), it doesn't matter whether it's an innocent misrepresentation, a malicious misrepresentation, or (as in the Singh case) a misrepresentation that exists only in the mind of a single (wonderfully well-qualified, and admirable in every respect) judge.
It doesn't matter whether an (alleged) misrepresentation occurs in front of one person, or millions.
And, on an aside ... in this case, the "polished" version of the CV is out there in the wild. I'm sure it will land on the desk of other potential employers. I wouldn't be surprised if it results in chinese whispers around the rest of the Square Mile.
Me, I think it's a potential libel suit. Against the recruitment agency. If that's not being "consciously dishonest," and misrepresenting their client in a way that might quite possibly lead to later loss of earnings or the opportunity to earn, then I don't know what is.
Admin
No, just that the word "shoe" followed by the word "in" has uses other than incorrectly in place of "shoo in".
Is it really that difficult or has Google just replaced thinking in your little world?
Admin
The reason the padded resume can be considered defamatory is that it made the applicant look dishonest to the interviewer. There is no way for the interviewer to tell whether the applicant padded his resume when he gave it to the recruiter, or whether the recruiter did the padding -- and, of course, the recruiter will claim that's how it was when he got it.
The defamation does not come from presenting him as better-qualified than he is; it comes from presenting him as a liar. The harm comes from the fact that the applicant has probably lost any hope of a job with that company even in a position he is admirably qualified for.
Admin
And what happens when you add nonexistent experience to a resume? The reasonable interviewer thinks you're a schmuck. Bang, defamation. Certainly a reason not to allow reformats.
Admin
In the U.S., it's called "Puffery." It's legal.
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I work in seattle - I've had a spate of crooters try to get me to interview for jobs in Atlanta.
Admin
So someone thinking I'm a liar doesn't meant they're thinking worse of me?
From the few cases we went over in business malicious intent wasn't shown, just that the person writing the incorrect statements knew they were untrue. Of course I'm not in jolly old england, and because of precedent setting cases the intent of the law may have been interpreted differently (which affects how it is interpreted from that point forth).
As for the comment on slander vs libel.. libel is basically written slander (published in some form, which now includes the web). Putting lies or exaggerations in someone's resume is not slander.
Admin
Why is resume stuffing so bad, when employers over-inflate their job description and requirements above and beyond what is needed day-to-day? And then offer an insulting hourly rate of $14 or so.
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Having dealt directly with a lot of recruiters and HR departments, the reason they ask for Word is that frequently they're looking for text based documents that can be easily fed into a system that sorts by keyword. If you have hundreds of resumes coming at you, it's a quick albeit lazy way of weeding them.
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That's why you should send only PDF résumés. They surely can't tweak it as easily as a DOC one. I use the outstanding moderncv template for LaTeX. Very nice output.
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T(Three)RWTFs are that:
The author took the effort to add the accented é (I say "effort" due to English keyboards not normally having é readily available) yet still screwed up - it's supposed to be written résumé, not resumé.
It's shoo-in, not shoe-in. It's frequently spelled as "shoe-in" for the same reason people misuse they're/their and you're/your.
Example - you can find more by googling "shoe in or shoo in": http://www.english-for-students.com/Shoe-In-1.html
Admin
I once worked in a recruitment consultancy, and I can honestly say that they haven't changed a bit over the last twenty five years. Ten per cent are (slightly) conscientious; eighty per cent make an effort to avoid being total slime-balls; and then there's the other ten per cent.
All three groups are frighteningly ignorant of what they're selling, however. Just yesterday, I had a reasonably competent one ask me whether I'd kept my QNX -- pronounced cue-en-ex, apparently, which is better than see-cue-ell, or (my favourite) "C-oh-bol") skills "up-to-date" since the last time I wrote a QNX driver (in 1999). There may be a metaphysical answer to this, but it doesn't spring readily to mind.
Meanwhile, on the question of PDF-to-Word conversions: there are millions of these. Some are appalling, some are reasonable. I can't even be bothered to check this one.
It's not my job.
In my personal nightmare, I'm the head of a recruitment company. I need salespeople. No problem! I need at least one person who has ever worked in IT (that's me). No problem! I need HR drudges and accountants and a really friendly bank manager who will bend over backwards for me (I sure hope it's a well-shaved gibbon).
But, most of all, I want people who can actually use a simple program to translate PDF into Word and then index Da Skillz.
How hard can that be?
On second thoughts: why are we still dealing with this worthless system? Screw obvious conversions. I'll take the shaved gibbon.
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Win or lose, Jon would be likely to be be worse off financially for suing, and to have worse job prospects (as employers who know of the case are unlikely to think well of him for bringing it).
Admin
When the recipient prints a copy of your resume using an editor format such as MS-Word, your formatting is at the mercy of the recipients installed fonts, template setup and available printers.
PDF is intended to reduce all of those problems.
Admin
Perhaps the best thing to do during an interview, immediately after the initial introductions, is to hand out a fresh clean copies of your resume to your interviewers.
It immediately removes any "markup" done by the recruiter (thus averting disaster later during the interview - nothing's worse than going through the process only to find out you suddenly have skills you didn't know you have. Most employers see that as a negative when they catch you, so a clean copy will help dispell any notion that you lied your way in. Especially since a nice professional looking layout that you've done probably looks way better than the recruiter hastily-done-up version.
It works for any instance, too (i.e., you applied directly to the company) - maybe an interviewer didn't get your resume but was asked to do an interview, and gives interviewers a clean copy to take notes on.
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I'm 27 and my CV (quite truthfully) states that I have 10 years experience. Then again, when it was 19, it (quite untruthfully) stated that I had 5. Still got all the jobs I went for though.
Admin
Can't you sue for filing fees as well in England? If it were me I'd bring it to small claims and file for fees as well.
I really don't see how Jon would be worse off. He'd be suing a recruiting company not a potential employer. I really don't see how an employer would catch wind of it, and if they did why would they think badly of someone who doesn't want to be misrepresented when they are applying for a job?
That particular recruiter may not attempt to use him as a candidate in the future, but my bet is they are such a confused organization that they'd never be able to figure out it was him. I bet he could sue them one week and the next he'd be getting call for the still unfilled position at the bank with how they, "..just need to massage his resume format a bit..".
Admin
Recuriter is some kinda garbled Latin for running a journey twice (re + curro + iter). That's pretty much exactly what the recruiter tried to get our hero (from the story) to do.
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Any competent technical interviewer can weed out puffery in minutes at worst.
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It's "shoo-in".
While we're at it, résumé has two accents.Admin
I really had no idea that it was "shoo-in". I've been doing it wrong all these years.
Admin
If someone tweaks your resume to make you look worse than you are, I could see that being libel.
If someone tweaks your resume to make you look better than you are, that's fraud.
(attempt #2)
Admin
The Real WTF is that there are actually people who use Lotus Notes.
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More p1ssing on recruiters: I just LOVE how they will purposely send in an obviously unqualified candidate ("mules", I think they're called) just to make a subsequent candidate look like a winner by comparison. I have been muled at least one time that I know of, and it made me want to go all Cartman on him.
Admin
Actually, from my experiences watching recruiters struggle mightily with Word, better remove that, too.
Admin
This sort of fraud occurs very frequently, you just haven't seen it yourself yet. If you are in a position to interview people ask them to bring in a copy and compare with the one the agency gave you. Otherwise you may reject people that have had all relevent experience removed or accept people where the CV has been padded with lies that the candidate is unaware of.