Philip Norton

Today I was phoned by quite possibly the worst recruitment agent ever.

I don’t deal directly with recruitment. My job is to assess the need of an extra member of staff on my team, pick the people I want to see based on their CV, do the interviews, and then pick the person I think is best suited for the position. Everything else (which is admittedly a lot) is done by the very excellent HR (Human Resources) team so I don’t normally deal with recruitment agencies.

The girl on reception knows exactly what cold calling is and is fully prepared to say that I’m in a meeting or something. However, I decided to talk to this guy as I haven’t heard of the company before and thought I would just inform them that HR are the people to deal with. This is only polite and saves them from wasting time asking for me in the future.

I’m not going to say the name of the agency, or the agent, but this guy just seemed to phone up with the sole purpose of insulting people. After his initial pitch I understood that he was with an agency and said that I didn’t deal with recruitment agencies directly and that he would have better luck talking to HR. However, he came out with the following sentence, which he said in his most condescending manner.

Oh, I thought that you being Lead Developer of Research and Development, you would be involved in recruitment.

I was so tempted to put the phone down the the guy without even saying goodbye. I just told him that I would transfer him over to HR who would be able to help him. Transferred the call, and hung up.

Speaking to HR later on I learned that this guy had just flat-out lied to them. He said that he had been in contact with me for years, well before my time at Just Search. I have never heard this guys name before, or even his company’s name so that clearly wasn’t true. Not only that, but if he did know me, he should have at least asked me how I was. Aside from being impolite, I really don’t like people who lie, so I think it is safe to say that we won’t be dealing with them any more!

He had probably just picked my name and job title up from one of my social networking sites (eg. LinkedIn) and tried his luck. Part of me thinks that it must be some kind of crank call.

I went to the Ad:Tech show this week at the Olympia – National Hall in London.  I met some really cool people there, gave away a lot of bottles of water, but didn’t really learn as much as I would have hoped.

The thing is that the seminars available would have cost about £800 to see, even if you were an exhibitor, and the ones that were free to view were just a glorified sales pitch.  This one guy talked about the future of the advertising industry, although I couldn’t have really figured that out if I hadn’t seen the title first.  His talk was essentially about him being a venture capitalist and how he made lots of money.  He was even samelessly plugged all of the latest things that he was investing in.  So I wasn’t really impressed with the talks.  Was it too much to expect some exchange of information?

I just took the current survey from A List Apart, the online web design and development blog. The results last year showed that I fit right into the normal demographic for a web developer. I also found it amazing that almost 10% of the people who filled out the survey had more than 10 jobs! Who has that amount of time on their hands?

Try it out for yourself.

Today is my first day as Programmer in the Research and Development department at Just Search. I had my new desk delivered yesterday and spent some of the afternoon moving over to the R&D office. It’s a nice new desk, and I got a several things that I need to work on, including installing MoreGourpWare so that we can keep track of our projects.

James (my manager) is a Mac enthusiast and he has already started to convert me by putting a Mac Mini on my desk. This will eventually be a testing platform, but I don’t really know what to do with it at the moment. It doesn’t look THAT good really. I don’t know what the fuss is about…

My role at work in the JustSearch Research and Development department requires me to have a new job title. But what? Apparently I can name my own! So here is my top 5(ish) choices (in no particular order):

1. Lead Research and Development Programmer
2. Lead Programmer, Research and Development
3. Head Research and Development Programmer
4. Head Programmer, Research and Development
5. Technical Director of Research and Development
6. Lead Developer, Research and Development
7. Programmer, Research and Development

I’m yet to decide, but if you had the opportunity of giving yourself your own job title, what would you choose?