Dear Headhunters ...

But at first: Dear Readers,

this article is not for you, it's a text i link in my social network profiles in order to explain some stuff to headhunters. So you can safely ignore it.

Kind regards
Joerg

Dear Headhunters,

always nice to hear from you. Because ... who knows, what you will offer to me. Perhaps a job flying around the world, talking about the deeper inner workings of technology i love to talk about and helping people using it (except the around the world part, it's the stuff i'm doing today). So i'm finding several of your mails in my Inbox, at Xing or LinkedIn and out of curiosity i don't delete them directly. While some are somewhat interesting, the kind of mails i get at and increasing number at the moment is just different from spam by a minuscule margin ... just a quantum leap above spam... in the real physical sense, not the in the way it's used incorrectly today. In the last weeks i got way too many request from you for positions that aren’t interesting to me at all. The sad thing about it: It's avoidable.

Please understand, that the role of the Principal Sales Consulant is technical position at Oracle, in my case a very technical one. I’m the guy technical presales ask when they have very technical questions and don’t want to go to engineering with their question or they want me to go to customer to explain for example inner workings of Solaris for example. I'm at least that good at that job, that someone thought it would be a good idea to put me in the Oracle Elite Engineering Exchange program. And i love to be at this interface between Engineering and Sales. This is something you could see by studying the profile at Xing or LinkedIn. To say this differently: I think there are really not many Sales Reps or Key Account Managers that can do performance tuning on Solaris. On the other side, tuning Solaris or explaining the inner workings of the process scheduling isn't a talent a good Sales Rep could use or need.

So just because you fid me with SELECT * FROM SocialNetwork WHERE POSITION LIKE '%Sales%' this shouldn’t lead you to the conclusion that i want to do a Sales Job. So … please don't offer positions for Sales Manager, Key Account Manager, Sales Rep or something like that to me. You can safe your time by skipping me at such positions. If this ever changes, i will change this blog entry. When you want to lure me away from Oracle, positions with "%Engineer%" or "%Consultant%" have at least a chance to get past the initial check.

However: The situation about this leads me to the conclusion that you did a pretty bad job at finding people for your clients as „I’m a technology guy“ is pretty much written on the wall in Helvetica bold at several thousand points and it really shouts that you just searched for above pattern and wrote all hits on the query without further checking. You should check if an offering looks even remotely interesting for a person, it's not the job of the people you are writing too. Or to use a different analogy: You should hunt heads as a sniper, not as a machine gunner.

Best regards
Joerg Mollenkamp