John Smith's Blog

Ramblings (mostly) about technical stuff

Slightly odd MS Bing job spam

Posted by John Smith on

I received the following message via LinkedIn tonight:

Screengrab of an email sent to me by a Microsoft recruiter

I'm sure they bash out thousands of these every day, but I'm mildly curious why they decided I should be a lucky recipient of one:

  • I'm not sure what the "CIS" in the message subject refers to. If MS thinks I'm from the former USSR, that doesn't say much for their CV analyzing abilities. I did look for alternate definitions, but other than the meaninglessly generic "Computer Information Systems", I don't see anything that jumps out as being relevant.
  • What's with the weird intermittent capitalization of BING/Bing?
  • Other than a couple of years of DOS development nearly 20 years ago, a proper look at my CV or LinkedIn profile would show I have very minimal experience or interest in Microsoft technologies. A glance at Twitter posts would in fact show that taking the p*** out of MS is one of my favourite entertainments.

Now, I'm pretty sure that the reason they've contacted me is fairly obvious - I have the magic word "Google" in my CV/profile. One might have thought that even MS realize that not all of the ~30k people who work at Google are on the search teams. (Not that I ever counted as part of that number, being a lowly "red badge" contractor.)

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite happy for recruiters to send me unsolicited offers (within reason). But spamming me about roles that are clearly not a suitable match for me is a waste of everyone's time.

About this blog

This blog (mostly) covers technology and software development.

Note: I've recently ported the content from my old blog hosted on Google App Engine using some custom code I wrote, to a static site built using Pelican. I've put in place various URL manipulation rules in the webserver config to try to support the old URLs, but it's likely that I've missed some (probably meta ones related to pagination or tagging), so apologies for any 404 errors that you get served.

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About the author

I'm a software developer who's worked with a variety of platforms and technologies over the past couple of decades, but for the past 7 or so years I've focussed on web development. Whilst I've always nominally been a "full-stack" developer, I feel more attachment to the back-end side of things.

I'm a web developer for a London-based equities exchange. I've worked at organizations such as News Corporation and Google and BATS Global Markets. Projects I've been involved in have been covered in outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times, The Register and TechCrunch.

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