RE: The odds of finding work through job ads

Subject: RE: The odds of finding work through job ads
From: "Gary S. Callison" <huey -at- interaccess -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 13:15:42 -0600 (CST)



JPosada -at- book -dot- com (John Posada) wrote:
> Let me rephrase that...the model is odds.
> If I send out 5 resumes and my response rate is 1 out of 100, then I
> get 0 response.
> If I send out 500 resumes and my response rate is 1 out of 100, I get 5
> responses.
> The amount of effort for either of them is for all intents, the same.

Congrats, you've just described the inherent scalability problem of spam
AND the reason people still do it. With minimal time on the front end, it
becomes as easy to send 100,000 or ten million emails as it is to send 10.
And if you send ten million, and your response rate is a tiny fraction of
a percent, you can still make money doing it. Never mind that you're
stealing resources from the internet at large and poisoning the same well
you drink from - you got your responses, so why do you care?

> When I'm coming to an end of a contract, I still do this...

oooh, you've hit a nerve.
> I'm continually adding recruiters and
> companies to my personal database...I have over 2,000 addresses in ACT!
> and I send them out through a program called NetMailer. Granted, the
> database is more tuned to what I'm trying to do, but that doesn't
> change the definitions of what I'm doing.

Maybe we should all work from the same definition then. Spam is
unsolicited bulk email. Unsolicited email, so long as it isn't bulk, isn't
a problem. Personal emails scale. Long-lost friends should be able to
email me. Bulk email isn't the problem. This listserv sends substantively
identical emails to all of the subscribers, and the readers want it that
way. It must be expressly solicited. The problem only exists when you
combine the two elements, unsolicited and bulk. That's what's killing
email as a useful communications medium.

Now, if the addresses you're carpetbombing resumes at are all culled from
webpages that say "Please send your resumes [a href=mailto:hr -at- example -dot- com]
HERE[/a]", then they're solicited. If they're just email addresses that
you scraped off of random webpages, usenet, or from your MILLIONS CD!
OVER FOUR MILION ALL OPTIN ADDRESSES ONLY $49.95, then they didn't
solicit your email, and you're sending spam. That'd be bad.

> |been a lot of education about spam
> There's also a great deal of progress on how to personalize it. The
> ones that are instantly recognizable as spam are the ones where the TO
> field is your email address and the source is a CD with 34 million
> addresses. However, if you are a recruiter and the email comes to you
> with you properly identified as the recipient (salutation, first name,
> last name, date of last contact all inserted as variables), then you
> don't see it as spam.

Perception doesn't change reality. The two elements of spam are
unsolicited and bulk. Most recruiters solicit resumes - if you're sending
resumes only to recruiters who have asked for them, that's not spam. If
you are sending resumes to people who have not asked for them, no amount
of 'personalization' of a substantively identical bulk email run makes it
any less spam.

> |found that only 17% of spams Wired writers replied
> |to 'gave rise to what appeared to be "legitimate"
> |offers: people with a real product to sell

A large part of this is the fact that, since nearly all ISPs forbid
sending spam or having a webpage or email dropbox advertised via spam,
many of them get shut down within minutes or hours of the spamrun being
detected. So, by the time you get around to reading the spam, the site
you're supposed to go to or the email address you're supposed to reply to
isn't there anymore.

> Do me, 17% doesn't qualify as rarely.

Nope. And spammers can always set up more sites and more dropboxes, get
another network connection and send more spam. Absent strong federal
legislation, there's no convincing reason for any of them to change.
Meanwhile, the technology used to block spam consumes more and more
resources, raises the cost of the internet to everyone, and can cause
legitimate email to break in the process.

--
Huey


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