The other day I had a questionnaire by email (16 lines of text in#

Mon, 15 Dec 2003 22:09:45 +0000

The other day I had a questionnaire by email (16 lines of text in only 64k of MIME-encoded Word document) from a recruitment agency which among other things asks:

• Experience with Unix?
• How many years?
• How strong are you?

I'm sorely tempted to answer "A few quite unsavoury episodes but on the whole mostly positive", "seven, with time off for good behaviour", and "can lift own weight".

Really, how hard can it be to ask questions that would actually tell you something about the candidate? You want to know about Perl? Ask what their favourite CPAN module is, and why (or whether they've written one, and what it does). You want to know about Linux? Ask them which distribution they'd recommend, or what they most like about the 2.6 kernel. $RDBMS? Ask how (in the case of MySQL, the more adversarial may substute "whether") it compares to $OTHER_RDBMS.

• It'd take a few minutes to fill out, but no longer than I'm now going to have to spend deliberating on whether my Linux abilities (I have debugged my userland signal handling code by inserting printks in the kernel/I did not write the kernel code in question - or any significant part of the rest of the kernel) should be classed as "intermediate", "advanced", "expert", "guru", or "minor deity". Some people will worship anything, after all.

• It'd take a few minutes to mark, too, but then (a) you'd get fewer responses to start with, and (b) who's really going to rate themselves as anything less than "advanced" on the job's core required skills? At least the answers would mean something

Is it fair to expect agencies to know this stuff? For 20% of the first year's salary, there's some kind of case to be made along those lines, yes. I certainly think it's not unreasonable to expect them to know when they don't know, and spend some time in constructive discussion with the client to rectify this.

(They also want to know if I can "raw code" HTML. In the privacy of my own home, yes, but I think I'd get arrested if I tried it in public and as far as I know "but I'm a web designer" is not an admissible defence against a charge of indecent exposure.

Look Ma, no "stand up in court" double entendres. What? Damn.)

For the record, some of the agencies I've met or talked with in the last couple of months have been doing pretty useful jobs: they're often filtering several hundred inappropriate applications for a single job, and then they're phoning the potential employer regularly to chivvy them into actually making a decision. Because, to be honest, some potential employers could probably go for months or years with this potential completely untapped, if it weren't for someone to call them up periodically and press them to make their mind up. I do think there's a place for them (and to forestall the obvious rejoinder, I don't think it has to be the second circle of hell) but there do seem to be more than a few places where the recruiter-client relationship is not all it could be, and everyone suffers as a result.

Another job description I'm looking at now says that "Candidates with experience of Pearl will be at an advantage". Who's Pearl? Would I like her?