Board Jockeys

Not too long ago, like everybody else, I was out of a job. It didn’t take me long to find something, but during that time of looking, I posted my resume just about everywhere. It was a good resume, it showed a bunch of senior exec leadership, and a history of close to two decades worth of technology industry experience.

Because of that last search and those last posted resumes, I am now bombarded with a daily list of at least half a dozen offers to interview for, say, an entry level tech support position, a windows DBA, or perhaps a c# programming job. All you who know me know that’s simply not something I’m going to do.

Nate Heasley, a friend of mine from the Bond Street Group, coined the term “board jockey” to me once. To him a board jockey is a bad recruiter that just watches indeed.com, slams whatever req he can find into one of the resume banks like career builder or monster, and almost randomly fires off emails to thousands of people hoping that somebody will bite.

It’s a mentality, a board jockey thinks that because they happen to know a position somewhere in the country is looking for somebody, that I will be interested in the job, perhaps even if perhaps it only pays 35k a year. And of course they always start there letters with “I saw your resume and think you’d be a great candidate for this job we have” though I know they didn’t actually look at my resume.

Look, recruiting may be dog eat dog, but there’s only one way to do it. A good recruiter is a master matchmaker. Job description and experience are one filter, but the most important one is always fit, and you’re just not going to get that from a computer screen.

I’ve decided to start keeping an ongoing list of recruiting firms to not work with, because they employ board jockeys. I can’t stand any of these guys, and I just can’t seem to shake my email address out of email lists.

Watch this thread as time goes on, it’ll grow.
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