I talked to a friend’s recruiter today. She told me she was calling from an agency and I started the conversation with “No, thanks, I am not interested”. Luckily, she got to me before I put the phone down and managed to blurt out “I am calling about so-and-so…”.

I sang my friend’s praises. She asked me to list the top few things about her – I told her she could get anything done and are amazing, great ownership, I would hire them again in a second – and that actually we have been trying to for a year. (All true.) She asked me the worst things about them. I told her I couldn’t really think of anything but they could be a bit acerbic. I don’t think she knew what that meant. She repeated “assertive” so I decided that was okay too, and we went with that. LOL.

I was on the phone to her ages – she wanted to know about recruiting at Zynga. I ended up giving her all the recruiters names (and looking up and spelling their email addresses for her). I told her what positions we were and weren’t hiring for. She wanted to know what we might use agencies for, and I told her what we sometimes outsource and how to do it.

I am actually starting to worry now that I might have put the phone down on her in the last week. I have done it several times in the past few weeks as agencies keep calling me. I think they probably see me on LinkedIn, read the news about Zynga and troll their contacts to find someone to fill their slots and get their commission. I have been offered quite a few jobs in the last few months, but I am just not interested in them – which is why I have started putting the phone down. Don’t call my cellphone spamming me. If you must do it, use email! I normally just say “I am not interested, thank you” and put the phone down before they say another word. I really hate phone spam. We used to have what was called a “Zapper” and you connected it to your landline and it would “zap” anything that came through tagged as spam (which was most of it). It was one of the reasons we finally got rid of the landline. I will be pissed off if we start really getting spam to our cell phones. (I know that political spam is excepted from the national “do not call” list. Trevor got a polticial spam voicemail the other day! I probably don’t get these because I am not a citizen so I am not registered to vote!)