elfs | Resume scanners suck

In the past three days, I've received calls from young woman with thick Mumbai accents, asking me if they can arrange telephone call interviews for tasks for which I don't have the skillset. The dance goes something like this:

"Sir, can I arrange for someone to call you about your HTML and CSS experience? Microsoft has need of experienced PSD to HTML developers."

Since I'm bound by the terms of the unemployemnt insurance, I grudgingly accept. I get a call from a first-line interviewer, who soon realizes that I'm (1) way overqualified for what he wants, since I'm not just some HTML monkey, and (2) I don't have PSD to HTML conversion on my resume. (I can do it, it's just not on my resume for a reason. It's boring!) The conversation closes with a mutual agreement that he doesn't want me for the job.

Then I get a call back from Mumbai. "Sir, it says here that you were not picked up for this job, and the note says that the keywords were not appropriate. Can you tell me what keywords I should be looking for?"

Politely and trying not to lose my cool-- this is my time she's wasting, after all, whatever her employer pays her-- I tell her that I don't know what keywords she can look for since I'm not in the field she's interviewing for, that it's not my job, it's not my job to help her, and no, I can't help her. Thank you. Click.

The other one is that since I've done Rich Internet Application development for "industrial environments," and have the word "prototype" on my resume, I've gotten calls for "Industrial Prototype Design and Development." When it becomes clear that what they want is someone who does rapid prototyping of physical things, not software, I ask them why they called me. "It says prototype on your resume.'"

I have to sigh and tell him, "Prototype is a programming framework and language for web page development. It sounds to me like you've got a bad keyword lookup."

"Can you tell me what keywords I should be looking for?"

"Maybe you should see if the words 'industrial' and 'prototype' are even in the same paragraph?"

Ah, the adventure never ceases. I just worry that I might soon have to tune down a resume' to something small and inexperienced to qualify for one of those scutty webmonkey jobs.