Recruiters cold calling for jobs

If it's one thing I learned from cold calling recruiters and HR people blindly is how nerve racking the experience makes you feel.

Now I understand how the recruiter feels if they're asked on behalf of a client to cold call random people from resumes on job boards. I got a call earlier from a recruiter at a staffing agency in Portland who was hiring for a copywriter - temp to perm. It's a long story why the company used a recruiter in Portland - they're old friends.

Unfortunately the job isn't located in San Francisco but rather in Sacramento. But the job sounded interesting from the vague description the recruiter gave. He sounded pretty inexperienced - he seemed unfamiliar with my background and the specifics. He only remembered I majored in journalism and that was enough to get him to dial my number. He wasn't supposed to give me specific details on the company name and job duties mostly because he didn't know and wasn't supposed to I guess. That made me question whether the job was legit but my instinct told me he had an interesting story.

He talked about his career background and mentioned international business, a field I'm exploring and giving serious thought. It was good to finally talk to someone who had some real hands-on business experience internationally. And he definitely picked up over the phone that I was young and sounded naive, something I'll have to change, the naive part, because if I'm going to succeed in business, I have to be tough and an aggressive seller.

But we ended up talking about business careers and mostly all about Portland from real estate, restaurants, the Voodoo Donut Shop, fiber optic Internet service and so much more. I seriously miss the Pacific Northwest and my friends up there, not that I'm looking at relocating anytime soon.

I was so intrigued with his career in business and he told a lot of stories until I realized he'd been talking for an hour. I felt sort of awful about asking questions that took so much time because he said I was really hitting him with "hard" questions. They weren't hard but I wanted to know the how, why, what and where, some of the gaps didn't make sense and I wanted to know he wasn't BSing.

There goes most of my evening.