Especially in their cold emails and cold calls.
- Not telling me the name of the employer. I kinda need to know that if I'm to write an effective CV. Or if I want to move to where they're based.
- Emailing my work address. Last think I want is my Outlook to pop-up a notification saying "Thanks for the job application" while I'm presenting to my boss.
- Lying. So many do this - they lie about salary, experience needed, benefits, location, timescales.
There are some good recruiters out there - but a lot of charlatans as well.
1. "My client is a leading company in x..."(does the client have a name?)
2. "My client is looking for university graduates from a top 20 university..."(so because I didn't go to Harvard/MIT/Oxford/Cambridge et.al you wont consider my application)
3. "Fast paced environment which is constantly changing..."(this company sounds like a confused sweatshop which decides to chose another technology because they hit technical debt.)
4. Experience in C/Haskell/Python/Java/C#/F#/Clojure/Lisp/Erlang/Rust/GO/Ruby/Assembly/Forth/Brainfuck...(Signs of a dodgy recruiter)
5. "Github account a must and you should have a contributing history to opensource"...(I use open source, I'm a huge fan of it, but because I didn't contribute to it means I can't get a job? Clearly this recruiter is following media trends. And what if I don't want a Github account, with what happened a couple of days ago[0] I would be pretty concerned about having one(though awesome work for getting the message out Github, other companies would just keep quiet and hope nobody notices))
6. Graduate with 2 years of commercial experience(I just finished university when I "learn" hoping to get that experience which you are asking for.)
I could probably write a blog post. I probably will when I get the energy. HR is a dodgy industry which doesn't know a lot about each of the sector it works with.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/12/critical-git-bug-all...
X > Y
Seeing cookie-cutter job descriptions (companies always talk about keeping CVs short, so why do they let recruiters write out template-style blocks of text try to magically explain what a great company it is without just saying the name - in fact, if you are bothered enough, you can work backwards and figure out the company)
https://scott.arciszewski.me/blog/2014/08/technology-recruit...
Linked in to me for no specific reason other than to build network.
Tell me about an amazing opportunity that they then forget about when I reach back out to them.