Re: Dirty tricks: headhunting (fwd)

Ombudsman account for AECOM (ombudsmn@aecom.yu.edu)
Tue, 1 Sep 1998 12:22:18 -0400 (EDT)

I have one question for the person who was upset about the, admittedly,
irregular method used by the headhunter to get his/her technician's phone
number. Would he/she have given the headhunter the technician's phone
number if the heqadhunter had called and explained straight on what the
intention was? I doubt it.

At 06:30 PM 8/31/98 -0400, you wrote:
>
>Ours is a small protein facility. Maybe this is the oldest scam in the
>books on headhunting, but I relay it for a variety of reasons, not the
>least of which is to alert others to it:
>
>I answer the phone and he says (quickly) "Hi, I'm [I didn't catch it] from
>the Department of [Neuro-something] and I talked with someone else there
>about protein sequencing a couple weeks ago and I need to ask them another
>question."
>"Well, you could ask me." I say.
>"No, isn't there someone else in your facility?", he persists
>"Well, there's my technician Alice." (whose name isn't really Alice)
>"Yes! Alice! What's her number, I must have mixed your number with the
>lab's"
>
>Now, this seemed pretty irregular since Alice usually refers users directly
>to me whenever they contact her first, but I give him the lab number
>anyway, thinking he's someone from the University (which has four
>departments starting with "Neuro") that I'm just as happy not to continue
>speaking with at the moment, and when he does finally reach Alice (who
>anyway isn't in the lab just then) she'll send him back to me.
>Later, I alerted Alice to who might be calling. Next day, she tells me he
>called. "He didn't want sequencing, he wanted to offer me a job!" (Which
>she declined interest in.)
>
>Not supposing that there's anything illegal about this, and I'm more
>bemused than irritated, but had Alice decided to jump I'd be pretty enraged.
>
>
>