Call came in saying his boss is interested in the products but he needs a sales manager who can speak English. His company is based in Germany, etc. -basically sounds legit. Sales manager is out so he asked for name and email address. So I did and then emailed the manager a heads up on the call. He called again and was transferred to the manager. It turns out he’s a recruiter!
Another call again today, this time with less finesse than the first recruiter. She opened the call with:
Her: I want to buy your products.
Me: Sure, which products are you interested in?
Her: What’s your name?
Me: This is “first name.”
Her: Okay. And your last name?
Me: <surprised pikachu face> Can I ask again what’s the purpose of this call?
Her: I want to buy your products. Why don’t you want to give out your name?
Me: Well, we’ve been getting nuisance calls from recruiters…
Her: …drops call…
I understand that recruiters need to be proactive but starting off with a lie? Even if I want to switch companies, I wouldn’t want to do it with a known liar.
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That’s pretty much a daily occurrence at my company. Often they will speak poor English as if by design. I can barely understand what they’re talking about. They’ll ask me to put them through to someone who retired years ago, and when I tell them that, they say, “Well who is his successor?”
And I’m like, “I don’t know. I don’t even know what department he worked in. You say he was in R&D? Yeah, well we have over a dozen R&D departments. Oh, you mean materials development? Okay, that narrows it down to four.”
I would be highly concerned that this might be a social engineering attempt to collect information about employees for attacks.
A couple of crude/simple attacks maybe to identify email addresses to attempt to brute force the password rather than brute forcing the email address & password.
Maybe to build rapport for you to divulge enough information for security answers or to trust them enough to open an attachment on an email.
All kind of tenuous, but I can’t see the above being a true/effective recruiting strategy.
This is very common, when I was a youngen I had a trial period at a company that did this and managed to bag a few names myself. Literally just hang up the phone, they will move to the next company on the list.
Be careful, they might be illegal foreigner* man hackers disguised as recruiters pretending to be potential customers, in order to social engineer their way into top secret company information.
This scenario should be covered in your organisation’s regular security training.
*The lab coated expert on the The NHK News authoritatively declared that only the foreigner man has the underhanded guile to think up such a nefarious thing. This is why Luffy and like-minded Japanese conmen must move to places like The Philippines(sic?) and Vietnam, so that they can *soak up* the guiley atmos and get their brains into the proper illegal foreigner man mindset, allegedly.
A more slimy trick is they hit you up to offer a seemingly great position and ask for your resume and references from 1 or 2 of your seniors at your current workplace. The goal is just to get the contact details of your bosses. who are their real target.
It’s just name collecting. They are trying to get names and titles to be able to scout by calling in or emailing (most companies have emails like firstname.lastname@companyabc.com ).
Just hang up.
If your company hasn’t trained you / set up processes for dealing with this kinda shit then your company is not run very well. These kinda tactics are suuuuper common in Tokyo.
It was more than twenty years ago that I learned about the tactic OP described.
The guy who told me about this tactic was a close friend of a recruiter, and the recruiter said “It’s impossible for the companies to defend against.”
It makes sense. Since companies still want to talk to potential customers, and a lot of potential customers want to speak English, I think the recruiter is right.
Yes, a few people will hang up. A few will hold grudges.
On the other hand, it’s a numbers game. Also, the employees who do end up getting recruited to new positions can get big salary increases.
Sure, the previous employer loses a valuable employee. But they were valued because *they were underpaid*. And it’s common for Japanese employees to be underpaid because it’s often hard to change jobs.
I interviewed at a recruiting company and part of the interview process is to call companies and get the names of ten people that can speak English. They give the people a list of companies that can be called. It’s likely that you might be on their call list for when they hire people. Also having to do those calls is a major pain in the ass even for them.
As soon as you figure out it’s a recruiter just say your name is Reginald Lambert. If everyone says that they’ll think it’s a very common name in the West however will be totally unable to pronounce it leading to laughs and confusion for all.
“Hi, this is Hiroki from IBN Japan. We got a voice message to call this number. It was a foreign name like Bob or Dave or Mike or Jim or something. Can you tell me the names of some foreigners that work there so I can see if it’s the person who left us the message?”
Best call (for imaginary creative points) goes to the recruiter who said he was “James”‘from Bond automobiles.
My friend gave them so much info and then afterwards did the surprise pickachu face when they pierced it together.
Mostly not for work, but when I get unknown messages that look like they have a chance of being legitimate (either for me or a real email or message for someone else), I reply saying “Hi, who are you trying to reach?”
Then it’s easy to say “nope, wrong person” when they give me another name yet still be slightly helpful if it’s a honest wrong number, or actually respond properly without being rude in the very slight chance it really is for me.
Her: I want to buy your products.
Me: Sure, which products are you interested in?
Her: What’s your name?
Me: This is “product name, let me tell you all about myself!”