How I Plan to Stop Outsourcing

When I put my resume out on the Internet, I get all sorts of recruiter calls. Here is a typical phone call I'll get from a recruiter. I'll get at least one of these calls every single day:

Me: "Hello?"

Recruiter: "Hello, may I speak to Holly Borkie, er, Burquooo...? (spoken with a heavy Indian accent - I am not going to try to replicate the accent, so just read it as though you can hear the accent)

Me: "Burke. Yes, this is she."

Recruiter: "Holly, my name is (insert a many-syllable name that contains more vowels than any word should contain) and I am with (insert contracting agency name. Usually something that is an acronym and not an actual word). I am calling you about your resume that I found on Dice and I would be wondering if you are still available for work?"

Me: "Is it a contract or a permanent position?"

Recruiter: "This is for a 3 month position with our client in Herndon, Virginia. It pays (insert half my current salary). Would you be interested?"

Me: "Actually, all I am looking at right now is permanent positions. I am not interested in doing another contract. By the way, Herndon is a 3-hour drive for me."

Recruiter: "Oh, but this is a salaried position with benefits."

Me: "Um, no, I do not want to do another contract."

Recruiter: "Oh, okay. Well thank you very much for your time and have a wonderful day."

(END CALL)

As soon as I put my resume public on the Internet, the vultures started circling. These phone calls really irk me. They are all identical, except for the name of the recruiter and the name of their company. I can tell now before I answer the phone exactly what will be said by the person on the other line. I can even tell by the location that pops up on Caller ID if this is a "real" or "fake" call. All of these heavily accented folks call from weird places, like Pennsylvania or Nevada. The line connection is always fuzzy and there is a slight lag in time. And they all call, trying to recruit me for the same lame-ass, low-paying, short-lived contract, usually for a large corporation.

You see, somewhere along the line, Company A thought, "I know how we can save money! Let's hire contractors!" Soon, Company B and C started copying Company A. Companies A through X began laying off employees and hiring them back as contractors.

Then, Company A said, "We still need to save money. Oh, I know! We'll outsource our local contractors to India! We will use our local contractors to train people overseas how to do their job, and then we'll fire the local contractors, because the people in India will work for a lot less money." And that is what they did. All the other companies followed suit.

Still, a problem remained. From time to time, Company A still had to hire local contractors to take care of some lingering problems. But their budget could only afford to hire someone for a quarter of the fiscal year. At half the average pay rate in their area. And they had to pay a finder's fee to the recruiting agency to find someone desperate enough to fill this position. What did they do with all the money they were saving?

Well, no self-respecting local American-soil recruiting agency could cut their rates low enough to be competitive to accommodate Company A. But the folks in India got wind of this dilemma and began forming little recruiting agencies, often with names consisting of acronyms (because acronyms sound important), and they said to Company A, "Let us bid! We will find you someone and it will cost you half of what you want to spend!"

And these are the folks who cruise the job websites, calling every Tom, Dick and Harry within a 2,000-mile radius that has a resume posted on the Internet, making a legitimate job search for a real job so much harder than it already is.

I think it is absolutely despicable that a local company will go to a foreign recruiting agency to find a local contractor willing to work for peanut shells. But they think we are all dumb, because that is the mentality many of these employers have of contractors. They don't even see that they were the ones who caused us to be contractors in the first place.

Well, I am not dumb. I am far from it. And I am insulted. These big businesses think they can push us around. They are right, to a degree. They can push us around individually, but if we all stand together, it's funny how those big businesses seem to shrink.

I am tired of complaining about this problem, and it's time I started doing something about it. What I am going to do is small, very small, but if everyone started doing it, it would turn into something big and I believe we could turn around this trend that has been started.

I know first-hand how awful working in a call center can be. I did it for over a year, and people on the other end can be mentally crippling. There is so much power in the words that we speak. You can get off a very bad phone call, scared and shaking, and afraid of having to take the next call, because you don't know if the person is going to be nice or nasty. Most people don't last long in that kind of call-center environment. It takes a huge emotional toll on you.

Therefore, here is what I am going to do: whenever I get a call like the above-mentioned one, I am going to be insanely rude and nasty. It's horrible to hear, I know, but my reasoning is this: if everyone were to be horribly rude and nasty on the phone, many of those phone workers would quit. Word would spread that being on the phones is not worth the money. Then, these companies would begin shriveling up and dying, which in turn would put more pressure on big American companies to put up or shut up. They would be forced to hire local recruiting agencies and be forced to pay reasonable fees and salaries to their contractors.

And that is what I plan on doing. I am going to make the emotional cost of their job too high for them. It sounds awful, I know, but they have choices in life, too. Nobody is forcing them to keep that job. If we all did this, I think we'd get our point across in rather short order.