I get it. You want to make sure that your clients - both the job prospect and the employer - don't try to screw you by cutting you out of the deal.

Trying to control contact info, however, is just plain stupid and against your own overall interests.


1. I can't effectively answer whether I'm interested in a job or not from the smidgen of info you have in a genericized job posting. I need to know who the company is so that I can effectively find out what I need to know about them to know both whether I'm a technical fit and whether it'll be interesting to me.

You usually just copy-paste the same copy they're using on their website or that's been used in other job postings anyway. Pretending that I can't use Google is kinda insulting; if I couldn't, I wouldn't be worth hiring.

While I'm at it: please don't waste my time by reiterating (and often mangling) info I can find on their website. Just point me at it and ask me again later once I've had time to review. What you can provide that isn't a waste of my time is more behind-the-scenes info - company size & composition, hiring plan and history, profitability, profile of likely interviewer(s), unpublished openings, etc. Anything additional.


2. If you reformat my resume, it invariably looks like shit. Frankly, you're not a designer, and it shows. So don't.

I actually did spend some time on my resume and CV to make them look good, be well organized, etc. Reformatting it wastes this.

Especially given that part of my salable skills are in design, this makes me look bad. By proxy that makes you look bad, because the candidates you're proposing look worse.


3. Trying to censor my contact info is silly. My website and nick is listed throughout my resume. My name is globally unique. Doing even the most perfunctory professional background check on me (e.g. checking my github account) would immediately lead an employer to my website which has all of my contact info. My info is on my business cards, which I give out whenever needed (especially to interviewers).


By attempting to censor and excessively control the conversation, all you accomplish is making both yourself and your prospects look bad.

As a result of this practice, I always bring with me nice print copies of my full CV and my business cards and give them to every interviewer, because too often I find that they have mangled or outdated copies of my info. It's lame that I have to do this when it's your job to make me look as good as possible.

Instead of doing this, which just ups your sleaze factor at an overall detriment to your reputation and your effectiveness, I suggest you concentrate on figuring out what your actual added value can be over just doing someone's web search for them and doing some scheduling.

You could have technically competent people (not non-technical HR/sales people) to review applicant skills and thus provide a trustworthy filter for quality[0]. You could improve many applicants' resumes (i.e. those whose skills aren't in design) by hiring an actual designer / technical writer to do rewrites. You could provide both sides with pooled information about current market trends for salary, terms, etc. You could tell recruits the results of previous applicants' interviews so they know what to expect and what the employer is sensitive to. Etc. etc.

By doing this, you could provide motivation for both sides to gladly go through you... instead of trying and failing at enforcement.


[0] You probably are not this person; don't try to be. You can't tell bullshit from skill, and you will be overselective for random keywords at the expense of actual meaning. It basically always takes one to know one. Focus on what you do do well.

Actually come to think of it, doing real pre-interviews - i.e. conducted by specialists with experience interviewing - would be a major value add from both sides' perspectives. Employers could get technical notes that let their own interviewers fill in the gaps and get immediately to drill-down questions; applicants would get faster interviews with more time spent on the interesting bits. And if you did it right and deserved it, you would very quickly develop a reputation for only providing excellent candidates... a reputation that would be very valuable.

More effort and expense for you? Definitely, especially since you have to hire experts just to conduct the interviews (which'll probably cost ~$120 per candidate). But you could easily charge a lot more than it costs you to employers for the service, since they'd waste more time, have it cost more (since they have to take someone off of real work to do the interview), and not be able to spread out the cost across multiple jobs like you can.