Pay particular attention to the second paragraph. The grammer is stilted and almost adolescent. How do these people become recruiters?
Dear Mr. Evans:
My name is -------------- with ------------ in Baltimore, and we are a nationally recognized professional services firm specializing in user-centric e-business solutions. The reason that I am contacting you is because I came across your resume on monster.com regarding an Information Architect opportunity that we currently have available. This would be a full-time, permanent position with the work to be done either out of our corporate headquarters in Baltimore or client sites in the Baltimore/Washington corridor.
First, I'd like to give you some more detail about our initial opportunity. This past December, we acquired a technical firm, ---------------, that specializes in doing cleared work (on-site) for the National Security Agency (NSA) at Ft. Meade, and this who we have gotten this opportunity from and where you would be working should both parties decide it is a good fit and you decide to come on board. What NSA needs a high level Information Architect with significant expertise in systems design, including data organization, metadata analysis, strategy, and information visualization. The NSA requires clearances to even be on-site, but because of your previous experience, I am told that there is a good possibility that you will have no problem being processed to obtain a clearance (probably either Secret or Top Secret).
Also, I got an email from one of our consultants at another one of our clients', the American Chemical Society, and they said that their IA work at ACS is kicking into high gear and they are lobbying ACS for more IA support. Unfortunately, I don't have a definite date on this work, but it would be more towards late summer.
All that being said, we have a lot of IA work in the pipeline that I think you could be a great fit for, so would you please get back to me and let me know if this sounds interesting to you? You can reach me at 410-555-1212 or via email (please include a Word document of your resume). Thank you and I look forward to speaking with you soon.
Regards,
---------------
*** Note: I removed the name of the consulting firm and changed their phone number out of respect, but I still find this humorous.
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Comments: 5
1) That level of work at NSA would require 'tickets' - and even for plain old ts, you can't make the judgement it will be easy or hard for someone you're blind mailing - plus it can take a year to get cleared, consulting firms usually want someone with active clearances
2) The letter is too damn long - if you're contacting a reasonably senior person cold, anyone with any experience is succinct
3) The NSA and ACS couldn't be more different - person seems to have a little trouble staying on message
My guess - its a low level headhunter who's in the churn - with demand rising, the happy process of them dying off has reversed - if he's got any lead at all on the NSA, then its probably thru rumor or the CBD
Oh yeah, and if you're in balmer md, and dealing with federal contracts, you're not a big player - biggness (sic) is a function of distance from K street, always has been - for techies it's sometimes tagged to reston, mclean, silver spring, greenbelt, etc, and I don't mean to slam balmer, but balmer isn't an A level address
And on general principles, one doesn't tend to mention actually doing cleared work at no such agency - it annoys them
My 2c, but I don't think its real - that said, Will, they'd probably like you - they tend to prize intellegence (the human kind) over dogma, afaik