This is an unsettling, even worrisome, case of phone stalking by an individual employed as a recruiter by ASK Staffing, who has access to years-old resumes as a result of that employment. Simon Munipalli persisted in calling an unpublished number SIX TIMES AFTER BEING BLOCKED, and had access to a ten-year-out-of-date phone number that was not currently published. That personal data archive and access is what earned ASK Staffing their own place in the Recruiting Hall of Shame.
It started badly enough, with an early-Saturday-morning call from another ASK recruiter. This particular job seeker does not list his phone number on the resume published on CareerBuilder, Monster, and Dice. Neither is the phone number in his profile on those sites. Instead, the first line of his resume says directly: "Recruiters, please email job description before calling." This is designed to weed out the myriad call-first-read-never recruiters who work only on keyword searches.
Since the applicant had never applied to ASK Staffing, he asked the first recruiter to notice the first line on his resume. He then asked her to email the job description - simple enough, right? She was momentarily flustered, then asked, "Are you in front of your computer right now?" He answered negatively on that early Saturday morning of Easter weekend, whereupon she pressed the issue with an odder question: "Do you have a smart phone, tablet or other device?" At this point, the applicant again asked her to simply email the job description, which she promised to do, whereupon he wished her a good day and hung up.
Ninety minutes after that first ASK Staffing recruiting call, Simon Munipalli entered the job seeker's personal world, and would harass the job seeker for the next few hours and the next few days. Munipalli called to describe a job and demanded a Word copy of the resume, but was barely intelligible to the applicant (who has 14 years of international experience.) The job seeker asked for an email of the job description, told Munipalli he could not be understood, and hung up. Munipalli then emailed a purported job description from AT&T for a contract project manager position, and again demanded a Word resume.
Second red flag: that job description could not be found anywhere on the Web. Whenever a company such as AT&T issues a contract requisition, it's almost instantly available on the Web, and is pounced upon by multiple recruiting firms, but this one was not found either by req number or keyword description.
The job seeker tried to learn where Munipalli had gotten the phone number by emailing that question. Munipalli replied, "from job board." When the job seeker pressed the issue via return email, he was dismayed to learn that Munipalli had access not only to the current phone number, but also another phone number from another area code, a prior residence from ten years previous. Weirdly, when the job seeker had lived in that town, he had been in another career field entirely, so Munipalli had researched based on name, not just resume keywords. Apparently, and we're all guessing, Munipalli and ASK Staffing have access to years of archived resumes, outside the published parameters of Dice, Monster, and CareerBuilder.
While the job seeker was researching the job, and his own resume trails, and trying to get answers via email, Munipalli called twice more within 30 minutes, hanging up both times when he reached no live answer. At this point, the victim was fed up. He told Munipalli via email, "If this is a real job, I'm sure I'll be contacted by a real recruiter. You've made two hang-up calls in 30 minutes -- this is highly unprofessional." The job seeker then blocked the Atlanta-area phone number from which Munipalli had been calling. That should have been the end of it, right? No, not with Stalker Simon. He had the oblivious nerve to reply via email, "call got disconnected that is the mistake, I think because of bad connection, I am waiting for your response from the long time." He proceeded to call six more times over the next three days!
There is no AT&T job, Simon Munipalli is a stalker, ASK Staffing somehow has access to years-old resumes, and they're both in the Recruiter Hall of Shame.
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