Jun 30, 2016
This is a staff augmentation (or "body shop") company. I read a lot of the comments here, and there is a misunderstanding of how these types of recruiting companies work. A lot of big companies have two types of employees - direct hire employees and contract employees (placed by "body shops" or staff augmentation firms). The contract employees typically work on short term assignments and once the project is over, their contract ends, unless the staffing company places them in another project within the same client. Sometimes they place the contract employee with another client. There are hundreds of staff augmentation firms out there.
The way these body shops find you is through various job boards that you listed your resume on. They will simply do a keyword search, and if your resume shows up, they will contact you. Sourcing resumes and entering into their database is the most time consuming part, and so many of these staff augmentation firms simply have it done via their overseas "research" teams (i.e. sourcers in India, Phillipines, etc.). This can be done very cheaply overseas at a very high rate.
Once they find you, they typically contact you in one of two ways. The first is via a simple email blast (which is personalized with your name in it), and the second is a phone call. Typically, if they think the candidate looks like a good fit for the contract position, they typically follow up on the email with a phone call directing you to the email. This is what they did to me in this case. These companies do not contact you until they have a position that they are trying to fill for. The people who contact you without a position in hand are not staffing augmentation firms, but typically so call job placement firms (they are trying to sell you a service, like resume writing, coaching, etc.). Staffing augmentation firms do NOT charge you a fee as they are paid by the client, not you.
Typically, a hiring company works with multiple staff augmentation companies at the same time. When the req is released to the firms, they all quickly go thru their databases and source resumes as fast as possible, and try to get the candidates in front of the hiring manager as fast as possible as they are competing against each other to place the candidate. I often get the same req from 3 or 4 placement firms within an hour of each other.
They typically call you, ask a few qualifying questions to see if you are a suitable candidate that can be presented to the client. If you are, they will ask for a pdf copy of your resume (the job board resumes may not be the most current, or may not be a presentable format as the job board version could be in a text format). They typically do not ask you for personal information like SSN until the client gets serious about hiring you. Note typically you work for the staff augmentation firm as a W2 employee during the assignment, but are placed in the client project site.