Had a message in my gmail inbox that initially sounded like spam….

We found your resume on the net and were wondering if you were available for an interview to discuss an possible opportunity?

Normally I would have deleted it, but at least this one listed a local phone number and a reasonably unique last name for the CTO sending the email. Well, I did a bit of digging before responding…

Checked out the domain name, and oddly enough there’s nothing in Google about it. Not a huge surprise if it’s a new company, so I went searching for the mailing address to see where it was. They’re located in an office building downtown, and the same spot was previously occupied by a couple companies (that appear to be unrelated) up until about April of 2001. Okay, so they’re relatively new.

Found the CTO’s resume on his website at hislastname dot com and notice that the admin contact on the company site is listed as the COO of the last company the CTO worked for…

Checked my logs to see how they “found” my resume and find that they did a relatively low-tech google search;

207.102.XXX.XXX – - [14/Feb/2005:16:02:18 -0500] “GET /resume.html HTTP/1.1″ 200
6725 foo.ca “http://www.google.com/search?q=vancouver+linux+resumes&hl=en&lr=&c
2coff=1&start=10&sa=N” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5
) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0″ “-”

I’m a bit surprised that I show up as high as page 3, though there really is a lot of mention of the word “Linux” on my resume, so I guess it shouldn’t be that shocking.

I responded requesting more information before I’d go to talk to him… I’m a bit suspicious of a couple ties that the company appears to have, but the product and ideas listed on the main web site sound like a viable product.

Hi CTO’s name. I’m not really sure if I am available for an interview or not; that would depend on what you’re looking for. If you could provide a bit more of an idea what you’re looking for, I’d appreciate it, and perhaps if things sound good we could arrange to meet later this week.

I’m generally just suspicious of “stealth mode” companies, as they all too often have both an inflated idea of their own self worth combined with a lack of cash. Not a pairing I really enjoy in a company I’d choose to work for, but we’ll see if he responds.