A good sign while job hunting, and Pipl.com
Wednesday, I found an intriguing job posted on monster.com
Thursday, I attached a customized resume to a cover letter email and sent it off. I also placed my resume in Word and PDF versions on my (real name) website. Shortly thereafter HR emailed me back, confirming that they got it. Thanks for that, HR.
Friday, I received my first good sign, someone had hit my (real name) website. I did a whois on their IP address, and then did the same for their company’s website. The hosting provider names matched. The user agent string on the hit hints at an out-of-date (1.0) version of Firefox on a windowing Linux platform. I’m leaning towards this being a bot, either that, or it’s a savvy speed surfer who has images turned off by default.
Saturday, I got an interesting hit with a referrer string from a site called Pilp.com, which seems to be a search engine targeted to find people. Chatter on the tubez of interwebz suggest that the company is good at scraping social networking sites like MySpace and Xanga. They also seem to have some access to court records and such. Obfuscated access log follows:
0.0.0.0 - - [05/Apr/2008:00:00:00 -0700] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 705 “http://www.pipl.com/search/?FirstName=FIRST&LastName=LAST&City=&State=&Country=US&CategoryID=2&Interface=1″ “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)”
This one pulled the image on my page, so it’s likely a real human. The reverse DNS hints that this is a dialup line, so I’m going to assume that it’s a person, using Internet Explorer, from home, checking out a job candidate that they are at least seriously considering, via a link they found from the search engine at pipl.com.
Hopefully I’ll get a call for an interview on Monday.
