In the two decades I have been consulting, I notice that in the past few years, many of the job shop calls I receive sound as though they come from offshore call centers (I am attempting to put this delicately). I invariably ignore these, for several reasons. The first is that they tend to act put upon if one asks for a job description that goes beyond a few acronyms or "Mathematica and Ph.D. required," as if I were being uncooperative to ask for something more informative than the few matching keywords they have in front of them. They seem to be interested in receiving the goahead to send a resume somewhere on the basis of a keyword search. Asking for details eats into their time. Secondly, they tend to offer lowball rates and seem as if they go in and out of business.