Why do I get called about roles unrelated to my skills?

I've often wondered about this... as I recently got an email asking about my availability on a Java/J2EE role.

For the record, I don't do Java or J2EE... at least not yet, I don't consider myself qualified for such roles. I will learn eventually, if it was called for... But at this point in time, it isn't an imperative.

But back to my subject line. I got the email from Recruiter A. She's asked about my availability for this role. I've already called her and explained my unsuitability. It seems the general system used by most recruitment agencies down here is based on keyword search, which in turn pulls in results relating to any CV that contains that specific keyword. In this case "Java".

You can imagine the number of hits it would generate based off this... But more importantly, depending on the sensitivity of these systems, words like "JavaScript", which would be quite common in many IT developers (well, the web-orientated developers such as myself), would light up a candidate's CV like a Christmas tree.

Guess whose CV made the list? ;)

Herein lies the rub... there are many candidates in this position, rather much like myself... who are focused on specfic technologies. They may have mentioned other technologies they had the opportunity to be exposed to during their time in these previous roles. It's these keyword searches that tend to pick up on these nuances.

It seems these keyword searches are somewhat limited and will return a hit on a single match in a document. It would be interesting to see if these systems are capable of providing relevance based searches that would determine the validity of these searches based on the number of matches per document, and with respect to most recently worked roles. Judging from the number of emails I have received lately about Dot Net based roles or roles regarding Java, that kind of technology has yet to be established as the norm.