Kenneth Goanascis

Many years ago when I ran an engineering team for a consultancy we would get calls almost every day from recruitment agencies trying to pitch their services to us.

To counter this we came up with an imaginary employee who was meant to be head of HR. He went by the name of “Kenneth Goanascis”. This name was not picked arbitrarily; it was an anagram of “No agencies thanks”.

So whenever an agency called we would tell them they needed to speak to Kenneth Goanascis and unfortunately he was out at the moment visiting a client or interviewing a potential candidate. Over time they would ring up and ask for “him” directly. We even started getting physical post for our imaginary employee. Eventually the agencies gave up trying to get hold of Kenneth and we received less calls.