Message to recruiters

As a recruiter I can shed some light on the other side.

A lot of recruiters are entry level hires. In my office most people are fresh out of a big ten school or one of the well-known colleges in Illinois. These are mostly people in their first full time job. Entry level sales is generally hard but having to learn tech stacks as well makes it even more difficult. Most people don’t take the job seriously enough to learn about different aspects of development. Honestly most people are not very good at sales or writing a compelling message so that’s why you end up with so much shit in your inbox.

The other aspect that comes into play is that every recruiting agency works a little different. My company breaks down by tech stack. We have 6 teams. My team only focuses on .net developers. When I started as long as I knew what C#, ASP.NET, and SQL Server was I could hold a conversation. Unfortunately many companies don’t break down this way so recruiters are working any roles they can. A lot of recruiting agencies focus on recruiting sales people, office admins, or healthcare workers, and also do IT staffing on top of that. When a recruiter has to work on multiple roles in multiple fields it’s just about impossible to be knowledgeable about all of them.

I encourage developers to work with companies that focus on IT staffing and ask questions about the company. Most developers don’t even know how recruiting agencies make money or how they find the roles that they are working.

As far as the LinkedIn spam… I actually think it’s a pretty big problem but in a lot of industries. I get recruiting in mails and emails every day from other recruiters. Corporate recruiters and agencies recruiters. More often than not I can tell I was one of 20 people receiving the same copy paste message. This occurs in almost any industry where the demand is high and people have a internet presence. Developers just happen to be in that sweet spot of high demand and often public internet presence that makes it easy for recruiters to find them.

I completely agree with this. I'm starting to look at other opportunities, and so renamed my tagline on LinkedIn to "actively looking for work". Since then, it's been a deluge of awful job offers or requests for a phone call. Most of them not even what I'm looking for.

I wish there was a way to force recruiters to read a small text before contacting me, that would state exactly what I'm looking for:

* A complete job offers with details about the company, technologies used, my future role AND SALARY.

* I know they'll never do that, but including the company's name would be great, so I can Google/Glassdoor them and find more about it.

* What's special about this position? Does the company offer any meaningful perks (counting among them work-life balance)?

* And finally something I'm interested in! Either Backend or Fullstack work!

This article is much better then some rants about jobs and recruiters I've read. He actually spells out some of the issues he has other than sheer volume or quality.

That being said if any of you think you get too many job offers please send them my way.