Hacker News Reader

Comment by ohitsdom | Hacker News Reader

Is this really necessary? If you get this worked up about contact from a recruiter, I imagine you also might write back to every piece of direct mail junk mail telling them how your interests don't align and to please stop contacting you.

Why not just delete it or reply no thank you? Google is a massive company, and unless they are specifically head-hunting you, it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site. You're going to get picked up by automated scripts for big hiring campaigns. Accept it, and don't waste time or mental energy getting frustrated or mad about it.

View on HN

Recruiting is a sales process just like any other. No one would ever say it's unfair to expect a business developer to spend 5 minutes researching a prospect just because he/she sells for a big firm and doesn't have the time.

Come on. This is their JOB.

When they have someone they specifically want to recruit/headhunt, I would expect them to spend at least 5 minutes research.

Your argument boils down to:

    Large corporations do not have to sell employment.
    Potential employees should feel honored to merely be contacted on the basis of an opportunity.

This sounds a lot like a cargo cult, or some weird corporatism worship.

Frankly if I'm contacted by a recruiter who is a direct employee of a company, and it is blatantly obvious I'm receiving a form letter based on a keyword search of a resume data base. I know exactly what my role will be at this company, an employee ID in a database row.

I don't think the argument is that you must feel "honored". Just not personally affronted by it.

I work for a company that has open developer positions. None of them are related to keyboard firmware, but if you told me nothing about a potential candidate except that he'd been doing keyboard firmware for fun, my first instinct would be, "great! Let's see if he wants to come in for an interview". Don't we all spout the company line about how specific skills are less important than "passion" or whatever? Well, then don't bitch if someone contacts you about something other than the specific skills on your CV. You don't have prostrate yourself before their glorious presence, but I don't see a reason to get upset about it.

No, it doesn't. You're putting an awful lot of words in my mouth there.

Generally speaking, they'll be two types of recruiting companies like this are doing:

1) General filling headcount. X department has N open roles for developers who they need suitable people for. It doesn't really matter who the person is, as long as they're suitable (and they'll figure that out with screening calls and interviews). These are the types of roles that these shotgun form emails are sent out to.

2) Headhunting specific people (for specific roles). A company is after someone in particular who they already know about, or they're after a fairly specific type of person (for an IMPORTANT role) so they'll do a bit research on who they want to approach.

Of course I don't think anyone should feel honoured to receive a form email. I just don't think it's worth getting your knickers in a twist over it. They irritate me slightly, but I get over it. If I wrote a 1000 word article on every piece of recruiter spam[1] I receive I wouldn't have time to do actual work.

[1] Amusing anecdote: One day In the office a whole bunch of phones and computers when off. I assumed it was a whole company email, but nope - it was a recruiter who had emailed everyone looking for MERN developers.

This is where you're wrong, they're not specifically recruiting this individual. They're playing a statistical game - use as many sources as possible to fill the pipeline in hopes that some percentage will make it through to the end. I'm sure the recruiters are incented to make as many contacts as they can. Google is all about automation, and I'm sure their process for identifying potential candidates has no human input whatsoever.

I think we're agreeing with each other.

Maybe I poorly phrased my comment, but I don't think sending an automated form email counts as 'specifically recruiting' OP, nor do I expect Google to spend time prior researching them.

You're right, I totally misread your comment - if they were recruiting a specific person, they would have spent the 5 minutes to check them out.

I don't think the emails are automated, I really do think there's a human at the other end, if nothing else they need someone to read your response. It's just that they're spending a minimal amount of time just to try to get you on the hook, and they'll use whatever information the automated system gave them to do that.

Right; but... are they? Or are they just trying to fill seats with warm bodies?

Google does do "warm body" recruiting, for example, to staff their support lines for Google Apps and other small business-aimed services.

Taking this analogy, cold calls and similar sales tactics are still being used, so they must bring at least some positive return. If the error costs are effectively zero, the recruiter may be still be getting benefits from mass mailings, although as a corporate strategy for Google it may not work too well.

Good cold-calls are well-researched.

In the sales world, the merits of research are well-known. An increased hit-rate is always worth the additional time in researching and qualifying before-hand.

This part 3. The previous posts make it pretty clearly that he did the "polite no, thank you." before.

And he'll have to do it again, since Google (and other companies) clearly does not maintain a blacklist of the sort he wants them to.

It's the part where he gets all Wrath of Khan about it that is a little entertaining.

> ... does not maintain a blacklist of the sort he wants them to.

I wonder why... Is the potential for one person changing their mind worth the negativity? I've also been contacted repeatedly by Google's recruiters, even though I live nowhere near a Google campus, and have no desire to move back to that area.

Technical solutions not always being practical in meat space and all that, but seems like a backoff like we would implement against an API which isn't responding would not be a terrible idea here.

I'm sure they use some kind of CRM to keep track of all their candidates, they could just mark them "do not contact"

Must have since they knew not to recruit people working for certain other companies.

Discounting the motivations behind recruiter's cold calls for a moment; people do change. Someone who felt comfortable telling Google to haul off one year might feel different one or four years down the line. Making the assumption that they didn't burn bridges, re-contacting them a respectable amount of time later may result in a different outcome.

If I change my mind, I will contact them. Repeatedly hitting me up with impersonal contacts I don't want is not going to do it. In fact, it will make me lessl likely to change my mind.

Even if they maintained a blacklist, in this case, it was 5 years since they last contacted him according to this site.

Blame the 100's of recruiters working for google on contract and a internal CRM that likely doesnt work very well. Add in the idea that everyone is looking around eventually and you have people reaching out to you weekly about things you already said no to in the past.

> Is the potential for one person changing their mind worth the negativity?

I didn't read this and come away feeling any more negative about google.

They certainly do maintain such a blacklist.

Sounds like "before" was five years ago.

I'm curious to read parts 1 & 2, wish there were clear links to them in "Part 3".

Part one is linked, though not clearly, from the article.[0]

Checking the category under which this was posted, Rants, gets you to number two in a single page where a good old Mark I eyeball grep is enough to get you there with some brief scrolling.[1]

(I was curious, too.)

[0] https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2011/12/13/google-f...

[1] https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2012/08/21/recruitm...

> Google is a massive company, and unless they are specifically head-hunting you, it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site.

Every time I see someone bring up this rough point the time gets shorter. "I'm important, I don't have 5 minutes to look at your personal page!" or some variant of that. It's ridiculous.

If I'm reaching out to someone to start hiring, I'd be looking at personal pages, github pages, looking through their code, etc. The only reason you wouldn't is if you don't actually give a shit and you're just working through a list of candidates and trying to get your conversion rate up.

Plus someone who goes around recruiting without looking at WHO they're recruiting is not somebody I'd work for...

Yes

If google is serious about hiring "the best" (which is debatable) they should definitely be paying more attention and not just spamming people

There's a pretty low signal to noise ratio on recruiting. They typically don't start going into a candidate's details until they've managed to get a resume.

But we don't know if this recruiter is hiring "the best" or just some schlub to sit behind a phone and tell small business owners how to update their email signatures.

Not every one of Google's 61,000 employees is "OMG super A+ number one hot code engineer geek!"

CSR's don't generally have github pages.

Ok? I don't see how that's relevant.

> The only reason you wouldn't is if you don't actually give a shit and you're just working through a list of candidates and trying to get your conversion rate up.

Conversion rate is $number_hires / $number_prospects_contacted.

It seems that indiscriminate spamming would pretty much tank the conversion rate.

You're assuming those two parameters, mine were $number_of_interviews / $number_of_prospects. Unless that's an industry term I misused, in which case I apologize.

I am, and apologies for that.

My starting point is "The goal of a recruiter is to fill positions." This leads to hiring actions being the key conversion step.

In a hiring pipeline with length like Google's or similar, I could very easily be assigning too much weight to this sort of role.

Thanks for helping me think in a different way.

> it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site.

If a company wants to hire me, I expect them to spend hours going through my site and assess my previous open source work, and how and why I might be fit for them, etc.

If they don't do at least that, there's nothing for me there.

And yeah, Google is spamming me too, like the author of the article.

They're not going to invest hours in you until they've determined that you're at least minimally interested.

My own employment history in the past 10 years or so clearly demonstrates this is not the case. Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager). A job they needed done, and a job they clearly understood I was an expert in.

I am am talking about senior-level jobs here, where the employee is hired because of his specific skill set and expertise in some particular domain. If the company does something that doesn't require any particular expertise, and no particular skill set, or if they don't know what they need, yeah... I don't want to be working there. Why would I? I would be selling myself short, and I would not advance in my technical career.

Companies can very well assess whether someone is interested in the job. They can't know without asking if someone is willing to tolerate the company, but they should be able to tell whether someone would likely be interested in a particular job. And if someone likes a job, most likely they won't mind the company, so it's worthwhile for the company to reach out.

Companies should also be able to assess with good reliability how qualified is someone for a particular job before contacting that person. If they can't, they either don't know what they need, or they are looking at the wrong person to hire.

> Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager).

I'm honestly curious what they would have done during that time. I mean, are you literally saying it took them days or weeks of constant analysis to decide whether to approach you about coming in for an interview?

And I'm not going to invest hours in them unless they're minimally interested.

I'm pretty sure that in a world populated entirely by people like you, the only thing that would cause anyone to ever actually become employed would be some confusion over what "minimally interested" means.

Well, when the recruiter emails, and says that they're interested in my skills, I'd like to believe that they're not full of crap, and that they actually have looked at some version of my resume.

I'd like to think that when they email and invite me to a local event, it's in a city I've been associated with before, not somewhere across the country, when I live in the same city as the HQ.

I'd like to think that when I've spent an hour on the phone, they at least let me know that they're interested or not, not just go completely silent.

Or, same deal after an onsite.

"If a company wants to hire me, I expect them to spend hours going through my site and assess my previous open source work, and how and why I might be fit for them, etc. "

I hate to say it, but ... it's unlikely to happen. The problem for you is that for most companies, there are plenty of leads in the sea.

For everyone like you, there are 100 who aren't. The likelihood you are objectively a better candidate than all those folks is ... low

Until that changes, your request pretty much won't happen.

(As for spamming, the author says it was 5 years ago, "My first thought was "what took them so long?" - it has been five years since my last contact with a Google recruiter."

I don't think i would qualify reaching out every 5 years as spamming)

> I hate to say it, but ... it's unlikely to happen. The problem for you is that for most companies, there are plenty of leads in the sea.

So, you are saying the "talent shortage" is a load of bullshit?

> So, you are saying the "talent shortage" is a load of bullshit?

You can have a lot of something and still have a shortage.

The original statement was "plenty", which is the opposite of "shortage". Also, while you can certainly have a lot of something in the absolute sense while still having a shortage relative to your needs, "shortage" applies that the additional things are not available. Having those things available but not having the resources to make use of them is not a shortage or that thing, it is a shortage of whatever resource is required to use that thing.

Yes, the talent shortage is bullshit. There is a shortage of some specific combinations of credentials, but that has very little to do with how easy it is to find people to do specific jobs.

> it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes

The problem isn't that they don't look or give careful consideration...

The problem is that they LIE about it to the people they contact.

>> Why not just delete it or reply no thank you?

Uh, at a guess: because if you don't expect to get a job at Google the next best way to pad your CV is to make it very publicly known that you've turned down an offer from Google?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com