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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Thank you.

(disclaimer: not a recruiter)

I like HN, but the attitude towards recruiters here is so ugly and smug and superior. We get it. You are so annoyed by all these companies who want to hire you. You have the power to merely pick up the phone and work at Google tomorrow if it pleased you. You drive a Tesla and have a supermodel girlfriend too. Great. Congratulations. You're awesome.

For the rest of us mortals, it's nice to have someone reach out and offer to put us in touch with someone looking to hire us. This is a LUXURY not available to the vast majority of workers in the world. Be a little grateful for a change. Sure, a lot of the jobs might be "bottom of the barrel" type jobs but you never know, and it never hurts to be civil and treat these folks with a little empathy.

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I do understand your sentiment, I was flattered when I first moved the to bay area, with all the recruiters sending me emails, and I would politely reply telling them that I'm not available (because of my immigration status).

But, the problem is that it's the same template, and most of the recruiters haven't even bothered to check the message that they sent (I think they are using some software to send these emails).

My name has an apostrophe in it, when the email starts with

    Hi Ala&#39;,

I know that he didn't check anything, and he is not interested in me, but in anyone.

When the email contains a lot of false statements, like

    Your experience in Python is impressive.

given that I don't use python, and my knowledge in it is very limited.

When you are receiving these emails 10 times a week, it becomes annoying.

Yes, I had my university project on my CV - which was comparing Perl, PHP and Java for a task. I didn't do any of the PHP code, yet I was constantly sent jobs for PHP because it obviously hits their keyword search.

You've had better luck with tech recruiters than I have. I once spent eight months looking for a job in Boston, dealing with large numbers of tech recruiters who wanted interviews and long discussions, only for them to reveal at the end that they didn't have any jobs available but they'd be sure to contact me when they did.

And then there were the cases where someone posted a new opening relevant to my skills, and I was immediately flooded with phone calls from indistinguishable recruiters, all of whom had sent me an e-mail literally seconds before and were calling "to follow up". Fortunately, these people normally revealed enough about the job that I could find the original listing -- and apply to it -- on my own.

I hate to say it, and seem all superior, but as recruiters, they're supposed to contact highly desirable candidates, and they are supposed to make them good offers. That's their job, they are not potted plants.

As such, their job is to not produce lousy come-ons, or, as has been frequently the case, attempt to recruit people several grades too senior for a post. It's a matter of context, and what might be an intriguing come-on for some (the "rest of us mortals"), is essentially a thinly concealed insult to others. If they took a little less of a cookie cutter approach to their jobs, they might stumble into fewer situations where people are tempted to be uncivil or lose their empathy (that being said, there's no cause to be rude in these situations).

> For the rest of us mortals, it's nice to have someone reach out and offer to put us in touch with someone looking to hire us.

And I have at least once taken the job, too. Once is enough that it's worthwhile to let them call me.

That said, if you try to repeatedly pester me, I'm going to try my best to lose you, whether you're a recruiter or not. You want to let me know you have something that I might be interested in? Fine. I'll listen. I'll tell you if I'm interested. If not, don't ask me about that one again. If I say I'm not willing to look around right now, don't ask me again for six months.

That is, I'll be civil and have empathy until I quit getting civility and empathy back.

Shouldn't you have a Lamborghini instead of a Tesla?

Any self-respecting person should have 47 Lamborghinis in one's Lamborghini account.

Who would want to work for google (excepting 20 somethings)?

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