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Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

I am, now and on occasion, a hiring manager. Naturally, every freelance recruiter wants to be my friend.

They often start cold calls with a description of a person's technical abilities, and then ask if I would be interested in interviewing that person.

When that happens, I ask them to define one of the buzzwords that they have just used. "Could you tell me what 'big data' means?" or "What's the difference between AWS and GCE?"

I don't do business with technical recruiters who aren't familiar with the meanings of the terms that they throw around. They have never been more valuable than a regex.

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There's another side to the value of headhunters and agencies, at least the competent ones, and that's the ability to warm a pipeline of candidates and do a lot of the grooming that your regex, no matter how clever, won't be able to do.

You can scour LinkedIn day and night for candidates, but especially in software engineering, finding inclined candidates is a much narrower task than finding an engineer with big data experience and experience with GCE.

Any recruiters I work with only need to understand how much they need to understand about technical skills to deliver me a workable and most importantly inclined pipeline. It's my job to educate them about subtleties in my requirements.

Edit: I should note, these are recruiters I've worked with on an ongoing basis. With cold calls, if they lead with a frag grenade of skills and buzzwords, that's just a bad pitch imo.

Please, please share one of the funnier stories you have about grilling recruiters who didn't know the difference between AWS and GCE.

Most recently I asked if the recruiter knew the difference between Java and JavaScript, since he had just mentioned both of them.

"Uh, they're web technologies... in very high demand."

"Yes, but is there a difference between them? What kind of web technologies are they?"

Long pause.

The background silence changes a little, as though a hand were placed over the telephone's mouthpiece.

I can't hear the word in the conversation he's having, but it's clear that he is talking to someone.

The hand goes away.

"Java is a general purpose computer programming language with concurrent objects, and JavaScript is the script version."

Pause.

"Did I get that right?"

Perfect.

Next time you should respond, "Hmm...that's not what I have here. The answer is, 'JavaScript uses Electron and Java uses Spring.' I'm sorry, I don't think you're a great fit for us. Best of luck and have a good day."

Then hang up, and kill two birds with one stone in the process: the tone-deaf recruiter finally understands how the buzzword bingo interview feels, and you have one less incompetent recruiter to deal with.

I like you.

FWIW also a hiring manager, and I wouldn't say I've seen a huge correlation between technical aptitude and efficacy from the recruiters I've worked with. A good recruiter typically learns what you are looking for and who would like to work for you from how far their candidates get into the interview process and the feedback from both sides, and adjusts to match. This doesn't require having much understanding of any of the technology involved.

The primary litmus test I apply, and I think it is quite effective, is "after I tell you I prefer to communicate via email, do you still call me constantly or do you actually stick to email."

I had a recruiter who called me in the mid-90's. It was pretty obvious I wasn't ready to leave yet, but we struck up a conversation and she called back a couple of times. She did have a basic grasp of the technology, but there were a lot of technologies, much like today, and understanding if an OWL programmer could adapt to a place using MFC was a challenge to recruiters. HR and the computer industry loves buzzwords, so its no surprise recruiters end up using them with about the same understanding.

I guess I always preferred teaching to help enhance the relationship from my side. My being a nice guy and teacher, did help when I wanted to leave.

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