This sounds amazing. I honestly think recruiters can be entirely replaced by a decent A.I. and good scheduling software. And we would all be better off.
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in. They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
They are invaluable.
I do have to say though that there is enormous variability in their skill. The secret is to only work with a few that have access to different contacts and that you trust. Don't spray your resume out there to bad recruiting companies.
I have noticed a difference between industries though. In my main industry (finance and financial technology) recruiters tend to be very knowledgeable and work very diligently to give you leads that fit your skills and priorities. I've noticed that in other industries like web or internet start up they can be atrocious. I get all sorts of random crap from them so you probably need to be extra careful in certain industries.
But i would never give up my recruiters. They take a lot of pain out of me trying to find a new position.
I have a lot of love for my recruiters. I wouldn't have nearly the career i do now without them.
I also spend the time to really talk to the recruiter the first couple times so he knows a lot about me and what I'm looking for. And i don't feel he would work out for me, i don't work with him.
I takes communication and i think part of the problem is on the job seekers side. Too many are uncommunicative.
To find new external recruiters i look at the job listings (Indeed, LinkedIn, etc) and see if i notice the same recruiting firm listed at jobs i find interesting. Then i get in touch with the recruiter directly and have a discussion with him. So i kind of look for recruiters more than i look for jobs.
They want huge commissions but they don't add a lot of value. That commission is almost always way more than it would cost me for my time to recruit from my own network or through traditional means.
Many of them never even meet their candidates. When I was in the market a long time ago - they would prep me with what to say to the hiring company even if it wasn't part of my skill-set at the time. That's very dishonest.
I'm an employer and they'll call me and immediately start talking about a candidate. They'll ramble on and on about how great their candidate is even though I'm not hiring or I'm only hiring for a different role.
Part of their strategy is to push a candidate on you, get you to like them and then talk about their commission only if necessary. They get really squeamish if you ask about commission.
They do a lot of leg work for you
- simple stats and analysis
They have access to many openings that aren't public.
- This is just companies choosing their preferred recruiters in a fragmented industry. A solid platform would solve this
And they can convince good companies to create an opening for you if you would fit really well with the company
- I dont see code doing this. But how often does this happen though?
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in.
- Not sure why you think this is exclusive to recruiters. Isnt this just another way of describing filters on a recruitment website?
.They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
- Its not hard to code something that can achieve this. Even saw a post here on HN about a site that can mass apply for jobs for you. Could make it a little more intelligent so it learns which jobs you prefer.
And no algorithm, stats, and analysis is going to be a good as a recruiter who works regularly with a firm and knows what they are looking for, what the culture is like, and their internals.
Also recruiters help negotiate salary for you too, and that always helps.
They also take you out to lunch too :)
Also recruiters help negotiate salary for you too,
and that always helps.
I guess I'm confused as to why anyone would expect a better result by having someone else do your negotiation?
In NYC i might deal with 3 or 4. A lot o them have the same listings so i will work with the ones i either already have experience with or that seem to understand the biz best.
So maybe i work with one that has great leads with small trading firms, another with better access to large banks, one who is more on the financial technology side, and one who does tech start ups.
I try not to do one offs (deal with a recruiter for a single position) but it happens of course.
There are some places i never would have thought to interview at because of preconceived ideas i had, but I'm glad the recruiter was able to talk me into it (eg, Bloomberg has a top rate technical side handling their trading platform and news distribution - i never would have thought they were so talented).
With Google Jobs you're the product to be sold. Only this time it's not annoying ad's, they're offering your employment for sale, your life.
https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/23/12610890/google-search-pu...
Oh and a few years ago they banned ad blockers from the app store https://adblockplus.org/blog/adblock-plus-for-android-remove...
So every time you see a shitty horrible ad on mobile, the reason you have to watch it is 100% Google.
It's worth a try if you haven't done so lately.
I believe you mean Android and the Play Store, not Chrome and the Chrome Store.
EDIT: To clarify, when I was a recruiter, we could build profiles on candidates, buy information on candidates, etc. It was pretty trivially easy to get all the relevant info from linkedin alone. My thought is, why not want that? It'd save me wasting a candidate's time if I could glance through his linkedin and see he/she wasn't a good fit. Because if you had a private profile, 80% of the time I'd be able to pull your phone number from a resume you'd posted somewhere (that my company paid pennies to have access to) and give you a call, just to find out real quick if you're a good fit or not.
Few people would hire me if they had access to my full Google profile, and I bet that's true of a lot of others.
Why is that? What is it that google knows about you that the rest of the world couldn't somewhat easily find out?
I'm mildly surprised, because I can't think of anything google knows about me that would prevent me from being hired. The only thing is maybe my porn history, which is all in incognito mode anyway, and really not even that shocking in terms of content.
Nice try :)
It's essentially the idea "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Your profile isn't shared with normal advertisers, so I don't think there's any use of sharing it with people advertising job positions.
Disclaimer: I have no idea how Google Jobs Search is implemented.
One problem is I also spend a huge amount of time googling stuff I'm completely uninterested in and hate doing. What wires do you jumper again to test a mid 00s whirlpool freezer icemaker to verify its motor works, again? Once its fixed I never want to see that again, certainly don't want to work as an appliance repairman.
Possibly there is an algorithm to analyze behavior. Oh he's searching for freebsd something or other maybe he'd like a sysadmin job. Oh look he's hate-searching for icemaker repair again, better not suggest appliance repair jobs.
If everything in my personal life were known over the last 20 years, I'd probably be unemployable. Let's just start with politics. I was an activist in my early 20s. When I was young, I had some pretty radical ideas. Google knows that, there's plenty in my gmail about it. Should that really be used to inform my current job prospects, 20 years later?
Google knows every time I've taken a sick day and lied about it (I carry my android phone, and use google maps).
Etc.
There's no reason for any of your information to be shared with the prospective employers here, no? The flow of information here is from the employers, via Google, to you, not the other way around. Your information, plus what you type, would just filter that info down to what you actually care about.
Recruiters are getting vile. Recently one contacted a friend and told my buddy that I had referred him. My buddy hit me up after the call mad that I'd told a recruiter he was looking.
I'd never met the recruiter but he'd added me on LI at some point in the past.
Be thankful that jobs search for you and not the opposite.
Should we be thankful that there are lots of realtors? We should be thankful there is enough real estate and the price is accessible (at least for some of us). Realtors are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
I liken it to web ads. The worst web ads will attempt drive-by downloads or are simply obnoxious -- loud, obtrusive, clickjacking, forced-redirects, autoplayed video on pay-per-bandwidth connections, ill-designed for different form-factors, badly layered under/over content. Then again, some ads are perfectly tailored, unobtrusive, small, and fast. Most people generally don't complain about the latter. They don't install AdBlockers to avoid the latter. But the latter are collateral damage of people avoiding the former.
> how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters
This is not costless. I stopped answering my phone because it was causing context switches while at work and affecting my productivity. Eventually I figured out that I needed to unsubscribe from recruiter lists (some of which were probably email-confirmation spam traps) and to completely obfuscate my job search profiles while I was not searching.
How does your opinion differ from the statement above?
But let's ignore the analogy for a moment. If someone is annoyed by something, it is not less genuine because others would not be annoyed by it.
The former (speaking of recruiters targeting modern technology professionals; 19th century naval recruiters are a different story) has less of a history of escalating to physical violence and forced taking of what is desired by the pursuer, a context difference which results in a significant difference in the level of reasonably perceived threat to autonomy and physical safety involved.
The "sexy" jobs are not chasing you, just like the sexy people aren't usually the ones that become stalkers.
It was kind of flattering until I realized most of them never works for me.
They'll call, ask a lot, ask me to submit a cv although my updated profile is already on LinkedIn. They'll ask about salary expectations and then I won't hear from them again.
(BTW: Yes, I walk from one nice job to the next, can't complain. But I've found that for me talking to recruiters is pointless most of the times. FTR: I got my current job through a recruiter, first time in ten years I actually got a job through a recruiter.)
They also don't do any curation. The majority that most engineers deal with are cold calling hoping that the buzzword soup overlaps enough.
Glorified telemarketers.
Algorithms aren't person though, and they are ruthless.
Personally I wish we could go back to companies/managers/HR doing the actual applicant filtering.
Fun game: find all jobs that could replace "recruiters" in the paragraph quoted above.
regardless of that, i share the same privacy concerns others have about google, so don't see this as a particularly enticing announcement.