Ask HN: How do you feel about recruiters? Do you receive spam? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you feel about recruiters? Do you receive spam?

1 pointmrtksn8 comments

Hi HN, do you have experience working with recruiters(agencies) as a JOB SEEKER? If so, can you please answer the few short and easy questions here? https://recrt.typeform.com/to/abCuHB

My experience was quite poor and I am wondering if I’m alone in this. My primary complaints are:

1) Very high number of calls and often the callers are very pushy. If I answer a call I have to speak now or schedule a call for later which is a problem for me since I don't have a rigid daily schedule. Still that would have been fine if the calls were not consuming my all day.

2) The recruiters want to go through each point of my CV, doing it with every single one of them gets old pretty quickly. Often they are not well informed about my CV and I every now and then I receive calls for Senior Java dev, a tech I have no experience with - I'm a JavaScript dev.

3) I think most of them claim to have “The perfect position” just to create a profile of me in their records. I tried to claim expertise at technology that I made up on the spot and the recruiters would have a perfect position with that technology.

So I’m now building a tool to handle the management of job seeking, I wonder about the of other devs.

Also, I would love it if you comment here.

Some (most?) recruiters don't know what they're doing, and contact me for entry-level help-desk positions (or senior network architect positions) that I'm well-past qualified for (or nowhere near qualified for).

Some at least take the 13 seconds to skim my LinkedIn profile or actual resume from my website, and at least send me listings for jobs that are sorta related to my experience.

And then there's the contractor recruiters, "2 months for $35/hour for a senior automation architect". Yeah...no. When base salary for positions like that starts at $100k annually (and has benefits), those hourly contract rates are comically insulting.

How did the random recruiters get your phone number? And then, if you want to speak with them at all, why don't you tell them as the very first thing in the phone call to send you an e-mail with the offer?

When an idiot recruiter sends me a message asking for my phone number (and I know he/she is an idiot, because I have prominently stated in my profile that I don't casually give my phone number away and prefer text messages), I always ask them to send me ad details in text.

Well, I put my number on my CV then uploaded that CV to CV-Library.

Later I removed my number but I think my profile is being shared and I still get few calls a day.

When a recruiter calls, I tell them to send me an e-mail instead but they are almost never happy with this and they try to make me talk right now.

Very pushy behaviour in general.

Well, it's them who want to talk to you, not the reverse. If they're unhappy to contact you in your preferred way, just tell them to fuck off and disconnect.

Once a resume with a phone number is out there it's fair game for "random recruiters".

Of course I receive recruiter spam; most experienced developers do.

I ignore almost all calls from numbers I don't know anyway.

I haven't had the experience of recruiters wanting to go through each point of my resume (actually I don't ever recall having had that happen in 25 yrs).

I don't get very many pushy recruiters either, although since it takes two to tango, my attitude probably squelches that noise real quick. I'm fairly direct and precise.

Some recruiters are good, most are not, a few are terrible (looking at you CyberCoders).

A clickable link to my questionnaire: https://recrt.typeform.com/to/abCuHB

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