Hacker News Reader

Comment by GhostVII | Hacker News Reader

> Second, never underestimate how lazy the HR screener is. They aren't technical, they aren't ambitious, they're generally borderline incompetent people whose sole marketable skill is that they are pleasant to talk with.

There are a lot of HR people in the world, that is a bit of a generalisation, don't you think? I'm sure there are lots of great HR people, and lots of incompetent HR people, just like any other job.

View on HN

HR is not 'like any other job'. Google's internal analysis of what HR practices yielded top tech performers strongly disproved most longstanding HR maxims, like hire from the best schools, with highest GPAs, etc. AFAIK, very few of the HR services used by most large corps have integrated much less acknowledged this sea change in tech HR nor integrated some of those lessons in their daily practices. Their hallmark MO continues to be: grep for keywords.

So I'd agree with only the middle of your last sentence.

I can count on one hand the number of good recruiters I've worked with over the years. Generally they view it all as a numbers game, spam over candidates until one sticks. They won't go out of their way to understand things is what I meant by "ambitious" there... If a candidate is thinking, "Well, my resume is basically just a link to my GitHub profile," or, "I have all these awesome references on LinkedIn..." I would caution them to not rely on HR people going that extra step to get the info -- it should all be on the resume or it's probably not going to get looked at.

I could count on one hand the number of good recruiters I have worked with and the number of Voltron lion robots.

Every second I spent talking to a recruiter has been an absolutely unmitigated waste of time. And they always try to waste so much of my time, too. They always seem to want to "touch base" and "reach out", or try to mine my contact list for other prospects. It didn't take long for me to figure out that they care not at all about my outcome, and overwhelmingly prefer quantity over quality.

There are a lot of HR people in the world, that is a bit of a generalisation, don't you think?

When I run across an outlier, I’ll let you know; seriously. But after twenty-five years, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.

(Remember that parent said “screener”, not “VP of HR w/25 years experience”. And even the VP can be a waste of good office space sometimes.)

There are definitely some that at least have tact and respect for the skills that developers have. I won't talk to any that don't come across in this way immediately. If they are all about buzzwords and clearly haven't taken anytime to understand what software development is about they deserve to be blackballed

I don't think so, I think he is spot on. If you have more skills, you do something else.

I had some great recruiters to work with, but they move up fairly quickly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com