Hacker News Reader

Sales funnel + psychology. Imagine you are using PHP4 and, 100 candidates out of your pool will totally hate it. As You know that in a face-to-face talk you have about a 10% chance to convince a PHP4 hater to still go ahead and take the offer. Now consider 2 strategies:

A) Write "we use PHP4" in the job description. In this case, 98 candidates will nope out when they read this (say 2% won't notice PHP4 or will be desperate) and 10% out of the remaining 2 gives you 0.2 people on average.

B) Be as vague as possible. Write that you use modern tooling and technologies, don't give any details. Now 80 candidates proceed to the next stage. If you only convince 10% of them, you still end up with 8 instead of 0.2.

It's similar to spam - even though >99% people will delete it without even reading, as long as there is a tiniest chance of someone actually buying the advertised product, the spammers will be in the black.

You're making a straw-man argument.

I don't think they are -- who is the person whose argument is being characterized?

It's just being cynical about companies and recruiters.

I'd say this is true, but only if you're working with terrible technology.

If you're working with Elm or some other cool language/technology I'm sure strategy A would fare much better.

I think you radically over-estimate the number of people who want to learn Elm in order to apply for a job.

I've done a lot of hiring and we use a "cool" language (Kotlin). We don't mention the language to recruits although it's not a secret (discussed on our website), because we want to hire people with many different platform backgrounds.

We had a problem advertising Clojure, everyone showed up wanting to write Clojure but didn’t care about our product.

As a series A company it was hard to get purist to focus on shipping and we started weeding candidates out that gave off a ‘I just want to work in Clojure’ vibe. Eventually new stuff got written in Java and we migrated off of it due to the hiring pipeline mostly but when we told candidates some honestly dropped out because they were excited to work in Clojure.

So can one say that you migrated off of Clojure because it attracts a wrong type of people?

I think advertising "work with X" is usually a problem if people don't care about your domain. Domain first, then the tech can be a nice to have.

Not really, because most companies will ignore those without Elm repositories on github.

I cannot be bothered to create Elm, Haskell, OCaml, F#, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, Rust, Go, Swift, Angular, React, VueJS, Flutter, Dart .... github repositories, after work on evenings and weekends, just for the tiny chance of getting around the next round.

As if almost 30 year of experience across multiple business domains are worthless.

You're giving these recruiters too much credit on their intelligence. They're vuage because they're ignorant and need to reach a certain word count to their pitch, and the same way they need to get a certain number of submissions. In short they're like monkeys incentivized is to give the minimum amount of vuage info in the shortest amount of time until the candidate agrees to continue with submission.

Source: I'm an engineer & recruiter that works with over 100 tech companies in NYC. I also work on a SaaS platform for recruiters.

After A/B testing tons of messages (and analyzing messages from a SaaS platform I built for recruiters to send messages) the messages that work are ones that are short. So I try to keep messages brief, reach out about a specific company that might be a match, and hope to get on the phone with you to actually be able to do my actual job. It's very hard to convert someone over an e-mail message. Getting you to respond to my e-mail is the first part of the funnel.

From there if I can get a conversation with you I can move on to the "fun" part of my job. Giving candidates a broad overview of the market based on their interests, expectation setting, and career counseling.

Edit: To answer your question directly the reason you get bad recruiting messages stems from a mix of bad recruiting practices, bad companies/ low investment in HR departments, and bad engineers. Would be happy to give you a recommendation for a solid recruiter in SF or NYC if you're in those areas.

> the messages that work are ones that are short.

I completely buy that. But in a short message there is still the choice between concrete information (tasks, location, level, tech/tools, salary, business sector, team size...).

> hope to get on the phone with you to actually be able to do my actual job

But that's the point: a phone call is a pretty big effort I think. I might do it if there is any clue that the job might be something for me but I won't do it if there is a risk that the job is in the wrong part of the country!

> Would be happy to give you a recommendation for a solid recruiter in SF or NYC if you're in those areas.

Not in the US, but thanks!

> concrete information (tasks, location, level, tech/tools, salary, business sector, team size...).

If location isn't implied the only reason you wouldn't give it is bad recruiting practices in your case. Salary/Tasks/Team Size could be changing pretty rapidly for startups and an external recruiter might not have the up to to date info. Companies do a bad job at investing in their external recruiting process. FWIW, I always provide company name, location, tech/tools, a hook about why I like them, and if I can find it a hook about the candidate.

> But that's the point: a phone call is a pretty big effort I think.

Switching jobs is a pretty big effort overall. A lot of engineers who are willing to take the step of taking a call are generally thinking about leaving or actively looking. For strong recruiters the message is just the hook. If you're able to find a few trusted tech recruiters you can use throughout your career it makes the overall search a lot easier every time. It's like finding the all-star real estate agent when you're buying a home. There are a lot of bad recruiters so in your case, it's more likely you haven't found a strong recruiter to work with yet.

Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring. For example, the people who are writing the job descriptions got a 1-line email, "We need to expand the engineering team; could you take care of it? Thanks!", and so they're basically having to come up with all this on their own.

Their first stop is probably a Google search: "example job description software engineering"

Then, they replace the buzzwords with their own buzzwords, which they probably already know, and they're done. This takes much less time than scheduling time with the engineering team, and since they'll be doing the interviews anyway, what's the harm? Their part of the job is already done.

The second part is that companies are doing the same thing that applicants are doing with their resumes; they don't want to put any red flags out there, in order to keep their possible pool of matches as large as possible. There's a chance they can persuade you to ignore a red flag if they talk to you; if they list it in the job description, there's a 0% chance.

Examples of information that might be excluded:

> where is this?

- It's in the suburbs outside Reno, NV.

> exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here?

- You'll be maintaining our undocumented, 12-year old legacy backend.

> What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs?

- I literally have no idea, I was just given a budget and a number of slots to fill.

> What tech is used

- Something you've never heard of, running on top of PHP 4.

> what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit?

- We will literally take anyone who can FizzBuzz.

Finally, there are some dog-whistle/shibboleth phrasing that seems perfectly clear to the person who wrote the description, but might not be clear to you. Examples:

> “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy”

- You'll be working on our product that is the closest to making money (or actually makes some! who knows).

> “You’ll work close to the systems”

- You'll be doing some DevOps as well.

> “You’ll have a central role”

- We have a small team.

And so on.

> “Highly motivated”

> “Passion”

Working overtime and week-ends while not getting a dime for it.

> Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring. For example, the people who are writing the job descriptions got a 1-line email, "We need to expand the engineering team; could you take care of it? Thanks!", and so they're basically having to come up with all this on their own.

And to think that hiring will have one of biggest impact on the engineering team.

> Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring.

I have the feeling many see this as malicious by employers. But it's already hard to find good developers, employing them as recruiters is a waste of resources. You'll try to find recruiters who have some idea what to look for and then only include engineers in the last stage. Having every application for a senior dev scanned by other senior devs won't work.

As for the recruiter, they can only learn so much about the job because the company probably has 20+ roles to fill where they need to know the basics for all. They can't be expert in all domains.

at larger companies you often have recruiters focused on specific areas - so they can know more. At places I've worked we've had just an engineering recruiter and just a sales recruiter and etc...

I feel like this isn't often the case. In multiple teams I've been on - the team wrote their own job descriptions and even revised them multiple times.

This could honestly warrant an entire separate post on its own.