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Comment by reureu | Hacker News Reader

I got a call from an external recruiter: "I have a candidate who would be a great fit for your company." I'm just a lowly data scientist with no hiring power, and at that job the entire data science team was quitting. So, I mentioned that I didn't think the team was growing since it seemed to be actively shrinking with no new reqs that I was aware of.

Recruiter immediately turned it around and said they could represent me and asked me to send them an (editable, e.g., Microsoft Word document) resume.

Nope nope nope nope nope. I'm not giving you a resume that you can modify however you see fit, only to cold call and cold email it around to random people you find on linkedin.

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Yes once I've even been told that this employer requires a Word document as Resume.

So I converted my full generated resume to PDF into a word document, line by line.

Turns out, it was only so they could slap their info on it, reword my words and produce a PDF.

I asked the employer later, they said they prefer PDF as it's easier to print.......... Snakes. They're leeches in snake skin.

Dude. It's one page of plain text. Maybe two pages. It will be transcribed by brute force in less than an hour, if need be. Probably by an unpaid intern.

You either want recruiters to help do all the leg work for you, or you don't. And you either want the job, or you don't.

If they have a policy of lubricating introductions under a branded letterhead, it's gonna go down that way.

The file format protects nothing. And by nothing, I mean absolutely nothing.

It doesn't even change the pace of what happens by slowing things down.

^Cut and paste.

I've been in the situation of an interviewer, having to painfully show the skills the recruiter edited into their resume to get them an interview.

I absolutely agree with OP about being worried about edits, except I generally take it to the maximum extreme and don't use dedicated external recruiters at all when looking for work.

In the past, I've been a hiring manager receiving resumes treated this way by agencies.

They always, always screw them up. The resume is hard to read, formatted incorrectly or whatever. Most of the time, I simply went by the linkedin profile.

My resume is not plain text..?

If it's encrypted, no one can read it, and thus it cannot be transcribed without a key file.

If a person can read the words, it can be transcribed and reduced to an unformatted string, including an amount of white-space padding.

If the information on your resume cannot survive a reduction to plain text, and still remain relevant, something is wrong, because that's the premise of a resume: to standardize job applicants.

I once got an email from a recruiter asking me if I was interested in a position at a company that he had a great working relationship with. I was the person doing the interviews for the position he was trying to hire for, and I'd never talked to him before in my life.

I also received a few times offers by recruiters for a company I was already in (and visible on linkedin).

> Nope nope nope nope nope. I'm not giving you a resume that you can modify however you see fit, only to cold call and cold email it around to random people you find on linkedin.

But... that's exactly the services a recruiter provides. Someone needs to make those calls if you want a new job, unless you feel that you're such a catch that you can rely exclusively on networking with former coworkers to find you new positions. Most people rely on recruiters to grease the social wheels needed to land them interviews.

I mean, it's not a glamorous profession, nor noble, nor particularly honorable. But don't indulge the conceit that recruiters are parasites. They do jobs you don't want to, so that you don't have to.

> rely exclusively on networking with former coworkers to find you new positions

Maybe not exclusively, but having a strong network is one of (if not the) best ways to stay gainfully employed. The best jobs I’ve had were found through former coworkers, friends from conferences, or folks I’ve corresponded with on technical issues. Knowing and being respected by someone internal to a company typically bypasses the first two or three interview steps, insulates you from petty interviewers to a large degree, and overall greases the hiring wheels. Keeping in touch with former coworkers and cultivating friendships through conferences pays off tremendously!

It's very helpful, yes, for your third or fourth job. People fresh out of school - or going into a career change, or moving to a new city - typically do not have much of a 'professional network', at least of any relevance.

I've had good experiences and bad with recruiters - the bad ones, fortunately, from the employer's side of the table, although they can't have been good for the candidates in that case either.

There's an alternative though, which is to do all of your fulltime recruiting in-house, and hire a software development agency instead of a recruiting agency to fill the gaps when you're short on employees.

The model of the recruiting agency is that they produce a headcount you're willing to hire, and once you do it they take a finder's fee and are no longer involved.

The model of the software development agency, when you manage them correctly (which is certainly non-trivial), is they produce code which your dev lead approves of via a transparent process which you have approved of, and they have an incentive to get their contract renewed every year. This keeps them honest.

IMO when understaffed, all software companies should contract out their least essential engineering to a well-supervised dev agency rather than rush the hiring process with some dumbo external recruiter. In my experience most of these recruiting agencies have no technical people at all, can't judge the quality of a candidate, and are basically just marketing operations trying to circulate as many resumes as they can.

They are parasites because they actively make it hard for people to find jobs adverts directly, by flooding job sites with their own adverts.

In the age of Google it should be relatively easy to search for job ads in a particualr area. But it isn't. Because 99.9% of the search results will be recruitment agencies.

When I search job sites for jobs within 5 miles of my home town, most of the results are actually for jobs in London, which is 30 miles away, because recruiters post ads for those jobs with the "misleading" location knowing that some people from my town will be willing to commute.

I've gotten those calls and emails, too. I typically mentally put those recruiters on a "do not use" list - if they're just randomly shotgunning every number and email at some company, what are the odds that they're good at any other part of their job?

If you have no hiring power, why do you talk to the recruiter at all? It seems none of your business to tell her the team is not growing.

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