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Comment by stevekemp | Hacker News Reader

Sadly I think the biggest pain I've suffered is from recruiters calling and making every conversation a rambly/chatty/friendly call that doesn't actually give any details.

I've been called by recruiters who won't name the company they're recruiting for, the salary range, and are incapable of actually describing the daily-expections beyond buzzwords.

I've found the best approach for me is to google "sysadmin helsinki", etc, and applying directly to companies. Any time I see an application form that wants facebook/linkedin/github details I just close the window.

Dealing with people (in-house recruiters possible) in the actual company cuts actually allows you to have a decent conversation about expected skillsets, areas that are involved, working hours, on-call schedules, salary, etc.

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This is because in most cases recruiters chase buzzwords and are not technical in nature at all.

I've had a handful of good experiences with recruiters, this seems to mostly be with recruiters who at one point were engineers or have been hired by FAANG. However, my best experience with a recruiter lead to a job that after about two weeks didn't fit the description of the job at hand. In short, I was under the impression I'd be writing Go and Elixir and within two weeks was writing glue code to hold together a shit-tier ruby app expected to "scale to 9-9's reliability". Other times, I've ascertained I haven't gotten a job after a botched interview and heard "officially" from the recruiter weeks later. Sometimes they're genuinely just idiots or incompetent (which is mostly annoying because it sucks when your time is wasted by someone incompetent). In short, I no longer trust recruiters.

They're not saying the company name because they don't want you going there directly and applying without them getting their hefty bonus

> They're not saying the company name because they don't want you going there directly and applying without them getting their hefty bonus

Of course, but I'm not sure why that is my problem. Does the company want good people, or just the best they can afford after recruiter fees? If the recruiter can talk the talk, I'll hang with them vs going direct, and they will get the commission. If not, they won't get the placement anyway. They would be better off telling me the company and making a case for themselves why I should work with them (dealing with salary negotiation etc) vs hiding details and ending up up with me bailing early on the opportunity. The typical approach is short-sighted imo.

For legal reasons, if a company receives a resume for a given person from 2 sources, it tosses them all and marks you as a no hire.

When 2 recruiters sends in your info, the company does not know whom to compensate. They have been sued for this. 15 years ago, the common practice, because lawsuits and fraud are expensive, it was safer to pass on the candidate.

It looks to me like another incentive to avoid recruiters as much as you can.

Getting your application thrown away because you happened to postulate a the company the recruiter didn't disclose you is just horrible.

Good form, is for the recruiter to tell you before they submit, so you can de conflict. Specifically tell them you are working with more than one recruiter, and need to avoid problems.

Between a recruiter and me submitting, I prefer the recruiter, as they should be pushing to get the job, its in their interest. If I get the job, it is no skin off of me.

Why’d I do that? What do I care if they get a bunch of money when I’m hired.

The money on the other side is ‘finite’. You could go direct and suggest getting a signing bonus instead of the recruiter getting 20-25% of your first annual salary.

I’m currently hiring for a bunch of roles and recruiters are aggressively reaching out that they “have the perfect candidate for your vacancy”. Even though I’m looking for experienced ML specialists and they’re offering someone with 1 year of Java CRUD app experience… they’re playing the numbers game on both sides of the market.

Then they should negotiate that they get the signing bonus if they make the referral, whether or not they're involved in the rest of the process.

That would only encourage them to spam the job at everyone who has the faintest glimmer of a chance of getting the job. Which is kind of what they do now..

This is still sort of bananas to me. I can't imagine applying to a company without... Well, knowing and investigating the company. How early in the process is this information normally revealed?

In my experience, you submit your resume to the recruiter, they pass it on to the company, and if the company wants to go further, the recruiter will give you the details.

There's a technique I've experimented with over the past 2 years that seems to cut through some of these cloak-and-dagger games.

State that you want to conduct your own research into the company first, and that by hiding the name they are coming off as unprofessional. To avoid the questions on conflict and timing, add this note: "You can use the this message and its timestamp as a proof of first contact."

Some come back with actual details. Always be kind and courteous with them.

Nonetheless, what I wrote back in 2014 still holds true: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/pages/recruiter-anxiety.ht...

> Any time I see an application form that wants facebook/linkedin/github details I just close the window.

You might be doing yourself a disservice there. It varies by company but I ask our HR team to offer the option of LinkedIn profile as an alternative to uploading a CV/resume in case you have the former but don't have the latter to hand or prepared. It's still a minority but I do see people come through who use their public LinkedIn profile as their CV.

Github is a complete waste of time as a guideline to anything useful. If there was any doubt about that in the past the recent trend I've seen of people setting up separate GitHub accounts for each job they have and keeping their personal account separate has completely removed it. (Sometimes this behaviour is company mandated, but often it's peoples' own choice.)

I've never seen the point at all of asking for other social networks because that stuff is none of my business.

Why do you find GitHub useless? Doesn't having access to a good chunk of code samples help guide the decision, even if it isn't their whole body of open-source work?

I don't use my Github as something public facing, so if you saw my account, it would look like a random mish-mash of forks, partially started projects, etc. Because it's a tool I use everyday, I don't want to spend the time making it a presentation layer. That's what Linkedin is for.

Fair point, I guess I was more complaining about sites that ONLY allow linkedin for applications - something I don't see too often but something that seems to becoming more common.

Agreed.

I see the request for social media, as a method to determine if you will fit in. If the group you are going to is extreme in some way, it would be a blessing to avoid them. e.g. if they all play tennis and they have their own tennis tournament ... and you hate tennis ... you will hate working there.

Makes me wonder if you, as a potential employee, should ask to see their linkedin / facebook pages .....

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