Tech recruitment: how not to do it | Hacker News Reader

Tech recruitment: how not to do it

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224 pointsjfarmer37 comments

There's a great way to beat them. Apply for the job. If you don't get it, sue them saying they didn't hire you because of your sexuality. Use this email from the recuiter to show that they are clearly not an equal opertunities employer. Hopefully the recruiter will now no longer be employed (by anyone).

Or alternatively go into the job interview, and make lots of homophobic/sexist/racist jokes there (e.g. "Good to see you keep the fags out and the skirts in the typing pool! My kind of company!"). If they act a bit suprised/embarrassed, point out the recruiters email, and tell them that recruiter will attract that kind of applicant.

Actually in the US it is not illegal to discriminate based on sexual orientation. There may be laws in New York state prohibiting it, I don't know. But in most of the US it is totally legal to post a job listing saying "Programmers wanted. No fags allowed."

It is pretty despicable.

There is, and ought to be, a difference between 'wrong' and 'illegal.'

This, this, a thousand times this!

The only thing the government can do to effect change in the actions of the people in the world is by the threat of jail if you do (e.g. steal) or do not do (e.g. pay taxes) something. That's all they can do.

For every problem the government "fixes", someone is losing a freedom or liberty that they once had.

For almost all of the problems in the world caused by the behaviors of humans, more laws are almost never the solution.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991756

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has interpreted the prohibition of discrimination based on conduct to include discrimination based on sexual orientation.

http://www.opm.gov/er/address2/guide01.asp

Currently the Employment Non-discrimination Act of 2009, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, is being considered. The Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has been introduced in Congress to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Neither of these acts has been passed, yet - there is still no federal protection against sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace.

Almost half of the U.S. states, including the District of Columbia, have active laws that prohibit sexual orientation discrimination in both private and public workplaces. These states include

California, Colorado, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin

Additionally, a few states prohibit sexual orientation discrimination in only public workplaces, such as for state employees: Delaware, Indiana, Michigan, Montana, and Pennsylvania.

Beau has been around a long time. I remember him posting jobs to the jobs.perl.org site and perl jobs list years ago (back in 2001). We had to ban him for similarly bad behavior.

I'm amazed he's still around.

That's impressive because he sounds like he's 14. "Fags ... suck dick". Real fucking creative Beau.

hum, just last week he was trying to create a page on job4dev to post "listings" with no information whatsoever about any of the actual companies that were hiring. Usually our moderation system is enough to stop recruiters to add vacuous pages to the wiki. But he went ahead and start spamming the comment pages anyway.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be possible to add to job4dev a service that would turn recruiters into a value-add into the recruiting space. But that kind of thing just goes to show that they just want to work as middlemen and really need to be cut out.

Did you ever consider the possibility that "Beau" is not actually a recruiter, but rather a mid-level troll with a creative cover story?

What, like Jon Harrop?

Or that Beau is a chatbot? I would not be surprised if the first few stages in the recruiter/recruitee process could be automated by some email scripts!

Sketchy in a lot of ways.

His LinkedIn profile has stars around the name http://www.linkedin.com/in/opensourcestaffing

He also has every state in the nation listed twice (postal code + full state name). SEO bait I guess.

It seems surprising to me that some of the fairly big companies listed on their website (eBay, Disney Internet Group, Rapleaf, Shopzilla) would engage with someone so visibly awful. http://open-source-staffing.com/clients.html

Fairly big companies often have surprisingly minimal filters for "visibly awful." Passing due diligence is easy when the process does not include common sense, and individual managers are likely to have misaligned incentives.

I also love how , as a recruiter, he is also apart of every Developer association out there.

The moral here has way less to do with tech recruiting than it does with just being a civil human being.

My guess is that someone has already taken matters into his/her own hands, check out his blog (redirected to from Beau's domain mentioned in the post):

http://opensourcestaffing.wordpress.com/

The latest post is (probably) not of his own doing I would say.

I'm afraid to say I expect it's actually his own doing. Considering his behavior it doesn't seem out of place for him.

The post: http://opensourcestaffing.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/504/

This guy is such a troll - where's anonymous when we need them?

His blog is now marked as private and requires a login

Here's the Google webcache

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TQGS39z...

Not is back, post deleted

Sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting my time. Idiots like this will never be entirely eradicated from the industry.

Maybe my next blog post should be a direct attack on recruiters, calling them out on there bullshit attitudes and illegal tactics.

Just because sexual orientation is not a "protected class" on a federal level, employment laws in nearly every state are very clear that in addition to the protected classes, you can not discriminate arbitrarily.

But it doesn't matter, in New York (SONDA) and just about every blue state has very clear anti-discrimination laws when it comes to sexual orientation.

And of course, regardless of the laws, nobody would allow this person to represent them or work for them.

This guy needs to be terminated immediately, his behavior is totally disgusting and reprehensible.

I do hope that whoever knows him personally points out just how unprofessional those emails were.

"whoever knows him personally" = "their boss"

"points out just how unprofessional those emails were" = "fires them"

I'm more hoping a good friend would tell him, "Beau, stop it. You're being a dick." Firing him will not stop his behavior.

People like that tend not to surround themselves with friends like that.

I'm glad Gould got called out on this; he probably just lost himself a lot of future business by being so cocky.

Called out on Hacker News and similarly hacker-y circles... that's not exactly the "$50K in NYC" demographic.

well if anyone googles his name, this will probably come up, right? I hope most people would be smart enough to do that before buying his services.

The Xbox-Live approach does not strike me as the prudent course of action for trying to recruit others for your cause. Even when actually on Xbox Live.

I've questioned how some recruiters that I've dealt with had jobs, but never had one remotely reached this kind of level of fire-him-now-ness.

Nice, website now 404ing and blog is private.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JqLMFQ-...

Huh. I'm curious why. The splash page still loads, but none of his links (contact, about, jobs...) work. All 404

This is also our problem in our local python users group http://groups.google.com/group/pinoy-python-users/browse_thr... , situation is like this:we have a conversations to help someone with their errors and the next thread reply/post is all about job posts! So I built them a simple job portal.

This guy is all over the NYC tech recruiting scene. I have some 20 emails from him over various tech mailing lists. Funny thing is, even though I see 4 or 5 emails a day from recruiters, his name is so unique I actually remembered him! I don't think people should be crucified for single outbursts, but it's safe to say that this guy is on a tear and needs taking down.

Yeah, not all that surprising. He frequently adds posts to the NYPHP email list as well, and they just come off as.. less than legit. Even still, this is rather poor form.

https://twitter.com/ossjobs what a jerk

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