Hacker News Reader

Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I’ve gotten 7 recruitment emails since Sunday and none of them have come close to sufficiently explaining what the company or job is for me to even consider responding.

It’s bizarre how secretive they are. I imagine the recruiters are looking out for their own interests.

Recruiters are in the way.

View on HN

It’s because if you apply directly, they don’t get paid for their work. So they hide the details until you talk to them.

I’m a software engineer that started a recruiting company. The current state of the industry is pretty bad. We are trying a different approach- we are transparent. We share all the details about the company right out of the gate. Including salary info. We refuse to work with companies that won’t let us publish salary ranges. I’d love feedback (https://app.facet.net/jobs/search)

Played with the search. Hard to evaluate on salary alone, especially for senior roles if equity is part of the offer. Showing equity as well may help (percent times last valuation)

Better recruiters are retained. They get paid for a search, not for a hire. And they don't spam you on linked in.

If they don't provide enough information, no one would reply I suppose and they will not get paid at all.

First off great concept. The salary transparency seems like a huge selling point.I also love the aspect of being able to search by tech stack within your jobs, very frictionless.

Indeed I think many recruiters have it backwards. I've had good and bad experiences. There are recruiters who understand the long term game as a salesman, who build win-win relations and check in on you every few years. Those are the people that will absolutely sell your CV to your future boss and those are the people I have no problem in acting on my behalf as an intermediary.

Very cool site. The salary filter is a little unintuitive: the minimum filter appears to apply to the _lower_ end of the listed range, and be non-inclusive. For instance there is a job listed at Netgear with a range of $300k-400k, if I set the filter to $300k, it is not shown. I would probably expect it to show until I set the filter to $401k or more.

Edit: I see now that it is filtering on salary (which is visible if you look at the listing details), but the summary is showing total comp.

> Recruiters are in the way.

So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.

> compliant vs competent.

I love this distinction. So concise and clear. Thanks.

A lot of this is employee incentives. I am strongly, strongly, strongly, incentivized to avoid mistakes over taking any kind of risk to make an improvement.

I was once told recruiters did this because they didn't want you reading the email and heading straight to the company's site to apply. If you applied directly, the recruiter was out of the loop and thus out of a commission. I suppose I _might_ be able to negotiate that commission in the form of a larger signing bonus. I doubt that's a winning strategy.

It seems like it would usually be in the best interest of the potential candidate to work through the recruiter. By having been sought out, you have an advantage. You can actually talk to a recruiter and check status of your progress, where as a web application is a black box of which you may never hear another word. At some point the recruiter is going to feel invested in you.

Agreed.

Why would I skip the recruiter and apply directly unless the recruiter is a non-helpful middleman? I’d love to have a direct contact to negotiate the whole process.

If you have ever met a recruiter who was NOT an unhelpful middleman, I'd love to meet them. My spam folder is filled daily with dozens of body-shop spammers with 50-point scrabble names offering me jobs I don't do in places I won't live for money I haven't made since I quit my newspaper route in college. It's maddening and has been very consistent throughout my career.

I've toyed with the idea of finding a for-fee recruiter on my own to spam these companies and their listings and pre-negotiate out something really interesting for myself. But that's more like a sports agent. Anyone know a tech sports agency to Jerry Maguire myself with? :D

(I know, first world diva problems, sigh... it's still grating though)

Every time I’ve actually been in the pipeline at a company, I appreciated having a recruiter as my point of contact.

I've worked with ... 4 in over 25 years that I would work with again. They were helpful middlemen. Only 2 landed me anything, but I know the other 2 put in some effort and things just didn't work out. There's been dozens I've spoken with and wasted far too much time with.

tldr - they do exist, but in very short supply (like many skilled/talented people in most industries)

The recruiter that got me my current gig was great. I literally didn't fill out anything or apply. I handed him my current resume and that was it. He scheduled the interview rounds, managed the negotiations (10k more than my requirements), did everything.

Sure, he's getting like $30k from my employer in a month, but whatever. That $30k has almost no impact on my compensation.

He mainly does Dallas, but my position is fully remote.

Can you email me your Dallas recruiter’s information? Not currently in the market for anything but would be good to have on file and may be useful to some friends in town.

Email is my username with one less 0, at gmail

You've got mail.

I’ve had almost universally positive experience with recruiters, as a hirer and a recruit.

Not exactly an agent, but you can hire a negotiation consultant at levels.fyi. When you get to the nosebleed levels of comp, it makes sense to have a specialist in your corner.

> (I know, first world diva problems, sigh... it's still grating though)

The fact that there seem to be more recruiters than competent developers sometimes tells me a diva status is deserved.

The thing is, a recruiter's pay can easily be 10K per placed candidate. Looking at my current pay, that means they only need to place a handful of people a year to earn as much as I do.

I was once told recruiters did this because they didn't want you reading the email and heading straight to the company's site to apply.

I've heard this a few times as well over my career, I wonder what-beyond missing out on that sweet contingency fee-recruiters have to lose by, as the article suggest: just being freaking transparent with candidates

other than the contingency fee, what do they have to gain? that's literally how recruiters make money!

> I suppose I _might_ be able to negotiate that commission

Asking for a friend. Does anybody know what this commission is?

30% of the engineer’s first year salary.

30% of the new hire's first year salary

It varies based on where you are and the specifics of the deal. 15–30% of the first year‘s salary is normal in my experience.

That's fucking disgusting.

you realize it doesn't come out of the employee's salary, right? the company has to cough it up separately.

It actually does come out of your signing bonus if you don't ask for it.

Signing bonuses are not the norm in most places. There are many companies who would pay 30% to a recruiter but not even 1% to an employee.

As someone that has tried to do it myself, and then hired a couple recruiters, that money is well justified.

Think of all the engineers that hate recruiters. A recruiter has to talk to those folks every day.

I actually had a recuiter get angry at me recently for asking them for a basic job description and salary after their cold email had literally zero information other than the expectation I'd set up a call with them for a "very competitive role".

Like, I just don't understand the audacity of most of them. Especially when almost invariably their competitive pay is 30% of what even base level fangs would offer. Its a complete waste of everyone's time.

There are good recruiters. They're relatively rare.

They tend to stick around the industry for a while, not treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark, bury you in bullshit), and respond humanly to human requests.

You can safely block the one you're describing here, and we'll all be better if that's the standard response.

This was (and I assume nothing has changed) an endemic problem in the UK, especially for contractors.

One of the most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read about it is “Don’t feed the beast - the great tech recruiter infestation” [1 - though an archive since the original has been taken down].

[1]: https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a056586967293...

This is beautiful. Shithead is what would have happened if Terry Pratchett wrote a novel about recruiters.

I'm a freelancing software consultant from Germany that gets increasingly spammed from UK recruiters and always wondered what the case is here. Your linked article pretty much nails it though. That being said things are only slightly different here in Germany, albeit not too much.

> Recruiters are in the way.

I'm astounded at how awful recruiters have gotten. What's insane to me is how no one in the industry seems to question the spray and pray approach to recruiting.

There are a few "whoa that's neat!" things on my resume such that if a recruiter or hiring manager looked at it they would certainly notice. This works as a great test for if a recruiter is really looking at me or just spamming a keyword on my linkedin. This filters out essentially all recruiter spam.

What's funny though is how much energy companies spend to pretend like they've read your resume and want the actual you as a candidate in any way. Facebook recently tried a tactic of sending email from the hiring manager. "I really want you on my team, let's find a time to chat!" But clearly it was just an automated email since the message didn't mention any of my resume that might make me a particularly interesting candidate for the team. Another company clearly automatically scraped my resume to make it sound like the read it, but picked the most bizarre, nonsensical things to pull from it.

The funny thing is, even though I love my current job, if you came to me as said "it_does_follow, I've noticed that you worked on XXX and YYY projects, we really need someone who could do that type of work for our team, we're working on exactly these type of problems" and they touched on the actual work I've done that I'm proud of, I would jump on a call in a heart beat.

Every engineer really would prefer to work on problems in their particular domain that interest them, for a team that values them as an individual. I am certain that if recruiters spent their time targeting a much smaller pool of good candidates that really are a match for the role, they would have much higher success rates.

A recruiter contacted me for a position at the company that I co-founded. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to play along, so the only outcome was a message to the hiring manager.

As a rule, I don’t trust any third party recruiters but that generally limits me to mid sized and up companies unless I actively seek them out. On the other hand, I get an email from Amazon recruitment nearly every day and I have zero desire to work the bozos.

Yup. AWS really wants to hire me as another cog. I’ll pass.

AWS didn’t want to hire me as a cog. I was mildly insulted.

Maybe you didnt STAR hard enough to be considered a dedicated, fanatic cog :)

When I saw they had like 14 principles I was like ‘yeah, peace out’. I can deal with 3-5, but 14? You can’t see the forest for the trees.

The scary thing is that I actually agree with almost all of their principles, I've memorized my answers for each one (with overlap), I can do quite a few BFS graph problems and implement an LRU cache accurately... I can do data modeling and talk about all of the non functional requirements of distributed systems.... and still I get denied :D

Oh well! Guess it will be remote work at a normal company for me then.

It's *Bezos. (joke)

In all seriousness, my experience with third party recruiters overall has been quite good. One sought me out and continued to follow up until it sounded like a good deal, and in the end I won a sign-on bonus, decent salary, and felt like I started a good working relationship with the recruiter themselves, too.

Now, this guy hits me up for when he has potential matches for my team. It's been really good. I'm sure like most things, there are good recruiters and bad ones, regardless of first or third party.

I was also getting multiple Amazon recruiter emails per day until I actually called one recruiter who listed his phone number on the email up. He was willing to mark me as "Not Interested" or something like that in their candidate pool, and since then, I actually haven't had any more Amazon recruiter spam!

Might be worth a try if you like having a clean inbox.

I tried that and immediately got 2 more emails from different teams. To this day, they continue. I swear that nobody at Amazon talks to each other.

If you're willing to do a minimal amount of screening to figure out which ones are the good ones, third party recruiters are worth their weight in gold. They make the hiring process significantly easier.

That's just it, also in my neck of the woods. I don't get it. Aren't there companies that just hire one of their own, internal recruiters? That way, they can directly approach people going "Hi, I'm a recruiter for company X, I'm looking for an Y developer and you match our profile. This position's pay range is A - B. Would you like to have a quick chat with one of our engineers to see if this is a match for you?"

Instead I get wordy yet vague e-mails or dodgy calls where they don't dare drop the actual name of the companies until you've agreed to go on an interview. And of course, being recruiters instead of actual engineers, they don't actually know what they're talking about.

I just don't get it. I've only been approached by a 'first party' recruiter once, for Google Docs in Germany. I didn't want to relocate or work on Docs though so that was a pass for me, and that was after the 'shine' of Google had passed as well.

These are the trash recruiters. The good ones are trusted by hiring managers so you have a better chance getting noticed by going through the recruiter.

Yup. I mean I've worked with a couple good recruiters that were genuinely helpful, but many are exactly as you said, just in the way.

One recruiter just couldn't understand that the commute for me was major. I had just left a job which had a 1-1.5hr commute each way for me, and I was looking exclusively for something with no more than a 30 minute commute. They kept trying to toss my resume at jobs that had equivalent or longer commutes because "the perks are really nice" or the "pay was really good". Which I took to mean their commission would be really good.

I feel 3rd party recruiters are such a massive waste of time and a drag on the overall process. Has anyone built a true job search engine that simply links back to the original company's site (instead of some recruiting agency)? It seems that even the big job sites like Indeed are so fully of recruiters that their quality is pretty low.

I simply refuse to work with 3rd party recruiters. I've had terrible experiences with them on the hiring side.

Internal recruiters as they currently are should not exist. That's the hiring managers job, including negotiation of pay.

The only roles I've ever accepted were roles that involved a hiring manager reaching out directly to me. There's a reason for this, namely that the only recruiters worth a damn seem to be working in boutique firms and want to take a significant bite out of my future pay.

Really, just avoid them if possible.

As a hiring manager I’ve worked with internal recruiters and a good one is invaluable.

- the transactional part of setting up interview loops, coordinating schedules, etc is extremely tedious for a field of 3-5 serious candidates for a given role. Internal recruiter takes all of this away from a hiring manager who has other duties.

- an internal recruiter can plow through LinkedIn to find solid candidates, identifying ones for the hiring manager to review and, if qualified, reach out to. Again, tedious work for a hiring manager with other responsibilities.

That should be your job. Even the "tedious" parts are too important to be left to a non technical person. Time of day for scheduling interviews really does matter and the initial communication of scheduling this can tell you an enormous amount about the candidate.

Your job should also include lots of time on LinkedIn searching, as many HMs do today. Letting a recruiter do this for you will give you many more bad interviews (expensive) than you'd get otherwise.

But apparently "tedious work" is above a HM. Have fun being on conference calls all day, pretending that you and not the engineers are the ones who do the work. Worker self management needs to become more of a thing in this field in general if we can't trust HMs to take an active role in candidate selection. Companies that disvow managers and empower their employees produce far more excellent work (e.g. valve) even if they don't always do it on the schedule that execs want - so this would be a net positive for the industry.

Strong nope on pretty much all points, and its rude and presumptuous to tell me what my job should be or what other work it entails. We’re going to just have to disagree here.

You are right, although there is a risk that internal recruitment teams become a bottleneck. Particularly when the requirement for new hires is more elastic than recruitment capacity. Something has to be given a lower priority.

Internal recruiters are kind of a necessity, though: hiring managers often don't have skills in sourcing candidates, have calendars filled with other responsibilities, and are generally more expensive per hour than recruiters, for the kinds of work that either could do (screening, communicating with candidates about progress, organizing interviews, etc.).

In most cases that I've seen the internal recruiters have strong relationships with the hiring managers and are incentivized to make sure the hires actually succeed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com