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Comment by hitsurume | Hacker News Reader

Are you planning to be a recruiter? Do you understand their problems?

Business X wants super ninja engineer for less then market rate because they're cheap and believe their mission statement should scream "come work for us like a slave". You, the tech recruiter now need to find this potential engineer, how do you do this?

As you already know, step 1 is spam people on linkedin hoping for low hanging fruit. Yea we get spammed, but like Nigerian scammers and robocallers, we're not the target audience, we are just unintentional victims in the recruiters process for finding a needle in a haystack.

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No I'm considering making tools for recruiters and/or candidates.

I probably don't understand all their problems, but it certainly looks like a lot of them come their...how do i put this? either ignorance or stupidity.

I'm not just talking about the crappy companies with low budgets. On more than one occasion, it was for companies with big budgets(either unicorns, scale-ups or startups who just raised millions, and it really was the recruiter/headhunter who was screwing it up.

One of my first strategy would be to use a model to detect the candidates who are the most likely to quit their jobs(I was about to build that but I saw a startup launched something similar) (of course I shouldn't even mention "open to work" or out of work devs, that's obvious)

2nd, I would do scoring based on exact keywords matches(some of them don't even do that correctly), then on similar technologies, ie:angular/react/vue, java/c#, on which roles they used it at, for how long etc...

3rd target the employees of companies with low/declining glassdoor ratings

4th, I may scrape github accounts, to find people who just started learning a technology but may not have it mentioned on their job experience

What I don't get is, you can only contact 100 to a few hundreds people per week on linkedin, so why they do they target us so badly? Sometimes it looks like they just look for the word developer and send a message to the 100 first results

It's not like they even use fake accounts to have unlimited messages, I've rarely seen recruiters with even just 2 accounts, so they waste the small amount of messages they have on totally awful matches

I'm certain with a decent algorithm and 10-50 linkedin accounts I could do the job of 10-50 headhunters

It sounds like you're building a SAAS for Recruiters. Maybe a simpler tool then linkedin itself to find potential candidates. You'd probably want to talk to tech recruiters to see if giving candidate leads would be something they would be willing to pay for.

EDIT: As an engineer / IC, even though its nice to talk to a competent recruiter, at the end of the day its all about learning what the role is, how much it pays, and if the company seems interesting or not.

I'm not even building anything yet, just thinking. If what I described is "simpler" that linkedin tools, either their algos don't work or the recruiters are too incompetent to use them correctly.

also my post wasn't really "rate my thoughts" but "how would you fix tech recruiting?" i.e how would you build a better process than unqualified spam?

Also my theory on Linkedin, is that they have absolutely no incentive to make actually effective tools.

A recruiter have no other choices, Linkedin is basically a monopoly, if they build a tool that is actually effective at recruiting, you'd need less recruiters, so less linkedin memberships, and more engineering/processing power needed on Linkedin side, they have nothing to win by making good tools to find candidates, they just have to look good enough to purchase a membership since they have basically no competitors. It's kind of like Google Search, it's ineffective and infested by ads, by design, for money, they're just a monopoly and can get away with it.

Recruiting is essentially advertising / marketing for a company about a job opening. Email / spam is direct marketing, which can work sometimes for recruiters. You also can do web marketing, like hackernews does for its YC companies, but recruiters would need to advertise on say, Linkedin, Stackoverflow, etc. Beyond that, you have your organic marketing, which is word of mouth, or friends of friends, but then you usually bypass an actual recruiter if you go down that route.

To me "fixing" tech recruiting is trying to come up with new ways to advertise something, which I believe is an evolving process but not something that can ever truly be "fixed".

In general I would suggest starting with a design approach to the problem rather than an engineering one. Yes its frustrating, but maybe also some empathy would go a long way.

You have people who are tasked with - finding someone to do a job they personally dont understand - given requirements often by someone who doesnt understand the requirements and often not the best interview set-up - dealing with candidates who have limited time or interest in interaction and more knowledge than the person tasked with finding them (information asymmetry)

who then are working on commission and sometimes against other recruiters.

Yes, I am similarly annoyed but I find this mindset ^^^ leads to better tools then "you ignorant person, I'm going to replace you with a robot"

Look it's okay to not know what every language does, or which library is doing what.

But a lot of them are not even using the tools at their disposal correctly or are just being wildly dishonest and incompetent, a few examples:

-In the past 2 weeks I got contacted 3 times for expert JAVA/JEE jobs, java is NOT on my resume/linkedin/github, you don't have to know what it is to search for a keyword

-I got contacted for a Senior SRE role by a DECACORN, and actually invited to an interview, I'm neither a senior, nor doing SRE, none of these things are mentioned on my profile

-I get contacted for on-site jobs 1000miles away, when I'm basically mentioning everywhere that I only do full remote, even WORSE, sometimes they start by saying "open to remote/remote friendly" only to tell me after a few messages: "oh btw this requires moving to [FARAWAY_CITY], are you ok with that?"

-even worse than all that, yesterday I got contacted by a headhunter, after a terrible experience with him and a lot of time wasted, I guessed the name of the company and messaged the CEO, turns out they're not even one of their clients: they just message every dev possible then when someone say yes they message the CEO to TRY to sell them your profile for a public job posting

-they don't want to share information, we have to play a cat and mouse game to know basic stuff like what's the actual stuff I'm going to build, for what salary, using which technical stack, remotely or on the other side of the country, I feel like I'm playing a crappy game of "Guess Who?"

If this is not ignorance/incompetence or downright villainy, then what is it?

I think some industries are rotten to the core and this is one of them, there is nothing wrong with saying it. Do you have empathy for spammers?bankers?insurers?

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