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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Finding a job is not just interviewing. It's a massive time sink. Researching companies, filling out applications and web forms, "quick" phone chats with recruiters who refuse to just dump info over E-mail, re-studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode or other skills prep, doing company take-home tests and "challenges". And then for every 100 applications, you might get interviews at 10 companies, producing 1 offer. It's quite a bit of busy work, and if you have many work deliverables or are booked solid in meetings 8:30 to 6:00, you're not really going to have time to do it. I've always had to take blocks of time off (vacation or unpaid time off) in order to seriously get another job.

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I've thought about piloting a temp personal assistant service for software engineers during their job search.

Imagine the following...

- Recruiter outreach is filtered / summarized.

- Recruiter phone screens are scheduled for you, batched together.

- Your assistant pre-screens for basic preferences: remote, salary, company size, role scope/level.

- Interview loops are scheduled for you.

- Receive a packet of spaced repetition exercises (optional), digest of Blind/Glassdoors messages, compensation data from the company/industry/area.

- Negotiation practice, coaching

In my experience, "forwarding this to my assistant for scheduling" is a power move.

Some of above is handled by agency-style recruiting (Cybercoders) but the quality of those leads is on the low end. The high-end recruiting agencies focus on the employer side of the equation. Feels like there's an interesting gap for a service focused on a highly-skilled candidate's side of the equation.

It's a great idea!

I've worked on a lot of these processes. If you're interested in talking, my Twitter is linked in my HN profile.

Followed, just in case! I probably won't pursue this idea (too many other things going on), so anyone who wants to run with this should try it.

I had good luck reaching directly out to a recruiter working at a VC firm last time I was looking. I'm not sure how this would work without a direct introduction, but presumably one could reach out on linkedin/email. This was great from the perspective of outreach/filtering.

It's a good idea. In show business, this person is your agent. If you can afford someone to do this, it makes sense to offload this tedious work.

A key difference seems to be that in show business you get many more offers. In software you might only switch jobs every few years. So the benefit of saving X hours every time gets amortized to a very low amount.

No, in show business you get lots of offers at a higher level but at a lower level the agent is also in charge of going out and selling you, also at the higher levels if you hear of a role you want you tell your agent, Sy, get me that part.

I know of one guy who was a consultant who had a dedicated agent to handle this stuff for him. Which lots of consultants get their jobs through agencies who match consultants with companies anyway, so it just seemed like a natural jump up to this level for him.

On the one hand, this sounds like a fantastic idea.

On the other, I get sort of a bullshit-job vibe on this, in the sense that it would an entirely new type of professional invented just to paper over inefficiencies in an existing system.

Is there a way we could improve recruiting across the industry that would make this sort of specialised PA unnecessary?

(Asking not just hypothetically -- it could help me design sensible recruiting processes.)

If everyone did this, recruiters would get no advantage over sending an email with the same information, since they wouldn't be able to "persuade" an assistant of anything.

So using assistants would be one way to make using assistants unnecessary.

I don't get the reasoning, when a recruiter contacts me they tell me we think you would be fantastic for this job, and then they describe the job, sometimes no match, sometimes match. The assistant takes care of this step, should the recruiter that has a bad job be able to convince you to take the meetings even though you are a bad match?

The recruiter with good matches asks for meeting time, salary, you figure it out reply. In this scenario assistant does that. Do you think recruiter is supposed to talk people into meeting at inconvenient times, interviewing for jobs with salaries below what they require? I think none of these things make a difference to the recruiter whether you provide the information or the digital job filtering agent does it.

It might surprise a lot of us here on HN but there are people who absolutely love this type of work. The trick is finding someone who also has the discipline to record notes and track all of the details.

While nice in some sense - I honestly find this part of the job search the least tedious, least stressful, and least time consuming. Yes, helpful to have done by someone else. Willing to pay a lot of money to have someone else do this? Probably not.

Leetcode and system design prep take up the overwhelming majority of job search time. (Hundreds of hours - months of nights and weekends) Then the interviews themselves come second. I did something close to 200 hours of interviewing for my last job search (including some dozen onsites which were all 5-6+ hours). This is hugely time consuming… spending a half time spamming some websites is hardly that difficult in comparison.

And yes, I had to finally take time off of work to accomplish this. I usually take PTO to do this or just quit my job outright or get severance to help as well. (All the above sometimes)

I'll second this and add that you're probably sending out fewer but more targeted applications as you progress further in your career.

Eh. Maybe but I still have to interview with dozens of companies because you need competing offers, warm ups to calibrate performance, and so forth.

I don’t expect any less than 10 onsites for any job search regardless of tenure.

This has not been my experience at all. My three most recent job switches (over 5 years) have gone like this:

1. Ex-coworker or recruiter reaches out with an opportunity that sounds interesting.

2. I ask for comp range and make sure it's acceptable (50%+ increase).

3. I go through the interview loop and get an offer

In there have been maybe 3-4 short recruiter calls that went nowhere for fit or comp reasons. In my life, once I got to the tech screen stage I have gotten an offer 6 out of 9 times.

Is this other people's experience as well? Maybe I have just been extraordinarily lucky?

Three times 50%? So 337.5%+ of your salary pre-first hop? I assure you, the far majority will not just get offers for that, if they can even find a job willing to make such a jump in comp. They'll be looking for those offers themselves. If only for the fact most devs are still in the first 5 years of their career.

Yes, closer to 4x (120k-480k). Admittedly I was originally underpaid even for my market area and the rise of remote work has allowed me to find jobs in higher-paying markets.

Anyway, my main point was that I have found inbound job requests from recruiters or referrals to have a very high success rate.

This is closer to my experience than your parent, fwiw. Though I have done job searches myself rather than going with inbound outreach from my network.

My recent job search was more like 8 -> 5 -> 3 rather than the 100 -> 10 -> 1 in the parent comment.

Same

This is my experience also. The only time I had a 100 -> 10 -> 1 type experience was looking for my first job leaving the military. That mostly due to me over applying for jobs.

Step 2 is the key.

Don't take a call just because the recruiter asks for one. They're just trying to extract as much attention from you as possible because they think extracting lots of attention from you is a positive signal and increases their chance of closing the deal.

Ask for comp upfront. Only go forward with those who disclose comp in your desired range. This will eliminate 99% of the wasted time in your job search, if you're not doing it today.

> "quick" phone chats with recruiters who refuse to just dump info over E-mail

This is definitely a pain, 100%. I've read as many as 90-95% of messages some engineers get from recruiters don't include comp at all within the outbound, it's a shame! On top of that, it's many times impossible to understand anything deep about the company, what projects they have going on, information about the team members you'd be working with etc. Recruiting, and job descriptions in general, can do so much more than they do today and actually be an asset to engineers instead of time drains.

I have never had an initial recruiter message contain comp info. Literally 0 out of hundreds. Maybe 10% are willing to provide hard numbers upon request, and about 50% have given me numbers after a 15 minute ~~phone call~~ sales pitch.

Ya the researching companies thing takes so long esp. if you're going for startups. These sites saved me a lot of time: https://topstartups.io/, https://breakoutlist.com/

Also helps to take a few days off here and there to get it all done, even if you're working remote

Sometimes there's also a part before job hunting - preparing your portfolio. Nowadays you get a lot of "show us what you made on GitHub" - which sort of makes sense from employers standpoint because you get to see code quality and ability of someone to think independently. I'm changing the tech stack completely - different language, different type of development (at least from the day job perspective, I had some 2,000h of experience with it on a side project I can't publish yet in the recent 2 years) and I will definitely need to prepare something, otherwise I have almost no relevant experience to show. I suppose it's going to take at least 500h and that's being optimistic. Time is slightly on my side though, as the day job is freelancing, I think I can cap it at 30h/week average and have remaining 30h/week for the portfolio project - which hopefully means I will be ready 5 months from now, but I would not be surprised if it blows up further.

The recruiter calls are the worst waste of time! On top of that, if a recruiting agency sets you up, you're looking at an additional call with each company recruiter and/or hiring manager, before even starting to interview.

On top of that, each individual call/interview takes up some adjacent time to schedule + prep and occupies your headspace until it happens.

I guess I am kind of privileged, but with experience at a "brand name" employer I get interviews at 100% of places I apply to, and offers probably 75% of the time overall. Most of them I have declined though because I've found it hard to increase comp (or there were other red flags).

If you have some recruiters that you've worked with in the past and cultivated a good relationship with them, then it makes entire experience a lot more streamlined. My last three jobs in the industry all I've done is literally flip a switch on my LinkedIn to "looking for work" and then notified my recruiters. They lined up some interviews - I picked the ones that I liked, finished the interviews and had offers from several companies within a few weeks. No grinding at all.

>producing 1 offer

And then the resulting offer isn't even on par with your current comp.

It's almost as if the entire thing is designed maliciously on purpose.

Depending on diff between your current pay and potential pay, one might be better off quitting and searching for the new job to create best possible outcome.

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