- I told him politely exactly what he was doing wrong and why I wasn't interested (including that he was recruiting me to the wrong team with the wrong programming language experience)
- He sent me the exact same pitch a few months later
- I replied again, mocking him and his company openly, telling him "feel free to contact me like this again in the future; I'll tell all my buddies in engineering about it and we'll all laugh at you (and recruiters in general)."
- In response he said "We should grab a coffee and talk more in detail about your advice."
Uh-huh.
As a developer, if you're in my rolodex as a recruiter / talent agent with a clue, I'll likely reach out when I'm considering career options -- even if it's several years down the road. As a recruiter, once you gather enough developers into that relationship, you should have your bonus-based salary covered... right?
Edit: I wrote a quick one-pager that I routinely send to recruiters who are particularly bad at their supposed job, http://notphil.com/recruiter_tips.html
Is it? Let's play devil's advocate. I think the following are at least somewhat true statements:
1) most vacancies are for run-of-the-mill jobs. Hence, the average recruiter has more of those vacancies than those that would help "building a relationship". Chances are even that most recruiters have only run-of-the-mill jobs on offer. Given that, they cannot afford to spend much time aiming precisely. So, they use buckshot instead.
2) if a recruiter finds you a job you like, you should be off the market for years (freelancing excluded). If a recruiter needs to land x jobs per year, and people stay in those jobs for y years on average, he needs a) x good vacancies per year, and b) relationships with about x times y good developers. I do not know what are realistic values for x and y, but I guess x cannot be much smaller than 25 (otherwise, one could easily run for a month without placing somebody anywhere. That probably would upset his boss, or worry the self-employed recruiter), and y probably would be around 5 years or more. So, a 'good' recruiter would need a relationship with over 100 people. Once one knows those people, that is doable (working full time, that is about two hours a month per person to keep up with LinkedIn profiles, blogs, whatever), but finding them in the first place will be a challenge.
3) it may be more profitable to get a good relationship with employers than with developers because those employers will bring in the vacancies without which you cannot do anything.
4) pay for typical recruiters may be too low to attract people with the combination of technical and social skills needed to do the job well.
However, I got into the field basically by chance. I was an intern at NASA, working as a researcher who wrote a bit of python. The day they were making me a full time offer there were a bunch of funding cuts and the only open role left over was a recruiter, so that was the job I got. Since then I have worked for Facebook, Google and a startup in SF, where I currently am. I feel like I excel at what I do because I legitimately care and understand technology, but I also understand that most people in the field have zero experience with tech and have decided that this is pretty profitable and enough like sales they will do okay :\.
I guess at this point I am coming off a bit like the Christian guy on reddit who apologizes to everyone for the people in his religion being kind of insane and awful, but if it helps, there are some of us who legitimately try really hard and really do understand the technology. Unfortunately, as the OP hypothesized, the bad ones are more noticeable because they are louder, send more emails and say stupider things. In my typical day I try to reach out to around 10, super elite people for a role after I have researched them on Github and and their blog. At some of the more sweatshoppey recruiting firms they are calling 40-50 people a day based on one word like "java" being in a resume and then hoping everything works out. This is shitty recruiting and it needs to end. We have a lot of kids straight out of school making 80k/yr to cold call spam people all day and it is seriously embarrassing to the profession. I guess this is a long way of apologizing for the rest of my colleagues.
Don't call me unless you are offering a huge pile of cash and/or 30+ vacation days.
In my case they almost all want me to work in Silicon Valley. I live in Boulder, and it would take a lot to convince me to leave.
I've had offers of VP-level equity, but what I want at this point is founder-level equity. So I'm doing my own thing.
Having said that, though, I receive a lot of phone calls from recruiters who've found my LinkedIn profile... But not the big notice that says I'm not looking for any PHP-related positions. I feel like every profile I have needs to have a "No PHP, no contracting, no moving to Canberra" notice stuck at the top.
There are some great recruiters (http://stevegilles.com/ is one such guy in Sydney), but it's unfortunate that there are just so many dropkicks that don't even do the bare minimum before contacting you.
Something like, "From: Bob Williams"
Hi, this is Stacey Fink from techwaveconsult.com... ...bla bla...
This happens a lot on LinkedIn, too. Am I the only person who gets these?
http://michaelkimsal.com/blog/dear-consultant/
95% of the stuff I get is untargeted and useless. The few people that actually read my resume online - http://michaelkimsal.com/resume - know when I'm available, and know what my terms are (no, I won't relocate to Colorado for a $45k/year job - don't send me junk or call me for this sort of stuff).
I don't really mind the emails too much, because I just delete the ones that make it past the spam filter.
On rare occasions, I'll get an email or call from a recruiter who has actually read my resume and notes, and indicates as much, and asks me for people I may know. The people who sound intelligent and have taken the time to read about me, call me up, and can pronounce my name - hey, I give them a few minutes of help. But almost no one is that professional.
What's worse is that they feel the need to CALL MY NUMBER, which they appear to be getting from our domain registration (which is used only for that!)
These aren't exactly no-name companies or recruiting firms but the actual companies themselves - we're talking about Zynga, Playdom, ngmoco, etc.
Is this something other founders have found?
No luck yet...
I wish recruiters would spend a little more time looking at my resume to see that all my past jobs have intern in the title and that I don't graduate for a while. The 'Senior Hadoop Engineer' position doesn't really fit me...
I've also had multiple recruiters contact me for the same job after telling them I wasn't interested.
Feel free to submit stuff.
I get a lot of good emails from recruiters and people looking to hire as well.
The spam from the keyword monkeys all looks the same. It's a mass email produced with a template. Usually the only personal thing in the email is the To: field.
I don't mind the ones that know the tech industry and actually make effort pairing people with positions that fit them. There aren't many of those out there, but they tend to produce higher quality candidates and consequently, get their people hired.
I do mind the ones that are spammers or more predatory. Just wastes my time, both as a job seeker and as someone with a hand in the hiring process.
Please let me know if you or someone you know is interested in position x.
Also please contact me in the future if you're ready for a spot.
Thanks -Random Recruitment message template A
Dear recruiters: adding "Urgent requirement!!!" to the subject line, or a "X-MSMail-Priority: High" header really does not make the offering more interesting to me.
The long version:
It started with a phone call one day; I was very discontented at my (then) job, and I'd contacted a couple of companies on my own already. I got a cold call from a recruiter, and instead of my usual please-go-away response, I decided to see how working with a recruiter might be. I'm already job-hunting; what's the worst that can happen? So, I asked this person (call them Alice) to please email me over some information about jobs they knew about that fit my skill set, and then I hung up.
The next day, instead of an email with jobs in it, I got an email from Alice asking to set up another phone call. I wasn't too happy about this, since I worked in a small, open-plan office and there was no place to make a quick phone call without being overheard, and I didn't want to open that can of worms with my (then) boss. I explained this, but Alice insisted on a phone call, and I caved in.
A few days later, I phoned Alice from a nearby coffee shop (for privacy from my boss). We went over my resume, which was online already; we talked about what kind of jobs I wanted, which I had said before in an email; and Alice said she'd forward my resume on to her colleagues.
Now, I'd thought that since Alice was a recruiter, she'd forward my resume to people with open positions to fill. Not so! This recruiting agency had two parts; recruiters like Alice who went out and found candidates, and other recruiters who worked with hiring managers. Alice had just forwarded my resume to all the hiring-side recruiters. The next morning, by the time I got to work, I had emails from Bob, Carol, Dave, Edna, Fred, and George. Each email talked, in the vaguest possible terms, about "exciting opportunities" with "awesome companies". And each one wanted me to set up another damn phone call.
As if that wasn't annoying enough, four of them had also left me voicemails telling me that they'd sent me email asking to schedule phone calls. In case I'd forgotten how to read, maybe?
Bob wouldn't talk via email; I tried, but he just wouldn't do it. I told Bob that I wanted a job that let me telecommute a day or two per week; he told me that no really profitable company ever let its employees telecommute, but he'd dig around his B-list and see what he could dredge up. Gee, thanks, jerk. Strike one.
Carol also wouldn't talk via email. I told Carol that I wanted a job that let me telecommute a day or two per week; she introduced me to a hiring manager who said, in no uncertain terms, that telecommuting would never happen on his team. Strike two.
Dave would use email, but he kept sending me job after job with no relation to my skills or what I was looking for. Strike three; I'm out. The rest of them were no better anyway.
In the end, it was a big waste of time. Every job they sent me was also posted on the company in question's web site as well as Github Jobs, Craigslist, or some other job board. All the recruiters did is burn up a bunch of my cell minutes and raise my blood pressure.
(Happy ending: I wound up finding an awesome job by talking to some former coworkers of mine.)
I have been placed in a few jobs by recruiters.
I rarely, if ever, call a recruiter back. And I never return any contact if they say something like, "we'll see if we have anything that fits," or especially if they want me to come by in person (those are the sleaziest).
What are they really trying to do? Is this some way for them to have "dibs" on you, in case you somehow manage to get an interview with one of their client companies independently?
And dishonest as well. You're not the client; you're the product.
Spoken word coding would kill me.
So I went to their office in SF. I had to wait around for awhile before finally being led back by what I can only describe as a bimbo recruiter. I sat at her desk among a see of other recruiters (most on phones) as she plodded through my resume and did God knows what on her computer. Basically, she completely failed to comprehend anything about my skill set and, in person, did that recruiter thing where they repeatedly mention jobs wholly unrelated to anything in your past.
Then they wanted references. Without any job having even been specified. I refused, stating that I only give references when an offer is on the table. They kept prying, saying they needed to vet me before presenting me (again, to no job that had been mentioned). Basically, I think they were just trying to pump me for contact.
Eventually, they gave up and went on to ask about past salary. As a matter of principle, I refuse to give this out. If you don't know what I'm worth, you shouldn't be in the business. They continued to pry, for some reason refusing to take "none of your business" for an answer. Finally, she asked if I could meet with some other guy.
So I sit in another room for ten minutes until this guy finally walks in. Turns out he's just there to try and break me for salary info. I keep telling him various version of, "I have a policy of never discussing past salary," to no avail. Finally he says, "look, I understand if you were underpaid," (I wasn't), "but you can either tell us, or there's nothing more we can do here." I said, "okay," and walked out.
A week later I got an email from the same idiots about another position completely unrelated to my skillset. I responded, telling them that I thought they were downright creepy and not to contact me again. He emailed me back to "disagree". I blacklisted their domain in my email client.
So, basically, my impression is that at best you are dealing with someone who values their time above yours, and more likely someone who is trying to pump you for information.