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Comment by hotpotamus | Hacker News Reader

> I'm still getting recruiter emails from many of the recent companies that have publicly said they are freezing/slowing down hiring

I wonder what a recruiter at a company with a hiring freeze in place is expected to do? I'd be inclined to say, "well then I'll be on vacation until you need me, thanks for keeping the paychecks coming", but I suspect that wouldn't work so well. I think they would want to "keep the pipeline flowing" or however you'd want to say it for a mix of practical as well as BS reasons.

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In my experience "hiring freeze" at a large company usually means "hiring freeze, but..."

Exceptions can and will be made, but need higher level approvals. The problem at these companies is that managers just want to infinitely expand their teams, because more people in your chain of command = more important manager, so they tend to use all of their budget regardless of whether they actually need to expand staff by 10% this year. Naturally, these approved hires tend to be specialized senior positions that are seen as business-critical.

In general, I think anyone with 10+ years experience will be fine, but now's a shit time to be a new grad trying to break into the market.

Oh, I pretty much get all that, but I'm just saying that even if there was a 100% freeze, a recruiter at said company still needs to look busy somehow, but of course they're in a silly position if that's the case; though I assume they still have mouths to feed and provide health insurance for.

Totally, I suspect pursuing a bunch of these "opportunities" would lead to dead ends, but I'm not looking for a job currently so I haven't found out.

This is why I'd find reporting that tries to figure this out a bit more interesting and relevant for most of our industry.

Layoffs are inevitable, will getting a new job after be a lot more difficult? Is the current deluge of recruiter emails still being spammed at me an illusion/a lagging indicator of where the hiring market is actually at?

Fired, probably. Recruiting, as a department, is unfortunately seen as expendable and the pipeline doesn't need to flow. Not that I think that's a smart decision.

Most tech recruiters seem to be recent college grades that have a string of a couple 6-12 month gigs before they move on. I am not really sure how any of these provide any value to the companies that hire them.

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