How to Not Be a Shitty Recruiter | Hacker News Reader

How to Not Be a Shitty Recruiter

team.adzerk.com

53 pointssnkahn52 comments

If developers were artists, we'd all be getting emails like this:

Hi user24,

I saw your profile on ArtIn and wanted to see if you might be interested in a commission.

The role requires significant experience using paint and canvas, as well as familiarity with brushes. Experience with chalk or pastels is not required, but would be a bonus. Our artwork hangs on walls around the house, where it is seen by lots of people. Our house is very exciting.

We are offering a competitive rate of pay in a very dynamic house.

If you're interested, please contact me. Alternatively if any of your artist-friends might be interested, I'll happily use them instead. I don't really care if it's you or someone else that fills this role so long as you tick the boxes. As far as I'm concerned one artist is much the same as the other yeah? Obviously the most important thing is how long they've been painting for, and whether they've used the exact techniques our other artists have.

Look forward to hearing from you!

A. Recruiter.

NB: I'm not trying to say that as a developer I am an artist, or that you can't quantify what makes a good developer. My point is that if you were an artist, would you take that role? You can't even answer the question because it doesn't tell you anything. Every art commission needs experience with paint! Is it a portrait? An abstract piece? What size?

Recruiters: your job is to attract me, not simply to find me. Tell me that your company is growing, which industry you're in, that you'd rather do it right than fast, that as a developer I'll have input to the product direction, etc etc.

Attract me.

I'm pretty sure that graphic designers who work primarily on marketing materials, and the like get emails like that.

After all, they're going to take art direction from someone else on the project so in the minds of the management, one junior 'line' artist is pretty much the same as any other.

I don't think that "I don't really care if it's you or someone else that fills this role" is such a bad thing. Good companies want developers that are smart -- they don't care about you because you're you, they care about you because you possess the characteristics of someone who will do good work for them. Similarly, if you want some graphic design, there are a number of people who will do a good job. You want any of those people, not one specific person. Unless, that is, that person has done something specific that makes them a particularly good fit. But you can offer jobs without being that specific.

In my own experience, I've gotten jobs both ways. I got a job at a small Perl web app company because of my work on a Perl web framework. The lead developer approached me directly. I've also gotten jobs where someone has recommended me because of general ability rather than any specific work.

I generally loathe recruiters, but I do feel a bit sorry for them. They are up against the real recruiters in this field: other software developers.

The pattern that I've seen over and over is:

* Good developer #1 starts a project.

* Hey, this project is great and there's more work here than one person can handle.

* Asks other good developers to see who is in between projects.

* Gig is filled without a "recruiter" ever knowing about it, because the real recruiter was Dev #1.

I don't feel sorry for them - they chose that profession, and most are starting to feel the futility of their job. What I'd like to see is a recruiter that works backwards: they asks what companies you want to work with, then actively goes out and see if they can form connections to get you an interview in those companies...

it will not happen.. Right now I have an interview with Tumblr in a few weeks, how did I get it if not going through their own recruiter?

I asked David Karp if I could turn in a proof of concept Tumblr Android app as part of the application process.

Contrast that with FB, which I am still in the Internal Recruiter shuffle..but is a holiday today maybe it will change on Monday.

That does happen. Recruiters that cultivate relationships in both directions are known as "full desk" recruiters.

The increase in bad recruiters is simply because the demand for developers is so high and there is room for them in the market. To me it's starting to feel like 1999 again - developers talking about what they are entitled to like they are sports stars. I just hope 2014 isn't like 2002 - I remember going to a job fair in Waltham where thousands of folks showed up for a couple of hundred jobs. For all you 20 somethings - enjoy this time while you can.

Glad someone else remembers this well. Every time I read some self-righteous, mid-20-something blogger ranting like they are Michael Jordan, I remind myself of when the first bubble blew-up and there WEREN'T jobs or opportunities for a lot of really talented/smart people.

I remember the last two career fairs at my engineering school in late 2002 / early 2003. There were crickets chirping. Five airlines had booked booths, but only one sent a representative to say "we're not hiring.' The other four were left empty. Tech companies were about as sparse, but most at least sent a rep. The only ones doing any real hiring were FedEx (but not for technical positions - package handling only!) and a GeoEngineering firm that was looking for GIS grads.

Talk about depressing.

I've been lucky to experience this a few times. I graduated college in 1992 and decided to go to grad school partly because of the recession. When I got out of grad school in 1994 I went into the defense industry (cool job building realtime control systems) which was hemorrhaging jobs because of the "Peace Dividend". We had folks with 20 years of hard core experience basically begging for jobs when they opened.

I am terrified of this possibility. I wasn't out there to experience the 2002 version, but I am deeply aware of it.

Number one rule (for all sales people, not just recruiters): be polite.

A remarkable percentage of recruiters can't graciously accept a politely negative response. Threatening to report me to my boss for endangering the (nonexistent) relationship with their firm was not an acceptable counter; I hung up. Ringing every nearby phone number in the hopes of finding someone to connect him to my boss was aggressively stupid.

True story.

Upon very politely declining an offer from a recruiter on Linkedin, I was very surprised to find a response saying "send me your resume, the offer expires tonight. one day you will be on the job market again, and I will not help you". Unbelievable, I wonder why he had to go out of his way to sound like a jerk, and why he thought that would be a good idea...

Why do recruiters on Linkedin always ask for a resume, anyway? Don't they already have it?

I think they are too lazy to actually look at your profile, they just do a keyword search and then contact you directly form the search page (you can still do this on LinkedIn if memory serves me correctly), apparently, being bothered to click on your profile and read through it would take too much of their precious time

I suspect they ask for a resume so they can send it to someone else. Extracting a resume from linkedin is work (AKA an opportunity for an application or linkedin feature).

I wonder whether folks are more likely to keep their linkedin profile up to date or their resume.

Every LinkedIn profile has a "PDF" button that generates a pretty nice-looking resume representation of the profile.

There's already applications that build structured data (aka HRXML) from scraped/API-grabbed LinkedIn data.

There's a ton of automation in the recruitment industry.

Don't know how it works in the US (or your country of being), but in my country ID laws expect you have to give companies explicit permission to handle your data in the recruitment process.

There are so many people that are like this..and not just in recruiting.

I've run into so many people that don't know how to treat their customers properly and have lost me completely. It actually gives me an advantage as a business owner, because my customer service is #1.

It would be interesting is the demand side of this industry (those startups and tech companies with with a sense of ethics and responsibility) starting demanding certain standards of their tech recruiters.

If you are a desirable company working with interesting technology, and a recruiter does an offensive job trying to recruit, that reflects badly on the company who hired the recruiter.

The companies should stipulate rules for the recruiters to earn the recruiting fee. Rules like: in the first email and and solicitation such as on a list, you must disclose who you hiring for, the nature of the project, the technologies involved, etc.

Companies could even resolve this issue by issue a company email like joe.mcruit+recruiters@companydoingthehiring.com that forwards leads to the appropriate recruiter. It's not a perfect solution, but any solution that allows candidates to deal with the recruiter in a way that holds the recruiter accountable to the company for which they are working can only serve to raise the very very low bar we have at the moment.

If they disclose who they are hiring for then what's to stop a candidate applying to the company directly? Cuts out the recruiter and they lose their fee. I've known this has happened to a few friends when they've dealt with recruiters who were stupid enough to disclose this in the first e-mail.

Bingo. It's not the only problem though. There is a surprisingly large number of recruiters posing as developers in order to find out who the competition is recruiting for, your reason, coupled with this is the sole reason why recruiters never disclose their client.

Wow, I didn't know this! Cheeky buggers :)

Just do a search for the text in the email and the real company's job posting will come up.

While the DHH quote was amusing, sadly it turns out be just a fictional scenario created by one of the commenters of the gist: https://gist.github.com/1285068#gistcomment-56327

Damn. I laughed pretty hard when I read that though. Mostly because we all know full well that if you or I did invent something, we would be asked by a recruiter how many years experience we had, and if it was invented 2 years ago, you would be asked for "3 to 5 years experience".

There was a HR story on the interwebs some time ago, when a job ad had a bullet with more years of .net experience that .net actually existed on the market.

There is a solution here, but not everyone will like it.

Shitty recruiters do this shit because at the end of the day, it still works. Or works well enough for them to make a decent salary. Really shitty recruiters quit after a year or two because their base salary is very low (or even zero) and they don't get their commissions if they don't get placements. Ignore them and they will literally die off.

All the Engineers, Designers, Developers who complain about this practice should just put these recruiters on blast. I freaking LOVE what DHH is doing with those stupid recruiter emails. Why don't all of you do that? Those shitty recruiters will be on notice, their Agencies will be embarrassed by the bad PR or Google Search results and no startup will use their services.

At the end of the day, a good recruiter (full disclosure: that's my day job) will still be in demand because they do more than push resumes.

Cheers, Hong

A few weeks ago one recruiter made the rounds of all the developers who worked in our building- with violent disregard to the skill sets of said developers. They were looking for a senior backend dev, but this recruiter was emailing frontenders, UXers, designers, devops, they really didn't care who you were. The pitch itself was ridiculous bordering on nonsensical due to the recruiter's extreme non-understanding of what he was describing, and he didn't bother to change it from person to person. Over a period of a few days we watched as this same pitch cropped up from person to person. It was painfully obvious this guy either had no clue, or wasn't even trying. Really, what kind of response did he expect? Who doesn't want to work for a 'HOT Music 2.0 startup'!

I tend to go whenever I can when a recruiter asks to meet. Most of them are the same. Interviewing is a skill I know I should work on. But usually recruiters have a job they want to fill and they myopically try to pigeonhole you into it.

Yesterday's experience...

Recruiter: So I see you have .NET experience. I'm going to put that at the top of the list on your profile.

Me: Yes I do, but as you can see my primary experience and interest is now mobile development and Linux.

Recruiter: I'll just put .NET on the top of your profile.

When a recruiter asks to meet you, they should be trying to form an impression and finding that perfect match when it comes along.

I love the how-many-years-of-experience response, "All of them."

tl;dr: Use smaller agencies or solo recruiters, ignore the big firms.

Just another prospective (from a high-end recruiter): You get what you pay for.

10% on a developer making $60-100k means that you need to push a ton of paper to make out a decent living at an agency. Its like the difference between Apartment Brokers vs Real Estate Brokers: The Apartment Brokers are jokers, because they need to deal with 1000's of people to make the 30-40 fees a year that make up a decent living. A Real Estate Broker can do a tenth of the deals and make twice as much. The quality of service is a lot higher.

Likewise, in high paying industry with top tier compensation the recruiters are much higher quality. I only need to make 5 placements a year to make six-figures, where as the jokers at Selby Jennings or those other massive paper houses need to make 15-20 placements to even get close to that.

I can afford to treat candidates with respect, protect their information, and tailor their search. Most technical recruiters can't.

My advice, if you don't make over $100k and want to use a recruiter, go with someone working at a really small firm or by themselves. They take service much more seriously than the well known spam-a-lot agencies.

PS: We're hiring, and work in a very cool, niche high tech space.

I made https://jobpoacher.com/ so you can send all of the shitty recruiters (and good ones) to an anonymous email address.

tl;dr and Some thoughts :

Actually talk about the project - The people sending out these emails and pitching for a position for you to fill, don't really know what the project is all about. Many a times they don't even know the difference between iOS and Android.

Money isn’t everything! - I don't know how many startups actually go out and pay a recruiter firm to do this job. From what I feel, i think in a startup its always best that the founding team takes this job up on their own.

Please never call us - so true!

Be active in the community! - Most of the times because of their lack of awareness and motivation to keep themselves updated, they don't really bother doing something like this. They just go out to a forum and post a job without thinking what would happen next.

Be transparent - As I said before, most of the times they don't know.

It seems to get worse every time I recruit (we're hiring, cheeky link - http://www.easyart.com/content/help/jobs.ghtml).

Every job ad I've written clearly says "no recruiters". Luckily, I don't have a phone number in this office. But in the first week I had:

* About a dozen recruiters calling our generic office line (despite the "no recruiters")

* A recruiter tracking down my personal contact details to offer his services

* A recruiter blatantly lied to a colleague who asked him "are you a recruiter". I Googled his name and number and found out that he was.

Absolutely relentless. Why they think I would do business with them is beyond me.

To be fair, I've had some emails from nice ones too, but the vast majority have been very unpleasant to deal with.

I suspect that 80% of the calls I get are from recruiters - typically offering positions out of state. Being the polite guy I am, I used to make it a point to respond to all voicemails with a "no thank you". These days, I use an "unable to answer" message that states up front that, if you are a recruiter, DO NOT leave a voicemail - email me instead. And yet, I still get voicemails sometimes. :P

For all of the recruiter emails I get, I have a GMail canned reply that states up front the geographic areas I'm interested in and the minimum rate that I'm looking for. For the vast majority of these emails, I never receive a response.

I have this same basic "disclaimer" at the top of my LinkedIn profile. Every once in a while, I get a cold email from a recruiter who has actually read it. 10 cool points to them.

Has anyone else noticed a trend of getting a lot of calls from offshore recruiters? I don't mean to sound xenophobic but I seem to get this stream of calls now (often 1-2 per day) from "recruiters" who I can barely understand as they have very thick accents, that are using poor phone connections (obviously over VOIP). My solution is that I don't answer the phone unless I'm expecting a call, everything goes to voicemail for me to weed through later. I am fairly open about putting my phone number up on resumes publicly, as it has benefited me before, so I guess its a price to pay but I just find it odd and can't help but wonder if they are actually recruiting for a real position or just trying to scam me in some way.

Yes, and I can't imagine anybody I would want to work for using such a service.

I've had a lot of this as well. I don't think it's a scam (though I wouldn't know since, like you, I just ignore those calls). The positions these people are recruiting for seem awful to me, which would explain why they're hard to fill (and why the company is using a seemingly cheap service to fill them).

Yeah, I agree.. well I have also gotten some emails (from seemingly similar types of "recruiters") who do some sketchy things such as asking me to fill out a form with SS#, etc, obviously these go right to my spam box.

Is your resume on careerbuilder?

I get on call/week from someone that found me on careerbuilder that matches your description. Most of the ones I get are 3-6 month consulting gigs at some crappy company in a different state/industry.

I think I have an old resume up there.. also, its definitely more than 1 person, although some do call repeatedly, its amazing how rude they can be, if you don't answer they call again in 20 minutes and keep doing this 3-4 times.

I'm not sure you understand which one of you is being rude. Calling back later is a perfectly acceptable thing to do when there is no answer.

You must be a recruiter. Acceptable is leaving a message and waiting for me to call back or calling back a couple of days later if there is no answer.

If you are calling me every 20 minutes: 1) you know me personally or 2) it's an emergency.

yes I do understand. Keep in mind this is someone I've never talked to before, they call me during working hours and have some expectation that I will answer and when I don't they just decide rather than leave a message and call back a day or two later they are just going to keep childishly calling me back, interrupting my work in the process. I can understand if its someone with whom I've already had contact and I agreed to make myself available but only a salesperson / recruiter would actually believe that I am the one being rude.

I can never resist these discussions. Relevant: http://voltsteve.blogspot.com/2011/07/all-that-is-wrong-with...

Recruiter perspective: I admit there are some really bad recruiters. And they don't improve, because either A)Lazy or B)What they do works for them.

There are two reasons why a recruiter won't release a client name initially. 1) Some recruiters use a fake position to engage a candidate in a conversation 2) Most commonly, a recruiter does not want a candidate to go around the them and apply directly or tell another recruiter about the opening. It happens and it sucks.

Two types of recruiters those that have exclusive contracts and those that do not..

Your description does not hold for those with exclusive contracts.. in fact those are types of recruiters you should interact with as they are very pleasant.

but the best was

Recruiter: How many years of Rails experience do you have? DHH: ALL OF THEM!

LOL at the title

Recruiters are great at getting you bunch of practice interviews (at companies you don't care about).

Then you can go to the real interviews prepared ;)

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