Career Advice Nobody Gave Me: Never Ignore a Recruiter (2022)

TL;DR: I suggest you ignore random recruiters.

Recruiters are paid to get someone (you?) to a position: it is not their job to care on whether that's the best choice for you.

The recommendations on the article require quite a lot of time managing recruiters, and it is only a matter of time, if everybody starts using these "techniques" that recruiters will devise defenses...

So I'll give an opposite view: ignore random recruiters. Use the time to setup alerts for companies/jobs you really aspire to get to, and fight for those instead.

100% agree. A tangent to this which I’ve found striking when talking to friends in other professions, is how spoiled I’ve been as a developer. I’ve _never_ had to apply for a job. Whenever I’ve been ready to move on I’ve just flipped that “open for suggestions” switch and within a couple of weeks I’ve signed on for a new company. As far as I’ve heard, that doesn’t happen in other industries. People work their asses off _looking_ for work. Even if I also sometimes get annoyed with particularly generic outreaches, I check myself and remind myself how lucky I am to have that problem.

This feels like that meme where raccoons are telling people to leave their trash outside so they can ransack the trash cans.

Of course recruiters would say this. If you are so naive that you'd buy into this narrative I have a submarine adventure for sale you might be interested in.

I will caveat this bad and misleading advice with something more useful:

You never know which recruiters will actually have reasonable work for you. Most do NOT deserve even a microsecond of your time. But up front, they will all look the same. I got one of the most meaningful jobs of my life through a recruiter.

I hate them to my bone because they do not have my interest in mind, and they will be very deceptive and dishonest about what's going on. They are not there to be friendly, nice or care about you. They are a repetitional splash guard for the awful, inhuman and socially toxic behavior that corporate values celebrate.

The recruiter that got me a good job was honest and up-front, he wasn't playing games. The key is dealing with reasonable people, and I think the recruiter industry just attracts a lot of people who are prone to "selling" things regardless of merit.

To put my response to the title / article in a more poetic format

Recruiters are used car salesmen, just because you can smell their sleeze a mile away doesn't mean there isn't a gem barn find on the lot. YMMV.

Is this written by a recruiter by any chance?

Of course recruiters can be useful, but you need to understand their limitations. They just want to shortlist five candidates to a prospective client, and beyond this, they don't care.

Of course, they can be helpful if you end up on their shortlist. However, I would also recommend applying directly to jobs. Recruiters do not care if the job you are applying will result in working for the devil himself, as long as they get their commission.

What I have tried is also saying "It's cool that you saw my profile and liked it, can you elaborate on what it is about the profile that you see is a good fit? Any particular technology or experience that makes me suitable for this position? What profiles did you check was it GitHub/StackOverflow/LinkedIn?". I have never in my entire career (which is older than those websites) had a response that indicated they had found or read any of the profile pages in question.

A good idea I learned to weed out the worst spam recruiters is to have a message on your LinkedIn profile saying "If you read this and want to contact me about an opportuntity, please include the following word: toaster". You'll instantly see if someone actually read your profile.

I'd just refine it to "never ignore a GOOD recruiter".

I'd say 8 times out of 10 recruiters never do what they promised they were going to do. They'll ghost you randomly, tell you you need to urgently get your CV to them then you never hear from them again, you tell them your job requirements and they immediately send you crap that clearly isn't a good match.

I'm not going to waste my time replying to every recruiter only to have 80% of them not even give me the common courtesy I give them.

But the good ones are worth working with. They know their stuff, communicate professionally and listen to what you say.

If you aren't sure just tell them the salary you wish upfront.

"I won't move unless I get at least X as my current team is really cool, so I'd want atleast that to consider the move".

Stop sending me machine generated emails based on keyword scans and then I might not ignore you. As it stands, I have to alert recruiters about what hiring managers will see as a red flag, the recruiter should have seen this but they're using scripts pretending to be personal review, then they ghost without even a courtesy reply only to cold email me with a script again in a couple of weeks and the process starts again. Recruiters need to be regulated like real estate agents are before their industry's reputation sinks as low as realtors used to be. That should include ethics and professionalism training with review boards that can hand out penalties, including loss of license/certification, to those who refuse to abide by the industry's standards. Or just keep going the route of used car salesmen in reputation and watch the industry implode.

I've deleted my LinkedIn profile because the constant recruiter spam was distracting me from focusing on my current job.

Yes, it's good to consider if there are better opportunities out there but not every other day.

It's a constant temptation in your face. At the smallest of issues at work, you think about replying to that recruiter's spam. It's not productive and makes you think of the easy (lol?) way out instead of working on the underlying issues of why you're even considering replying.

As with news, I take a more focused approach. When I need a job, I'll look for it.

Yes! Finally! A post defending recruiters.

I do not understand the vitriol against them. They literally exist to find people jobs! There are bad ones, sure, but there are also lots of good ones!

Recruiters aren't as effective as referrals in getting people placed, but a good recruiter goes a long way!

One nit: Their auto-response template is way too long for a first response.

Recruiters, as they correctly indicated, are cold-calling people, usually based on leads in LinkedIn Recruiter or very targeted Google searches. This means that they are going to spend very little time qualifying people that they find. (Just because they found you doesn't mean you're a qualified lead!)

While I definitely agree with stating what you're looking for up front (ESPECIALLY the role you want, compensation targets, and other preferences, like remote/hybrid and unlimited vacation), you can do that in a short paragraph with a call to action at the end, like this:

"Thank you for messaging me! I would love to talk but want to discuss compensation and preferences first to respect each others time. I'm looking for ${x,y,z}. Will this role fulfill what I'm looking for? If so, let's talk on $DATE. Looking forward to hearing from you!"

Super short, direct, easy to read, and the recruiter can posit what you're after within a few seconds.

Remember: recruiters WANT to place candidates at the highest base salary they can. They are paid on that. The easier you make it possible for them to do this, the harder they will work to place you.

While I get where this is going as far as salary potential goes.

I also strongly disagree. Early in my career I wasted a lot of time from bad interviews because a recruiter seemed to care more about just getting numbers in for an interview than actually good interviews.

I have had a recruiter get me in for a job and then just a couple months later call me asking if I am looking for a new opportunity (to be clear, the same person).

I have had recruiters completely waste my time and send me to group interviews for tech jobs (by this I mean one person interviewing 10 or so of us at the same time... who does that for a tech job?!?).

Oh and then there was that fun time that I had 2 different offers from companies with 2 different recruiters and had the fun situation of one of them trying really hard to convince me to not take the other job even though I kept trying to make it clear that I would learn more in the other job. It was less money but a far better learning opportunity.

Because of the constant push from recruiters to get for money I ended up having several jobs that lasted for a year or less that eventually came to give me problems getting my most recent job. Yes I could have done better with this myself but sometimes it can be hard to ignore that magic increase in money.

So no, I will continue to ignore most recruiters since I have wasted enough time in my career as it is going on bogus interviews and I have had to tell off at least one that I will never work with again.

Also, I get enough literal spam calls as it is. I am not going to answer your recruiter call.

A bit of a naive approach in my opinion - nobody will tell you the name of the client or even a vague salary range without a phone call - otherwise they would have included it in their first message. Also, nobody will read that long email. It is too long winded, and if the goal is for the recruiter not to respond, then it might be effective (but then you could also ignore incoming requests, which is just easier and less pain).

It's a viable strategy to increase TC, however I would not follow it for three reasons:

1. The algorithm is suboptimal as you will be applying to one job at a time and won't have any negotiation leverage. You might get what the recruiter promised but not as much if you applied even to one more firm with a similar TC.

2. This requires frequent job charges, which may be an impediment to further job prospects. Depends on your field though.

3. It amplifies recruiter spam, every response, even a rejection, raises your score in the spam databases, much so a non-rejection like this. I used to politely decline recruiter spam until I began to notice I keep getting spammed by the same firms/people. I then stopped responding and that reduced the spam significantly.

I remember that time at a company event where I told the human resources lady that I didn't even have a LinkedIn profile. She looked at me as if I was a mystical unicorn. (I do have a LinkedIn now - current company pretty much required it as part of my advancement).

My skillset at present is kind of niche (Nginx+Lua). The carpet-bombing mass-email approach that recruiters tend to use (looking for, say, a "Node programmer with experience in React and Mongo") doesn't really match me well. Or it does match the me but from 10 years ago.

So yeah, I ignore them and it's fine.

I've worked in this field since the average HN commentator was in diapers. It's my experience that the common wisdom about the uselessness of recruiters is, if anything, an understatement.

They don't read, they don't understand anything about what they're selling, they often lie, and they don't care. There may be a few exceptions, but if so, they are so few and far between that it's not worth trying to sort through the rest.

Here in the UK recruiters get a lot of flak but the reality is that they are the oil that keeps the machine running. It's in their own interest to get you a higher pay and to sell your profile as they get comissions. Often they do the heavy lifting in that regard. Then all you need to do is provide the skill and work. However the UK is undergoing a severe drought in terms of jobs and contracts and they are the first to tell you this.

Unless they have an actual amazon.com, or mandiant.com, or similar email -- that is, an actual company email address -- it's a hard pass immediately.

with actual corp headhunters it's usually "give me a number" and then if the number looks good, we'll talk.

also watch out for scammers and phishing attempts, been a notable uptick in attempts using "check out this pdf job advert".

The best jobs come through word of mouth and peer-to-peer connections which you develop over the lifetime of your career. I've had mixed results with recruiters. In the end they're in it for themselves, so have an intrinsic interest in selling a fit on both sides of the negotiation even when there might not be one. And the fees they charge can create a barrier or resent from the corporate side.

Recruiters are just one kind of connection, and a very mixed bag. Cultivate relationships, try not to burn bridges, find the people whose work you admire and make professional friendships with them.

Also, having been in industry long enough to see this a couple times: there's a huge difference between what recruiters do during economic downturn periods versus booms. In the down periods they end up acting as gatekeepers. In the booms they end up being the folks aggressively pushing people onto the bus. I'm sure there's a healthy median in there somewhere, but it's really tricky to find and assess a good recruiter -- especially during boom times. (We're not quite in a down time yet, but getting close).

Recruiters are a barrier between you and ground truth. If your resume is in demand and expected salary is high enough they can keep the pipeline full. If it is not and most likely you are reaching out to them, instead of the opposite, then you are simply running from the truth.

I have never not ignored a recruiter and it's been fine. So ymmv.

Ridiculous. Facebook has been hassling me for years. I’d never work there for any amount of money nor will I communicate with their hounds. I don’t owe them anything. If recruiters don’t want to be ignored they need to represent ethical clients.

Did... a recruiter write this?