Recruiting - A Tutorial | Hacker News Reader

Recruiting - A Tutorial

blog.capwatkins.com

23 pointsnikunjk12 comments

If you're getting cold-called by a recruiter, that recruiter is a spray-and-pray inside salesperson, and no list of suggestions is going to make them worth working with. You have the complete correct answer at the very top of this post: find out who they work for, and blacklist that company.

One of the problems with having the personality of an experimental physicist is that one gets irrational pleasure out of testing the very, very obvious. You know the theorists are probably right, you know the published data is probably right, but who can resist the experiment? Seeing is believing!

Taking a cold-call from a recruiter is on the list of "things I have tried in the whimsical spirit of experimentation". It did not go well. Fortunately, I was ready for that. Expecting it, even.

My one quibble is that perhaps you shouldn't judge a company too harshly if a poor recruiter claims to represent them. Companies are often desperate to hire, efficient recruiting is not a skill that everyone is blessed with, so they sometimes take fliers on bad recruiters as well. More importantly, one simply cannot trust a strange recruiter to honestly represent their relationship with a company.

I'd add another one here - make sure you learn about the candidate prior to the interview.

I once tried to hire someone who had contributed heavily to an open source library we were actively using on a project. We didn't ask "what experience do you have with X", because we knew about this candidate's significant contributions to X.

Unfortunately, a lot of recruiters are dropping a net across a river, figuring that an intensive technical screening will filter out the small number who can actually do the job. And of course, having done lots of tech interviews, I do understand why the technical screenings are done. But I also know that they can suggest a kind of laziness, an implication that you don't need to get to know a candidate's work, because if they can get through your screening, then of course they can code. But asking "what experience do you have with technology X" to someone who is all over the commit log for X can make you seem like the sort of company that isn't really aware of what's going on in your space.

I didn't succeed in hiring the programmer I mentioned, but I'm pretty confident that we made a good impression on a strong candidate.

A few weeks ago, I had an email from a recruiter that contained a job description that I had written just a few days prior. This guy was trying to recruit me for my own team.

I forwarded it to HR, and our company no longer uses that firm.

I once got 7(!) separate recruiter calls for a job at a company I was fired from years earlier, for the position I had at the time. You'd think they'd do a basic search to make sure the company name they're recruiting for isn't already on the resume!

I don't mind so much when they call. I just ask them over and over how much this fantastic opportunity in South Dakota pays and what the exact benefits are (ie: what is the name of the insurer they use, do they pay full relocation, etc). No one wants to give this data out, and yet it's rather critical. It's pointless to discuss my qualifications when your pay is at the median or below.

This experience, as I understand it, is not uncommon. In fact, Andrew seemed surprised that I was unhappy with being cold-called at home. “This is industry standard,” he argued with me.

Someone once tried that line with me when they were ripping off my stuff and selling it as their own. For some reason, it now really really sets me off these days.

Unfortunately, anyone with an email address and a phone number can call themselves a recruiter. And because $15 billion in fees is up for grabs every year in the USA, annoying/dirty/spammy tactics are the norm, rather than the exception. You'd be surprised about how many people calling themselves tech recruiters think "Rails" is a form of transportation :)

If these behaviors didn't work they wouldn't do it. Recruitment agents don't care about being a dick they care about money and quotas

The worst I've gotten from a recruiter was just a few days ago. All it was was an email with the subject "Please call me right away thanks", and the message only contained his sig, including his phone number. This is bad in so many ways I wouldn't even know where to begin enumerating them.

If you're in the EU brush and sick of this, brush up on your local implementation of the Data Protection Directive ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive )

> Read the profiles. Know who you’re contacting

This is the most annoying part. I have been contacted several times for various technology lead positions because of the buzzword-hits approach that lazy recruiters use.

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