“God, I hate recruiters” | Hacker News Reader

“God, I hate recruiters”

gregsavage.com.au

36 pointsaledalgrande49 comments

I get 2-3 emails per day in LinkedIn. I read all of them. It gives me confidence that I'm hot and it's easy for me to just move on from my current job. When I see Twitter, Facebook, HP, Google and Apple are reaching out to me, it gives me confidence.

I sometimes use small but rich startups that can afford high salaries as a tool to get a raise. Just by bringing their offer to my manager's table if it's required. This year I'm targeting $180K salary. It would be impossible without recruiters help.

Just a heads up, confidence is the correct noun to use.

Confident is the adjective form.

Neat obscure language thing: adjectival is the adjectival form of adjective.

Edited. Thanks. I am not native English speaker. :)

How did you go from "started programming (for real) about 2 years ago" to recruitment offers from Google/Apple and "targeting $180K"?

You can get recruitment offers without knowing any programming (fake profile) and you can technically target $180k if you're making $5k.

I'm not saying that's what the GP is doing, but it's not impossible!

I'm just really good at it I guess. I went to software engineering school in my homeland country but both quality of university and my desire to learn were not there. After I moved to the US all of sudden I felt in love with programming.

The reason I'm not responding to big companies yet is that I don't have enough english and US work history. I failed at Yahoo! just because I was not able to speak good English(they said it).

Out of curiosity, where do you work? :) And what's your home country?

Sarcasm is lost on the internet

Crocodile tears, I suspect. Based on multiple past experiences, I'd be a little reluctant to trust a recruiter who described himself on his blog thus:

"Over a career spanning thirty years, Greg Savage has established himself as an icon of the Australian recruitment industry".

It's immodest, it's untestable, and after 30 years, it's probably a bit bloody late to start preaching the good book.

Edit: And yes, if your recruiter has an English accent, better find another one.

    So this very day I have scheduled company-wide training
    at Firebrand. And I will be running it myself.
    
    The topic?
    
    “Differentiating our business through candidate service.”

The first lesson in that training should be how to stop talking like that. Candidates are people and they want you to use humane language not business jargon. Differentiating is something you do to functions. How about:

    Standing out by taking better care of candidates

It's easy to hate recruiters when the market works in your favor and demand for engineers is higher than availability. Everyone is trying to hire and now they seem redundant and unnecessary evil.

If the market cools down I bet most would feel lucky having a recruiter knocking on their door.

My experience with recruiters hasn't been bad at all. (I'm in Atlanta rather than Australia, though) Quite the contrary, now I don't have to browse Craigslist or Monster myself. I don't have to keep asking my friends for job leads. They come to me. I don't understand the hate.

I listed my resume on Monster, bracing myself for the worst. So far, it hasn't happened. I get two or three emails a day, most with decent leads. For the first few days, they kept telling me my resume was "thin", until I grilled one on what he meant, I reformatted it according to a template he sent and now they love it.

If I got an under-compensated offer, I'd just ask for more. If the recruiter's lead isn't interesting, I email back with what I am interested in. It takes half a minute. I could copy-paste a boiler-plate response but so far I haven't found the need to.

I suspect most of the hate towards recruiters is coming from the tendency of engineers towards introversion, so they perceive each interaction as draining, and think negotiation is much tougher than it is. In other words, it's not the recruiters they hate, it's the job hunt, period, they just don't want to admit to themselves that they have a tough time selling themselves.

I posted on Monster a few months ago and just got inundated: at least a dozen calls before I had a chance to leave the coffee shop I was in.

I'm sure there's real professionals out there, but every one I've ever met is just scanning the job boards trying to match keywords. I'm tired of hearing from them how wonderful every position is (with one of our top clients!) and when I've been on the other side I quickly grew tired of hearing from them how wonderful every candidate was. It's not that they're lying really, they just generally don't have the ability to evaluate either.

Recruiters are like the throng of people you meet when you arrive in certain third-world countries who follow you around offering to show you the sites or trying to sell you trinkets. I don't hate them or anything; they're just annoying, they get in the way, and I certainly don't think they're adding any value.

> I posted on Monster a few months ago and just got inundated: at least a dozen calls before I had a chance to leave the coffee shop I was in.

If I had this problem I'd do the same thing I already do for Craigslist, get a Google Voice number and put that on the listing. Go over it once a day and reply only to the promising ones.

Engineers complaining about recruiters is no different from attractive woman complaining about getting picked up all the time.

I don't mean this negatively, because getting bad recruitment inquiries over and over does become tiring at some point. But this is definitely one of the problems that are nice to have, if you see it from a positive light.

I think this is partly because the vast majority of 'tech' jobs in Sydney are as 'resources' in cost centers, not profit centers, ie 'IT department' not R&D.

There are not yet enough big business successes in the area that leverage tech in a big way for a major competitive advantage or sell tech as their product/service.

This affects the image of the profession in the area, how we are treated, and puts downward pressure on compensation.

I hate recruiters too. Not because they cost me too much annoyance, but it's just sad to watch them flounder. I get at least one or two a week trying to pitch me a job (interview?) on LinkedIn and I've yet to not regret opening the mail. Half the time it's for a technology job I'm either under qualified for (management positions, data scientist, etc) or technologies I'm clearly not familiar with nor interested in.

The times it is a technology match I'm completely underwhelmed by the offer, considering I have a current job listed. I get it Amazon, you'd love to have me as a moderately paid backend java programmer, but come on.

Recruiters should have to pay me to pitch me, as they should be that confident they have something compelling to pull me away from my current gig. If i'm out looking it's a different story.

This is really a first world problem. I agree recruiters are often irritating, but I try to remember back 15 years ago when I could barely get a recruiter to return my call. I often take a moment to respond to recruiters on LinkedIn, sometimes offering them encouragement or advice on what I think they could be doing better. It doesn't take that much time, and I like to think that being friendly with them could help me down the road.

Trouble is, I think LinkedIn is a cancer. You know, I've worked with some pretty decent people, but I've often cringed to see their extravagant self descriptions on LinkedIn. No way are they the people they think they are. And if decent people can be tempted into such self deception, what about people who aren't decent in the slightest?

Is it just me, or is the whole "I hate recruiters" bit a big 'ol humblebrag? Just ignore them.

He means actually working with them, not the spam. They seem puzzlingly worthless. I actually asked a guy at an interview, years ago, "Why do you use recruiters?" and he said it saved time going through resumes. As if that's worth a fat commission: Using some lib-art knucklehead who can distinguish 5 years of .NET from 3 years of .NET.

Also, they sometimes call your office. If you don't have a good relationship with your receptionist, never ever use them.

Last time a recruiter cold-called me at the office I asked them if they really thought it was appropriate to 'phone my client in an effort to recruit me … and then hung up on them.

If only there were some kind of meta-recruiter you could use to identify and recruit the good recruiters.

I think there's a lot of humblebrag for sure, but for me the annoyance isn't that they are annoying but that they seem to provide a very useful service so poorly that they are a net negative. I don't want to humblebrag about unsolicited recruitment attempts, I want a quiet and fruitful partnership with somebody who does the job well.

It's all because the noun in "HR" is Resources, not Human. From soup to nuts, the employment industry treats people like equipment.

To be fair to recruiters, the reason they do so is that their ultimate bosses, the companies looking for staff, view people in a similar manner. Paying for human resources is a necessary evil, like paying for mineral resources is. At least, that's how it shows up systemically— any individual manager might not have this view. But to the company, especially the kind of company that has turned to recruiters to acquire them, human resources are another kind of resource.

But unlike all the other resources, a resource that lives, thinks and judges people as they are done by.

Yeah, I was including them, too. Fuck companies with HR departments.

Here is how I deal with them. I always reply with:

"I will not consider any position that pays less than $200,000 a year. Non-negotiable."

They leave me alone.

I also do that about moving to some cities. I'm kinda hoping I stroke lucky sometime and someone really does want to pay me €500,000 for a job in $CITY. Jackpot!

Yes, that is effective. I tell them "I am not open to full-time employment -- corp-to-corp consulting only". That also repels them.

I receive lots of recruiter spam through LinkedIn. I reply to each an every one indicating that I'm not looking and that I don't connect with people I don't know.

One of two things will happen next, I will get either a phone call (from the details in the email signature), or an email asking if I will refer other people.

Either of these will ensure that I never deal with the recruiter.

There is only one recruiter I've ever met that doesn't fit that mould. I won't talk to much about HOW he's different, because it's his secret sauce. But Steve Gilles (@stevelikesyou on twitter) is someone that is highly regarded within the Australian Ruby community.

If you are looking to find someone, or looking to find a job I highly recommend a chat with Steve.

Disclaimer: I have over the last 3 years, become very good friends with Steve.

It often seems to me that there are incentive problems with recruiting. HR's most commonly centred, on shaky data, around getting rid of as many candidates as possible, and there's no real advantage in them treating you decently, unless they think they're going to be rewarded for some financial gain down the line. If they don't think that they're going to be rewarded, there's still an incentive to mess you about because they don't really want you going with someone else.

Position of power, poor incentives, actively contradictory interests in the case that they decide you're no good for them. shrug

Breadth first search strategy manifests social problems.

Funny he says that about the English accent - even from the other side of the (Australian-based) hiring desk, whenever I pick up the phone and hear that accent I just know what the next question will be, and I could copy&paste my answer.

No, we aren't looking for anyone right now, and certainly not with those skills (we've never looked for those skills); yes, that's the same answer I gave you last time you called.

And if they could remove the phrase "a quick heads up" from their lexicon, it'd make my year.</gripe>

Dealing with recruiters is maddening.

They are, in my experience, not only incompetent -- but harmful as well.

Their interests are barely aligned with yours. After all, you're not paying them. Their real customer (the hiring company/manager) is.

Here's a scenario I've had happen in the past: * Recruiter pings me about job I'd really like * They prep me and I go to interview * I'm clearly not qualified or actually prepared as hiring manager asks about stuff that wasn't on job description * Company chooses other candidate from same recruiter.

Stuff like that makes me really wary of recruiters in general. Best way to get hired is to make great industry contacts at as many levels as possible and network your way into a gig (perm or contract). Most of mine have been through this route.

Agreed. The worst ones harm all three parts of the triangle - the client company, the candidate, and their own recruiting firm. Here's an example from last week: junior recruiter contacts me for an ERP PM role because she won the first round of key word bingo in my generic CareerBuilder resume. That's primarily an instructional resume in which I tout my ERP training experience, although I'm a certified PMP as well.

Dolly the Bimbo asks me to update my resume for PM - done. Dolly the Bimbo then asks me to draw out my manufacturing ERP experience - done, along with addendum with details. (two resumes, three days) Wisely, I've learned to demand review of my info as it will be submitted to the client. Amazingly, she only used the original CareerBuilder resume, with wrong job title and scant mention of ERP, rather than the well-written, targeted resume that she herself solicited.

Certain outcome: the client company rejects application ("What the heck?! This isn't even a PM resume!"), so they suffer without a good candidate. Client company also downgrades their estimation of recruiting company, so that's a hit. And, of course, my name is on the client reject list, so the candidate is burned as well.

Dolly can't read.

I swear, I must be the only person here who doesn't get contacted by a million recruiters every day. I haven't had a single recruiter email in three years, when Google sent me one.

How do you guys do it? Why are they avoiding me?

I've heard, and my experience supports this, that in Silicon Valley you get a ton. I've consistently got a lot of attention since moving here (albeit only from local companies). I also got a ton in the weeks after my last company received a lot of media attention. If you're working at a fairly typical company in a fairly typical city, that might explain it.

I have been contacted because a recruiter had seen my profile on Linkedin, because I was in the list of subscribers to a Meetup group (not attendant, merely subscriber), because of classes I took in college (about 3 years after the fact), because of my github profile, because of my (very minimalistic and completely outdated) homepage, and through one or two other channels I'm probably forgetting right now. And I'm neither in the US, nor particularly known for anything.

So, either you're really stealthy, either I'd like to know your secret.

http://www.korokithakis.net/

https://github.com/skorokithakis/

http://gr.linkedin.com/in/skorokithakis

I'm just as puzzled as you are.

Not that I'm looking for work, it's just one of those "why am I being left out?" things.

From a glance at your linkedin page (recruiters don't know about github), there's a couple of things that I think are helping you stay recruiter-free. The first is that a cursory glance would imply that you're in Greece, which has less of a recruiter problem (even though I think you're really in Cornwall). And the second is that you're missing the Java/c#/SOAP/Agile set of buzzwords that corporate recruiters are scanning for.

Yeah, it might probably be a bit of both. I've never been to Cornwall, that's just where my company is registered. I'm currently in Spain. It's lovely.

I've stopped trying to understand recruiters. Looking at those links, I am also surprised you haven't gotten an e-mail in three years.

The only thing I can think of is that you're listed on LinkedIn as being in Greece and I'm in the US near Silicon Valley, which might explain the difference?

Maybe! I'll have to ask my Greek friends if they get emails, although I think the deluge started for one of them when he updated his LinkedIn profile city to San Francisco.

Have you overloaded your profile with keywords and endorsement tags? That seems to be the bug zapper that attracts recruiters.

Oh, it seems I have been remiss. I'm not very inclined to do it, but that might be it :)

I hate quotes in URLs, so we are even.

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