Form letter response for engineering recruiting emails
bryanduxbury.com
bryanduxbury.com
They are not after you. Or the best. Those would never work for them anyway.
They are after the unwashed masses that would fall for that. That fall everyday for a car salesman pressing them for the more expensive model.
We all are just percentage error for those people. And they couldn't care less.
It's entirely possible that these recruiters are paid by how many actually respond, not how many are worth hiring. I.E. Spammers send thousands of emails and if even one sale was generated, then it was worth it as it costs them so little in the first place.
In general, making people believe that they are important seems to be a malicious but very effective trick. Everyone likes to be important.
My take, in my role as VP engineering at Radius, I have hand-written every recruiting email I've ever sent. No template. I personalize it to you.
A lot of people discard it as spam, or don't accept the in-mail, or whatever. I understand, but at least on the off chance they read it, I know I tried my best and showed legit interest.
Sad that recruiters don't take the time to do such a thing, but it's often a pure numbers game for them. They get paid based on this stuff, just like sales people, and they just crunch through.
on the flipside, I instantly trash anything that looks template-ish or shotgun-approach.
Really? We are arrogant because the following behaviours appear to imply arrogance on the part of the recruiter:
1. A recruiter constantly spams our inboxes with job descriptions that are either wildly different from our skillsets. (I get job descriptions that talk about 10 years of experience). It is not that fucking hard to read my Linkedin profile before you spam me.
2. Ask me technical questions which the person asking me has no qualification to answer. This is the one that pisses me off. It started off when I was just starting out with questions like what is Polymorphism where an answer which didn't sentence match the company answer confused them. Recently, one asked me to describe statistical graphic modes (when they should have meant statistical graphical models). The person had no idea what any of these things meant.
3. Try to play a pressure game. When I politely declined to do further interviews at one company because I had accepted another offer, the head recruiter literally harassed me, telling me I was making a bad decision, resorting to outright lying about the work I would be doing. (I knew enough about what the role would involve from talking to their engineers) and calling me twenty times or so that week.
No, this is a group of people who don't know how to do interviewing, working for broken companies. Now, not all recruiters are like that. One time, I was recruited by a company where the "technical recruiter" had a degree in Computer Science. That was a joyful experience. I felt like what I was saying was understood and they weren't looking for whether there was intonation match going on here.
Hell, when I graduated college 5 years ago, we were talking about the precipitous drop in CS enrollments and the outsourcing of the entire software industry. Now, CS is the most popular major at my undergrad.
Maybe it's different in Chicago, though, I don't have people calling me every day or being rude. I just feel like it doesn't hurt to keep a positive relationship with anybody who might one day find me a job when I really need it.
That's where I draw the line from 'polite refusal' to 'try to string them along to figure out where they got my info'
if i'm in a chatty mood, i can even get insider information from these casual conversations like how fast these companies are growing and what technology they use behind the scenes. when companies hire recruiters, this information is leaked out. they know this; that's part of the dance to attract talent.
this information then can be used in my own interviews with people i'm trying to hire. see how that works? it's almost as if we're competing in a market. let's call it.... the labor market.
good recruiters are highly active in this back and forth, that's how they make their living. bad ones just send shitty emails and give out info without producing/capturing any value themselves.
the thing most engineers don't understand is that in a business context, everything in your environment can be used to your advantage, if you just figure out how. even annoying emails. i'm not saying i've figured it all out, but this is definitely one obvious thing that everyone who runs a company or even a small team is aware of.
and that's why most people don't run startups. they'd rather sit there and be annoyed at things and write passive aggressive emails to people who won't even read them. LOL you might as well write something similar up and send it to the guy who sends the penis pills or oxycontin emails also. make sure you make those nice check boxes too! he's going to give just about as much of a shit.
furthermore, 80/20 rule applies and a simple set of procmail filters can get rid of the vast majority of recruiter emails. there's only a few dozen firms that do this sort of thing at any any appreciable scale. but really, you should be reading these emails too, if you give a shit about the industry you work in
to me this just sounds like faux-annoyance / ego tripping on how in-demand our field currently is. it won't last forever. i know because i've lived through 2 downturns already.
Also, loved the letter, it's great.
Here in Spain there are a lot of companies (known among engineers as "cárnicas", meat factories) that recruit people as own employees when they see an opening for contract work in a company, ship them directly to the contracting company for short terms proyects, and dumping them uncereimoniously when the contract ends.
They pocket a generous hourly rate, paying the contractor a standard rate monthly salary.
A large part of job offers publicly available here are of this kind...
And all the recruiters I've dealt with are paid a flat fee by the hiring company, they don't take a percentage of pay. Then again I've never worked directly for a recruiting agency, either.
If someone has been getting offers and interviews for $60k positions and a recruiter can get them an $80k position, what does it matter to the developer if the recruiter gets $20, $40 or even $80k on top of that? I think with the right incentives recruiting can help everyone involved. The problem is when the incentives aren't aligned. If a company is giving Recruiter A $100k to find a developer no matter what, A's incentive is to push the developer's salary as low as possible. If Recruiter B gets a lump sum of 50% of the first year salary, B is going to fight for an extra few thousand dollars on my bottom line.
I'm on the opposite side of the country so it's very possible the recruiters in the Valley are leeches like they appear to be based on the general consensus on HN. My experience with them has been varied, from the former classmate with a degree in Fine Art suddenly trying to learn the difference between Java and JavaScript to someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
I don't feel particularly screwed because I'm going to be getting raises over time, especially if I decide to hop out of my first job at year 3 or 4.
55-60k really isn't a bad place to be in many locations. I can't imagine it in some of the traditional startup places like the SF Bay area, Boston, or Seattle area though.
Hi there,
Please remove all data pertaining to myself or Happy Bear Software from your systems and refrain from contacting me again. Any future correspondence including a reply to this email will be reported as spam.
Kind Regards,
Honestly, a developer who's taken a flick through a book about sales and marketing (e.g. Ultimate Sales Machine) would do a fantastically better job of selling recruitment services (at both ends) than 99.99% of recruiters.
Never engage with them directly. They're a time sink, and they never have your interests at heart. I manage all comms with them through gmail canned responses.
The "quick call" line resonates with me. I've had a couple of these interactions lately, and in my minds eye, I just picture someone [me] walking onto a used car lot and a sales person [recruiter] is trying hard to sell me, when I really just want to look around. Leads to an awkward interaction.
There are a lot of people right now who would be thrilled to receive these emails from recruiters, and would reply to every one. Why burn the bridge with a snarky response? Maybe one day you could be one of those people.
Having humility when your job is in demand is good, but most of the practices indicated in the article indicate recruiters that are either unhelpful or actively harmful.
For example - there are recruiting firms who will submit your resume without telling you where, and play it off like it's common practice (which it is, but only among assholes.) This puts you in a bind where if a company recieves your resume through another source, they may have conflicting legal obligations attached to both sources, causing your resume to go in the garbage. Many recruiters do this, but plenty do not. Only work with the second kind.
The other checkboxes indicate carelessness, trawling, spamming, and other less than great features. Take it or leave it, but ask yourself if that's the kind of person you want to work with.
I've learned not to rely solely on recruiters either so in the end, the only recruiters I feel like are justified to work with are recruiters hired specifically by a company, meaning that they represent the company and the company won't deal with anyone outside of that.
https://draftin.com/documents/95708?token=uf_BIHiv8xAonKejRl...
If you finally graduated, it's time to update all the info :-)
I was impressed, and I figured the least I could do is write back and ask for more information. Well, it's been two weeks and I haven't heard back from either person! It's almost like the twilight-light zone. Why spend all that time researching and writing to someone only to never respond again?
I just mark them all as spam.
This approach to recruitment may work for some segments of the market, but it's pointless for me. I used to actually respond to such inquiries when the market was very slow and I was getting desperate, but they almost never followed up, so I stopped wasting my time.
But I cannot agree with your second point in Additionally section. The recruiters are doing their jobs, whether or not just sending cold emails. They are not obligated to understand or even know the 'work style of engineers'.
Salespeople (which is effectively what recruiters are) are not obligated to know anything about their product or customers. But it can really help.
'Knowing your customers' usually means that sale-person know how and what a customer is thinking so s/he can bank upon it. It doesn't mean that sales-person should contact only when customer is away from work and is not too busy to talk.
Maybe they aren't, but the degree to which one understands the product one is selling is the degree I treat them as a helpful person instead of lying, malicious fraud. If you don't understand anything about the product you're selling, then every single word you utter in favour of it is a blatant lie.