So, you want to hire me? My response to recruiter spam. | Hacker News Reader

So, you want to hire me? My response to recruiter spam.

blog.jazzychad.net

34 pointsjazzychad32 comments

Perhaps "I am not currently looking for a job" will suffice? Or maybe ignore the mail?

I am working with a startup and the office is in a large shopping complex. As a result, almost every other day you have someone coming to pitch you stuff or give you a flyer.

So I was in the office one day and a person came in. One of the employees was quite dismissive. The others did not bother to look up. I picked the flyer from the person, had a quick chat and the person was on his way.

The ridiculously funny thing is that we were billed to hand out flyers THAT same week for an event we were organizing. So after the "interloper" left, I asked if they would be happy if they were treated the way they treated the salesperson when we go out for our own unsolicited pitch. Of course they said no.

Suffice to say, since then they have treated such people much better since then.

My short story aside, if you have been identified as someone worthy to be recruited, why do a lot of people on HN find it so offensive? What is wrong is saying thanks but no thanks? I am definitely sure there was a time in your life when you would were grateful for such opportunity. Now you may have passed that level, be humble about it

Of course, always remember it is a human not a machine that is going to read your reply [1]

[1] http://sivers.org/real

>My short story aside, if you have been identified as someone worthy to be recruited, why do a lot of people on HN find it so offensive?

I don't know any other way to read these emails than "your job is worse than what we are offering!". Since I've chosen this job myself and happen to like it very much it appears quite insulting, especially when the offered job is objectively worse (i.e. less pay, less fun, less prestige).

> why do a lot of people on HN find it so offensive?

They are probably not offended by job offers at all, but rather recruiter emails that are not truly offers but invitations to apply

I see strong parallels between this and the Linus Torvalds discussion on being polite as an engineer.

I get a fair amount of email (maybe one every week or two) from people with technical co-founder offers or engineering interview offers. I have no interest for various reasons, some of which line up with yours I'm sure. Here's my standard response:

"Hey John,

Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, I'm still a full-time student, and I won't have time to take on another part-time obligation next semester. Best of luck filling the position."

Sure, I might laugh with my friends about how positively stupid that businessman's email was. However, I'll be nothing but cordial to the person's face. I try to be cordial to everyone. You never know when your paths might cross next in life.

Moreover, an email like yours perpetuates the stereotype that engineers are socially awkward and hard to work with. As someone doubling in engineering and finance, I hear this all of the time in my business classes. It's something that annoys me to no end.

Why not just put a comment on your profile that says you're not looking?

This does cut down on the emails you get. You'll still get some, but I'm willing to bet you get an equal, if not greater amount of emails from various retailers you've purchased from.

From these, just hit delete, or not interested.

The only thing I find annoying about LinkedIn "spam" is that while apparently good engineers are hard to find, the laws of supply and demand seem to cap out around a certain compensation level. I always wonder if I were in sales or finance, would recruiters that really want to fill a role try and lure me to leave by mentioning the free candy bars? or tell me they'll pay me ___ % more than I'm making now?

Anyway, given the situation for most people in the country, certainly getting spammed by people with job offers isn't the worst problem in the world, nor is it that hard to cope with. ymmv.

I read things like this and it makes me concerned that it's a sign of the party ending for developers. I'm sure OP was doing this tongue-in-cheek but the fact that it was written at all is a sign of hubris caused by an apparent software engineering work bubble.

I've been in IT for 20 years now and the last few I've been making unbelievable money, fully expecting it to end any minute now. Stuff like this makes me fear it is going to end soon.

Serious question: How does something like this you perceive as hubris indicate that the end is coming?

Cause pride comes before the Fall.

I felt the same way as the OP right before the dot com bust. Then all the startups went out of business and the only way to get a decent job was to know a recruiter for a big company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris#Modern_use

I usually simply explain to them the cost of living differential between where I live and SF/NYC, and then they balk at what that means in actual dollars. 175% raise? Don't mind if I do.

Just don't forget what a privilege it is to be turning down work offers. I have a Master's Degree in my field from what is consistently ranked the best school for that field and haven't been able to find a job in that field for over a year, and the last job I was offered, that required a Master's and experience, was for $27k a year.

What field is that? Notice how I did it bring up a bunch of fields as examples.

Social Work, with an emphasis on research and macro-level policy work, but some teaching jobs would certainly apply as well. Still want to solve hard social problems, but have decided there is too much friction in the traditional human services fields and NGOs to make much headway that way, as well as a burnout trap. So at the moment I am just doing IT consulting for small non-profits, heading to a programming bootcamp this fall, maybe another one over the winter, hoping to eventually work on interesting social problems from a coding angle. Or work a bit on something not so interesting, enough to pay the bills, and become time-rich to work on interesting and fulfilling projects pro-bono.

I'm sure you knew that Social Work is low paid before you invested in such a degree. While it's a valuable field hypothetically, who actually hires a social work master degree person -- no company that actually expects a profit. As a result the market doesn't value such qualifications. Just sayin'. With software, engineers are hired to add value to a company which means they can make more money, which is kind of the point of a company in the first place. There's also a supply and demand issue. Low demand for Social Work and an oversupply. Social Work is almost as low-valued as an English literature degree. I'm not hating on Social Work, but your plight is certainly no surprise and elicits little sympathy as social work has never been a high demand profession but folks still spend tens of thousands of dollars in schooling and wonder why they aren't getting hired.

I don't believe the market is particularly good at determining value in anything other than the most short-sighted terms. I think there's a hell of a lot of teachers, social workers, and others bringing more value to the world than some software developer cranking out brochure web sites, making banner ads, cranking out another zynga game, etc or some management consultant that talks in nonsensical corporatespeak that is paying paid hundreds of dollars an hour to advise some company on its decision-making processes.

I'm not complaining, I'm the first person to admit about the inefficiencies and shortcomings of the modern non-profit industrial complex, I'm jut saying most of the world rolls their eyes when they hear people talk about how hard it is to be offered all these jobs. I chose to go into debt because I was studying interesting things (non-linear systems modeling as applies to social systems/problems) and I thought the academic credentials could provide an on-ramp to being able to work on big social problems on inter-disciplinary teams. This didn't happen, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which because social work itself doesn't value itself as a distinct and credible field the way, say, economics does.

All that being said, most of humanity still doesn't have the luxury of picking and choosing how they want to put food on the table, so it just smacks of privilege anytime I hear anyone whining of too many job offers, etc.

Agree with you that the market isn't able to pick out value, especially value that isn't easily exchangeable for money. Social work is of indispensable value from a particular perspective, and social workers are in short supply in many countries including my own (Singapore).

However the market does not exist by itself, it exists in a structure put in place by governments, with many other players such as non-profits, interest groups, etc. At this point in time, social workers, teachers, etc. have to be supported by funding from governments and donors.

Short of having a more enlightened economic system, what we can hope for right now is for governments to better reward professions that provide such value.

I have a job (and I work in tech with a math degree), but I don't have all these recruiters beating down my door or sending me emails every day either.

For those who didn't catch the Brown M&Ms reference [0]: the rock group Van Halen had a provision in their standard contract that there had to be M&Ms backstage, but all the brown ones had to be removed. Sometimes it was interpreted as them just being "spoiled rock stars", but it had a purpose. Much of the contract specified technical details like how much weight the stage could hold, power capacity, and other things that if done wrong could completely wreck a show. As David Lee Roth said, "if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl... well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you're going to arrive at a technical error. They didn't read the contract."

In this case, it's not clear whether the writer is trying to evoke the "spoiled rocker" persona or the "make sure you read the contract" one.

[0] http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp

What does a flippant response like this accomplish? Nothing but wasting one's time emailing a recruiter mill. May as well send thought-provoking replies to your email spam.

Many comments here mentioned the bubble, and posts like this being a sign. I started recruiting software pros in 1998, and didnt have the benefit of LinkedIn or any web tech beyond doing searches on old search engines and résumé boards. Some candidates were nice about moot wanting jobs, and others were rude.

If the approach by the recruiter is not respectful, thought out, or at all relevant or personalized, by all means thrash away. But if the approach is a legitimate "hey, I've got a job that appears to fit your skill set, and if you're interested I'd like to discuss it with you and learn more about what interests you", then a response should be polite - or just don't respond at all.

I can tell you that many of the people that were nasty to me during the boom were begging for me to even look at their résumé during the bust. I think recruiters do have too much influence on the hiring market in tech, but keep in mind that there will be down times for most in the industry, and recruiters will remember who was respectful and who wasn't.

It's mostly junior recruiters making mistakes it seems, and they do learn by being shamed, so I do accept treating pure spam as it should be, but please (for everyone's sake) differentiate between legitimate polite contact and spam.

Like mamma always said, "well you're certainly not going to get it if you don't ask for it".

While true, that doesn't mean that it's always a good idea to ask.

Or you could not be a douche and just ignore that email.

If he were actually interested in a change in employer for great financial gain, something more like a $250-500k base with "uncapped bonus" might result in real inquiries. Particularly if his experience included a decent amount of machine learning and big data, as I've noticed that quite a few Chicago and NY area finance firms -- especially those who have bowed out of the HFT arms race -- are currently willing to pay well for folks with those skills.

I quit LinkedIn and now receive almost no recruiter spam. Recruiters seem to only exist on LinkedIn now, so if you really want to avoid them just delete your account.

$1 Million base, 10%/yr guaranteed perf bonus, whatever hours I want, AND 10% equity as first employee. Sold. I'll take that job too.

While this is an interesting concept that I used to think about in the past, you should never bother doing it. There is no chance that a random recruiter will ever have those resources to hire you.

It's easier for both of you if you just say that you're not interested in a job or you just completely ignore the message/email etc.

great answer man!

Some time ago I creates a linked in group called "Bad recruiters" where shame job spammers offering me "sizzling hot" £23k PHP roles. Please join up and help getting the quality of IT recruitment up to the standard it should be.

This "response" is not funny, smart or anything. Why does it even got posted here?

My response to recruiter spam: hit the "junk" button.

Can't wait to use this as anti-LinkedIn-recruiter ammo.

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