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An Awkward Conversation

codingjohnson.com

89 pointsgringofyx104 comments

UK's IT recruitment industry have to die.

After 2 years of uphill battle, here's how I managed to get off from all recruiters' spamlist & call list:

- For every email coming from an agency: search via the recruiter's domain name for all older emails; scan their websites for contact details; BCC everyone on it (this will make it a subject of coffee conversation)

Subject line: Cease and desist further communication

Body: Dear $RECRUITMENT_COMPANY, and to all whom it might concern,

Pursuant to my rights under the Data Protection Act 1998, I am requesting that you cease and desist communication with me in relation to job offers, or vacancies of any kind.

You are hereby notified that if you do not comply with this request, I will immediately file a complaint with the Information Commissioner's Office. Civil and criminal claims will be pursued.

Sincerely, $FULLNAME

* Send, and mark the original email spam. This will help spamfilters to classify emails of this kind correctly.

* For phone conversations, where the phone number is visible: register for http://www.tpsonline.org.uk/tps/index.html (this is a good idea regardless) ,and file a complaint.

* For phone conversations, where no phone number is available, your mission is to elicit a company name, and while keeping them on the phone, look it up using http://wck2.companieshouse.gov.uk/ . If the company exist, use the above form via email, and inform them the same content verbally.

* If, despite all the above, a company is repeat offender, contact me (email in profile), and we'll take them to small claims.

The recruitment industry in this country is vile but very lucrative, the people in it would probably not feel out of place as estate agents if they decided to switch careers.

I've heard tales of hapless graduates falling into recruitment and ending up earning £10k a month through commission.

Not bad for a job that's essentially just spamming emails, ringing people and lying to them a lot. But utterly soul destroying at the same time

yep, and it would die if companies just stopped paying the ludicrous placement fees, which run about €10k I think. I know it's a lot of hassle for companies to find good staff but surely the HR people can do it instead of forking out that kind of dough.

It's not just the UK. Recruiting is a rough industry pretty much everywhere.

Here's an email I received this morning:

    From: [redacted]
    Subject: Windows Software Developer Engineer
    Date: August 5, 2013 9:47:37 AM PDT
    To: Aaron Brethorst

    Dear Aaron,

    Good Morning, I have an open Windows Software Developer Engineer position available.
    I would like to know if you or someone you know would like a new adventure. I found
    your profile by simply using Windows Engineer, C++, SCM and Visual Studio. You are
    only 1 of about 200 in the USA. I have attached the position description along with
    a description of the company and location. I look forward to hearing from you.

    Thank you
    [redacted]

So, setting aside the fact that—if you were to spend literally five seconds Googling me—I have never been a C++ Windows developer, and clearly have no interest in embarking on that now, I am kind of astonished that this recruiter is proudly proclaiming that she found me by some sort of really naive keyword matching on LinkedIn.

She also didn't actually include a description of the company or location. Sigh.

They include as little information as possible because they don't want you going around them to get the position.

Quoting from her email:

I have attached the position description along with a description of the company and location.

"1 of about 200" so the pay is probably £37k rather then usual 35.

The industry needs an "IT recruitment horror stories" website.

I got contacted once by a recruiter offering me a job in my company, the same position I was employed in, and the recruiter told me I was "a good match" for that role. Yes, looks like I could get that job if I wasn't already hired in that exact same position.

In some environments that would be a huge warning!

My employer is always hiring Python developers because in this area looks like is hard to find the right candidate:

http://www.memset.com/careers/#PythonSoftwareDeveloper

But you're right, that was my first thought :)

Pity. It would have been amusing if you had applied and turned up for the interview!

they could help their search for the right candidate by dropping the unnecessary requirement of a technical degree. you don't need to have studied a STEM degree to know python, SQL, jQuery etc

I totally agree. In fact I'm surprised, I would have expected "or equivalent experience" or anything in that line.

Did you find out what pay and benefits they were offering?

LinkedIn emails me weekly with a list of jobs I'd theoretically be interested in--almost all internships, because I have in the past done internships. Apparently they haven't figured out that I don't want to go from Senior Member of Technical Staff back to Intern, it's kind of a step down.

I am on the opposite boat. As an current intern, I keep getting LinkedIn emails about senior developer positions. Flattering in a way though not really useful!

Since becoming "Director of Technology" of a startup, these emails have enlightened me to all the kind of technologies that have directors.

My favorite was the suggestion that I apply for "Director of Pork Technology" at Cargill.

Probably kind of like web development, right?

I get lots of calls from similar recruiters, but had I been in this guys position the call would have gone like this:

RECRUITER: Oh hi Matthew, my name's ### and I'm calling from ### with regard to an exciting opportunity that's come up in London for a Senior Developer, are you interested?

ME: Where is this job located?

RECRUITER: [Says something that translates to] 4 hours away.

ME: Thanks for contacting me, but I'm happy with my current job and I don't want to relocate right now.

RECRUITER: [In the face to two good excuses the recruiter says] Ok, you have a good day.

ME: You too.

More pleasant for all involved.

Yeah, I go one step further - if I ever get cold-called by a recruiter I stop them mid-sentence and tell them that I do not take cold calls, and that they are welcome to email me.

If they try to keep talking I hang up.

Most recruiter contacts are woefully far from anything that might even remotely interest me - neither I nor the recruiter should be wasting 10 minutes of our lives to find this out.

> RECRUITER: [In the face to two good excuses the recruiter says] Ok, you have a good day.

Have you ever talked to a recruiter? In my experience they never give up that easily. We had one tell us they had "plenty of developers to offer," more than they knew what to do with. After we said we weren't interested, he then immediately turn around and ask if we knew any developers looking for a job, because they had plenty of job openings they couldn't fill. Right...

> WTF!? This is like asking "Do you use a gear-stick?" followed by "Have you ever been in a car?"

I was once asked if I had ".NET and API experience" (verbatim) :/

More to the point, though, I don't really understand all the complaints about recruiters. Emails can easily be ignored, and it's not impossible to decline a call (politely, or even rudely if necessary). Having an awkward conversation is, to a certain extent, a self imposed burden.

For my part, I tend to enjoy hearing about what else may be available out there, even though I currently have no intention of switching employers.

If nothing else it is frustrating to know that there are people out there being paid to do this and that their salaries are clearly taking a chunk out of potential HR payrolls.

I may well be wrong, but aren't most recruiters via by commission?

I think you accidentally a word there.

No matter what structure the payment is made under, its still coming out of the actual employers bank account. Money which could be used to actually pay employees rather than keyword matching recruiters.

Having (or, well, not having) awkward conversations is a matter of skill. If you've never had an awkward conversation, or haven't reflected on the ones you have had, you won't realize what makes a conversation awkward and won't know not to do that.

In this case the author could have answered the assumed questions rather than the asked questions, and I imagine the conversation would have gone rather differently. Unless of course he finds having awkward conversations to be amusing.

> I was once asked if I had ".NET and API experience" (verbatim) :/

This is one of the things that irks me most about recruiters. They talk about these skills like they are trading cards or XBL achievements. "Oh good I see that you have Python. Do you also have Javascript?"

Recruiting has become such an awful race to the bottom I don't understand how these companies stay in business. Wait yes I do, naive 23 year old me who almost got his second job through a recruiter because he didn't realize how many opportunities he was qualified for.

>> WTF!? This is like asking "Do you use a gear-stick?" followed by "Have you ever been in a car?"

> I was once asked if I had ".NET and API experience" (verbatim) :/

You have not lived, until a recruiter asks about your proficiency in "Ruby Red"[1], not to be confused with "Ruby on Rails"[2]

1. http://static.caloriecount.about.com/images/medium/squirt-so...

2. http://www.firstlinesoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/...

But seriously, in today's job-market I feel for the difficulty these recruiters must have trying to find people, who probably don't always treat them well, that match up with skills they might never have heard of. I try my best to be polite to every LinkedIn recruiter, explaining clearly and non-condescending why I'm not a good fit for the job they're asking me about.

First, the idea of expecting technical skill out of someone willing to do cold calling is... laughable. Are you willing to cold call folks? I'm not. It's unpleasant. If you have technical skill, you can get a job doing something rather less scummy, and deal with people who don't hate dealing with you.

I get at least one of these a week and that is after I took my phone number off my resume. I found out that in order for your number to get purged, you need to post an "alternate" one.

I also have the suspicion that recruiting agencies have temps call/email people to "verify" details since there are potentially so many fake resumes out there that are bought/sold. IMHO these are like spam lists or something...

Yeah, complain about clueless recruiters calling you with an offer. There's people who would do anything for a job.

Yeah, they're called IT recruiters.

Stop. I have to breath :)

Precisely. There's something particularly grating about the self-righteous attitude of this author.

He may not care for such a call, but if there is an actual vacancy involved, there are millions of unemployed/underemployed people in the UK who would kill to get unsolicited calls from recruiters offering them £35-40k roles.

And you should always finish your dinner because there's starving children in Africa.

The terrible state of IT recruitment is a legitimate issue and trying to derail discussion of it in this way is obnoxious.

Also, there's not millions of viable candidates for software development roles who are unemployed. If there were, salaries would be dropping and there'd be no cold calls from recruiters. The people you're talking about - while potentially highly skilled in other areas - would hate to get that call just as much as the author, as it would be a job they couldn't do and a waste of their time. (Not to mention demoralising.)

And how do those millions of unemployed people feel about the fact that they probably won't get that call simply because of the incompetency of said recruiters?

Anybody else notice the "I can't know MVC without knowing ASP.Net" in there?

I cringed too, but I guess they meant the framework of the same name from MS: http://www.asp.net/mvc

They're paying £35,000 but will go to £40,000 for the right candidate

I literally laughed out loud at this. I'm a Yank who doesn't even know what the exchange rate is, and that is laughably, sadistically low, even for an entry level position in Podunk, Nowhere. And they're offering this for a "senior developer" in the urban metro area of London? The author is right, IT recruitment is totally broken.

That's $54k a year to $61k a year. Absurdly low even for a college hire.

n.b. Developer salaries are considerably lower in London than in many parts of the US. (Although that's still low for a senior role). Aside from banks, not many places will offer £40k for an entry level graduate role.

http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/default.aspx?page=1&sortby=0&or...

You probably should check out salaries outside of southern California. It is not 'Absurdly low even for a college hire' in most of the US.

£35-40k is actually very high for a university graduate in the UK.

Absurdly low for Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Denver, Raleigh-Durham, Seattle, Orlando, Tampa.

Most CS programs have exit salaries above $60k.

Have you ever been outside of the bay area? Go someplace not in the top 3 for most expensive real estate and you'll see kids 3 weeks out of school making $40k a year with plenty left over after paying for their car and 1-bedroom with no roommate.

God it's like everybody on HN was born and raised in SF and has never made less than $150k a year.

Well, I was born and raised in SF, but have interned in Seattle and Austin. I'll be the first to admit money goes further there, but even in those places my full time offers - years ago - exceeded $61k/year.

$60k seems low for me anywhere for this reason: Even with the Bay Area's high cost of living, a college hire with a $90k offer without a family who wants to live with roommates will be able to save more than someone in a low cost of living place making $60k. The $20k additional take home will more than cover the added cost of of a room (perhaps $12k more/year).

As far as one bedrooms go, at $60k you can find one bedrooms for $1600/month or less in SF (less hot places or below market rates in hot places). In cheap Austin, $600 is about the minimum. That's a $12k a year spread, but not enough to not take a $60k SF offer over $40k in Austin.

How can you possibly know that without knowing the exchange rate?

(It's about 1.5 USD per GBP, so that's $52k - $60k... which is silly for a "senior developer" but I think actually reasonable for a low-cost-of-living entry level position.)

I had a hunch you'd get slightly more dollars for pounds - looked it up and did the math and it's still a pathetic offer.

> * that is laughably, sadistically low, even for an entry level position in Podunk, Nowhere*

The salaries are low by US standards, but not "laughably" so IMHO.

In USD, those salaries currently translate to $53k - $60k. I know developers in the Bay Area who make the same (not taking equity into account), and I'm sure those salaries are reasonable in "podunk nowhere, USA".

I guess it's also worth noting that the dollar is currently somewhat strong relative to the pound (in 2009 it was closer to 1:2 GBP:USD, for instance).

> In USD, those salaries currently translate to $53k - $60k. I know developers in the Bay Area who make the same

Really? I thought bay area salaries were more around 80k+ to take into account cost of living.

> Really? I thought bay area salaries were more around 80k+ to take into account cost of living.

Generally yes, but ~$60k salaries are not totally unheard of - particularly in poorly funded startups hiring on equity and/or for junior roles. They are probably outliers.

That may have been true 10-15 years ago. For someone with either experience or a degree, most places pay 90k+. A senior engineer (as mentioned in the blog post) would easily make twice that.

Sure. As mentioned, I know people that make the salaries I quoted (who have both experience and degrees), and that's not something I plan to argue (because it's a fact). In my opinion they could make more if they really wanted to, but that's orthogonal to this discussion.

More like $100k - $150k+ in my experience, depending on what kind of work you're doing.

In the middle of nowhere, web developers make $30-70k in my experience. You need to work in a "city" (even if its small), or work remotely for a company that pays well to do any better.

A web developer making 30-70k is either underpaid or overpaid.

The same is true of virtually everybody at all salary levels.

The average for the bay area is somewhere around 94 USD... Based on an infographic I read 2 years ago.

this is a bit low for a senior developer, but it isn't crazy by UK standards and would actually be an extremely good salary for someone straight out of university not working in a bank. go search for experienced developer jobs outside of London if you really want to see sadistically low salaries...

Mean wage in the UK is £29k Median is £21k 75th percentile is £33.3k

These figures are for the UK as a whole 2012/13 from wikipedia.

Developer salaries in the UK are a lot lower than even your average entry-level Silicon Valley* engineering gig.

*I haven't worked elsewhere in the US for comparison.

As others have stated, salaries in London (and almost anywhere else in the world) are quite a bit lower. But many would argue you need less for a good quality of life in these places as well.

It's not sadistically low in comparison to the rest of the UK, £40,000 will put you in the top 10% of earners in the country.

Obviously it's not amazing pay, seeing as the average wage here is around £26k, it's not awfully bad.

Try browsing rightmove and zoopla. Might get a fresh perspective on living in London.

As a graduate, you can live in central London pretty comfortably on rent of about £8k/year.

£35k is about £25k after tax, so you'd be spending about a third of your post-tax income on accommodation. Completely reasonable.

Even if that were true - and it's not - this isn't a graduate role is it? For a senior dev role in London you're going to need to start at £50k and be prepared to end up nearer £80k if you actually want someone to do more than grind out some simple business logic.

You would be sharing a house in a less than salubrious area for that.

when I worked in Holbourn last year of the 3 young members of the team living in central London 2 of them lived in family owned property on the other had well off family (a first from oxbridge)

But technical and engineering roles salarys have historically been very poor compared to the USA.

It's more like $60k in USD, and while that is still lower than I've ever made out of college I have a suspicion that you are not aware of how cheap the cost of living is in Podunk, Nowhere. I don't even live in Podunk, Nowhere, but in a rather large but medium-COL city, and I do very well for myself.

I can't help but laugh when a friend in SF, making easily $30k/year more than me, can't even afford a place with his own washer and dryer. Meanwhile I could buy a 4+ bedroom house with 20% down after one year of working; or, if I choose to rent in the city, I can get one of the nicest apartments the city has to offer in an upscale area. The only nicer places would be high-rise penthouses with doormen, valet parking, and panoramic views of the city.

Granted, the real problem here is that London is not cheap. It's fucking expensive. So you're not going to be living like I am on that sort of salary in London.

I have been to these many "awkward" conversations so many times. In USA, developer == senior developer == tech lead == hands on architect. So they keep on adding better "title" of role, but we know that, it's 100% hands on job with reporting to 10 different managers and at least 4-5 status meetings in a day.

Hence, I am OK with my current job. :)

The important thing is to be arrogant and shame this person for literally doing their job.

If your job is harassing people and wasting their time, it doesn't make it okay because you're "just doing your job".

I'm just gonna go ahead and Godwin this particular subthread and say "I was just following orders" didn't hold any water at Nuremberg, and doesn't hold any now.

Yes, the recruitment industry sucks. The author of this article works in the recruitment industry — which company, I do not know, but by association to the industry, the author also sucks.

Let's face the facts. Huge sections of the working age population either unemployed or significantly underemployed. Dozens, if not hundreds, of applicants for every vacancy.

Which recruiters win in this market? Those who spend lots of money on highly skilled staff who can woo potential candidates with their in-depth knowledge of the industry they are recruiting for when performing basic qualifying cold calls for relatively low-paid roles, or those who hire people for near-enough minimum wage to churn through a list of candidates, read from a script, and get the information you need to qualify them for vacancies?

"But good heavens!" I hear you scream, as failsafe as the latter business plan sounds, the recruitment firm has left a bad taste in the mouth of the author!

Who cares? I bet they found the perfect candidate for that vacancy that same day after a few more phone calls.

To address the OP's 'Perfect World' recruiting scenario:

"I'm not sure what the answer is - probably some kind of flat-fee recruiter that makes extensive use of technology to automate and clean up the process with some (good) people on standby for edge-cases."

This is exactly what Mighty Spring (https://www.mightyspring.com) is - a high quality technical recruitment agency which is managed entirely by you, the candidate, through a web app.

The app helps you build out your career preferences and then shows you jobs matched to your background. If you're interested in hearing more about a specific opportunity, you can request that a recruiter from Mighty Spring call you to provide more details or put you directly in touch with the company. The best part? Their recruiters are technical and don't call unless you ask them to.

(Full disclosure; I'm the founder of Mighty Spring and an ex-recruiter to boot. OP hit the nail on the head with this post, IMHO.)

I know someone who works in IT recruiting. He makes $200-300K per year. Nice guy, but he doesn't know fuck all about technology. In fact, I've never once observed him asking a question that betrayed any knowledge or curiosity about the trade.

This is because success in the recruiting industry has nothing to do with industry knowledge and everything to do with sales and networking ability. Software developers like to think that their jobs are humbling because every time they make a mistake, a compiler will return an error. That's nothing compared to recruiters, who will make about 1200 phone calls for every 1 that leads to a hire. Then even if they get that hire, they are at the mercy of the consultant / employee and the employers.

Your friend is not a recruiter, he is a salesperson. This explains the way he can make a lot of money whilst knowing nothing.

A large proportion of people calling themselves recruiters are actually just salespeople. A real recruiter who understands the industry they're hiring for is a contact worth hanging on to. The rest, just block them asap and move on.

The emails don't bother me. Calls to my cell are little annoying but I just don't answer numbers I don't know. What really gets under my skin is when a recruiter will call my companies switchboard and then call my office phone!

That is ridiculously rude. I've had that happen to me at my current job. Way to leave a good impression, slimy recruiters.

I've been harassed by recruiters who would email me on my personal email address, my work email address, my cell phone, and my boss's office phone. Virtually all of it during work hours. I guess they got my cell phone number from the signature of the email that I sent politely telling them to please stop contacting me because I am not interested in any positions, regardless of the pay. I eventually had to personally spend the time researching the company and carpet bombing their management with a legal threat upon receiving further communication from them. It shouldn't have to come to that...

If technical recruiters did actually have technical experience, they could make much more money being programmers rather than working as recruiters. Therefor, there are few to no technically experienced recruiters. This isn't a problem that's going to fix itself, unless companies start valuing recruiters by paying the good ones a lot more. Clearly, this isn't happening widely, if at all. So instead of bitching about bad recruiters, startup founders could put their money where their mouths are and hire technically experienced people to recruit for them.

As a matter of fact, that's the way many successful startup founders operate - lots of them say they get their best hires by referrals from existing hires.

Anecdotally, the IT recruiters I know make more money than the developers I know. If you look at industry averages then you'll probably find recruiter income to be misleadingly low. Like most sales jobs, there's an incredible amount of entry-level turnover and stagnation at the left of the curve. Once you limit yourself to looking at people with a few years of successful experience under their belts, they actually make quite a bit of money.

I hung up on a recruiter the other day who called me mad for not being interested in a job opportunity for an unknown bank for an unknown salary in a vague area of London.

Something I wonder about is the way I get hit up by recruiters driven from LinkedIn in bunches. Most recently, I got a call from a big name and had several profile views from other people at the company.

Immediately following this, I was contacted more in a week than I had been in past 6 months.

It made me wonder if LinkedIn rotates through "featured" profiles, whether recruiters have some indication of who other companies are looking at or what?

I won't speculate on LinkedIn's practices, although it seems possible they could drive retention by 'rotating' inactive users into a more featured spot (or maybe you're correct and they have a feedback loop based around who's 'hot').

On the other hand, it could just be that when larger companies have openings, they're typically hiring for more than one developer. Thus, they might contract multiple recruiting agencies who then converge on the same profiles based off the information they're all getting from the hiring company, leading to a flurry of contacts in short bursts. Aside from looking through LinkedIn's query logs or talking to someone who works there, I'm not sure how you could verify either hypothesis, though.

The problem seems to me rather to be the clients of those companies. I don't envy those people in their call centers. Although I don't know how their job is set up, perhaps they just get x$ per successfully referred employee, and calling as many people as possible works.

It sucks how broken this part of the industry is.

I think a big reason why it's so broken is that it's easy to extract a lot of money out of recruiting with a comparatively shallow level of effort. Hopefully someday some disruptor will turn things upside down and fix things.

I'd sign up as a candidate on any site that only allows recruiters to get in contact with candidates if they submit a company name and zip/post code. If it also gave some stats as to how many candidates they had contacted/put to interview/successfully placed that would make it much easier to filter out time-wasters.

I have a simple solution to the problem of recruiter phone calls. If I haven't solicited them first I hang up on them as soon as they've identified themselves as a recruiter. It's simple, efficient, and makes my point very clearly.

This post inspired me... to remove 40 connections on LinkedIn. (Mostly recruiters.)

LinkedIn is now taking things to the next level by asking people to vouch for other people's expertise with keywords like HTML, CSS, Design Patterns and best of it all 'Product Specialist' .

In a perfect world people would know what they were talking about. But unfortunately that is rarely the case. Being a buzzword jockey goes mostly unpunished today, so people just keep going with it.

I'm a little unclear as to why you had such a long conversation with someone you were annoyed by about something you weren't interested in.

Having to be rude sucks.

"well yeah, if I'm going to be doing ASP.Net then I can't do that without knowing HTML."

You would be surprised.

anyone know how much these recruiters get paid?

Seems fairly easy to do an above average job considering the bar is so low.

I imagine you'd only have to work a few hours a day sending sensible emails and you'd out perform the majority of recruiters.

The worst part is trying to be polite replying to those £35k e-mails.

kind of a dick this guy, just hang up?

Glad someone said it. I stopped answering recruiter calls several years ago, and now I just email them back with a list of demands and the resume.

There is zero -- and I mean zero -- point in engaging them for conversation. They will ask you stupid stuff, try to make you take stupid tests, etc., and then try to sell you the job like a timeshare in Miami.

There are a few who do NOT do this, and I am eternally grateful when I encounter one of those.

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