Engineer-to-Engineer Recruiting | Hacker News Reader

Engineer-to-Engineer Recruiting

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44 pointssamskiter31 comments

Here is an idea for getting useful responses back - give the candidate enough info to evaluate whether they are interested. This means info on the company, detailed description of the role, ballpark on the comp. You are even more likely to get a response if your email suggests you went as far as googling the candidate.

I truly don't understand why recruiters think "unspecified opportunity at top startup in technology industry, send me your resume since I'm too lazy to google it, I want a phone conversation" is actually useful.

I like the recruiters that tell you nothing other than a bit of the technology, and even that does nothing to distinguish it. "I have a great Java opportunity in (your area); call me if you're available and interested". Yeah, I don't think so.

It's like they're trying to prevent you from going straight to the company, to where they won't get their finder's fee, but all it does is ensure they only get responses from people who are desperate.

A lot of those recruiters are agency recruiters working on contingency. Meaning they don't actually work for the company they're recruiting for, they just get paid for successfully referring engineers to that company. The reason they're so vague is because they don't want you skipping over them and contacting the company directly, which would save you/the company a lot of money (and cause them to lose their recruiting fee).

Like I said, "to where they won't get their finder's fee"

I understand them wanting to protect their sources, but they have to give some details. "I have a Java backend position in the telecommunication sector, it would be on the client's (whatever team) that (does whatever). I'm looking for a developer with 3-5 years experience in Java or other static OO languages; the client uses (frameworks), and some knowledge of (tech, tech, and tech) would be helpful as well. Compensation is competitive, the pay is a bit better than average, standard benefits" would be the elevator pitch that might actually be worth paying attention to (well, no, because I don't want to go back to writing Java, but you get the idea).

In short, I want to know -something- about the job beyond "it's a bog standard development job". I can find a bajillion of those posted online, without having to call and actually -talk- to someone. Show me that you actually know what the position is about, and might be able to answer questions about it before I actually talk to the client, and I might respond.

We are in agreement.

I used to get a lot of 'this role requires a Java expert, it also helps if you know jquery, html5, css'.

What's really frustrating is when I get a seemingly personalized email, and then six of my coworkers say that they got the same email. Do recruiters really think we don't talk to each other?

I try not to take it out on recruiters because from people I know who've done it, their bosses are constantly on their asses to make quota/reach a certain # of "connections" a day. The personal touch and relationship kind of goes out the window.

Very true, and unfortunate. However, its kind of bullshit when a company who would look down on me for "resume blasting" and not tailoring my resume for them thinks is OK to "lead blast" me with a fill-in-the-blank form letter.

Well then it's the recruiters in management. The industry is broken and hostile to developers.

What gets me about recruiter spam is how similar to regular spam it is. I've received only a smattering of messages, but largely, they're entirely lowercase, they have almost no punctuation, and they frequently have patently obvious grammatical errors. I responded to one recruiter (she managed to contact me at a time I was looking at alternate employment), and on the phone she was well-spoken; something about sticking a keyboard between them and me apparently causes communication to devolve into a base form.

I hear a lot about this, but never had any recruiter emails at all. I'm 20 years old so I suppose my name is just not known in the programmer world (?), but then how does that work? How do you get your name known? Day after day you hear about unemployment in the news, yet here everyone is complaining about receiving too many "please come work for us" emails?

It's not that I don't believe that many developers receive so much spam, but I don't understand why or how. How'd they even know if you're any good? According to some internship places, >50% of the developers is incompetent. Do recruiters just pull as many people as possible in for interviews and check everyone out, is that the goal? Or is it mostly just because the company wants to expand, or to compensate leaving/older people?

I didn't start getting a ton of recruiter spam until I had a linkedin profile and started "connecting" with recruiters on linkedin (to "get my name out"; not sure I'd use this method to get my name out again though). Before that I would only occasionally get anything. Now every time I update my profile I get a flood of recruiter spam.

You don't need to connect to recruiters, per se. But yes, having a LinkedIn profile will ensure you get a constant trickle of recruiters. Any time you touch your profile, expect the number to increase; LinkedIn's algorithm seems to promote newly updated profiles, likely due from the assumption that touching your LinkedIn profile is like updating your resume; you're more probable to be looking for a job than someone who has left it sitting there untouched for two years.

Well, it also made a big difference once I moved to the Valley

Put a profile mentioning a handful of popular technologies on Dice.com with the actively looking status. You should get tons of recruitment spam. The problem is that the vast majority of it will not be good leads. Most of the jobs you will not have a realistic chance of getting because the recruiters will ignore key details such as level of experience and where you are actually willing to work.

Or even if your buzzword-based experience is relevant. Last time I tried Dice, I got a deluge of recruiter emails for contract Django positions because I mentioned that I used Python for analyzing radar data.

I get a ton of recruiter spam. For me I think it's a combination of having a LinkedIn profile, an active Github and Stack Overflow profile, having a blog, and having them all linked together. Unfortunately, I'm now at a place where it's mostly just a nuisance because the positions they have to offer are generally at worse companies with worse management, environments, pay, and benefits. It's generally not worth my time to respond. If I do respond it's not going to be with my resume, but instead with a list of questions they need to answer to decide if it's worthwhile.

Pretty much identical to me. I make a point of telling them to email me details because I learned a long time ago that 99% of their phone calls are a waste of time.

It's been a very long time since a recruiter got me a good job. Mostly it's direct contact with companies or people in my network.

I'm about the same age (just turned 21), and I do get a lot of recruiter spam. I'd gladly trade to be in your shoes instead. The lack of effort many of these people put into their emails is appalling. I understand recruiters are frequently ignored so I do make an effort to respond in any way if they show some effort. "r u interested? call me" types just get deleted.

To answer your question, LinkedIn is a big part as many have mentioned, website, I also have an occasionally updated blog which has been on the top 3 of the front page on HN.

Most people to reach out to me through the blog have written the best emails and still maintain a good relationship with me after the fact. Emails from CEOs or CTOs also usually reach me there.

Other than that, my LinkedIn doesn't have too many connections (I only add people I've met or spoken with), but I do have a few good recommendations. I co-founded a business a couple years ago and I still get some contacts through people who know me from there.

For the most part, recruiter spam is not a problem you want to have. Be grateful （:

Engineer-to-engineer recruiting works to some extent, but only as long as your engineers are willing to tolerate it.

Airbnb, for example, has (had?) an "Always Be Recruiting" dogma: Get your engineers so psyched about the company that they go forth and witness to every engineer they know. It seems to work–at least, until you dig deeper. The nigh-unto weekly "most recruiting recommendations" statistics single out the few who are willing to share the Kool-Aid, and–more importantly–the many hundred who are not. If your engineers are made to look bad because they're not proliferating their trade at every tech talk, it's a bad sign.

As an aside to my aside, this article seems to ignore the glaringly-obvious "Have the CEO do the recruiting" conclusion.

> As an aside to my aside, this article seems to ignore the glaringly-obvious "Have the CEO do the recruiting" conclusion.

Comparative advantage. It's likely that the CEO's time is better spent elsewhere even if he's also the best at getting responses to recruiting.

Maybe the right answer is to have a recruiter recruit using the CEOs account, pretending to be the CEO and then handing people off to the recruiter version of themselves when they reply.

Good marketing spam about their product. Nothing for the end user here; just to sell to companies.

I wish recruiters would be:

a) honesty. Nothing good is built on a lie. b) personal. Get Feedback if you are not interested and actively engage in talking to your potential employee's as well as your potential clients. c) communication. Falls into b) but it also falls into a).

I immediately delete most recruiting spam that is not actually written to me. I realize this costs me jobs potentially but it also saves me face. Nothing worse than getting hyped up over a potential job that will never be.

Interesting article and its small sampling echoes what I’ve long preached – keep HR and recruiters out of the hiring process.

The claim that HR/recruiters are the only ones that have “pipeline management” (translation: multitasking), “offer negotiation” (translation: requirements validation; this is farce as HR/recruiters work for the company and not the candidate, thus they all have a take-it-or-leave-it approach), and “brand recognition” skills are completely false. If HR/recruiters were such experts on brand recognition then there would have been responses to the limited sampling.

If a recruiter is open to telling you the company name, I usually respond. If not, they're much more likely to be ignored.

I think the article raises / highlights a great point. When you're trying to hire the most talented folks out there, making that effort of integrating the team, be it the CEO, VP R&D or any of the engineers in the process makes a strong statement in my mind that a company is really interested in you and that you're not being carpet bombed by email. That in itself creates a slightly stronger sense of good moral obligation from the side of the candidate to respond, as he feels that there's a "real" person on the other end, but also that this company is making a real effort. The fact that they incorporate engineers into this, is also something to would send a strong signal (at least to me) that this is a company worth checking. My two cents at least.

I think spam is spam no matter who sends it (engineer or recruiter). If I send or receive a random message, it'll be just that: a random message in an inbox. Such messages are usually ignored. While recruiting for my startup, I've had the most success through introductions rather than sending random messages to people.

Interesting, I think you highlight the point that the more personal the contact is, the more fruitful it will hopefully be (see purereason's reply). While you consider all recruitment email to be spam, it seems that not all do (according the results of the experiment shown...)

The best recruiters I've ever talked to have been from VC firms. I've actually ended up friends with recruiters working at VC firms that I've gotten calls from. With the better firms, they realize it's not all about placing people in one of their companies today, but rather fostering a positive relationship.

This requires recruiters to actually do work, instead of keyword searching resumes and spamming candidates.

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