Striking Back At Recruiter Spam | Hacker News Reader

Striking Back At Recruiter Spam

blog.42floors.com

I rather like Atlassian's take on the issue: https://www.atlassian.com/company/careers/recruiters

That's a great policy. It doesn't completely remove time or energy from the HR/hiring manager at Atlassian, but it clearly outlines objectives of working with recruiters with a very real, tangible penalty for spamming. Nice.

Called the number - surprisingly real sounding, nice execution.

Still, seems like a jerk-move. I can see this backfiring in some way or another.

I hope they're keeping statistics on how long people are on the line before hanging up.

Is that a fixed recording of someone reading out 5 random job descriptions, or are you dynamically getting 5 fresh descriptions and using text-to-voice? Its probably the former, but if not, that is amazing text-to-voice, and I'd love to know where its available!

As much as i agree that recruiters can be annoying getting the right recruitment/recruiter help can be the most amazing leverage tool for your startup and to be honest this comes across really childish. That said recruitment is ripe for disruption.

I admire the execution of this and simultaneously condemn it for its douchebaggery.

If legal, they should make recordings of the reactions.

"this call is being recorded for quality purposes"

Not sure this allows the recordings to be divulged, though

"This call is being recorded for quality purposes and may be used for marketing or other purposes at our discretion."

This is a waste of time and money.

This makes me sad. It's petty vindictiveness and it doesn't help our industry. Rather than accepting that recruiters have wasted his time, and moving on, the author decides to waste even more time to get back at them. And for what? Does anyone think that the recruiter who wasted the author's time is going to reflect deeply on this and change his ways?

Rather than striking back with some ego-stroking revenge, maybe educating the recruiter on why his behavior was shitty might help more? Maybe making a general page that you could easily refer him to that explains why his tactics are disrespectful so that he can learn from this, rather than just having his time wasted? You could also refer other pushy recruiters to that page.

This isn't my company though, so the author is free to do what he wants. I'm wondering if people look at this and think "that's awesome, I can relate! I want to work there," or if they look at this and think "that guy has no problem spending time being mean to people he thinks deserve it, I might stay away."

You obviously don't have a lot of experience working with recruiters. They know exactly what they're doing and know which things they do are scummy. Their tactic is to fish for as many people in an organization until somebody bites.

I think the idea is great - it needs to be extended to other, configurable, phone numbers. There should also be a version for recruiters calling potential candidates.

I think it's assumed from the article (and the screenshot of the Gmail trail) that the team members have explicitly stated that they don't want to be bothered and don't work with recruiting agencies, this is a total last ditch effort.

At our ~20-person startup, we have a few recs open and I still see multiple people get calls on their mobile phones from recruiters over and over, and in the majority of these cases they don't even know how the recruiter got their number.

The job postings on the 42floors website don't have any information indicating that recruiter/agency submissions will not be considered. While the unprofessionally aggressive won't let "We do not accept unsolicited resumes from recruiters or agencies" deter them, not every recruiter is unprofessionally aggressive. A lot of them are persistent but capable of understanding "no" if it's delivered firmly and professionally.

Frankly, I find it amusing that the OP would take the time to set up a fake phone number but couldn't take the time to add a simple sentence to his company's job postings.

You tell them to go away. You tell them to not call you. You tell them to not call others in your company. And yet still they call. And call. And call. And email. And call. It never stops.

Two days ago I got a phonecall out of the blue.

"Is now a good time to talk?" "No, I am at work." "Just 5 minutes, blah, blah..."

I just hung up.

I don't see it as vindictiveness but as some kind of "spammer's honey pot" -- while the recruiter is listening to this at least he's not calling someone on their team.

But I was disappointed about the low-tech quality of the approach; I was hoping for some kind of evolved Eliza-like HR robot that could sustain some form of conversation for some time.

If this caught on, at some point recruiters could never be sure they're talking to a real person.

- - -

I very often get calls at home, from people trying to sell me either new windows for my house or some low-cost mobile phone service.

I used to hang up on those calls, but not anymore!

Now I put them on speakerphone... and give the receiver to my four-year-old. He's very excited that someone wants to speak to him, and starts talking about his day right away.

This has transformed a very annoying experience into a great form of entertainment for the whole family (not to mention it "shifts the burden of rudeness" to the caller... how do they dare hanging up on my son!!!?!)

Training an Alice bit for this task (and similar marketing talks) should be relatively easy, especially because the marketer wants to stay on the line and will make allowances for wonky conversation.

http://alice.pandorabots.com/

http://alicebot.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/mitsuku-wins-loebner-...

(Sorry for mobile links)

I'm surprised it hasn't already been done.

> I'm wondering if people look at this and think "that's awesome, I can relate! I want to work there," or if they look at this and think "that guy has no problem spending time being mean to people he thinks deserve it, I might stay away."

I look at this and think - wow, these guys have an awesome sense of humor and don't hire (usually bad) devs peddled by such recruiters. Definitely raises my interest.

"Ughhhhhhhhhh people keep emailing me to offer high paying jobs and I have to click archive."-The most first world problem in the history of the universe.

They're actually dealing with recruiter spam on the other side. "I see you need people, I have 'great candidates' for the roles that I would love to setup for interviews."

And they said some go to the lengths of calling the mobile number of every engineer at their company. So basically the recruiter is just an extremely persistent salesperson who distracts the entire company in hopes that they'll find a way to sell their product.

When entrepreneurs do that, HN calls it "hustle"

That's not what's happening here. The recruiter is contacting 42floors to try to get them to hire their candidates.

"people keep emailing me to offer high paying jobs and I have to click archive."-The most first world problem in the history of the universe."

I agree 100%

However, he has the opposite issue, he has job openings and he's getting spam from recruiters proposing candidates.

OTOH, there's one type of recruiter spam that annoys me: the ones that spam with openings where I explicitly say I'm not authorized to work, so, surprise surprise, if you're incompetent to see that, I don't trust you (It's the "no brown M&Ms of recruiting")

1. The recruiter is not contacting him to help him get a job, he's contacting him to provide candidates and get paid if 42floors hires them. It's the other way around.

2. A recruiter never emails you to offer you a job, he's asking you to apply for some position. There's no guarantee you'll get the job. If he's a good recruiter, he studied your profile and knows you're a good match. That's pretty rare. Most of the time, recruiters are just spamming a list of emails addresses of people working in the general field when just a quick look at the linkedin profile would be enough to see that it would be a very bad match.

>If he's a good recruiter, he studied your profile and knows you're a good match.

Even studying your CV, they can only match up two words. They have no idea that the concepts of RDBMS are SQL pretty synonymous.

These aren't job offers, but offers from recruiters to find candidates for the positions which OP posted. Just clarifying.

Also, the "First World Problem" meme is so tired by now. A problem doesn't need to be as bad as starvation to be worth solving.

Agreed. Yes, it's a problem probably unique to the first world. However, 42Floors is operating in the first world, and it's dumb to dismiss problems simply because they happen in the first world, especially when that's the world you live in.

This isn't about developers getting recruiter spam.

"Grr, someone posted something that I don't want to read at all but feel like trashing in the comments." -the second most first world problem.

I mean seriously, as everyone as pointed out this post is not about that problem in the first place. If you actually read the post you would see that they made a pretty cool little hack. Try calling the number, (415) 534-6560, for yourself. It sounds surprisingly real.

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