What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages
blog.alinelerner.com
blog.alinelerner.com
- Salary Range. yes, a range. don't give me crap like "market rate" and "depends on experience". That's the same as saying "we won't tell you". It is understood that not everyone can negotiate the same amount of money but the range is crucial to know. For example, if I want to get paid 150K base salary and the range says 100-120K, I am not going to be bothered any further.
- Name of the client/company: Please don't play games with this one. Either you tell me the name or I am out. I don't wanna hear "Fortune 500 client with great benefits". really ?
- What are they looking for? Ok this one is subjective and sometimes difficult for a recruiter to explain. Totally understood. But please work with the hiring manager on understanding their requirement more. I blame hiring managers more on this one. I have got calls saying "we need an excellent C++ developer but donno any further details". Umm no.
- Location: Where will I need to be ? If you don't know, then I am not going to guess. I cannot move to Austin from New York (well I can't) Only when I know these things at a minimum from a recruiter, they will get my attention.
There have been many, many letters that I ignore because they don't include a salary range. By not being open about it from the beginning, I become inherently suspicious of any offer given. Not only that, but if a range is not given and they offer me less than what I'm making now, I'll be pissed as I just wasted a day or more going through this process.
Also, if I don't know who the company is, I immediately decline. There are certain companies and industries which I am morally opposed to, and if the company believes so strongly that they cannot reveal themselves then the first question that comes to mind is "what is the mystery company doing so bad that they are afraid to let potential candidates know their name?"
I agree 100% that everybody should demand full transparency, about salary, company name, benefits, signing bonus, company culture, tech stack, etc. before they even waste 30 minutes on a phone call.
It's absolutely INSANE in this competitive market to expect someone to jump on a 30 minute phone call to learn basic details about the company & the position.
Also, a lot of recruiters are not retained but work on contingency, so they're at best arms-length from the companies they "work" for - it's questionable how "inside" they are. Going with them may not confer as much of an advantage to getting the job as one might think.
In any case, I feel like tech recruiting is a poor solution that encompasses two problems: job discovery, and candidate discovery. Recruiting is effective at the latter, but oftentimes is used to fulfill the former.
Do you have evidence of that?
Anecdotally that has not been my experience. While recruitment fees are taken into consideration, between choosing a locally sourced vs 3rd party source candidate, it has had no bearing on salaries.
As an employer, the trifling cost of a referral that leads to a hire doesn't even enter into the conversation. Any candidate who would go around a recruiter (regardless of the fact that their reasoning is misguided) is demonstrating bad faith already, and I would not hire them.
Perhaps, but not always. I've been in a situation previously where I felt that the recruiter was not working in my best interest and decided to contact the hiring manager directly.
Seriously though, I think this is false logic by the recruiters. Most people will go through the channel that's open to them, where they have been contacted. They're not going to try and find the right contact at the company. There's a tradeoff between people going around you and people ignoring you. I think ignoring is a bigger problem. A job that consists of keywords for an unspecified company with an unspecified salary is just not noticeable.
If the whole arrangement is laid out such that there's a semi-adversarial relationship between the person who has the opening and the person who's trying to fill it, count me out. That situation will infect any interaction that comes out of it.
Also, if you use the relationship right, recruiters will do a lot of the upfront work for you.
Sometimes this is recruiters trying to maintain power. More often it's hiring managers being poor communicators. A lot of people have similar problems with simple marketing communication, like an elevator pitch, ad headline or a CV. Vague generalities feel like they capture more and they don't want to limit themselves. An SMS gateway that also does email brands itself Total Digital Communications Solution. Nice and broad. People who need a way of sending text messages do not look at that and go, I have a digital communications problem that needs solving.
"What are they looking for?" is a harder problem. This one is hard to know so inherently hard to explain. I always feel that describing it in terms of "skills and experience" is the problem. Wouldn't it be better just to say what they will be doing.
You will need to be the primary person maintaining and adding features to software written in PHP & C++ over the last 8 years. You will be assisted by a tenured intern and a graphic designer. We have a long wishlist of features and no documentation.
Our finances thus far consist of three bank accounts, six credit cards, a shoebox full of receipts and an audit conducted by the Republic Of Dagestan Tax Authority. We are a 2 year old startup experiencing hockey puck growth. We've added up all the money investors gave us and the money that came through stripe. We then subtracted the money in our account and came up with an estimate of the content of the shoebox. Your first task will be to open said shoebox and make sure that its content is similar to the product of the above arithmetic.
Would you want to see the range as 150-350K+? I mean I guess it at least tells you something, but at the same time, we don't want to scare off someone who's looking for 350 who would assume they either won't get it or won't like the people they are working with just because they might make 150, or maybe think the role is beneath them because it could pay as low as 150.
Basically, we want to have a chance to have a discussion with them about what they are looking for in a job and how much they are looking for. Putting a range in there squelches that discussion, whether justified or not.
ps. To head off the obvious question, it's the same job role but the expectations and criteria for success are obviously different for the 150 vs. the 350.
The person earning the high end of that scale is almost certainly not working in the same role as the person earning the low end. Their jobs are different, even if the HR-mandated job title is the same. It shouldn't be difficult for the person responsible for supervising and hiring for the roles to write up job descriptions that accurately reflect that difference, and provide a corresponding gradient of ranges that is appropriate, but doesn't include such a wide salary range.
If it's not possible to do this, I'd submit to you it's very likely that: the person earning the low end of the range is getting shafted, the person earning the high end is (relatively) over-compensated, or your organization has/had some serious lapses in distributing tasks and organizing your talent around the jobs to be accomplished for the company's mission. All of these things are negative indicators, in my opinion, so why shouldn't a prospective candidate view them as such when presented with that information?
For example, let's say you have two people in the same role, one at the top of the range and one at the bottom. The one at the bottom may do something like write a small script to audit resource usage, whereas the person at the top of the range would create an entire software platform for building such audit tools.
Both are doing the same job (auditing resource usage) but one is doing it at a much higher level, and both are needed, one to solve the immediate problem and one to solve the long term problem. And both are getting paid slightly above what they could get if they left the company and went somewhere else.
True. Recruiting Failure starts with disengaged, inattentive leadership hoping a 3rd party will magically fill their empty seats.
I used to work for a team lead who took a lot of time prepping recruiters on what he wanted. He took time to write up a good job description which stated that what kind of past experience would be a good match and which ones were _not_ a good match. Then applicants were asked to take an online 30min C++ test which tested some very basic skills. This weeded out about 95%.
Almost everyone was given a contract to hire offer. If you are good enough, you "rake it in" during the 3-6 months or so to make up for the "risk" you are taking as a contractor.
>>> Salary Range.
Too many times I see "Competitive", "Highly Competitive" "Plus Good Benefits" - you are simply wasting my time. Write out the benefits in point form and also add the salary.
>>> Name of the client/company.
I want to know who the company is straight away rather than wasting 3 - 7 days waiting of your phone call or email about more information on the company. Why do recruiters even do this?
">>> What are they looking for?"
Another classic blunder recruiters do. The best one is when they list some technologies, for example "Our stack is, Python, C++, C, HTML, CSS, etc." - etc.? Really? Its unprofessional in my eyes.
Location:
"Various" "enter_vague_region" - unprofessional and lazy.
Human resources will not find good employees doing this. They seem like headless chickens throwing unnecessary buzzwords into requirements. Why is there so much confusion?
1) It's a highly competitive business and not every engineer engaged with is ethical or trustworthy - after all we're all human. As most engineers hold anyone in the staffing industry in such high regard (they're all the same right?) and Recruiters only make money by filling a job they may be concerned with an engineer taking the lead they provided and simply applying to the job in order to avoid the Recruiter interaction completely (Wait... people avoid recruiters?!?). This is something that happens more often than you'd believe, for many reasons. Maybe you had a bad experience with a Recruiter in the past? Maybe you, like many engineers, are under the false impression that Recruiters get paid out of the money the company would have paid you? Most times, I believe, Recruiters aren't trying to be deceitful but rather are concerned with protecting themselves.
2) The most important thing to remember when you get any communication from a Recruiter is that they are simply making an attempt to start a conversation. Believe me the Recruiter hopes that this is the right position for you but most importantly they want to engage you in their service. It's about much more than any single opportunity they are sending your way. (NOTE: this can vary between corporate recruiting and agency recruiting)
If only all Recruiters knew how to communicate these things.... Unfortunately, like in any industry, recruiting has rock-stars who can be outnumbered by roadies just along for the ride.
It's a broken industry. Plain and simple. Some of us are trying really hard to fix it.
How about a web site instead? Oh, there are dozens of those already. Ok, so fix those. Not perfect, but they don't start out with a conflict of interest at their heart.
I'm not sure if I'm one of those hiring managers that you'd blame, but I can see recruiters hiring for my positions saying something similar. The reason for it is that I have very little in the way of specific technology requirements. I'm much more concerned with finding intelligent, inquisitive engineers that are willing to grow into whatever parts of the job they don't already have covered. I don't want engineers who limit the possible solutions to technologies they're familiar with...I want them to stay somewhat on top of what's going on in the industry and always be choosing the best technology to solve each problem they're given.
Because of this, I'll have a few core technology requirements (usually language or platform, only because we have existing code that needs to be maintained) and then the rest of my requirements are around development philosophy. I need to feel comfortable that a new hire has embraced not just agile practices but the philosophy behind it. If they're not comfortable developing without a spec or they're comfortable producing something with insufficient test coverage, that will cause friction with the rest of the team. If they're uncomfortable doing their own devops work or being responsible for their code in production, they're likewise not a fit for my team. And lastly, the team is responsible for solving everything and a lot of developers have problems being vulnerable enough to ask the team for help. I don't want developers that get stuck and waste 2 days banging their head against the problem.
But these kinds of requirements don't translate well to HR, so they get expressed similar to what you wrote. And it's not because they're not s well-thought-out on my part as the hiring manager, they're just more complex than "5 years of C++." Though even that has hidden complexity...I'll take the right 1 year of experience over the wrong 5 years.
As I mentioned in those comments, the statistical analysis is a bit arbitrary and not very scientific.
There are other issues as well, but that's the most obvious. The whole thing is a cautionary tale of not doing data analysis when you don't have appropriate training and experience.
WRT "Instead I wrote a little script that hashed messages with an edit distance" an alternative, possibly faster strategy, might be vocabulary. Look at the form letters full of meaningless idioms and cliches, total corporate-speak, all "believe" and "passionate" (that word is only used in cheap pr0n and corporate speak) and "casual" (See commentary on "passionate") and "challenge" "fit" "strong" (what is this ESPN Sportscenter or a recruitment email?) and "Agile" (which has been poisoned in the market to mean absolutely nothing now) How the corporate-speak form letters avoided classics like the phrase "work life balance" is a mystery. Words like "opportunity" and "experience" are kind of on the bubble and generally indicate corporate-speak. Relative lack of corporate-speak vocabulary in the personalized written by and for humans messages is also apparent.
(edited to add, an interesting difficult startup idea would be addons for word processors or web browsers which highlight corporate-speak words and phrases to dramatically improve writing styles. Any time "key takeaways" or "metric" appears in the text box its underlined in yellow or something.)
Note that all the graphs in this post
are interactive, so you can hover and
do other fun things.
502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)I don't understand the appeal of interactive charts for simple, static data.
Anyways, just an interesting take on another type of factor that can impact recruiting messaging.
A recruiter's _only_ job is to recruit talented people. A founder/engineer has other things to do. Yes they should be spending a significant portion of their time recruiting. How realistic is that expectation though?
Also, how do the %s above add to 100 unless there is a significant overlap between Engineers and Founders?
Big data!
When a recruiter from a recruitment company contacts me on linkedin, I immediately flag and block them.