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Show HN: Form I send all recruiters to

e.l1t3.com

31 pointshippich29 comments

I've signed offer letters and hired about 300 people in the last 5 years, and I still consider myself chief recruiter...

Two comments:

1) This is obnoxious in the sense that it's placing a bar that other candidates don't, and it's lacking context I'd prefer to provide over a phone call. For instance, equity at our company is typically quite different than equity at other companies. Not all equity is created equal, and our cap table is very clean.

2) For the right candidate, I'd still make a best effort to fill it out despite the aforementioned comment.

To me the most broken part of recruiting is the third-party recruiting process, and yet, we still use them, because they do occasionally bring in great candidates we would otherwise miss.

Nice to see recruiter's side! I bet if I would receive email from you, I would not respond with link to this form :)

This idea started as a joke, and more people liked it so I made it standalone :)

Personally, both from experience long ago, and from what I gather is the case today with exits being difficult and good ones very rare, I'd make the stock options a "Equity" check box, and include a text box with a politely worded version of "If you wish, please tell me why the discounted value of the equity is not essentially zero or negative...."

The negative is because they can be a motivation to fire an employee just before they become worth something, e.g. in the most infamous case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist...

@davidu: I have friends who apply to companies through the company recruiting Web sites. Even when they are great fits for a position, and it would be better to discuss the matter, they are still forced to fill out numerous fields without any "context." So, if nothing else, maybe forms like this will make companies rethink their own recruiting Web pages.

I do not disagree w/ you.

I do 99% of my recruiting with a hand-written email from an email I find on linkedin, github, or a personal webpage.

My initial reaction was "obnoxious," too, but he finishes on a high note: Asking for the hiring manager, his title, etc.

Obviously this form could use improvement. For example, without knowing the percentage of shares outstanding and stock classes, having a number of options is meaningless. But it is more in the right direction than not.

Love the idea and I'm interested to see if anyone bothers. As you say, if the recruiter cares and isn't playing the numbers game, it's not a huge task for them to go through for a good enough candidate. You'll likely get few responses but from the recruiters who you want to be in touch with.

Exactly, and I always hate to simply not respond to email, because it is always a possibility, that this particular email will lead to a better job.

While I doubt any recruiter will ever take the time to fill this out I love the idea. That said it would take a miracle before I would work with a third party recruiter again and I would never send something like this to recruiters that work for the company in question. In my experience they have been very good at their jobs, third party..... Not so much. I've had third party recruiters make me jump through hoops (tests that prove nothing), try (and fail) to hide the name of the company, harass my references, and be completely useless.

I landed 2 solutions (sales) engineering jobs in NYC with the help of 2 different 3rd party recruiters and they were excellent. No hoops, no extra BS. They really helped me zero in on the positions that fit with my goals and experience, so I wasn't wasting time.

Coding positions might be a whole different ballgame, though. I probably wouldn't have much patience for coding tests with a recruiter which undoubtedly makes the process harder for all 3 parties.

I'm sure recruiter usefulness does vary on a per-profession basis. As for coding tests, I am fine with problems that prove that you can work with a language and/or prove basic programming/problem solving skills. In fact I love them, I spend a good bit of time on Project Euler and the like (Code kata and stuff like that). My issue is with tests that really are seeing if you can execute code in your head:

Given the following code snippet what is it's output:

//IMAGE OF CODE

A) 1

B) 2

C) false

D) null

These are stupid questions IMHO, in fact the last test I had to take like this I could have typed up each code example and run the code in the time I was given on each question. Test me on my problem solving but don't ask me to boot up an interpreter in my head that skill is NEVER needed in your day to day life as a coder. (I also take issue with tests that ask about boilerplate or stuff handled by the IDE/environment). We live in a world where a massive amount of information (I'd argue even more so when you look at just programming) is just a google away. Don't ask me to memorize docs that I can lookup in seconds, it's just not a skill that's really needed. I prefer "learn as you go" over "memorize this book". Now when it comes to programming concepts I might budge a little but not much.

Is the "Foosball table" item a negative or positive?

for me - positive :) i like to foose (although I am not good at it)

A good recruiter is worth its weight in gold, I think this is useless against recruiters who are just spamming; because it's a numbers game for them, and they don't have the time to be filling forms when there's money to be made elsewhere.

And a good recruiter might find it a bit pretentious. I'd rather take the spam than risk my career.

If I see email from recruiter worth a following up - I never risk it. But this is rarity, more often you get boilerplate emails. But who knows, may be one particular recruiter with boilerplate email is actually care.

I would hope a good recruiter would ignore the form and try to contact the OP in a non-spammy way like most recruiters do these days.

this should rather be used by recruiters to generate an email template that will definitely get more attention and higher response rate...

Does the form represent the priority of concerns you have about a position?

i.e. does the compensation and perks come before technologies and management?

May be slightly, but more importantly, all these fields required - i.e. this information what I consider most important about opportunity and usually takes quite awhile to find out from my experience. So I offload it to recruiter to do it.

I like this idea a lot, do you have an auto response set up in your email or manually send it to them?

In my form right now - no. But it is possible to configure emails sent to recruiter too. Thanks for idea!

How many recruiters jump through this particular hoop?

So far - 0, but i just started responding with link to this form. But if someone really care about position/company they are working for, it shouldn't be hard to get answers to questions.

I think it is better than just not responding to recruiter email or mark it as spam. There is always a chance.

A vast number of recruiters are not in-house recruiters so they will never have most of this information anyway.

And this is perfectly fine. Better noise-to-signal ratio.

Probably great specificity, but close to zero sensitivity. I guess thats fine if you have no intention of changing jobs though.

What is the green lock at the bottom for?

instead of captcha - https://hashcash.io/

Well Done!

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