Ask HN: Do I have to go through recruiters nowadays, how do you find new jobs?

Googling "the name of the company you're interested in + careers" usually does that. Or you can go on linkedin and search for internal recruiters from that company, but you'll be wasting time.

A counterpoint to that is that if a company is hiring a recruiter they are serious about hiring somebody.

There are some places where they bring in a huge number of candidates, interview them, and then never hire anyone. For instance, at a local Uni, they had a position open for 2.5 yrs.

If there is a recruiter involved there is a sense of urgency at least.

    > is that if a company is hiring a recruiter they are
    > serious about hiring somebody

Interviews can be a little easier for contracting because there's a 6-12 month interview called the contract. If you work with the right recruiting company I think it can work out pretty good.

Good Recruiters are out there but they are like needle in a haystack. It is tough to know good ones but when they do come, make sure they are in your rolodex

Having said that, I have found a couple of ways of finding jobs that I want:

Approach 1. Decide a company that you want to work for. Go to their careers page if they have one and then find a relevant position. Then go to Linkedin and search for "HR <company name>" in linkedin and try to find an HR contact in that company. Send them a short email that you are interested in that specific position. You never know and they may just connect you to the right hiring manager (has happened to me). BUT the trick is that you need to write effective and precise email. Don't send generic "I need a job" type of email.

Approach 2: Go to sites like indeed.com and shortlist a list of relevant jobs you like. They may not provide a direct HR/hiring manager contact but it could be a recruiter. That's ok for starters. Now take some of the keywords from that job posting and run a google search on the exact words. You may be surprised to get a direct listing from a company's career page. Now go back to Approach 1. (Done this as well)

Approach 3: The "good" recruiter can be very useful if you have found one. Then just go through them as it will be worth your time (done this as well)

Rinse and repeat.

The key with recruiters is to find one that is like you. Read their messages and if they say something that "hits on something" for you, then go with that one. Trust your gut!

The benefit of a recruiter is that you won't have to do the whole "meet for coffee" thing, where the company does an initial check to make sure you don't have any crazy red flags. With a recruiter, you "meet for coffee" once, he vets you (or tells you you have a big red flag), and then does your leg work.

A recruiter is also your negotiator. The money they make is dependant on your salary, so it's in their best interest to get you the highest salary possible. I suck at negotiating, so I really appreciate this aspect of recruiters.

And if you picked the right recruiter and they are open with you, they can really help cut through the bullshit that are most job postings. They'll say things like "This posting says X, but I talked to the CTO and he really just needs someone to take a functional spec and build an interface out of it".

Without a recruiter, you'll need your wits about you, lest you end up being deceived by a flowery job posting. And you'll need to have confidence and a firm understanding of your abilities so you can negotiate a good salary. You'll have to pour through job sites and you'll submit the same application form over and over and over... It's tiring.

Disclaimer: I've used recruiters to find every job I've had other than the first one.

> I'd rather talk to a company directly.

Why? What benefit do you get from that? You're not like to negotiate a higher salary than you would without the recruiter, and you're not in a better position to get hired either (over the total spend of an employee's lifespan the recruiter commission is a drop in the bucket). Some companies I've worked for place candidates they receive through external recruiters higher than self-selected candidates because they've already presumably gone through some sort of screening process.

A good recruiter will understand what you're looking for and won't put crap in front of you. That doesn't mean you'll get the perfect hand-picked job, and they'll probably challenge you on some of your assumptions, but if you're a .NET developer they're not going to try to get you to take a PHP job.

But here's how I generally go about looking for a new job:

1. Email bosses I've had who I would want to work for again and let them know I'm on the market. Just a quick "Hi _______, I wanted to let you know I'm ready for a change from my current environment. If you hear of anything I'd love to take you out to lunch and discuss the opportunity." LPT: They will buy the lunch 95 out of 100 times :)

2. Email recruiters I've used in the past and send them an updated Word resume, salary/commute requirements, and what I want v. my current job (bigger, smaller, different sector, whatever).

3. If I'm very gung ho I will go on Ladders, Indeed, etc but the above typically hasn't taken very long to find something.

One of the actual uses for LinkedIn.

Generally you probably want to work for people you like and respect. If you know some people like that, then finding out how to reach them on LinkedIn is a good way to let them know you are interested in working with them.

Sometimes they won't be interested in working with you, its a fact of life and you have to let that go. Sometimes they are open to the idea but they don't have any budget. And sometimes they will get you interviewed and move you over right away.

If you are in the "any job but this one" mode, you are at a disadvantage. If you don't know what you want to be doing then people will have a harder time knowing if you would work out well in their position. Its painful when there is a job available but you know it isn't what you really want to be doing, do you suck it up and work there because its a job? do you turn them down? Depending on your financial status it can be a very tough call.

When folks ask me "should I look for a new job?" I have two pieces of advice regardless, one is that you should always be considering new opportunities, and two you should think about what you jobs you like doing while you are not under pressure (say being unemployed) because it helps you be more honest with yourself on what you like and don't like.

Recruiters can sometimes get your name in front of a manager at a company you want to work for when you don't know anyone there. But generally their value is more to hiring managers than the people they represent.

Disclaimer: I have used recruiters and I work for the company I'm about to recommend

That said, I do recommend these guys:

https://www.vettery.com

I'm a developer here. We're a hiring marketplace similar to Hired, but we've got a more human touch which includes getting to talk to our in-house team. I'm impressed with how hard our team works and this is the thing I've built that I'm proudest of.

If you want some middle-ground between a recruiter and doing it yourself, give it a look.

I despise recruiters with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. That leaves me (and you) with a few viable options:

1) Use a matching service like interviewing.io or TripleByte to get connected directly with companies. (Effectiveness: Questionable but promising)

2) Use a job listing site like Indeed.com to find positions that you're interested in applying to. (Effectiveness: It works, but is like throwing mud on a wall to see what sticks -- hard and not very lucrative.)

3) Use Indeed / AngelList / whatever to find companies that are hiring, then use LinkedIn or some other method to find the hiring manager directly. Email them directly with your resume and cover letter (since it's effectively a cold-call, make that cover letter damned impressive). (Effectiveness: works great, in my experience)

4) Use your network. Email old bosses and coworkers and let them know you're on the market. If you've left a good impression, they'll usually be more than happy to do whatever they can to get you into good companies. (Effectiveness: fantastic, assuming you have a network in the first place.)

There are tons of other ways, but those are the strategies I've used. In the mean time, study up for your technical interviews. Good luck!

How common is it for recruiters to "inject" themselves into the process? I ask this for a couple reasons.

I interviewed for a position a while back where the person interviewing me at the end asked, "What firm sent you again? Was it Firm A?" when I had been sent by someone with Firm B. I'll also get contacted by recruiters from different firms for the same position.

There have also been a couple cases recently where I've been submitted for a position by a recruiter, interviewed with a company, and got a pass or didn't hear back at all. And then I'll see the position show up a couple weeks later on a site like StackOverflow Careers. I got the impression that a recruiter jumped on an opening they came across and just kind of threw me in there and the company hiring decided they weren't getting much in return for the potential money they'd be laying out. I was pretty well qualified for one of these positions, so I wondered if they wouldn't have been more enthusiastic if there hadn't been a recruiter between us.

My conclusion after about a year of working with a number of recruiters in my area (Southern California) is that the industry is dominated by a few big firms (I refer to CyberCoders as the McDonald's of recruiters, but that may be being too generous) and has a lot of turnover. I suspect they have most their success placing more junior developers in less critical let's-get-this-seat-filled kind of positions. I've come across a few that I would call real professionals. Unfortunately, they always seems to be focused in areas or locations that don't line up with my own.

I still look at a number of recruiters emails each week. But now I only respond if I am convinced that they have an actual working relationship with the company they claim to be representing and aren't just trying to win some race against the rest of the rodentalia out there.

I also put together a page on my wiki for Recruiters to which immediately I refer them any time I am contacted:

http://klenwell.com/is/Recruiters

This has been helpful in quickly filtering out the most callow practitioners.

    > I got the impression that a recruiter jumped on an opening
    > they came across and just kind of threw me in there and the
    > company hiring decided they weren't getting much in return
    > for the potential money they'd be laying out. I was pretty
    > well qualified for one of these positions, so I wondered if 
    > they wouldn't have been more enthusiastic if there hadn't
    > been a recruiter between us.

    > But now I only respond if I am convinced that they have
    > an actual working relationship with the company they
    > claim to be representing

Hi, I'm a recruiter.

Look for job aggregators like Adzuna, Indeed, etc, which scrape all jobs on the web. When you see results, it should be easy to work out which jobs are posted by recruiters, and which have been posted directly by the company.

In my (massively biased) experience, you are better off applying for a position when you've been put forward by a recruiter:

* The recruiter knows what the client's salary range is, and wants you to get paid as much as possible (as the role is commission based) - they'll be able to make sure you're getting a good deal out of the client

* The recruiter is a professional sales person, and will chase the hiring manager for feedback, technical interviews, etc etc, in a way that as a direct candidate you'll come across as too pushy if you do yourself

* The recruiter will genuinely have a good view of other similar jobs you may not have found that you'd be a good match for.

* The recruiter will get much much more candid feedback about you than you'll ever get directly from the client

... and a whole bunch of other factors.

I actually just posted this http://weworkcontract.com/ for London contract jobs aggregated from job boards (and recruiters).

Disclaimer: I am a software engineer at Underdog.io.

There are a lot of platforms nowadays that help to remove the "middleman" of external recruiters. Underdog.io, Hired, Vettery, InterviewJet, and others. These platforms typically are working to connect companies and candidates together directly by removing the "find and apply to each company individually" type approach. Instead they accept candidate applications, put them through their own internal approval process, and then, if selected, present them to companies to then make the decision if they want to talk to the candidates directly. In my opinion is approach is a much nicer and less stressful process for candidates.

    > Instead they accept candidate applications, put them
    > through their own internal approval process, and
    > then, if selected, present them to companies to then
    > make the decision if they want to talk to the
    > candidates directly

Call up your friends and tell them you are looking for a new gig. Your peers will likely make better matches and more meaningful intros to companies you'd actually want to work for than recruiters.

It is a numbers game.

You will be falsely rejected from some companies.

You will be falsely accepted from some companies.

I got my current job by applying on their jobs page.

In the UK there's something seriously wrong with the IT jobs market. On the job sites (TotalJobs is my go-to example) literally 99% of DevOps positions on any given day are being advertised through recruitment agencies. I was forced to deal with them for years and the majority are either incompetent or shady. I wrote an essay on this (https://mocko.org.uk/b/2015/10/14/dont-feed-the-beast-the-gr...) a few months ago detailing some of the appalling behaviour I've seen from recruitment agencies on the London tech scene and in the ensuing HN debate people raised equally harrowing examples of their own.

What's wrong with this? Well, from my perspective it's now basically impossible to land a job without either knowing the people hiring (i.e. networking, something we nerds are bad at) or lining the pockets of some talentless parasite who's found a way to insert himself into a high-value transaction.

The "only work with the ones you like" argument people often respond with completely misses the point. I believe it's based upon a misapprehension of the dynamic - nerds see "agent" in their job title and assume something like a literary agent, someone with incentives aligned with their own who'll pimp them around a variety of potential employers. The truth, however, is that agents aggressively pursue companies for leads (I've been on the hiring side too and had dozens of calls a day) and some actively threaten companies ("use us or we'll poach all your staff") into using their services. The social engineering they use to navigate the corporate phone system to reach decision makers can be quite ingenious. Companies with the backbone to say no are sadly rare, so from the the applicant's side if you see a job advertised and if you want it, you have no choice but to to kiss the agent's ass for an introduction to the employer.

This rent-seeking behaviour generally nets the agent a sum equivalent to the first few months of the applicant's salary or 10-20% of their contract rate for as long as they stay there. The only real service the agent offers in return for this is spamming nerds who they'd like to apply (as happened to the OP) and weeding out obviously bad applicants to save the employer's time.

Since writing that essay I've flat-out refused to have anything to do with recruitment agencies. Internal recruiters are fine (hey, if you're hiring a lot that's totally a specialised job) but I take the use of a recruitment agency as a sign that an employer either 1) gave in to an agency's aggressive sales tactics or 2) has a reputation so poor that putting their name on job ad actively discourages the best candidates.

In short - most recruitment agencies (at least on the London scene) are dishonest, greedy, target-driven parasites. They aren't your friend and the more you feed these people the worse the market gets.

Just say no.

I am not a software engineer, but I am in finance with a solid resume. I say this because I am still a desirable candidate, but I probably receive about 1/10th the recruiter mail that you receive.

I am interviewing today with a great company, and meeting with another great company on Friday and I have a bunch of leads in the pipeline for next week. Here is my advice:

1) Figure out what companies and specific roles you want to work for.

2) Make sure you have your resume tailored to those roles and make sure you know how to answer the technical questions related to those openings.

3) Reach out to 1st, and 2nd connections to companies that interest you and ask to grab a coffee to learn more about the role.

4) If you are personable and seem like a good fit, they will ask what you are interested in and they will help make introductions. When possible, ask to meet someone else in the company closer to the role you are interested in. For example, if your friend works in sales, but you are in engineering, ask for an intro to someone in engineering. This is important because that other person will be better at vetting you.

5) You will enter the formal interview process with people already liking you and wanting you to succeed. You just walk in, have a good time and answer the technical questions.

6) Negotiate an offer.

6) When you get there, be a good person, help people out, build relationships and do great work. 5 years down the road, you will have more connections and more opportunities.

Don't make the mistake of letting leads come to you. That is how you end up in so/so companies and situations. Go after what you want.

i agree. that was part of the inspiration behind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441183 . I am making progress on the product but primarily i think linkedin is biased towards serving recruiters better than users.

At the very least there should be a way to filter out good recruiters from the bad ones. I hate to say but more like a review system where you can rate your interaction with a recruiter.

Stack Overflow Careers. LinkedIn. Glassdoor sends me emails - seems similar content to what comes up on LinkedIn. The Python Meetup group here in Barcelona often has jobs posted to the mailing list. Jobserve used to be the one to use in the UK, but I haven't lived there for a while. Infojobs in Spain.

Many years ago a recruiter contacted me about a job for a well known Investment Bank, we had the usual bullshit conversation and never got back to me. I applied directly and got a job.

I like to go through a recruiter because I hate managing a job search myself. I build up relationships with four or five recruiters, and they simply send me opportunities, and then I just talk to them and go on interviews. I do not have to follow up or devote any conscious attention at all to the process.

Corporate hiring is a massive shit show and I consider recruiters to be an incredibly useful sanity saving device. People that want to deal with corporations directly, I just have to ask, why in the world would you want to do that? So annoying.

Imagine you worked in any other profession than coding. Having someone else manage your job search is an unimaginable luxury. When I talk to my non-coding friends, and they ask how many hours I've devoted to a job search, they're amazed and jealous when I tell them about my recruiter-enabled workflow.

If you have the time, go to local meetups. They can help you build a solid network and often have information about employers looking to hire. My last two jobs came from networking in this way.

I also absolutely despise recruiters, after having deleted my LinkedIn profile and answering every e-mail with "please remove me from your database" I think I'm finally free of the spam.

When I am looking for a new job, I try to think about where I actually want to work. One of the core issues I have with recruiters is that I am a developer to be placed in a development role, when in reality I have a set of wants and needs in a job that I'm sometimes not even aware of myself until I read a description and see the part that sticks out like a sore thumb to me. So, my advice is don't go looking for any old job, find the company/companies you'd like to work for and check what vacancies they have. If none, pay attention to what events etc. people from that company go to and make a point of meeting them.

There are good recruiters but they tend to be the ones that are working directly for the said company and are paid via a placement fee one-time or simply salaried. The worst ones tend to be the middle-man recruiting firm that claims to be a tech firm and just takes hourly off the top and has no technical understanding of anything. That's like having two bosses where the recruiting firm is not involved enough to even know what's going on from your perspective and is just there to annoy you with bro speak. There is no value there other than the initial placement. I hope there is a general revolt to that among tech workers as we don't need this and it hurts the companies hiring through them as the workers will not want to stay in that situation long term. My friends from India seem to have to put up with the worst ones imaginable.

I use LinkedIn as a self-advertising tool explicitly listing I am a consultant corp-to-corp which definitely reduces the amount of bullshit.

I'm a recruiter I can tell you all that I work my ass of to not be like 98% of everyone else in the business. Thankfully, I just have to not be a knob and I generally stand out.

Most agency recruiters are a pain in the ass because they are not actually recruitment professionals. Sounds odd, I know, but having worked for a few firms I can tell you that many will hire SALES people rather than folks who actually want to recruit, let alone have a clue as to what the f*ck it is.

If you want to try and figure if a recruiter is going to be a tool or not, look them up or ask them what their job is. Do the do business development and account management as well as recruit? If so, ask them which half the like better. Should be a neat chat.

Bigger recruitment companies will always claim to be HR Consulting/Service firms in all their media and PR propaganda, when internally, they hammer home that they are sales companies first. I worked for one of the largest recruitment firms in the world and that is EXACTLY how they operate.

Small/mid-sized agencies tend to offer a better candidate experience because their staff aren't focused on KPIs and arbitrary activities to keep their bosses off their backs. Instead, those firms just care about closing business and doing it well so the big firms don't kick the shit out of them.

In general, most recruiters are shit. I've been headhunted more than once and man oh man has it been painful. But I've engaged in the process because the opportunity at hand was worth the nonsense. Not pursuing an opportunity because a recruiter is an idiot is cutting your nose to spite your face.