Ask HN: What are the most annoying things about tech recruiters?

4 points by plvch ↗ HN

3 comments

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In my experience tech recruiters do not know anything about IT and seem to have no ability to reason logically. So they call and email about jobs that absolutely don't match my profile nor CV. On the rare occasion that I call them about an advertised job they seem to ask masses of irrelevant questions.

It is extremely rare to come across a tech recruiter who has actually worked in IT and has a minimal level of understanding.

1. Sometimes they pretend to have an open position "X". They do them to increase their database of candidates, just in case a customer will require that kind of profile in future. You know what's happening because, even if you apply for that position 1 ms after the publication of the ad, they respond that the selections are closed but they have "similar positions";

2. Sometimes they pretend to be an "official" and "exclusive" recruiter for the company "X" but after a brief search you can find out plenty of ad for the same position around Internet;

3. Related to the point 1 and 2, sometimes, when you require information about the position or the company, no information is provided because the position doesn't exist, the think you can contact directly the company that's looking for employees or both these reasons;

4. Sometimes recruiters don't know what are speaking about/ what they are looking . I can testify hundreds of example related to IT.

5. Sometimes they aggressively try to contact you by phone even when you, after receiving necessary clarifications,you tell them you are not interested to the position;

6. Sometimes they are spammers, mostly spammers by mail and spammers by Linkedin. About Linkedin, using it as a type of FB surrogate, sending tons of links with private preferences, kitties, funny viedo on Youtube, photos of celebrations in their offices, advertisement ot their customers, etc. Why they don't send the only thing you want from them ? I'm speaking about job specs of course.

When they email you a second and third time about the position that you deliberately ignored because it was such an obvious poor fit that you’d have reported it to LinkedIn as spam if there were a way to do so.