Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

Since I think having coffee with him is a total waste of my time, how do I even begin to think about a pre-call for the coffee?

Phone calls (or any form of live communication, really) are extremely efficient in comparison to email.

Email is pretty much the worst form of communication for most people. A conversation that would take 15 minutes on the phone might take weeks (if not months) to conclude over email, and because of that latency things frequently get forgotten or lost.

You might say: "Hey, if I don't respond to your email that means I'm not interested" or "This clearly isn't a priority for me, that's why it takes so long to respond" but on the other side you'll semi-frequently encounter people who actually are really interested but take a few follow-up emails to respond for whatever reason (busy, OOO, just forgot, etc).

Email is just very forgettable for most people, even for things that they might actually be interested in. You might be an exception. I'm a pretty strict Inbox Zero person, so I feel your pain. Still, you choose the tactic that works most effectively for the vast majority of people, and that's live communication of some kind.

I agree about the business hours, almost none of us have our own offices anymore, so the business hour phone call should only be about making an appointment outside business hours when you can actually talk.

It seemed weird and I really didn't want to waste my references not having even just a verbal confirmation that they were interested in hiring me. I really thought they were asking in good faith.

It turns out that you should NEVER disclose your references with a recruiter before an offer is on the table, in writing. This is a very common technique and it usually means they are no longer interested in hiring you but they would gladly use your references as potential candidates or future leads to get more business.

Very shady ;)

TL;DR: do a lot of Googling of the kind "how to tell if a recruiter is bad".

- Don't stick your CV on a job board, there's no expiry and recuiters will call up wondering if you're still unemployed three years later.

- Never answer "how much are you currently on?". You should always say "I'm looking for $X" - feel free to give a range, but keep the ball in your court. Check glassdoor/linkedin to make sure you're not blagging for an unreasonable figure.

Now outside recruiters...

I've had some outright demand my salary information so that they can sell me for the right price. Just be clever enough not to disclose that.

It's entirely a business interaction and not a friendship. They want something out of you, and you may want something out of them.

It helps if you can honestly say you want $X and that you're already interviewing with other companies under that expectation.

If you don't need to, don't needlessly sign up for interviews and tests with positions that don't particularly interest you for any reason.

I've also been bait-and-switched before. There's not too much you can do about that. But if they pull that, you know to end the discussion there.

It's not supposed to be a zero-sum relationship, but sadly many will sell you to the lowest bidder if that means a commission.

All that said, don't shut off completely if you don't want to. I engage casually from time-to-time. I'll give them a 15 minute call sometimes if my curiosity gets the better of me.

And all of that said, it's much better speaking directly with the people you'll be working with or for.

The initial email needs to hook me somehow, and show that you've at least put some amount of effort into personalizing your pitch to me, specifically (you know, show that you've actually read my profile and explain why'd I'd be a great fit for your client).

I no longer deal with recruiters if I can help it, but if I find myself using them again I'd consider offering to add their logo onto my CV myself to avoid them butchering it.

Since they're all but certainly going to ghost you anyway, why not just

"Sure, here's the original. This is using features that aren't in the ancient Debian distribution of TeXlive; you'll want to follow the excellent instructions at https://github.com/posquit0/Awesome-CV to get XeLaTeX configured correctly (or it'll bomb out with the most inscrutable of errors).

I'm having a couple of locale issues with attaching files through pine at the moment, so I've pasted the source below. I trust it will not be difficult to copy-paste to a new file.

  %!TEX TS-program = xelatex
  %!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
  \documentclass[11pt, a4paper]{awesome-cv}
  \geometry{left=1.4cm, top=.8cm, right=1.4cm, bottom=1.8cm, footskip=.5cm}
  \fontdir[fonts/]
  \colorlet{awesome}{awesome-blue}
  \setbool{acvSectionColorHighlight}{true}
  .
  .
  .
  {\thepage}
  \end{document}

Thanks!"

I can't speak for tech recruiting companies, but at the company I work for removing the header is a method of anonymizing the resume to prevent unconscious gender/race/etc... bias based on someone's name, city, ZIP Code, etc...

I don't do QA courses. I do TDD development. And I never mentioned Udemy.com to them either.

They put words in my mouth.

Or are currently in a bad company which forces/encourages this kind of behavior. I wouldn't mind recruiting company reviews though. Because there would be a few on my blacklist.

Regarding point 1) there are ways to fight unjustified negative reviews (e.g. "I didn't get a job, this agency sucks!"), similarly to how they do on websites like Yelp. This is more of a community guided effort (unless we start actively moderating reviews, which is an option).

For now we're focusing more on building a sort of index of "horror stories" involving recruiters but before releasing the data we'll make a big effort not to publish biased content or blatant lies.

For point 2) We absolutely agree and we are still discussing how to release the data so that "nobody gets hurt", at least individually. You can keep in touch with us by adding your email address to the form (even if you don't want to share any story, although it would be much appreciated). Feel free to use a temporary email address or an alias.

1. Initial convo, things seem interesting, no salary details from recruiter, lots of questions about how much I make

2. They ask me to sign an NDA, a bunch of other paperwork, and spend a bunch of time in meetings doing dumb whiteboard questions

3. "You're amazing! Can we hire you for 50k below market? It's totally worth it, we have a $200 xbox that you can stare at while you work 60 hour weeks trying to fix our abortion of a product!"

So, unfortunately, my rules have become:

+ Salary range upfront. If you can't give me a number, I can't give you the time of day.

+ No NDAs or other BS unless you give me the $600 for my lawyer to go over it. Protip, my lawyer is going to reject it.

+ You get one day of whiteboarding/whatever. I don't do follow up visits. I don't do "projects" or "homework". I'm not implementing the twitter api for you. Sorry, spent too many days doing projects for free.

  Or how does it work in the USA?

Situation A: If I currently make $70,000 and you are looking to pay $40,000-$50,000 we're both wasting our time by keeping quiet.

Situation B: If I currently make $70,000 and you are looking to pay $70,000-$100,000 and I reveal my salary first, you can offer $70,000 and I might have left $30,000 on the table.

Situation C: If I currently make $70,000, you are looking to pay $70,000-$100,000, you reveal your range first and I say my requirements are $100,000, you have left $30,000 on the table.

And why would I feel I was leaving money on the table? Maybe I've seen posts on HN saying "many" mid-career Google employees earn $450,000.

The traditional HN advice to refuse to name a salary first comes from people who prioritise avoiding Situation B, even if it means increasing the risk of Situation A.

Normally you might be in contact with 10-20 recruiters for a few months and end up working only for one company for the next few years so the impact recruiters have is a superset of the employer's.

Maybe recruiters could stop selling the company to death and openly admit what is wrong with the current state of things (e.g. poor Joel score). People appreciate honesty and I would definitely work for a company that admits their problems but is willing to fix them.

Also getting rid of recruiters altogether is not a viable option.

When I get 8 contacts over 2 weeks for the exact same position, that lets me know there are huge red flags ahead. Or, and this is more fun, you're contacting me for a position I already interviewed with and turned down.

Are you in a death spiral and need bodies ASAP? Does your comp suck? Does your office suck? Does your location suck? Are you too picky in your interview process? Maybe a mix of all of these?

At this point in my career, I've probably interviewed at 200-300 companies. I think I can count the number of times I've received a positive response for a position I applied to directly with one hand.

All my interviews have been from recruiters (whether it be third-party or in-house) reaching out to me, or friends referring me.

Maybe my resume just sucks?

I’ve worked with local recruiters almost exclusively over the past 20 years. If I send you a resume directly, I have no way of knowing whether you looked at, how much of your job req is fluff, what the necessary and nice to have skills are etc.

When I work through a recruiter, they’ve already been debriefed by other candidates who interviewed for the same position and they can tell me what the interviewer prioritizes.

I’ve also worked with recruiters from the other end as a hiring manager (actually Dev lead), I would call the recruiter back and give feedback.