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Ask HN: Recruiting agencies that focus on remote opportunities?

29 points by ohiohills ↗ HN
First off, thank-you for clicking on the post and taking whatever time you might to read and respond!

As an engineer in the data analysis/software industry, I'm quite blessed to have an abundance of alternatives out there to my current position and receive recruiter emails/LinkedIn/Indeed/etc. a few times a month, generally.

All of the positions I am contacted for are office-based though, but due to my personal situation and preferences, I'm not willing to give up my flexible remote position for an office. Are there agencies that recruit for remote work positions?

Indeed.com has a filter for remote jobs and there is flexjobs.com, but I've found that working with an agency can be a positive experience in finding an interesting company and getting a serious (non checklist-HR style) interview. My education is in physics and applied mathematics with software experience as a serious hobby and internships along the way. Recruiters understand that background can work in the machine learning / software engineering space while I suspect HR departments don't.

Finally, I apologize for the throw-away account, but I work for a very small firm (less than 20 people). My actually HN username is quite similar to my true name. ;)

8 comments

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matt_oriordan
We at Ably Realtime have a largely remote engineering team. I’ve been searching for a good remote recruiter for some time now and not come across one. Unfortunately I think it’s just largely easier for recruiters to focus on local markets, and sadly it seems the demand is mostly for local workers in spite of what you read in the tech media.

Top talk was mentioned and are good, however I’ve only used them for contract roles.

We’re recruiting now too, perhaps see if it’s right for you: https://jobs.ably.io

Best of luck, remote work rocks (if you like it!).

Matt Ably https://www.ably.io

GaltMidas
Have you tried https://weworkremotely.com ?
MetallicCloud
While I like the idea of weworkremotely.com, as someone who currently lives in Australia it would be so beneficial to be able to filter by jobs that require a specific timezone or country (which on that site they are almost all required to be in the USA or on a similar timezone). Without that the site is pretty much unusable for me, with most jobs not telling me until I click in that I'm ineligible.
zeuslawyer
I live in Australia too, and I think this could be pretty dang useful! Anyone have experience on noob programmers in terms of getting remote gigs? I'm a career changer, after 15 years in corporate.
nikhildaga
I have helped many developers get the best remote job and startups find the best remote talent.

I can't promise to get you hired but I will definitely point you in the right direction and try my best to help you out.

Feel free to reach out. The contact info is in my profile.

bowlich
From your username, I'm going to assume you're in the US. :)

I've been working fully remote for six years now, and have recently started hunting for my next remote gig. So I've been in a similar boat.

I have had some success with reaching out to recruiting agencies in urban centers of my general region. Explain that you're an experienced remote employee, and that you are only available for remote work.

Surprisingly (having just gone through hiring two remote employees for my current team), it can actually be pretty hard to find experienced remote employees or even employees who want to be fully remote. Plenty of applicants seem to totally lose interest when they find out there's no office to go into or that they'll have to be pretty much entirely self motivated. Bizarre, but to each their own.

Actually interviewed recently for a firm who hired a recruiting agency explicitly to weed out all the applicants who aren't remote-friendly because they were tired of getting into interviews and finding out that the applicant didn't read the remote-only part of the job announcement.