Ask HN: What things that tech recruiters do, annoy you the most as an engineer?
For me it's definitely their desire for everything to be a call. If I'm even remotely interested, that'll be a 30mins call to setup. I really only have 3 basic things I want to know to see if it's even worth perusing: Salary range, tech stack, team size. And when you ask them about those things: "Oh, well cover all the on the call".
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] thread1) they got crap requirements from the company to begin with
2) even if they got great requirements, if they could talk about them all fluently, they would probably be a developer themselves and not a recruiter.
Those emails get ignored. I ignore most automated agency emails as well.
I will always reply to personal emails from in-house recruiters or employees, however. I am starting a new job soon, though, so it's only to thank them for writing.
I add an emoji before my first name on linkedin for the same reason.
- Sending totally unsuitable vacancies
- Refusing to disclose company name
- Refusing to disclose salary
- Not respecting your time
- Fishing for your information without disclosing anything to you
Generally having a kind of condescending, slimy, sales like approach in communication, although this is far less common then it used to be.
Gives you an impression they could by selling anything. In the morning - you to the company. After lunch - a house or a used car.
Not showing up for the call they insisted on :P
Easiest way for me to not even consider your opening (and don't worry, 99.9% of the time they're not worth it)
Saying they'd like to "chat" instead of just telling you you passed the interview and got an offer.
I only had a simple yes/no question about the job that was important enough to me to either refuse or stay considering the position.
The recruiter just uploaded my cv in his database to start the normal long process and never bothered answering to me ever again.
It was a waste of time for everyone involved.
- lack of diversity in candidates. (not just virtue signaling. if all I see are nearly identical resumes, I assume the recruiter is just phoning it in.)
- candidates “just a little out of your price range” who are 30% over the top end of my budget.
- “confidentially” telling me what other offers a candidate has because then I know they are also leaking my offers to my competitors
- telling me every candidate is great
- telling me every candidate is a hot commodity like they are hotels.com
This is in effect how you gauge what your talents are worth in the labor market. I’m glad offers get leaked for this reason
We pay well. I don’t alter my offers based on the others I hear about. We usually beat them anyway, but when we don’t, that’s too bad.
The only problem here is that they're claiming confidentiality which is obviously not true. Workers and their agents should be playing offers off each other.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-10-13/it-isn...
Could you explain what you mean by this? I don't quite understand the language.
// ...
INFORMAL work or perform without much effort, interest, or enthusiasm. "I think of my playing as committed—I can't remember ever phoning it in at any performance"
So in this case, they don't actually care about finding good (or underpriced) candidates, they're just spamming a basic resume match.
By way of example from the other side of the fence - my LinkedIn profile asks recruiters to state that they've read my pre-requisites for a role when they contact me. 90% don't do that (and clearly haven't).
The kind of recruiter that doesn't bother to read the candidate's profile is "phoning it in"
I delete all of those - the remaining recruiters are generally ok, though they're often offering roles that are trivially discoverable to anyone actively job hunting.
I think it's the pipeline as well as selection: I work in finance and usually in smaller firms.
Will add to the OP’s list by saying they often also leave out even the hiring company’s name and if it’s a defined length contract in the initial message. Why do I need to get on a call for this?
Ghosting you is definitely not ok, but the inability to provide status updates usually comes from the end-client, not the recruiter.
5 seconds with a search engine and I can usually find the exact job. Now I know the name of the company you're so carefully trying to avoid naming.
The initial intro and description can be handled via email or text. If not, well that is a red flag right away.
You're not going to take a call from someone you couldn't imagine working for.
I've been called by recruiters who won't name the company they're recruiting for, the salary range, and are incapable of actually describing the daily-expections beyond buzzwords.
I've found the best approach for me is to google "sysadmin helsinki", etc, and applying directly to companies. Any time I see an application form that wants facebook/linkedin/github details I just close the window.
Dealing with people (in-house recruiters possible) in the actual company cuts actually allows you to have a decent conversation about expected skillsets, areas that are involved, working hours, on-call schedules, salary, etc.
I've had a handful of good experiences with recruiters, this seems to mostly be with recruiters who at one point were engineers or have been hired by FAANG. However, my best experience with a recruiter lead to a job that after about two weeks didn't fit the description of the job at hand. In short, I was under the impression I'd be writing Go and Elixir and within two weeks was writing glue code to hold together a shit-tier ruby app expected to "scale to 9-9's reliability". Other times, I've ascertained I haven't gotten a job after a botched interview and heard "officially" from the recruiter weeks later. Sometimes they're genuinely just idiots or incompetent (which is mostly annoying because it sucks when your time is wasted by someone incompetent). In short, I no longer trust recruiters.
Of course, but I'm not sure why that is my problem. Does the company want good people, or just the best they can afford after recruiter fees? If the recruiter can talk the talk, I'll hang with them vs going direct, and they will get the commission. If not, they won't get the placement anyway. They would be better off telling me the company and making a case for themselves why I should work with them (dealing with salary negotiation etc) vs hiding details and ending up up with me bailing early on the opportunity. The typical approach is short-sighted imo.
When 2 recruiters sends in your info, the company does not know whom to compensate. They have been sued for this. 15 years ago, the common practice, because lawsuits and fraud are expensive, it was safer to pass on the candidate.
Getting your application thrown away because you happened to postulate a the company the recruiter didn't disclose you is just horrible.
Between a recruiter and me submitting, I prefer the recruiter, as they should be pushing to get the job, its in their interest. If I get the job, it is no skin off of me.
I’m currently hiring for a bunch of roles and recruiters are aggressively reaching out that they “have the perfect candidate for your vacancy”. Even though I’m looking for experienced ML specialists and they’re offering someone with 1 year of Java CRUD app experience… they’re playing the numbers game on both sides of the market.
State that you want to conduct your own research into the company first, and that by hiding the name they are coming off as unprofessional. To avoid the questions on conflict and timing, add this note: "You can use the this message and its timestamp as a proof of first contact."
Some come back with actual details. Always be kind and courteous with them.
Nonetheless, what I wrote back in 2014 still holds true: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/pages/recruiter-anxiety.ht...
You might be doing yourself a disservice there. It varies by company but I ask our HR team to offer the option of LinkedIn profile as an alternative to uploading a CV/resume in case you have the former but don't have the latter to hand or prepared. It's still a minority but I do see people come through who use their public LinkedIn profile as their CV.
Github is a complete waste of time as a guideline to anything useful. If there was any doubt about that in the past the recent trend I've seen of people setting up separate GitHub accounts for each job they have and keeping their personal account separate has completely removed it. (Sometimes this behaviour is company mandated, but often it's peoples' own choice.)
I've never seen the point at all of asking for other social networks because that stuff is none of my business.
I see the request for social media, as a method to determine if you will fit in. If the group you are going to is extreme in some way, it would be a blessing to avoid them. e.g. if they all play tennis and they have their own tennis tournament ... and you hate tennis ... you will hate working there.
Makes me wonder if you, as a potential employee, should ask to see their linkedin / facebook pages .....
Salary range is more a function of the market (yes, there are companies which seem to under- or even overpay), tech stack is changeable if needed, team size's flexible - if it's too big, it splits into parts.
The most annoying thing... is that you often don't know what was not good from the company standpoint.
- ghosting
- asking for my current salary
- asking for my desired salary for a job that I know very little about
- not sharing the actual salary range for the position we're discussing
By ignoring them, you become more and more interesting to them, and their study. Be wary. Soon they will stalk to IRL.
Though I leave my little Java experience (just some side tasks, no career in it) on the CV as a honey pot that allows me to identify stupid recruiters earlier. If they contact me because of it, I know they're just chasing buzzwords and don't care about actual experience.
Followed closely by "how much are you currently earning?"