Sorry but I do not care enough about my career to put in this much effort. Recruiters are a dime a dozen these days and it's so much easier to just wait until you need one. Even if it's a bit less optimal.
This. It works. And it saves time for both sides ( and remember that recruiters have no motive not to disclose it -- the more you get the better it is for them ).
One question I have- recently some states (notably Colorado, California, Connecticut) have required job postings to specify the salary range. Is this something recruiters are required to provide via contact over email/Linkedin message?
I've been doing a variation of this myself over the years, it's gotten me good jobs. Sometimes, I'd simply say I want X salary that is ~20% more than I currently would have thought I was worth. Then sometimes the recruiter would come back and say that is actually possible.
I agree. Although as someone who has been burnt before, I would not consider the position from a small company unless its a very senior and generous offer.
The typical recruiting-house recruiter has a script that was given to them by someone else, has no particular job in mind for you, and does not know the difference between Java and JavaScript. They are, in short, one small step above spammers. Unless you are currently thinking about changing jobs, you should definitely ignore them.
None of that applies to an in-house recruiter. Someone who works in HR for the hiring company, directly, may have years of experience, good training, and have a good idea of what the hiring manager is looking for. You shouldn't ignore them, although if you're entirely happy you should have a short message prepared -- "Thanks for thinking of me. I'm happy with my current position, but you never know what the future holds. Feel free to check in with me again in six months or so."
Hmmm... maybe I should have been clearer and more explicit about the fact that there are times when you ignore the script entirely.
Companies that are known to pay top of market... Like you're not going to hammer Facebook or Netflix by saying "how much sucker?" if you're in a bottom of the market bracket.
I also ignore the script when it is a company that I'm really interested in and excited by.
I liked your article, you don't need to cover every edge case imho. Its on people who want to take inspiration from your script whether they apply it like a sledge hammer or a goldsmith's tool.
Absolutely true. 3rd party recruiting agencies have very different motives than an in-house HR department recruitment.
An easy tell-tale sign is that they withhold the name of the company until they get you on the phone. They have a contract saying once you're in direct contact with the recruiter, you are in their pipeline and they get rights to bill a portion of your contract.
3rd party agencies are incentivized to get you the most amount of money they can, so they can skim off the top. They are highly motivated to move you through and get you signed as quickly as possible, qualified or not.
In house recruiting doesn't have this constant need to move candidates, and will be fast or slow depending on the needs within the company.
My experience has been the opposite. 3rd party recruiters cold messaging me have led to my last two job changes and significant bumps in salary. One of them put my salary in at a higher level than I had asked for.
In house recruiters on the other hand have not been more knowledgeable about the team they are trying to fill for. Also, I have a theory that companies that are willing to pay a huge commission check to 3rd party recruiters are more likely to pay more for talent.
How could anyone come to this contrarian conclusion, even after reading the article it is baffling.
There is a time and place for in-house recruiters and third party recruiters. This article does not identify them and obsessively takes the contrarian view with no supporting rationale for doing so.
Hey! Thanks for your feedback. I would love to try and understand what you're saying but I'm struggling a little.
Can you explain what you mean by "There is a time and place for in-house recruiters and third party recruiters." what is that time and place?
I honestly tried to be really nuanced (but clearly failed a little, thanks for that data point).
I think it does speak to the fact that I have seen 20 years of the prevailing narrative that there is zero value to recruiters and this realization was, to me, pretty mind-blowing.
I appreciate that "never" is a word that lacks nuance, maybe that was a little too clickbait of me.
I wouldn't go so far as to say zero value, but I would say that engaging with third-party recruiters is generally an activity with a negative expected value. Generally they don't actually have or aren't willing to share the incredibly useful real and direct insights you wisely point to.
Personally, I've found that high quality messages from recruiters are usually painfully obvious. They lead with the name of the company and show evidence that the recruiter read my profile. These are so rare that I completely skip any kind of bot-ish response to handle them.
Most of the responses I can expect to the kind, compassionate, empathetic script you've so helpfully provided will not contain all three data points requested. At best, we can expect to get a JD and maybe a company name. Comp is usually withheld and the cycle goes around again.
Treating the recruiter-spammers as humans, unfortunately, does not really seem to produce the results we would all love it to. It mostly seems to be treated as proof that the spammer has hooked a fish and just has to reel them in.
I like third party recruiters because I like to use them strategically. I know how they are compensated and they learn what I want to do, so I could get raises every 15-18 months by switching companies that they placed me at and they could get paid multiple times because turns out I'm a reliable employee!
We knew to ignore each other for 15 months. It was a good symbiotic relationship. Sometimes they knew I wanted side gigs and would hook me up with the companies that "needed something yesterday!" while they knew I was employed at one of their client companies. sometimes the recruiter hired me on their payroll directly instead of letting me be a contractor with their clients. it was a fun time for some time.
This has almost nothing to do with random outreach from them on linkedin. It is barely the same topic. But thats what I used them for.
In-house recruiters are distinctly different animals with a couple of overlapping daily tasks and the same name, but the way to use them is very different. A company with one of those wouldn't be using third party recruiters and thats fine, in house recruiters can somewhat bat for you in a unique and more holistic way but they are still just gatekeepers you want to get passed so you can talk technical stuff with hiring managers.
I give an extremely simple answer, where I state that in the present, for $real_reason, I'm not looking for other opportunities, but in the future, I may. It worked!
I actually spend a little bit of effort to filter out (block) incompetent recruiters, but that's all.
I also recommend a response to every recruiter, but you don't need to explain your privilege, you don't need to suck up to them, and you don't need to justify your actions.
"Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
"Hi, thanks for the message. I would appreciate as much detail as you can via message. Interested in location, compensation, and what specific problems they need help solving. Thanks!"
I don't take a call unless the work description is specific enough. I don't want to work on your "backend". If asked, I tell them my comp expectation is min +50k over what I currently make. And I sure as hell am not moving to the bay area.
I replied to a first follow up (~'I don't think I'm a good fit', nevermind anything else) this morning as it happens. Almost always ignore; took one as far as interview a few years ago, which I never heard back from (no result/feedback) until a week or so ago! But I might make that a policy, if they 'just check in' after the first email then may as well try to head it off there I suppose.
I've started getting very firm with them. I respond to each email with "no thank you, also stop contacting me, also here's the last person I asked to stop contacting me, but who didn't." We'll see how long it works, if at all, but after 3 separate Amazon recruiters contacted me last month I was fed up.
Yep, at least tell me who your recruiting for. I have a list of companies I don’t care to work for, so let’s not waist time on those.
A number of recruiters are also just bad at their job. I worked as a .Net developer 12 years ago, but most recruiters apparently aren’t smart enough to figure out that not only is my knowledge horrible out of date, it might also not interest me anymore.
> "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.
They go silent, or they also give a canned response about being competitive in the market when it comes to comp (without naming a number).
If they do name a number and you reply it's too low, they again go into a canned response of "we're willing to reach (++x) for the right candidate", which is just as much bullshit as before. You'll complete an interview cycle and get the lowball offer of (original x).
TLDR they'll lie about comp and never completely answer you.
Sometimes I say something like "I'm glad to hear you're competitive! I'm currently being offered $REAL_BIG_COMPANY_NUMBER, so I look forward to our conversation." Generally this ends the conversation.
One of the most common reasons is simply that they don't want you to go direct to the company in question and bypass their commission. If they give you too much, it is very easy to do and many companies will recruit directly and the recruiter would have no legal basis to do anything about that.
On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
9 times out of 10 the job description you get from the recruiter is a lazy cut-and-paste from the actual company's input.
It's never anonymized and simply pasting it into Google will almost always get you a lead on the hiring company.
Another lead is if they give you the company location. There is only one company on the planet, for example, that has R&D offices in both Mossvile and Aurora, Illinois.
Also 9 times out of 10 its a bait and switch for a different company. Whenever I've worked with these recruiters they always "see whats a good fit" with my resume and its never the company that was in the job description.
I want them to understand that I need to know up-front if the position is interesting enough to be worth investing my time in at all. I could sacrifice my time and energy to assuage their fears, but every time I've done that in the past ten years there has been zero return on investment.
A reader might, at this point, optimistically point out that the next recruiter could be different. This reader would be correct. That could indeed be the case! Yet every time I wind up deciding to try the optimistic approach I wind up on a phonecall in which I learn that the company isn't someone I want to work for, the JD isn't one I actually want to work on, the comp isn't nearly enough, or some combination thereof. Generally the comp is so far off it has no change to even be negotiated to something I would consider. Often they try to sell me on a 40%-60% pay cut, because a slice of that is worth a lot to them (it's happened twice this month).
At this point I'm quite tired of paying optimism's price to assuage the fears of recruiters. The kindness is not returned. I understand others might choose differently.
But isn't that the advantage of the approach in the OP? It shows some more effort and good faith to the recruiter, without actually requiring any additional effort or time on your end.
> On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
This isn't my experience at all, having worked with recruiters both as a hirer and hiree. Recruiters typically are looking to close as many positions as possible, making money on volume. Their incentives are to spend as little time as they can getting candidates just enough so they say yes.
They typically are paid a percentage of a candidates first year salary. At first glance this might seem to mean they're motivated to get you as much as possible. In reality it means that the effort to get an extra $20k, which might make a big difference for the candidate, only results in an extra e.g. $2000 for them. They're not going to spend time on that that could be spent on closing another candidate, and getting another full commission, if they think the candidate will accept either way.
The money a recruiter is paid also often comes from the same budget a potential signing bonus would. The fact that they take 10% of the first year salary makes companies less forthcoming with extra money for the candidate.
A lot of the recruiters have different businesses. Some may be recruiting for direct hire but alot of them retain them as employees as they contract for six months or however long...sometimes years..for an hourly rate. They pocket the difference over what is paid to the engineer.
> it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them
Up to a point. They get a fraction of the marginal increase in salary, and they’d much sooner “close the sale” than risking having someone else fill the job to try and get an extra 500$ commission.
It’s the same story with real estate agents: selling your house for an extra 20k might be a lot to you but to the agent it’s an extra 400$ in commission (exact percentage varies). In other words, it’s hardly worth risking the seller losing interest or working an extra 2–3 weeks for so little.
I’ve never encountered a recruiter who would even entertain that idea. They loved “cookie cutter” deals and hated this kind of unusual arrangements for the same reason that they can’t understand anything else than keywords.
Assuming it is an active real estate with lots of transactions, yes, the agent is absolutely more motivated to close the deal and move on to another deal than to get the highest commission possible on a particular deal. The situation is similar with recruiters. It is important to understand these motivations to correctly interpret what you are hearing from the agents/realtors.
I used to work as a waiter when I was in my first summer out of high school. The calculus was similar there. When it was busy the tables turned as soon as the person got up, so I would often not emphasize dessert. The added $15 on the check from dessert increased my tip a couple dollars, but regular desserts could cause me to lose 1-2 full turns of my section over the course of the evening, so with a four table section of everyone for dessert, I might lose 8 tables total, and if the average tip was $20, I’d lose $160 minus the extra $16 in tip gained from everyone having dessert. Point is, I much preferred quick turns over small per capita increases in per table tips.
In non rush times though where tables didn’t get filled when people left, it made a lot more sense to play up dessert.
This works if you have an open house/2-5 days dedicated to showings and a set time where offers are allowed (which is at the end of that showing period). However, even now, houses need to be appraised by the bank for the buyer to get the loan for the house, and many people aren’t ready to get in a bidding war only to then need to come out-of-pocket an extra $10k because they bid too much and the bank appraised it that much below the offer amount.
Exactly. When I sold my house a few months ago I found a good agent that helped me price correctly and we sold the same weekend. Made sure it went to someone that actually needed a house and not some investor looking to flip. Still came in over asking.
My point exactly. The seller’s (or job seeker’s) upside is much higher than the agent’s, and so the agent won’t try and get you a higher price/salary if it means delaying the sale.
I think the one time I responded to a recruiter and went through the process was because they told me the company up front. Unless its an internal recruiter, I never get that info. I was interested in the company and I figured they could help speed me through the process (which I believe was true). I didn't take the job but I appreciated this person not BSing me.
> it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
Unlikely. Its way better for the recruiter to focus on the quantity of hires rather than trying to increase the salaries of a smaller number of them. It takes way more work and makes them less money to help increase your salary by 20% than just finding another role and hire.
>On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's in the recruiters best interest to maximize their throughput in placing candidates, and they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
> they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
No, the company would pay you your salary and keep the commission itself, it would not have given you that commission simply because you went directly with them.
that all depends on the contract setup with the company and recruiter. i've worked at places that had exclusivity contracts with recruiters where we wouldn't even post the positions in hr until the contract expired.
> On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's in their interest, yes - but it's not worth more than closing a deal quickly.
They generally make more money by seating 3 hires at new companies for 100k than they do seating 1 hire for 300k.
Because of the downside risk of possibly losing a deal, and further - because they're paid over time as an employee remains with a company, it's much more beneficial to place many people quickly than it is to place a few people for more money.
That hasn't been my experience. I always get the salary range, equity package, and what stage/growth the company is at currently and where they want to take things. All in the first 30 minute call.
I've tried a fair number of those calls. You might be surprised by how many recruiters don't really have salary range or meaningful equity details (preferences, shares outstanding, etc.) but really want me to be excited for the great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing business.
To my eyes, thirty minutes is a pretty expensive way to find out if a position is in line with my comp and the company one I want to work for. It could just as easily be handled in thirty seconds.
Last month I had a quick 20-minute call with a recruiter who couldn't tell me anything about the company or the position that I hadn't found in thirty seconds of searching. This is not an unusual experience, unfortunately. The only explanation for that call I can find is that the recruiter sincerely expected to impress me with a phone sales approach.
If they are attempting unsolicited headhunting - that is, not affiliated with the company - they almost certainly don't know the expected compensation.
>I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
Well, that's not a problem - the whole point of this reply template is to filter out the useless cold-calling spam without wasting time in interviews, so that 80-90% of recruiters going silent is exactly what you want. The only reason why you respond at all is to give a chance to the 10-20% of serious offers.
This is what I'm doing so far. I typically answer stating how I would like to work and hint my conditions and let them know that I'm happy to follow up if they see a fit.
I don't like to ignore recruiters, but it's hard to answer them correctly. I'm always looking for a nice way to articulate "I'm comfortable with my current job, but interested in exploring whether I'm being compensated fairly. I don't want to slam any doors. But, I am also not up for the hazing session of grinding leetcode, filling out online forms, doing take-home tests, phone screens, and 5 rounds of interviews, just to find out at the end of it all what my current market value is."
Late to comment, but basically this is why I just ignore it all unfortunately.
I'm on a subreddit that talks about my profession and basically all interview processes are now broken in my industry. A lot of just nonsense, waste of time stuff. You hire the professional prep companies so you know the right buzzwords to say and how to show you follow the "framework", but almost nothing from the interview actually really determines how well you'll do day to day.
Instead of going to an interview, they should just call my dev team and scrum master and ask how things run with me and use their feedback as the evaluation.
It's amazing how these basic questions are often like kryptonite to these people.
Protip: If you want senior people to respond, you should probably include that information up front.
I've done several interviews at places only to get to the stage we're talking money and suddenly it becomes clear they were expecting to pay about a third to half of what I currently make for someone in a senior position. Each time I think it could genuinely save a lot of time and effort (and thus money) by just being up front about that stuff.
I don't have time ... the volume of messages is too high, and the amount of 'legitimate' inquiries are too low. And the odds of getting ghosted by the recruiter too high.
If they're a recruiter from a company that I know and they WORK FOR that company, I'll respond.
Having said that I think that is a good article and I really like that email.
I suppose it is possible that a temporary contractor has an email address from that company, but I think you can get reasonably high signal by looking at their LinkedIn history. Switching positions every few months is a red flag. Even if they're an independent contractor, longer-term arrangements with each client suggest better relationships and better commitment to real outcomes.
I see plenty of recruiters who just work for recruiting firms and don't hide that fact. Anyone who won't immediately tell me who they're recruiting for gets ignored. I'm sure I end up talking to the occasional contractor but you can easily filter out a lot of obvious low-hanging (and rotten) fruit).
I find that a lot of people working for a recruiting company actually make it clear in their email with the address or signature.
To some extent a contractor who working for the company I know ... I'd still consider that a direct company reaching out to me type situation that I'd be more inclined to respond.
I don't find that it is hidden all that often, but that's just my experience.
Possibly, but they left out the possible outcomes of "simply refuse to talk salary, or to talk salary in email" and "just lie about the salary and/or the job".
I did have that in there at one point. In my case I tend to either practice refining my script, or just thank them and walk away. It's in the autoresponse "without that data I'm unable to continue further discussions"
You do have to stick to that, but it's IMO pretty clear but also concise enough that you don't well on it.
Interestingly, I have employed a similar sentiment so far, without knowing that it might be actually a good thing. I am trying to give at least one short and comprehensive answer that: I am not looking for new challenges, thanks though. Exceptions might apply to especially annoying recruiters who just don't care and ignore my wishes and send me useless messages regardless.
The problem I have is that almost every recruiter that emails me lists the positions they are trying to fill. Almost all of those positions are ones to which I am morally opposed. It's a waste of both of our time to respond positively and interview for positions that I won't accept under any realistic circumstance.
I'm not sure how you go from "Never ignore a recruiter" to "Always respond positively and interview with a recruiter". There is a middle-ground where you can reply, without being positive and not setting up an interview, while not burning bridges that you might want to cross in the future.
This may be familiar by now but developers are very lucky.
I left computers to move to investments, make 500k+/year but I envy the stability and choices that developers have. If I lost my job tomorrow it is not clear I could find another similar job. You have lots of options.
It looks like the situation will remain this way during our lifetimes (you never know), but you should at least appreciate it.
Great take. I turned down a path into finance to go computers, and did so to target the reverse of what you notice.
Few other jobs offer pay and stability similar to a Dr. or Lawyer without the working hours and with geo-flexibilty. Few other jobs offer a shot at a massive personal liquidity event without the direct exposure to a recession like in finance. Few other jobs offer this pay for what's basically a trade without a tough physical lifestyle like working in O&G.
If more "normal" people went into engineering, as in the normal white collar types who are smart but go into MBAs/MDs instead, I think we'd see interesting social impacts as more people discover that you can do flavors of digital nomad work without being the stereotypical tech bro. I think this is just starting to happen with MBAs who go into TPM roles.
Eng paths re-enanble lifestyles that I feel were lost post-1970 for much of the general working population. Now, you can live and work nearly anywhere. No requirements to suck it up in Cleveland, NYC, whatever for the kids because of good schools and a good local white collar job. If you want to pack up and go to Europe, you can grab a visa from big US tech there, or small startups. Just meet the right recruiter. Wild stuff.
Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest.
I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy.
But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks so I don't have to bug my network.
Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time
Or share your data.
I made a throwaway, but not obnoxious email on my domain just for recruiters a few years ago, so I could try tracking who I was talking to.
Via three consecutive third-party recruiters I started getting cold calls and e-mails from recruiters I’d never contacted, never met, or never before engaged with from agencies that weren’t the ones I spoke to or sent a CV to. Soon I started getting other completely irrelevant email. Then the robocalls came. I later found that email address among five different data leak sources.
Just so happened to be a different popular recruiting company that has “Cyber” in the name.
I have a nice collection of "throwaway" phone numbers for all kinds of reasons, while one of them is dedicated to job hunting, I don't think merely having it would have stopped this agency from sharing my CV across to whomever they shared it with, or stopped whatever leak occurred for said email address to end up in so many collections of leaked data.
That was the reason: to understand where my data was leaking from, not to duck recruiter calls.
A scenario I hadn't thought about, that you might want to be aware of: I had to call 911 recently. I talked to the dispatcher, and hung up. A few minutes later they called me back to give me instructions. The call showed up as a regular Los Angeles 323 area code number. In fact, it was flagged by my phone as spam.
It made me wonder whether reverse 911[1] calls, which are used to warn about hazmat situations, fire evacuations, and other public safety issues, show up similarly.
I don’t know anyone that isn’t my parents age that has a landline anymore so this scenario already wouldn’t work with my friends, family or neighbours. My phone isn’t directly tied to my address in any way that might be useful for emergency services.
Sure, that's why I said that mine isn't. I know that's not the case for everyone, but it is for me and many people I know, at least. Its obviously not the case for everyone, many people will have a phone tied to an address, but many people also don't. My phone is tied to me, but whether or not the provider has an address depends on if I have a bill phone or not (many people here do not).
I also wonder EU countries, including Sweden, would actually allow telecom providers to share that information with other parties such as emergency services or whether that would be against data protection laws.
Besides, prior to the pandemic, there was also a high likelihood that I wouldn't be at home, if you called me on a random day at a random time, so even if my phone were tied to my address, it wouldn't be a good idea for emergency services to rely on that.
A true landline, very few people. But setting up a cheap VOIP line is not very expensive on a month-to-month basis, and it's useful to have a phone number that you can give to any person or business that can't bother you at work. We have poor cell service at my house, so the VOIP line is my preference for most calls at home.
The one time my neighbors called for help (their car wouldn't start and they needed to go to urgent care), they txt'ed first, then called. Though I would have picked up when they called (and it would have gotten through my do not disturb settings) because their number is in my contacts.
Not saying that your neighbor would call you, but that the emergency services would call you on your neighbours behalf (and it will not be from a number you recognize).
I've never heard of that happening, but yeah, if the neighbor calls 911, and then EMS calls me for some reason, I'm not going to answer since 99% of the time it's a spammer.
I have lost track of how many times I have told people: just because you hear a phone ringing on your end, doesn't mean it's ringing on my end. (Verizon US, and yes, you as a caller will hear ringing while my phone sits silent.) Leave a voicemail. It can be short, it can be almost devoid of meaning, but if you send it, I will at least know that you called. If you don't? No record at all. I was out of range, you left nothing to be tracked by...
I quite honestly think that general direct-dial telephony is only a few years from catastrophic collapse, not for technical reasons, but because people will simply defect from the system.
There are too many nuisance calls, there are too many people (and businesses) falling for scams, and there seems to be nothing telcos or governments are willing to do about it.
It's pretty much the same thing that's happened to Usenet and Email (and is now happening to the Web as well). John Gilmore's lament about crackdowns on open email relays is heartfelt, but ultimately naive. If I'm remembering correctly (and I'm probably not), it ran something like: We created a way for anyone anywhere in the world to talk to anyone else, and it wasn't an accident. The problem is of course, bad actors, and lowering costs means enabling vastly more bad actors.
Figuring out how to impose highly asymmetric costs --- and not necessarily financial ones --- on unwanted communication attempts, will win this.
The technical problem is reasonably straightforward. Generating widespread adoption is the real challenge, IMO.
I hadn't really thought about this before, but your comment made me realize the costs that used to be associated with spam calls in the past.
Monetary or social costs were both asymmetrically in favor of the receiver because a long-distance call was expensive and a local spam call would eventually incur a high social cost (either in the innocent case of teenage prank calls being figured out by parents or the less innocent cases where the police or phone company might need to trace the source).
I haven't received any robocall, cold sales attempt or spam SMS in years. I'm also EU based, maybe it's another side effect of non-existant privacy laws in US?
My understanding, from the last time I looked into this, is that the US does have decently aggressive laws against spamming people without offering them ways to opt out and some prior relationship, but a bunch of the spam originates in places outside the US and its immediate allies, so shutting it down becomes nontrivial.
I have, in fact, gotten periodic spam calls, though only once or twice an SMS - usually trying to solicit me about my car's insurance policy having issues (I do not own a car).
I sort of wish I could convince my Android phone to treat all calls to my direct number from anyone but GV as spam, because I have never given that number to anyone.
- The US remains relatively high income / high wealth. Especially among the more vulnerable senior population.
- The regulatory environment in the US hasn't been successful, or much interested from appearances, in taking on spam.
- Uniform language. Virtually the entire country speaks a single language, English. That's roughly 300 million targets (minor children generally wouldn't count). The largest single European nationality would be Germany, with a total population of 84 million. It's not even possible to necessarily presume an entire country speaks one language, as with Switzerland. And though computer-generated calls are increasing in prevalence, most still use human speakers.
Effectively, it's opportunity, mechanism, and logistics.
But as costs fall and voice-processing (both comprehension and realtime generation) improve, I'd suggest increasing your vigilence around telephone hygiene.
I’m also in the EU and received a spam SMS not even five minutes ago. I get maybe one a year, so your point stands. Cold sales attempts used to be more frequent, but after blocking a handful of numbers they stopped.
99% of the phone calls I get from unknown numbers are some combination of scam/robo/or just immediate hang up. The only exceptions tend to be businesses responding to my initial contact (eg, trying to get a plumber out to my house), in which case I will answer unknown numbers for a day or two until we connect. Otherwise nope.
This is a US mobile number that I've ported from carrier to carrier since the mid-00s. Haven't been particularly careful about where I use the number, which is probably how it got this bad.
I think they're just enumerating the entire address space, rather than buying your phone number from somewhere. But I guess I have no evidence to prove this; I have given my phone number to companies, and I get a ton of spam calls.
My partner and I have adjacent phone numbers (x and x+1). /Occasionally/ we get sequential spam calls, where my phone goes off immediately after she hangs up. But not super often. Though one can shuffle before calling everything, just as easily.
I think they're just enumerating the entire address space
Even when you consider most calls now for SIP/VoIP platforms (which is where a lot of these scammers get their DID/phone numbers from) are charging fractions of a cent for outbound calls, enumerating and then dialing entire NPA spaces gets prohibitively expensive after even five minutes of dialing waiting for someone to pick up, even for the most dedicated of scam call centers.
Doesn't mean they aren't dialing randomly to see who picks up, just I doubt they're dialing entire phone number spaces wholesale.
What can be observed going on is these scammers quite literally trade lists of leaked phone numbers and email addresses and they actively keep track of who responds, and who falls for their scam before sharing the list with others.
Jim Browning (a popular youtube scambaiter and infosec pro) has videos where you can watch it happening with your own eyes.
When I set up a contact, I change the ringtone for them. Then, I ignore calls from non-contacts, which are currently dominated by offers of help with my non-existent student loans (it used to be the warranty on my 20 year old car).
I've more than once asked a cold-call recruiter how they got my number where the answer has been a rather candid, "there are markets for such information".
Kinda makes me regret the few years my LinkedIn profile had my phone number public, but I do wonder how successful these questionable personal data marketplaces are. I certainly haven't had a conversation get beyond "this is spam".
Check out http://intelx.io, depending on your risk tolerances, putting your email and phone number in yet another search bar may not be in the cards. If you can swallow it though, depending if (1) anything you care about has been leaked at all and (2) anything you care about being leaked has been indexed by this site...the results may be illuminating. Or nothing at all.
Interesting resource nonetheless that supplements my day-to-day line of Devsecops.
This site and a few other OSINT tools was how I discovered who 'sold out' my CV to some of the questionable 'recruiting agencies'.
I legally changed my name two years ago and I still get recruiting emails addressed to my old name. It hasn't been on LinkedIn for equally as long, so I can only anticipate that my data was sold and my old name is cached in some database.
You make a good point. This advice is strongly weighted towards people who still have multiple salary doublings left in their career ladder. At each step up the career ladder, you can afford to be more and more selective around what you're looking for.
This basic script is designed to remove or greatly reduce that time-waste from the early process.
I'd argue that it makes early ghosting a non issue, by reducing the cost of the initial and clear response it cuts through multiple layers of that dance that the spam-cruiters go through.
You're also right about referrals and I don't think this is mutually exclusive with them, instead it is a complimentary passive search protocol.
Closeness isn't a requisite for nepotistic behavior, only undue bias due to personal familiarity.
I don't think it's any less bad to hire someone you don't know all that well because you share friends than it is to hire people because they're you're close friend or a family member.
The point is that it's exclusionary to outsiders, and outsiders tend to be the exact people tech needs more of.
Actually it is not; this is how the term is defined:
> nep·o·tism - /ˈnepəˌtizəm/ - noun - the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs. [0]
> Nepotism is a form of favoritism which is granted to relatives and friends in various fields, including business, politics, entertainment, sports, fitness, religion, and other activities. [1]
The practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends,
That's precisely the point - "close" relations. When we talk about business referrals, it by no means implied that the person being referred is a "friend" in the usual sense of the term (let alone relative). Usually it's just someone you vaguely know (by their work, and/or a chance encounter at a meetup or conference), but don't know too well personally.
And just because they come in via a referral does not mean, ipso facto, that "favoritism" is happening and all objectivity is thrown out the window in the evaluation process.
We may be violently agreeing here; what is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes?
Our industry is uniquely, as in above-replacement-industry, plagued by a diversity problem, and I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends over other, more qualified candidates is a contributing factor to that diversity problem.
It is not guaranteed that this always happens, but I am asserting it often is (as evinced by the "lack of interview" or "going by reputation only" as reputation is rife with bias), and that is a bad thing.
Violence is completely counter to my way of being - so No.
What is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes?
We keep going in circles - with this idea that person that someone in the company already "knows" (or who came in via a referral anyway) gets the job at the expense not just of a comparably qualified (but not known to the company) candidate, a hypothetical more qualified candidate. You just keep assuming that this what happens when companies act on referrals (and implicitly, that it happens a lot).
That's now that I see happening, when referrals are made. But if it's what you want to believe, then it's what you want to believe - and there probably isn't anything I'll be able to say to dissuade you from this belief.
Violent agreement is just a term for when people seem to be disagreeing but actually aren't. [0] If that is completely counter to your way of being, then it's possible your way of being isn't compatible with the concept of constructive argument.
And I'm confused about where I said anything about certainty. I'm not talking about how all companies operate all of the time, I'm talking about how some companies operate an unfortunate number of times.
> Holding everything else constant, from job title to industry to location, female and minority applicants were much less likely to report receiving an employee referral than their white male counterparts. More specifically, white women were 12% less likely to receive a referral, men of color were 26% less likely and women of color were 35% less likely. [1]
I'm not talking about how all companies operate all of the time, I'm talking about how some companies operate an unfortunate number of times.
In between these opposite extremes -- your language clearly indicates that you think this level of what we might call "aggravated bias" (hiring not just someone in your network; but hiring them over a more qualified candidate, presumed to exist and be interested in your opportunity) is commonplace, or something close to it.
Such that in your mind, "including referrals in your hiring funnel" == aggravated bias (in the sense above), basically.
As to the bias stats you liked to: the findings interesting, to say the least -- if they can be validated. Unfortunately the link to the original Payscale "study" seems to be broken (if we can call it that -- since remember, this is the work of a private company, with products to push).
I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends over other, more qualified candidates is a contributing factor to that diversity problem.
So you're defining closeness as not including blood relation or friendship?
You are quoting definitions which disagree with your assertion. You used the word incorrectly, and now you're doubling down on that rather than leave the word behind.
Better hope good recruiters aren't seeing this! ;)
I'm with you on your core assertion, about leveraging personal social networks in hiring leading to reinforcing systemic racism and cultural biases.
But in this context, you used "nepotism" to mean "people one knows" and then leaned even further into saying it didn't mean "close relationships" but any relationships. That's just not what that word means, not how it's commonly used either. So that assertion is wrong.
I cited two separate definitions, at this point you're disagreeing with not just me, but my citations as well, which makes it hard for me to take what you're saying here and make any changes to what I understand the word to mean.
I'm not sure a) why you think you have authority here, or b) why it's such a sticking point to the point that you've continued this conversation for over an entire day.
I think at this point the only real option you have is to admit the word must have either evolved since you learned it, or you may have learned it wrong/incompletely.
My use of the word "nepotism" was correct here, but more importantly, what the fuuuuuuck does it have to do with my larger point? This is, literally, the definition of pedantry.
Um, you kept defending your use of the word, rather than abandoning it in the face of multiple people showing you used it incorrectly. I returned to the website today to a new-to-me question from you asking for a definition, so I gave it. You've been antagonistic and personal to me rather than admit that nepotism means family and close friends, not "everyone I know," and it has hurt your core thesis since--again--multiple people read your posted definitions and noted that they did not support your use of the word.
It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this, or how it's undermining your primary point, but you do you.
> Um, you kept defending your use of the word, rather than abandoning it in the face of multiple people showing you used it incorrectly.
Do you often abandon ideas because of a volume of people disagreeing with you? How do you differentiate that from falling victim to an ad populum logical fallacy?
> You've been antagonistic and personal to me
Apologies! Can you cite, specifically, where I was unambiguously this way towards you? I'd like to understand whether this is just you reading too much into something I said, or if I've genuinely made a mistake here. I suspect the former, but it could be the latter!
> rather than admit that nepotism means family and close friends, not "everyone I know,"
What's interesting here is that you think I ever said, "everyone I know". I certainly didn't mean that, and as far as I can tell, I never said that either. I look forward to seeing the specific language I used that caused your confusion!
> and it has hurt your core thesis
How would this hurt my core thesis, since it's not important to that thesis if the people being favored are close to the person in power?
> multiple people read your posted definitions and noted that they did not support your use of the word.
Noted incorrectly. There's nothing to be done if people write factually false statements on HN, but that's what they are; factually incorrect.
Further they're not "my* definitions, but definitions from prestigious institutions trusted to define English words.
> It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this
That implies there's something to see, when in fact there is not. What's actually weird is how you keep replying, yet with no new information or analysis.
> or how it's undermining your primary point
It cannot be undermining my primary point, as it's not related to my primary point.
> but you do you.
Oh I will, I do not need permission from you to do that. Again, I'm curious about why you take this position of authority, as if you have any control over my behavior at all.
I once had a former team leader tell me that "I warn you, I practice nepotism", and she did not refer to familiar relations, she just meant that she favored people she knew and liked when looking for people (it included me, I guess, since she "got me in" at a consultancy when I was looking for a job).
It's not nepotism. That isn't even what "nepotism" means.
People have always gone through their in-network to seek advice and find others to work with, since the beginning of time. It's how nearly anything really great or interesting gets done, actually.
I don't think, "It's always been done this way." is as good of an argument as you think it is, especially considering the discrimination that takes place when you hire referrals over searching for the most qualified candidates.
Maybe we should shoot for doing better than how it's been done in the past? I think we can as an industry do a lot better than where we are currently.
Hiring for "culture fit" is problematic. Hiring known commodities is not.
I'm interested in hearing how you think the search for the most qualified candidates can be improved. Interviewing is, necessarily, a messy process and full of uncertainty.
A person who is referred (especially in SWE) doesn't automatically mean they'll get the job, they'll still have to pass checks from members who may have never even interacted with the referrer. The advantage lies in the fact that it means their resume/cover gets reviewed while the 200th applicant doesn't. The reality is companies get tons of applicants and on paper most of them might be qualified.
When you have multiple people on this very thread saying they've hired or been hired as referrals without any interview at all, it's hard to say with a straight face that these people still had to pass any quality check whatsoever.
> Industry sanctioned nepotism doesn't feel like a good look for the SWE industry
Is it nepotism though? Your friends are not your family. Unless I'm missing some fine details of what nepotism means as a non native English speaker.
Besides, if you are a reliable employee, I doubt any reasonable company would miss out on an opportunity to consider a strong referral. Regardless of industry.
Your friends, family and people you don't like but do a favour for are all examples of nepotism because they got the job through a non professional relationship.
Referrals are welcome. Filling the managers roles with these type of relationships makes the workers below feel they have no opportunity at those top jobs.
You make it seem like straight white men conspired to take over the industry and box everyone else out. Last few teams I have been on were very skin diverse. They all had privileged cushy backgrounds though...except for one of the white men who was self-made.
The power base in the US is white middle class. It's not just software that is dominated by white men. Law, medicine, construction, management at corporations. Not just white men. Privileged white men and the few "diverse" people mostly come from a level of privilege that would make my white lucky ass sick to my stomach.
It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that.
It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a position, but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions, and once you've found each qualified candidate, selecting the candidate that brings the largest difference in perspective (regardless of representation group) will be the best candidate. Given the saturation of straight white men in the SWE field, the odds that another straight white male will give the largest new perspective is not super high (though it is not zero).
The "action" here, if we need to walk away with one "thing" to do, is to saturate your pipeline with candidates from very diverse backgrounds, and then select the best candidate. It's a bullshit move to say, "only straight white men applied" if you did no work at all to reach out to other communities explicitly.
The reality at all the companies I've worked for is that you are handed resumes, one or two at a time, from HR or a recruiting partner. You interview those 1 or 2 until you find a good/great candidate. Then you stop interviewing, make an offer, and wait for reply. You don't interview 50 people then choose the best and most diverse candidate.
Your "action" doesn't fit with the reality I've experienced.
Did you know you can actually talk to the people who are handing you those resumes? You can a) ask for more resumes at a time and/or b) suggest they look at certain pools of candidates.
> Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions
This is a wrong assumption, in my experience. As a rule of thumb, for not-principal/staff SWE roles, I would estimate that it takes:
1. 10+ resumes to find someone worth phone-screening
2. 10ish phone screens screens to find someone worth an in-person interview
3. 3ish in-persons to find someone worth an offer.
In other words, a hiring manager has to look at 300+ resumes to find one qualified candidate. So... imagine you get a reference from someone you trust. You go from 1 in 300 odds of finding someone who is basically qualified to 1 in 3.
This is after recruiters have pre-screened the resumes, btw. The candidate pool for Step #1 excludes all the people who apply to a senior SWE role with no Github portfolio, no relevant claimed skills, no degree and no work experience other than Burger King.
I'm curious to hear other people's experience, but I've literally never been in the position of "Do we hire candidate A or candidate B for this tech role?" It's always "Do we think A is good enough, or should we keep looking?"
> but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Sure, defining who is "optimal" is challenging but that's a cop-out. The situation is usually: Person A can't finish FizzBuzz (literally FizzBuzz) in 45 minutes in any language in coderpad, while Person B can do FizzBuzz, some easy recursion problem and maybe some kind of stats brain teaser. There is no world in which both of those candidates are "approximately the same".
I thought you wanted companies to cast a broader net. Now you're saying that it's too broad?
> Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
Do you hire for tech roles? Software engineers, data scientists, analysts and the like?
Also, having 3-5 people make it through your process isn't meaningful. You can always find n people make it all the way through if you wait long enough. The problem just that the (n-1)-th person will generally take another offer by the time you find the n-th person.
Like I said, I have never been in the position of having two qualified candidates at the same time for one role and having to pick which one I like better. My experience, by the way, seems to match that of everyone I'd discussed this with in real life.
The experience you have is part of the broken system that discriminates against qualified candidates because of their race and gender. I'm not surprised you and everyone you know conducts yourself in this discriminatory way, it's all too common in the industry.
You have to proactively attempt to break this cycle in order to make any real progress, and a few ways to do that include being intentional about how you find qualified candidates (growing your recruitment pipeline to source from non-traditional groups), and changing your interview process in ways that allow for candidates who are qualified to move forward together, rather than do some kind of false stack ranking of your candidates, creating this incorrect notion that "only one" person for any given role is qualified, which is objectively untrue.
Stack ranking is bullshit when applied to employee performance, why would it be anything but bullshit when applied to the interview process?
Former recruiter here. You are spot-on about referrals, and having an insider advocating for you or just their willingness to make the recommendation starts things off at a great spot.
Here's where I disagree. You haven't doubled your salary BECAUSE of your policy of not working with recruiters, but rather DESPITE this policy.
Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise, especially at the higher levels. Exec roles are often handled by retained recruiting firms and aren't as well publicized as entry level and junior roles. So just saying "I will never work with a third party recruiter" can certainly be your policy, and you may save yourself a fair amount of time by sticking with it, but that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)
The reasons that there are so many incompetent recruiters are many, but a few are:
- low cost: companies hire entry level recruiters and pay them next to nothing in guaranteed compensation (mostly commission-based). The good ones will make the company a lot of money, and the bad ones can't afford to stay in the industry because they aren't making enough in commission - so they 'go away'.
- low skill: the skills required to be a good recruiter aren't typically taught in school, so they aren't coming out of college with a strong foundation. They need to learn and be successful quickly (because it's commission-based)
Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise
and
that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)
Are readers supposed to read this as a suggestion that missing out is synonymous with losing out? I kind of take exception to these phrases because it strips a lot of agency out of otherwise exceptional people who are more than capable of navigating their careers to where they want them to be, maybe not necessarily where you as a recruiter think they should be.
Seems to me the market is very strong for employees and those with in demand skills and experience to back them up are probably missing out on job x but probably aren’t losing out by any equal measure-all other considerations being equal. One of the most common refrains I've been hearing right here on HackerNews in response to the 'Great Resignation' isn't that people are leaving the workforce, they're just finally leaving jobs they've been wanting to anyway and taking their labor elsewhere.
So
That said, what does it really matter if someone decides they want more autonomy in who they decide to interview with? Shouldn’t we be encouraging more of this?
Especially given some of the fees that come with hiring through a recruiter?
Sounds like just a general statement of opportunity cost. If you're disregarding all recruiters, and someone comes along with a possible job that fits with a $200k raise that you would normally disregard out of hand, and most of your average raises you find on your own are $50-75k when you switch jobs, spending time talking to the recruiter would likely be worth it.
That doesn't sound like a thing that ever happens.
If I took every recruiter call I receive, I'd be spending half my week talking to recruiters. All for a tiny, small, infinitesimal chance that they might find me a job that A) is in a field I want, B) at a company I want, and C) at a decent salary.
I've been unemployed with next to no professional network before. And I took those recruiter calls. And they were a waste of time. I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.
In the end, the only way I've ever gotten good jobs is through the professional network. It was faster to build a professional network from 0 by working on open source projects and going out to meetups than to go through a 3rd party recruiter.
> I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.
It's somehow correlate, since one of the most potential client for recruiters are companies that hard to find employees. Though there are also companies that lack channel / networks to specific fields, it cannot be dismissed that the previous point still stand.
I don't think missing out and losing out are synonymous. I'm simply stating that if you decide to ignore any subset of potential opportunities solely due to the source, you are limiting your exposure to possibilities.
For example, if you don't have a LinkedIn profile, you will probably get far less incoming inquiries from hiring entities (external/internal recruiters, hiring managers, etc.). That's a decision many people make.
Everyone has autonomy in who they interview with - I'm not sure where that comment is coming from.
This isn't about autonomy or interviews. It's about the ability to say "yes" or "no" to additional information about opportunities. Nothing more.
EDIT: To address the Great Resignation thing, agreed there as well. I'm a resume writer/career advisor now and my business has been brisk. Lots of clients are changing industries to find more impactful work, better working conditions, etc. Obviously if someone IS leaving the workforce they aren't calling me to write their resume, but I'm seeing a lot of activity from people looking to find work they "feel better" about in one way or another.
I read it as a fairly mathematical statement of fact. There is a tree of opportunities, and one can choose to prune some of them at the root. By definition, any direct/anticipated; and any unanticipated, indirect opportunities; are gone. Which is a 100% valid personal choice, I interpreted the minor quibble being whether this is a net positive creditor to their overall success. On one hand, pruning opportunities is in principle a negative; on the other hand, time saved not dealing with undesired channels is a positive.
The reluctance to work with recruiters is mostly the "time suck" element. If you were to chase every opportunity sent by recruiters you'd waste a ton of time, but you'd also maximize your potential for getting offers that meet your criteria (whatever those criteria are).
It was meant as a statement of fact. To oversimplify, if you limit the information you are willing to receive, you won't have all the information you could have.
My main issue with the original post was that OP was crediting a policy of reduced information with doubling their salary. That just isn't the case.
As far as I can see, the only thing outsourced recruiters provide is blame-shifting. They're not better at judging candidates. They're not better at finding candidates. They're almost certainly worse at understanding what the company needs than the company, and worse at understanding what the candidate has to offer than the candidate.
But, if the company hires a few people they're unhappy with through a recruiter (which is bound to happen from random chance no matter how they hire), they have someone to blame. They can switch to another recruiter, and assure their further-ups that the problem has been addressed.
There are many corporate roles that are mostly about providing blame-shifting opportunities, but outsourced recruiting is an unusually pure one. Along with "networking"-logrolling, it's one of the things which I really can't stand about working in software development, and on darker days they makes me wonder if I shouldn't go be a hermit in a cabin in the woods or something instead.
Does this blame shifting really happen though? I've never seen recruiters get blamed for a bad hire. I've seen them get blamed for sending people that fail at the first interview though.
A bad hire isn't on a recruiter unless they are basically lying to the employer about the hire's credentials or background, and even then it's the employer's job to vet what is being said.
That's assuming the employer has infinite time and resources to interview and vet candidates. They don't, they are overwhelmed, and it's supposedly the recruiters job to make it easier, yet most seem completely clueless and useless.
I said bad "hire", not bad "interview" - this was by design. If a company makes a bad hire, it's not (generally) because the candidate was presented, but rather a flaw in their interview and vetting process. The "how" of the candidate appearing is mostly irrelevant at that point.
Companies are stupid. Recruiters talk them into bad hires all the time, then there candidate gets a job, experience, and they get to replace them the following year, placing another person with the original company and moving the other candidate to the next.
I’ve only seen the blame shifting work at another layer: HR dept telling us that they made their best by engaging a recruiting firm, they can do us a favor by finding other recruiters, but it’s not on them if all the candidates we get sent are mismatched.
"but that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)"
Why does everybody assume that the goal is to advance to an exec role?
I'm sure that you were a competent recruiter, but the reality is that I don't have the time or the energy to waste on you to figure out if you are or not.
I don't assume everyone is looking to advance to an exec role - in my experience, most actually are not looking for that at all. I tend to assume people aren't looking for exec roles.
"Advance your position" could refer to improved work/life balance, more time off, remote, whatever you value. I was referring to overall position (life quality), not on an org chart. I can see how that wasn't made explicitly clear.
What's your suggestion on fostering relationships with recruiters?
I do ignore the vast majority of contacts due to the sheer overload of them, I don't have the energy or time to parse through each message and see if it's worth pursuing the recruiter in the future or not.
My CV is no unicorn, I have a lot of experience in different roles and company sizes but I'm not a deep specialist or a very sought after technologist, just a decent engineer. Even then I get dozens of contacts per month, it's impossible for me to actively engage with that...
If I decided to keep some recruiters in the loop when I look for new jobs, how should I do it? I can't just answer all these contacts and filter out, are there good places to match decent professional recruiters and job-seekers? I'd love to have an ongoing relationship with a good recruiter who could match me to openings offering things like a 4-day work week, etc., but usually I'd have to go searching for these openings and then contacting the recruiters for them, how can I invert this relationship?
I feel like tech recruiting became a new gold rush, noticed it got progressively worse the past 15 years with recruiters just blasting me with spam. The increasingly higher bonuses for hiring attracted a crowd that I'm not very fond of.
The article's methods are actually quite good. You should ignore most of the recruiter contacts - if the recruiter approaches you for a job that is clearly not a fit for your background, I'd dismiss that person as either not respectful of your time or incompetent, and both are good reasons to ignore that person down the road.
If you're getting a fair amount of incoming traffic, you're already optimized for discovery, so that is working. Telling recruiters "I'm only looking for jobs that fit these parameters" and then paying attention to the ones that are respectful of that will work to start a relationship. I had some relationships for the entire 20 years I was in the business, and some of those people I didn't make a dime off for maybe 15 of those years.
One thing that's contradictory to what you've said that's caused me to ignore recruiters is that they misrepresent the opportunity even when the criteria doesn't match up. I've dealt with a few that I've told "this doesn't fit my criteria" and they're very insistent that the company is looking for people, not skills, and I should interview anyway. Ultimately this is a lie and I'll end up wasting everyone's time. I've done probably 30 interviews via recruiter and never landed a single position. All my positions have been the result of me just applying directly or through referrals.
Agree, but recruiters who can actually respect and match you with good criteria are valuable. I don't know why companies isn't do better job marketing / posting / community communication, but there are many jobs that feels like exclusively reserved to recruiters.
I don't think that is contradictory at all to what I wrote. I agree, many recruiters will try to send you out to every client and every job they have just to maximize their chances of a fee. Those recruiters should be avoided.
If you've gone on 30 interviews and never landed one job, that might be something you need to also consider and look inward. Going 0-for-30 is pretty unusual, unless you were accepting interviews for jobs you were clearly unqualified for.
> The reasons that there are so many incompetent recruiters are many, but a few are… companies hire entry level recruiters and pay them next to nothing in guaranteed compensation (mostly commission-based). The good ones will make the company a lot of money, and the bad ones can't afford to stay in the industry because they aren't making enough in commission - so they 'go away'
Wouldn't that be an explanation for why there shouldn't be so many incompetent recruiters? Why don't the incompetent ones all "go away"?
Good question. The bad ones don't go away immediately. They go away eventually, and are quickly replaced with another round of new hires. So you have maybe 10% of the industry that stays for the long haul, and 90% is a revolving door of college grads.
There are probably other industries that have similar models where most of the workforce is newbies at all times, but I don't have an example that won't be dissected.
How am I supposed to get any sense of a recruiter's skill when they reach out? Do I need to be looking at their LinkedIn profiles to see their tenure? I've dealt with maybe one or two competent recruiters out of dozens.
Tenure is a good one, but can be misleading. There are a few ways to make money in recruiting. Being really good at it and ethical is one way, but there are also people who are unethical and it hasn't caught up with them.
I would always suggest looking at their tenure. A new recruiter doesn't have the depth of client relationships to be all that helpful, but most new recruiters are 'sourcers' and not handling the client side (they are responsible for researching and bringing in candidates).
That's actually the problem with third party recruiters: the bad ones so greatly outnumber the good ones that it's extremely hard to filter out the bad from the good. I could easily spend half an afternoon or more every week on random calls with third party recruiters and never get anywhere.
What I've started doing is only dealing with the ones who both show a little evidence of having seen my profile on LinkedIn (since this is generally the ultimate source of these contacts), and mention a specific opportunity (not just "full time Python role with my direct client").
That brings me to the second problem, which is that most of these third party recruiters are working for companies that are still series C and earlier. I've done the startup game twice now, and figured out that working for a company that's going to pay me partially in lottery tickets that won't pay out for 7-10 years isn't that great of an opportunity. There are the odd exceptions out there, but they are few and far between.
I think only true part in that description is "Exec roles are often handled and retained by recruiting firms".
But that is level where normal developers are not finding themselves. I am senior developer but I don't imagine being approached for exec level role.
There are different worlds of recruiting - world where I am is low level spamming that I get every day and most of it is just predation on unhappy people that would be open to switch job.
World where there is super specialized recruiting like exec level or really niche skills might work as described but that is super specialized and most people are nowhere near that world.
All of my recruiting work was retained for the last 5-10 years I was in business, and I wasn't recruiting executives. I'm not saying that is the norm (it definitely isn't), and you are correct that senior developers will not be approached for executive roles.
Higher level candidates will probably attract higher level recruiters, because the amount of time to place someone making $100K is the same amount of time to place someone at $500K, with the only difference being a $25K fee for the first person and a $100K fee for the second.
I stayed at one job too long until 2008. I was looking to restart my career and I spammed every ATS I could find. I didn’t have a network and I had no choice. I found a job that paid around $80K as a mid level .Net dev - still more then I was making. But about $10K below the local market.
Over the next three years, I did build out my network of local external recruiters who had relationships with the hiring managers.
I hopped around between various corp dev job - one generic corp dev CRUD job looks about like any other - by leveraging recruiters. By the beginning of 2020, I was making $150K and hearing opportunities of $165K locally. Then Covid hit and external recruiters had absolutely nothing to offer me paying more than I what I was making.
I hopped on the FAANG bandwagon because of an internal recruiter in mid 2020. Almost two years later, I still haven’t had an external recruiter ping me about anything mildly interesting.
I'd bet your LinkedIn isn't optimized at all for discovery. Populate a skills section with languages and tools you use, and you'll often see an immediate uptick.
Technical consultant in AWS ProServe. I specialize in enterprise app dev/architecture + cloud.
Solution Architects are pre sales.
Consultants are post sale doing billable implementations. There is some overlap though. I do some SA type work and depending on the day of the week, I’m lumped in with the SA organization.
Out of curiosity, why did you (correctly) suspect I didn’t “grind leetCode”?
They may not care about what languages and tools you are using when they hire you, but that's how they find you. They aren't on LinkedIn search for "Software Engineer" in most cases - at least I wasn't.
You would be surprised at how wide even internal recruiters at BigTech companies throw their net. My very light LinkedIn profile had a bunch of no name companies where I was doing CRUD C# work yet and still I had internal recruiters from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook reach out to me. No I wouldn’t have passed the initial tech screen without practice. That would be obvious to anyone who knew their own interview process.
Since 2020, I’ve been working as a “cloud consultant” at BigTech. That’s all it says on my LinkedIn profile. Yet the recruiters from Facebook and Google are emailing me about senior software engineering and even engineering manager positions. I have never been (nor desire to be) a manager. Even internal recruiters aren’t really that good.
Another anecdote, I’ve had internal recruiters reach out to me at my current company on LinkedIn even though it shows I already work here.
On the other hand, my development background from 2008-2018 is doing C# CRUD “full stack development” the salary ceiling for that isn’t high. No matter what tools I say I’ve used - C#, Node, Python - they aren’t going to say “let’s pay him $200K+ to write a CRUD app!”. My one saving grace that let me overcome that without “grinding leetCode” is that all of the major cloud providers have internal cloud consulting divisions.
Some of the replies to this comment make me crazy (should I disclose here I know this commenter?).
There’s some useful information in there, that the distribution of roles behind recruiters change as the jobs become higher level. I didn’t know that. And he hedged his statements all over. And then people still reply like he’s saying if you don’t pick up a cold FaceTime call from a recruiter while you’re in the middle of coding you’re going straight to hell.
I see this pattern so often. I only hope there’s this silent readership thinking “oh, interesting. Thanks.”
As logical, meritocratic and evidence-based as they claim to be, software developers get dug in to their emotion-based positions and wear blinders just like everyone else does.
Once someone thinks "I hate recruiters; they are useless" it becomes very difficult to change that mindset.
FWIW, I've been in industry for 30 years and all but my first job out of college came through recruiters. I tell the bad ones to quit bugging me and I work cooperatively with the good ones to find positions that I might actually like.
I’ve also been in the industry for 30 years, and not one of my jobs has come via a recruiter.
I have always either had — or gone out of my way to establish — the contacts necessary to line up a job at the next company I wanted to work for.
I hardly need a recruiter to find interesting companies where I can do interesting work, and the kinds of companies I want to work for avoid (or outright prohibit) using external recruiters.
Most people never get to the point where they're candidates for executive positions.
And software salaries get shared publicly on things like levels.fyi these days, so you need third party recruiters even less.
With that said, I don't have a hard line policy of never responding to them, but I pretty much never get contacted by a third party recruiter with something that looks even remotely good or interesting.
I think if the company is using a third party recruiter, the gig probably isn't very good. Obviously there are exceptions, but no great role is getting sourced through Cyber Coders.
I was recently talking to a 3rd party recruiter who started asking me for detailed salary info of all my past jobs. I told him that I didn’t feel comfortable answering that, then when he pushed back I told him I’m legally not required to give him that info in my state (and the potential employer’s state.) He abruptly cut the call off and ghosted me.
I decided to apply to the company directly. They were happy to talk to me because my experience was a really good fit for them. I come to find out that the recruiter emailed them saying that I was a poor candidate and that he suggest they don’t talk to me. Luckily they didn’t listen to him.
It is ok that you did not feel comfortable with that, but pay negotiations are exactly why you would want to have a recruiter: they handle that for you, and are generally incentivized to get you as much money as they can since they generally get a percentage of your yearly salary as their pay. So by telling the recruiter you were not going to share that with them you were hamstringing them... of course they thought you were a bad candidate (for them).
It is a bit petty that they told the company that you were a poor candidate, but you seem to not understand what was happening. And it could have been they had already mentioned your name to them, and then had to explain why they suddenly were not representing you. I don't know, but that is a reasonable explanation.
I personally have had a mixed bag with recruiters: many I have dealt with are worthless in that they don't understand the jobs they are recruiting for (so give very bad matches to both sides), but I have been lucky twice and had recruiters give me great jobs and handle the pay negotiations so well that I probably got $20-40K/year more than I would have by myself (if I had somehow found those positions).
So the only good candidates for a recruiter are the ones willing to let their recruiter break the law and make a salary history a requirement for consideration?
WA state law makes it very clear as a candidate I don’t need to share salary information, and by some readings of the statute it’s illegal for them to even ask.
My most recent job is at a very large public company where the salaries are well published (levels.fyi) - there was no need for me to give a detailed salary history of all my recent jobs.
If the value-add of a recruiter is getting a better negotiated salary, what is the value-minus of putting another point of failure between me and a job I want. Surely it’s possible that over time the minuses are greater than the pluses.
>and are generally incentivized to get you as much money as they can since they generally get a percentage of your yearly salary as their pay
This is not quite true. They're optimizing for throughput, not max dollar value. If they optimized for the maximum amount of money they could get you that would come at the cost of their time which would lower their throughput of placing candidates and hence the maximum amount of money that they can personally earn in aggregate.
The only reason a recruiter would ever negotiate your comp up is that you are asking way below market. Then they will indeed "negotiate" up to the lowest bound of the comp band for the position. Otherwise, it makes no sense to try to get a few grand more in commission at the cost of risking the whole placement. In fact, all recruiters I've ever worked with tried to negotiate me down instead of negotiating with the HM on my behalf.
I talked with a mortaging company that's pretty big after hearing a friend's experience. Got through with the first interview. A recruiter at a third party firm heard about this and called me up: "I thought I told you about this, do you want me to say some nice things about you?" I didn't understand what she was conning me into so I said yes. (This was mid morning. By late afternoon I get a call from the gmorgage people saying "hey you did great in the first interview but we're going to pass.")
Recruiters comment on that: "They keep passing on everyone I refer"
Ended up getting a job elsewhere, and the recruiter still hit me up on "do you have any referrals?"
That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people. Everyone is moving around enough that you'll be able to cross into new companies and skip whole song and dance prior. You also get the benefit of having a heads up on the company you're joining too.
I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying somewhere, I probably will too, since we value similar things in the work.
I was just trying to articulate what I see as a difference between a purpose built career network and a network of actual friends from work. There is a difference between those two types of networks not captured when you call them both a "Professional network".
The difference is the intention behind the relationship I suppose. I don't think it matters if we disagree, it was an off the cuff statement. I see a difference, I consider it important. No one else has to.
Not to beat a dead horse, but the reason you keep getting these kinds of replies is because it seems like you have an idea about a second type of Professional Network that is different than what you described as your network of friends. Everybody's just trying to say that the real Professional Network is exactly the network of your friends, and if there is another kind of "purpose built career network" that people are talking about, it's the imitation of what you've got, not the other way around.
What you've described from your own experience is the substance of what a professional network is, and has always been. LinkedIn connection requests are trying to create a digital product in the form of the real-world phenomenon that you've experienced and described. If we're going to call one of them a professional network, everyone in this subthread is saying, let's give the real thing the name professional network, and the imitation a different name.
(None of this is intended to disparage LinkedIn. It is what it is, but if it's trying to be a substitute for real relationships between humans, it will always be the shadow, not the substance.)
Eh I think there is a huge middle ground between "network consisting of work friends" and "LinkedIn network". Maybe it's different in academia but I know plenty of people that have a strictly professional network built from real world interactions - conference meet ups, seminar series, collaboration projects, etc. They would be happy to call each other up for work purposes but would never do something purely social together or consider each other friends.
I don't think the type of network I've just described is imitating anything. They are mutually beneficial but purely professional relationships. The fact that the internet has enabled people to have a much larger number of superficial relationships doesn't mean that what the poster was describing is the only way to have a "real professional network". Yeah it's a professional network, but it's not the only kind.
That is the case I think, the two ideas about types of professional networks seems clear, and it would seem I probably see it differently to some. To me, "professional network" is better at describing a network curated for your career.
It's a tough one, because while I can see that it is also a professional network, said network would be pretty offended if I called them that. So I don't necessarily disagree with you, or even with the other commenters, but there is at least some room for subjectivity about what to call your own personal relationships.
This is exactly what I was trying to describe. People on HN are so much smarter than me lol. I used the word "informal", and you expressively described what I was intending to communicate.
> I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies.
You might not want to label it as such, but that is exactly what a professional network is. People can genuinely be your friends and still be part of your network.
Hence the 'per se'. Some people go out of their way to groom a network of people specifically for their careers, I was just trying to articulate that difference.
Eh, I find work "friends" to be even more ephemeral than school friends. Nobody I've ever worked with in the past has ever contacted me after I left the company we worked for. At least school friends are around for a more or less guaranteed period of several years.
Edit to add: I have initiated contact before and been well received. Nobody contacts me. It's tiring to have to do 100% of the work to maintain these relationships.
Sounds like it’s on you for either not being someone they liked working with or not putting any effort at maintaining contacts. Can’t always expect other people to pull all the weight.
I've had the same experience. I have no idea how this advice is working for people in most job markets - it certainly doesn't seem to be a thing in Australia.
I'm in my second role in Australia. Can't say whether it's a thing but people from my previous role (people still there and people who have moved on) definitely keep in touch with each other.
I get it. I'm definitely not an asshole; even my ex will tell you that. People seem to like me. I’ve never gotten any feedback from any manager or team member of mine saying anything about bein difficult or anything. I try to help people out when I can.
The times when I have contacted people, it's been about as well received as I'd expect a contact from a former coworker to be. It's just that nobody ever initiates. I'm not getting anything out of trying to maintain these relationships except stress, so, why bother?
And, now, someone (actually 3 someones, because I was at +3, now at 0) has gone and downvoted my original comment for whatever reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Can confirm. I've seen at previous jobs that some cliques do form, especially among high-rising careerist or very social folks. Other people just don't intermingle that much and are sidelined.
Maintaining contact happens rarely. And no, a linkedin add doesn't count at maintaining contact if the last private message was exchanged on the last day of work.
I suspect there's a sort of introvert / extrovert miss match.
I did this for a while and certainly got some leads but the really well paid roles still seemed to come mostly via recruiters.
The "networking" was also very time consuming. It was also fun but if i had a wife and kids I wouldnt have had the time for it.
The good recruiters seemed to have a knack for finding the companies that were the right combination of rich and desperate whereas companies I found through my network were generally from companies that were always keen on talking to a decent technologist but werent exactly craving somebody with my precise skillset to start next week.
> I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying somewhere, I probably will too, since we value similar things in the work.
I wish this were true for me. I do have people I click with but I have a personal value not to work for anywhere whose main revenue source boils down to "more eyeballs / clicks" and this rules out pretty much everywhere my past coworkers/friends have gone to work.
"That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people."
I agree. Personally I'd include recruiters in that group of people as well.
I don't work with keyword monkeys...the ones that send you job opportunities for jr. sysadmin roles 20 years into your career, because a 10-year-old resume they dug up from somewhere mentioned bash shell scripting in there somewhere.
I work with a handful of recruiters I've developed a good relationship with and who know what I'm looking for.
Also strong disagree. I literally ignore several obviously useless recruiters a week. I occasionally humor one long enough to confirm that they know exactly nothing about me and have put zero actual thought into their inquiry. Asking “what about my resume made you think of me for this position” is usually very enlightening.
I do have an exception, however, and it’s not recruiters that are affiliated with a particular company, it’s high quality recruiters that my friends refer me to and who will work on my behalf. I had one spend a TON of time really getting to know what I was looking for, what my skills were, and what made me happy, and he looked at companies with an eye toward making both me and the company happy long term, because he knew that’s where the big payoff was.
Agreed, though I still pay attention in case something interesting shows up. For example, I got my current role through a third-party recruiter (an individual, not a farm like Cyber Recruiters) and it was a great experience through and through.
I was hired to my current company through an external recruiter that had a great track record but was expensive. We dropped all of those external recruiters in favor of internal ones who are absolutely useless at finding us worthy candidates because unlike the external recruiter I worked with our internal ones don't have an engineering background.
My recruiter started his career as a software engineer.
I'm sure there are great recruiters out there (somewhere), but totally agree on this. Had real days of my life wasted on interviews and such, sometimes only to have everyone at the table realize it was a completely bad fit with no hurt feelings about a minute into us talking directly and not through "the process". Meanwhile got an out of the blue referral from a guy I had worked with ten years prior that started my consulting years.
Not everyone is a superstar networker but be kind, supportive, and professional to your coworkers. People talk.
My takeaway from the article wasn't to work with every recruiter that spams you (in the sense of actually spending time in their funnel), but rather, take the opportunity to "interview them" with a "standardized test" of sorts.
As the article said, most of the time, you're not actively job searching, but you generally do care about salary data points and what sort of roles are available. For unicorns, you can find salary info through levels.fyi, but for those not making those 300k+/yr, the pool of better paying jobs is much larger and recruiters still remain a useful source of data. Sniffing for roles is an underused technique. Recruiters have like 3 paragraphs to catch your attention, so they optimize for bang-for-the-buck. Which means they aren't going to offer EM roles if you don't already hold that title, even if the company has an opening. A lot of times, if your next career ladder rung is a title upgrade or a role pivot, you need to ask explicitly.
As for your policy, I feel like it's attributing all your chips into one thing while ignoring everything else you've done. Like many here, I've had my share of salary bumps over the course of my career, and each time it was through different methods (diagonal internal move, OSS lead, unicorn recruitment, promotions). It'd be naive to not have more than one tool in the arsenal.
Same. Sorry for any good recruiters out there, but these people are generally used car salesman like scum. Multiple keep emailing my work address even after asking them numerous times to stop. One I worked with on a potentially good role - acted like my best buddy, constantly texting and calling for weeks, and when I decided not to take the offer, just ghosted me. Not even an 'OK thanks anyways'. I think even an annoyed reply like 'Sigh, OK' would have been more professional.
Well, let's be honest - when you're just starting out, making $50,000/year, you can probably double your salary in one jump. If you're making $200,000/year, you're not going to double your salary, recruiter or not.
> I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for.
This is a massive privilege. A lot of companies interview in a way that I couldn't pass years ago, so I depended on external recruiters to get me jobs. This was basically how I made a living in the South without a CS or CE degree.
The universal truth I see throughout every career advice thread is always take this advice with a grain of salt.
Yes, it's interesting to see how many people here are 100% against 3rd party recruiters rather than recognizing there are those good and bad at their job - just like anything else. My best friend from growing up had a 3rd party recruiter go completely out of their way to help him, and he was very appreciative of that.
I think it's possible to recognize that 3rd party recruiters can be good or bad at their job while also coming to the conclusion that the bad outweighs the good to a degree that it's not worth the time to figure it out.
It's certainly a privilege to be in a position where you'd still have an excess of inbound job opportunities even without 3rd party recruiters. But if that's the position you're in, it's one of the more effective strategies I've seen to increase signal:noise.
> Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest.
Cyber Coders, I think that is the actual name, is pretty bad. They use a lot of automation to build funnels and send out messages automatically. There are several thousand other recruiting firms that do the same thing with more or less technology.
That being said their goal isnt to waste your time. They are just playing a numbers game. They are trying to hit the postgre DBA who just got told their contract is ending with an email about a postgre DBA contract that starts ASAP. If you are that person and you get that email you might have good results.
I think people get angry when recruiters don't personalize messages or make sure that they are actually qualified for a job or that they actually are helpful during the interview process. But they sold for 105 million in 2013. Their model works despite having one of the worst reputations in the business. They generate a shit load of revenue by spamming massive amounts of people and getting enough emails to the right person at the right time.
If you view third party recruiters as someone who is going to be your job agent and work for you, you're going to have a bad time. If you think of them as street vendors who are slinging wares of questionable quality and price and who offering no refund no return one supply items... You might have a better experience and save yourself a lot of grief.
TLDR: Recruiting companies print money by getting the right email to the right person at the right time. They don't work for you. Don't expect their service to be tailered for you.
Very much agree with this comment. Just had an awful experience with a Jobot recruiter and will 100% never work with anyone affiliated with that company again.
Strongly with you on this one. I have had recruiters from the UK reach out to me(I'm based on the west coast in US) from agencies and made the mistake of replying to one. Complete waste of time and total incompetence on their side. I have a rule like this(recruiters have to be from the company they are soliciting for):
- If I am interested in the company I will reply right away.
- Somewhat/not really interested ignore first email they send out and if they followup a reply I then email them stating I am not looking for work now but could change my mind in the future.
- Not interested in company at all just ignore the unsolicited response.
I have also completely given up on startups as the comp they have been getting back to me with is 50-70% lower than my TC and its a waste of my time. Your time is the most important resource you have, don't waste it on unsolicited responses from recruiters in positions that are not right or companies you have no desire to work for.
1. Internal company recruiters. They couldn't care less about contacting you directly unless things have changed in today's market (My last interaction with in house recruiter was circa 2010).
2. Scummy recruiting farms where they hire a bunch of people on commissions and they spam anyone and everyone
3. Recruiters who actually have relationships with a customer, prospect good candidates like a salesperson, keep their pipeline full and understand the hiring needs. They work diligently to find good candidates who fit the job description. They do exist but are rare unfortunately.
I have no problem with #3 above and I have worked with some great ones in the past and right now as a hiring manager, working with one who is trying to find a senior level candidate for a while now (lot of work there).
My exact experience. I've had one actual great recruiter that was in the #3 category, one okay recruiter from #2 who a #1 recruiter farmed out to, and then dozens and dozens of sleazeballs from #2.
For the most part, I just say ignore recruiters entirely, unless the job is for a great company and there are no red flags, instead opting to network and send emails directly to people in charge of hiring.
I got my current job through an internal company recruiter. He's the best I've ever seen in this business -- the introduction was extremely well targeted, the process was very low-pressure, and he's measured on the long-term success of the people he brings in.
He spent time explaining the role, the skills, and the goals, and offered feedback throughout the process.
> Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest.
100% agree. I'd go a step further and say: don't bother applying for any job on Indeed where they say "we're looking to fill a contract position with <insert some info about another company (a top industry producer!)>" because they're just a front for those same recruiting farms.
> Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks
I wish this were always true. When I worked as a recruiter, I saw referrals routinely get tossed onto the stack of resumes with no special preference. How candidates are treated completely depends on the preferences of the hiring manager & corporate red tape, even at smaller companies.
I’ve had great experiences with local recruiters who had relationships with the client companies. They will tell you the max salary you can get, the interview process, why past candidates failed, the actual must have requirements, etc.
My success rate from my application being submitted by a recruiter to a phone screen with the client company is 100%. My non rejection rate was close to that.
That’s when I was hopping around in corp dev. I have a specialty now that’s slightly more niche. I am working for by far the largest company in that niche so I don’t really need the middlemen anymore. If I ever decide to leave my current employer, no one is going to ignore my resume.
Because the market is tiny. Recruiters can't specialize, and those that do get eaten up by the likes of Datacom or Australian-based providers.
Most recruiters in NZ start from labourer/contracting/HR firms and then move into tech because it's better paid. Whereas in Australia you get people who trained specifically to be a tech recruiter, or migrated to recruitment from tech (usually BA and QA type roles).
> I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy.
Let say you started at 50k (which is very low) and you doubled your salary 4 times (what is plenty ?). Then you make now 800k. Which is unlikely, so your main argument is probably wrong
Les'see, when I worked halftime for my Dad at 14, I got 60 SEK (~$12 at the exchange rate back then?) a month... Uh, no, would need to know cumulative inflation since then to figure out how many doublings it's been. Quite a few, I guess. Not as many as I'd wish.
Agreed. My primary test for a recruiter call is to ask them if the position is funded and what the title is. Recruiting warehouses will often say they want to ask me a few more questions before answering that, and the truth is they're scouring Indeed for the same jobs I could find on my own and adding a recruiter commission to the bid.
Also I've had third-party recruiters ask for an version of my resume in Word format so they can standardize the format.
A. Fuck no. You aren't modifying my resume. I created it to be presented exactly as I have laid it out. I made it to stand out, not be standardized with a hundred other resumes
B. I don't use Microsoft stuff, like many other engineers
Usually if a third-party recruiter says Company XYZ is looking for people and I'm actually interested in that company, I'll just go shoot an e-mail to that company directly with my resume and not respond to the recruiter. I highly encourage everyone to do the same.
Agreed. When I looked for my first job I entertained calls from 3rd party recruiters. They were completely worthless and a huge waste of time. On top of that, they sold my info to other recruiter/spammers. I started getting tons of calls from robo-callers and other recruiters whom I never contacted. Had to change my phone number.
Now I only leave my email on my resume. And the only recruiters I'll ever talk to are ones who directly work for the company I'm applying to.
This is a given. Recruiters are there to help you get access to companies you don't have referrals in. They're good for those from other states or countries, or from a different social class.
YMMV. I've doubled my salary in the last couple of years by following recruiter cold-calls, including once for a recruiter not affiliated to the company, and it obviously wasn't a pure waste of time for me.
Maybe it works for other (non-SWE) professions, and maybe it still works for the more conservative enterprise companies, but my experience is that for most Silicon Valley style tech companies, a referral might at best just let you skip the phone screen. Then it's the same leetcode circus show as anyone else.
But yes, I agree with you that most third party recruiters suck. I'd say there are some very small boutique firms out there that don't suck though. Generally, the larger the recruiting agency, the shittier they are.
I have had some positive third-party recruiter experiences, but only after being referred by friends. On the other hand, there are other guys putting up fake listings to trick you into contacting them.
I've landed almost every gig in the last 10 years through the same recruitment firm. They've been so awesome, and they have a finger on the pulse of the industry.
I've had excellent dealings with recruiters over the years from various companies.
Right! Additionally the "recruiters are also one of the best career resources you can find" was never true to me. The exact number out of close to hundred recruiter contacts is 0.
As you said, using my network, be it tight or loose threads (colleagues to acquaintances or even the knowledge of an organization) helped me exclusively.
Even the affiliated ones are problematic many times. My latest experience is a recruiter hired by the organization advising me to improve the cosmetics of my CV (i.e. lie about my past, exclude an incomplete but important education), organised the interview and gave an interview preparation with stale and generic 'advise' you can find on internet word by word, which was useless as the topic of the interview was something else and with someone else than predicted. They seemed to operated based on a script that was prepared to give the impression of caring and making actual work, however the content of the work was mere scheduling.
This is the key to success. Even if you think a company is bad, but you have a good network that sends a referral your way, it will probably save you.
If the job was good and you liked working there - and you had the right attitude - then it's your job. Recruiters and even companies make it harder for a resume to get to the hiring manager than it ever used to be.
> Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks so I don't have to bug my network.
I like to think of it as spamming the spammers! The marginal cost of extra words in a "select all -> copy -> paste" is pretty low so I think it makes a lot of sense to be very clear and address any objections they might have in advance.
I also have found through experimentation that posting one liners like "how much?" just results in the recruiter reverting to their own script of "objection handlers"
The size and clarity of the message really does say "this isn't a conversation", "no bullshit" and "let's not fuck around here"
This is my own experience though. I've been running with it and refining for about 6 months to a year. Maybe It could be better. :)
I think you could get the same effect but in like 6-8 sentences, 1-2 paragraphs.
If I saw this text in a response, personally (and I'm not a recruiter), I'd move on since the person seems hard to handle.
But yeah my approach is different in the first place. I only respond to recruiters who seem to put good thought and background research into their conversation starter.
I'd love to see your version of the same thing. The exact response isn't really as important as writing something that is authentic and in "your voice"
You're probably right that a different response would work well for you.
Though if a recruiter wasn't willing to read through that for the ~$30k payday I'd represent if they are successful, maybe that's one that I don't want to work with either.
But we all gravitate towards people who we think we'd fit with. Maybe someone skips over me for coming across as a stuffy and a lot of work and maybe someone else says "finally a type-a jackass like me! we're gonna crush this thing"
"Thanks for reaching out, could you send along the company name, a job description and total compensation details for the role?"
Get to the core of what you're asking. The rest of the response is needlessly long-winded. You don't want them to waste your time, and that is a fair ask in our industry, but you also don't need to waste theirs.
I'm going to agree that the "if you want me, do some work first" thing seems a bit overkill. For me, usually just a single sentence asking for salary range and job description gives me more than enough to figure out whereabouts in the spectrum they are.
This is the way I think about it:
1) there are different types of recruiters. At least in the city where you are, I can tell you that there are actually some good recruiting firms that consistently send appealing opportunities while avoid wasting your time with emails about lowballers, if you just spend the 30 mins upfront to chat with them about your expected salary range and specialization. These recruiters understand that there's an entire subsection of the workforce that is very capable but has zero online presence, and they build their own moat by connecting w/ professionals directly, to build a long term, high quality, proprietary network. Being part of such networks and having the recruiter sift and prescreen jobs for you can be valuable. For one-off linkedin cold mailers, the signal to noise ratio is generally pretty low IME because they optimize for volume. While they can give me data points about what lowballers offer, I personally haven't gained anything from this info, so I'd optimize elsewhere. YMMV.
2) you can often infer salary range from the company name and job title alone. As a rule of thumb, if it's an no-name company, they're almost always going to lowball if you're at senior level. If your goal is to raise your salary quickly, then rather than looking at sideways increments, you'll want to target "obvious" upgrades (e.g. if one is junior, look for "senior" roles; if you're senior at a local non-US company, look for US-based multinationals; or just go for broke and try for unicorns exclusively)
Those are incredibly good points. If you look at the levels.fyi data I think this pattern applies really well to the people within the bottom half of the graph.
There's ALWAYS the option of trying to go from "No Name" -> "Big Name" but I also feel like that can be a harder path to take. When the person reaching out is a "Meta" or a "Netflix" I know that I don't need to ask how much.
I'm pretty sure the number I got there would be a 4x or 5x... in Meta's case though, it's the leetcode stopping me (2 mediums in 45 minutes? Maybe if I wasn't dad to a toddlerI could study enough to get there, though my other problem is I keep getting bored of the grind and wind up building cool shit for fun instead), in the Netflix case it's because they keep saying "NO" (hahahahaha)
The optimal path here for the bulk of the developers in the middle of the pack is to make a move when the person reaching out has a role at a different no-name shop that is 50% higher than their current.
Remember there are a few vectors for that big salary bump. One where you were grossly underpaid from the moment you were hired, but another one that pops up might be that you've been in the role for a couple years and you have been so busy and engaged that you didn't even NOTICE that the market popped in the meantime, your no-name-company doesn't really pay attention to keeping up with the market and the persona reaching out is ALSO picking you for a spot that has a significant increase in responsibility.
I do think that the "reply to everyone" model starts to fall down once you're at an Uber, or some other big logo.
The best part about advice is once you've heard it you can choose to ignore it on a case by case basis.
:D
I've PERSONALLY only ever heard the "I ignore recruiters" jokes so the idea that they're this tremendous fountain of untapped knowledge was pretty wild to me.
OOOH!! One more thing about the leetcode grind. I'd ALSO argue that if you're in the middle of your grind and a 50% raise comes along, it's probably a clever move to pause the grind for long enough to take the raise and then get back to work on the grind while you're making way more.
> The optimal path here for the bulk of the developers in the middle of the pack is to make a move when the person reaching out has a role at a different no-name shop that is 50% higher than their current
I think it's worth noting that 50% bumps were historically nowhere as realistic as they are today with the current job market. At least from my convos w/ recruiters over the years, large bumps would normally imply some very tangible upgrade, like a corresponding job title change. A 30-50k bump back in ~2015 typically meant moving from a dev role to a role w/ significant leadership/managerial responsibilities.
Being able to command 50% bumps without a significant change in levels of responsibilities in today's market is definitely an anomaly from a historical perspective, but under these circumstances it definitely makes sense to consider lateral job changes to get in on those juicy market dynamics.
It reads like the author really wanted to get that "privilege" line in there, and then came up with a lot of other words to put around it to hide that fact.
A recruiter got me my first job a decade ago when I was fresh out of college and my internship place didn't hire me and I was panicking to find something as I didn't have a backup plan. He helped me interview at multiple places until he found one for me (the pay sucked but it was a job). So yeah, they're annoying, but I do understand their place.
Outside of the fact that if you like the city, the surrounding land and the people that live there. As well as many other great reasons to live in the cities.
Just because you guys don't like them doesn't mean many other people love those areas, please stop unnecessarily dumping on cities you don't like.
"No" reason is probably an overstatement. But it's certainly a different lifestyle than e.g. living in a suburban / rural area and working remotely. Many of us would consider it a step backwards unless the net increase in income was life-changing.
That's about how I figure it. Even if you try to split the difference by living in the suburbs of NYC, my impression is that housing is still pretty expensive and you have a time-consuming commute.
What are you talking about? The Bay Area has one of the greatest weather of the world, lot of job opportunities, beaches near by as as mountain. Lot to like also.
I only spent couple days in NYC, but the experience was pretty awful: the city is crowded, it stinks, and is full of weirdos (for example some random girl I asked for directions turned out to be a prostitute, some guy started to yell at me for no reason, etc.). I also almost got killed by an SUV when trying to cross the street, and my hotel room turned out to be the size of an average walk-in closet.
Can you elaborate on reasons for the move? I am facing a similar realization regarding another one of your child comments about not clicking as much with west coast culture but am concerned about a drop in tech opportunities
Many reasons. But after 10 years on the west coast, I had many dozens of friends but almost none that I wanted to spend holidays with (i.e. felt like family, neither friends nor partners). I decided that it wasn't for a lack of trying or giving it time.
The west coast felt judgmental and divisive. I couldn't always express myself for fear of alienation. I do not have strong views and I (used to?) consider myself liberal (I'm not American).
I really enjoy how conversationally adept the average New Yorker is. It's simply more fun to be with people. And the diversity is refreshing. I'm a software dev more by circumstance, not temperament. I used to only talk to ~30 y/o tech men/women. Now my day includes a sweet 75 year old lady, academics, health workers, and plenty of ~30 y/o folks who are living interesting lives without a mold.
I kept my job and moved here, taking a 10% haircut thanks to taxes. Oh well. All the big tech firms have a physical presence in NYC (FB, GOOG, AMZN..). There's less kool-aid drinking startups, but I'm ok with that. It's a big city, you can have your pick. I think as a tech worker, you have the breathing room to give up the top 10% opportunities in the field and still be a top 1% earner in the larger society (with more job satisfaction).
Not the person you are responding to - what about NYC made you get in touch with non-tech people that wasn't possible on the west coast? Is there something different about NYC's culture that helps in mingling with more people?
Hm.. It might be largely a numbers thing: higher density (more interactions), and more diversity. But can't ignore the general willingness to connect (ex: going to a bar solo in NYC yields me a lengthy convo 50% of the time, and I almost never initiate.).
I like NYC. I moved here in 2017 though. But after the pandemic I moved to Central Queens where my rent is much cheaper (2400/mo) and the apartment is bigger (1,000sqft ish) in a doorman building. 30m subway to Central Park and the best Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Korean restaurants in NY are the next neighborhoods over.
The coffee and pastries nearby aren't as fun as Brooklyn though.
I get access to salary statistics every year via my union. They collect everything from the member, support is almost always around 80%. Just plug in area, experience, title and if you have a management role. So yeah, my answer would be: most people have insight in salary levels.
Also remember that in some countries you income is public record that can be looked up by anyone.
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None of that applies to an in-house recruiter. Someone who works in HR for the hiring company, directly, may have years of experience, good training, and have a good idea of what the hiring manager is looking for. You shouldn't ignore them, although if you're entirely happy you should have a short message prepared -- "Thanks for thinking of me. I'm happy with my current position, but you never know what the future holds. Feel free to check in with me again in six months or so."
TL;DR: reputation counts.
Companies that are known to pay top of market... Like you're not going to hammer Facebook or Netflix by saying "how much sucker?" if you're in a bottom of the market bracket.
I also ignore the script when it is a company that I'm really interested in and excited by.
I should clean that up. Thanks for the comments.
An easy tell-tale sign is that they withhold the name of the company until they get you on the phone. They have a contract saying once you're in direct contact with the recruiter, you are in their pipeline and they get rights to bill a portion of your contract.
3rd party agencies are incentivized to get you the most amount of money they can, so they can skim off the top. They are highly motivated to move you through and get you signed as quickly as possible, qualified or not.
In house recruiting doesn't have this constant need to move candidates, and will be fast or slow depending on the needs within the company.
In house recruiters on the other hand have not been more knowledgeable about the team they are trying to fill for. Also, I have a theory that companies that are willing to pay a huge commission check to 3rd party recruiters are more likely to pay more for talent.
There is a time and place for in-house recruiters and third party recruiters. This article does not identify them and obsessively takes the contrarian view with no supporting rationale for doing so.
Can you explain what you mean by "There is a time and place for in-house recruiters and third party recruiters." what is that time and place?
I honestly tried to be really nuanced (but clearly failed a little, thanks for that data point).
I think it does speak to the fact that I have seen 20 years of the prevailing narrative that there is zero value to recruiters and this realization was, to me, pretty mind-blowing.
I appreciate that "never" is a word that lacks nuance, maybe that was a little too clickbait of me.
Sorry for that.
Thanks again for the feedback.
Personally, I've found that high quality messages from recruiters are usually painfully obvious. They lead with the name of the company and show evidence that the recruiter read my profile. These are so rare that I completely skip any kind of bot-ish response to handle them.
Most of the responses I can expect to the kind, compassionate, empathetic script you've so helpfully provided will not contain all three data points requested. At best, we can expect to get a JD and maybe a company name. Comp is usually withheld and the cycle goes around again.
Treating the recruiter-spammers as humans, unfortunately, does not really seem to produce the results we would all love it to. It mostly seems to be treated as proof that the spammer has hooked a fish and just has to reel them in.
We knew to ignore each other for 15 months. It was a good symbiotic relationship. Sometimes they knew I wanted side gigs and would hook me up with the companies that "needed something yesterday!" while they knew I was employed at one of their client companies. sometimes the recruiter hired me on their payroll directly instead of letting me be a contractor with their clients. it was a fun time for some time.
This has almost nothing to do with random outreach from them on linkedin. It is barely the same topic. But thats what I used them for.
In-house recruiters are distinctly different animals with a couple of overlapping daily tasks and the same name, but the way to use them is very different. A company with one of those wouldn't be using third party recruiters and thats fine, in house recruiters can somewhat bat for you in a unique and more holistic way but they are still just gatekeepers you want to get passed so you can talk technical stuff with hiring managers.
I actually spend a little bit of effort to filter out (block) incompetent recruiters, but that's all.
"Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
"Hi, thanks for the message. I would appreciate as much detail as you can via message. Interested in location, compensation, and what specific problems they need help solving. Thanks!"
I don't take a call unless the work description is specific enough. I don't want to work on your "backend". If asked, I tell them my comp expectation is min +50k over what I currently make. And I sure as hell am not moving to the bay area.
But more practically: if I decline after the first, I don’t get the other 4 emails they have queued up for me
If you have an existing relationship with them, then it could be considered rude, but it would depend on your relationship.
For me: Linkedin inmail->email->cold text within 3 minutes.
When I told the guy that was pretty unprofessional. His response "it's just text mate".
Escalated to jeff at amazon. That got his attention pretty quickly.
I still get recruiters trying to recruit me to amazon.
My LinkedIn profile clearly shows I work at AWS…
A number of recruiters are also just bad at their job. I worked as a .Net developer 12 years ago, but most recruiters apparently aren’t smart enough to figure out that not only is my knowledge horrible out of date, it might also not interest me anymore.
Works most of the time for me.
I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.
If they do name a number and you reply it's too low, they again go into a canned response of "we're willing to reach (++x) for the right candidate", which is just as much bullshit as before. You'll complete an interview cycle and get the lowball offer of (original x).
TLDR they'll lie about comp and never completely answer you.
On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's never anonymized and simply pasting it into Google will almost always get you a lead on the hiring company.
Another lead is if they give you the company location. There is only one company on the planet, for example, that has R&D offices in both Mossvile and Aurora, Illinois.
I want them to understand that I need to know up-front if the position is interesting enough to be worth investing my time in at all. I could sacrifice my time and energy to assuage their fears, but every time I've done that in the past ten years there has been zero return on investment.
A reader might, at this point, optimistically point out that the next recruiter could be different. This reader would be correct. That could indeed be the case! Yet every time I wind up deciding to try the optimistic approach I wind up on a phonecall in which I learn that the company isn't someone I want to work for, the JD isn't one I actually want to work on, the comp isn't nearly enough, or some combination thereof. Generally the comp is so far off it has no change to even be negotiated to something I would consider. Often they try to sell me on a 40%-60% pay cut, because a slice of that is worth a lot to them (it's happened twice this month).
At this point I'm quite tired of paying optimism's price to assuage the fears of recruiters. The kindness is not returned. I understand others might choose differently.
This isn't my experience at all, having worked with recruiters both as a hirer and hiree. Recruiters typically are looking to close as many positions as possible, making money on volume. Their incentives are to spend as little time as they can getting candidates just enough so they say yes.
They typically are paid a percentage of a candidates first year salary. At first glance this might seem to mean they're motivated to get you as much as possible. In reality it means that the effort to get an extra $20k, which might make a big difference for the candidate, only results in an extra e.g. $2000 for them. They're not going to spend time on that that could be spent on closing another candidate, and getting another full commission, if they think the candidate will accept either way.
The money a recruiter is paid also often comes from the same budget a potential signing bonus would. The fact that they take 10% of the first year salary makes companies less forthcoming with extra money for the candidate.
Up to a point. They get a fraction of the marginal increase in salary, and they’d much sooner “close the sale” than risking having someone else fill the job to try and get an extra 500$ commission.
It’s the same story with real estate agents: selling your house for an extra 20k might be a lot to you but to the agent it’s an extra 400$ in commission (exact percentage varies). In other words, it’s hardly worth risking the seller losing interest or working an extra 2–3 weeks for so little.
In non rush times though where tables didn’t get filled when people left, it made a lot more sense to play up dessert.
> Real estate agent-owned homes are on the market longer and sell for more (2005)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26840289
As someone who has been trying to buy a house on and off for a few years now, thank you for caring about this.
Unlikely. Its way better for the recruiter to focus on the quantity of hires rather than trying to increase the salaries of a smaller number of them. It takes way more work and makes them less money to help increase your salary by 20% than just finding another role and hire.
It's in the recruiters best interest to maximize their throughput in placing candidates, and they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
No, the company would pay you your salary and keep the commission itself, it would not have given you that commission simply because you went directly with them.
https://freakonomics.com/2008/02/real-estate-agents-revisite...
It's in their interest, yes - but it's not worth more than closing a deal quickly.
They generally make more money by seating 3 hires at new companies for 100k than they do seating 1 hire for 300k.
Because of the downside risk of possibly losing a deal, and further - because they're paid over time as an employee remains with a company, it's much more beneficial to place many people quickly than it is to place a few people for more money.
To my eyes, thirty minutes is a pretty expensive way to find out if a position is in line with my comp and the company one I want to work for. It could just as easily be handled in thirty seconds.
Last month I had a quick 20-minute call with a recruiter who couldn't tell me anything about the company or the position that I hadn't found in thirty seconds of searching. This is not an unusual experience, unfortunately. The only explanation for that call I can find is that the recruiter sincerely expected to impress me with a phone sales approach.
Well, that's not a problem - the whole point of this reply template is to filter out the useless cold-calling spam without wasting time in interviews, so that 80-90% of recruiters going silent is exactly what you want. The only reason why you respond at all is to give a chance to the 10-20% of serious offers.
I'm on a subreddit that talks about my profession and basically all interview processes are now broken in my industry. A lot of just nonsense, waste of time stuff. You hire the professional prep companies so you know the right buzzwords to say and how to show you follow the "framework", but almost nothing from the interview actually really determines how well you'll do day to day.
Instead of going to an interview, they should just call my dev team and scrum master and ask how things run with me and use their feedback as the evaluation.
Protip: If you want senior people to respond, you should probably include that information up front.
I've done several interviews at places only to get to the stage we're talking money and suddenly it becomes clear they were expecting to pay about a third to half of what I currently make for someone in a senior position. Each time I think it could genuinely save a lot of time and effort (and thus money) by just being up front about that stuff.
I don't have time ... the volume of messages is too high, and the amount of 'legitimate' inquiries are too low. And the odds of getting ghosted by the recruiter too high.
If they're a recruiter from a company that I know and they WORK FOR that company, I'll respond.
Having said that I think that is a good article and I really like that email.
I know there are two extremes: (a) recruiter is a regular employee of hiring company, vs. (z) recruiter works for an unaffiliated placement company.
But i.e. if a recruiter is a temporary contractor with the hiring company, they'd still have an email address from that company, right?
I see plenty of recruiters who just work for recruiting firms and don't hide that fact. Anyone who won't immediately tell me who they're recruiting for gets ignored. I'm sure I end up talking to the occasional contractor but you can easily filter out a lot of obvious low-hanging (and rotten) fruit).
To some extent a contractor who working for the company I know ... I'd still consider that a direct company reaching out to me type situation that I'd be more inclined to respond.
I don't find that it is hidden all that often, but that's just my experience.
You do have to stick to that, but it's IMO pretty clear but also concise enough that you don't well on it.
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts!
I left computers to move to investments, make 500k+/year but I envy the stability and choices that developers have. If I lost my job tomorrow it is not clear I could find another similar job. You have lots of options.
It looks like the situation will remain this way during our lifetimes (you never know), but you should at least appreciate it.
Few other jobs offer pay and stability similar to a Dr. or Lawyer without the working hours and with geo-flexibilty. Few other jobs offer a shot at a massive personal liquidity event without the direct exposure to a recession like in finance. Few other jobs offer this pay for what's basically a trade without a tough physical lifestyle like working in O&G.
If more "normal" people went into engineering, as in the normal white collar types who are smart but go into MBAs/MDs instead, I think we'd see interesting social impacts as more people discover that you can do flavors of digital nomad work without being the stereotypical tech bro. I think this is just starting to happen with MBAs who go into TPM roles.
Eng paths re-enanble lifestyles that I feel were lost post-1970 for much of the general working population. Now, you can live and work nearly anywhere. No requirements to suck it up in Cleveland, NYC, whatever for the kids because of good schools and a good local white collar job. If you want to pack up and go to Europe, you can grab a visa from big US tech there, or small startups. Just meet the right recruiter. Wild stuff.
Makes it easier on all of us
I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy.
But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks so I don't have to bug my network.
Or share your data.
I made a throwaway, but not obnoxious email on my domain just for recruiters a few years ago, so I could try tracking who I was talking to.
Via three consecutive third-party recruiters I started getting cold calls and e-mails from recruiters I’d never contacted, never met, or never before engaged with from agencies that weren’t the ones I spoke to or sent a CV to. Soon I started getting other completely irrelevant email. Then the robocalls came. I later found that email address among five different data leak sources.
Just so happened to be a different popular recruiting company that has “Cyber” in the name.
I keep all my interviewing data isolated from my private data.
That was the reason: to understand where my data was leaking from, not to duck recruiter calls.
It made me wonder whether reverse 911[1] calls, which are used to warn about hazmat situations, fire evacuations, and other public safety issues, show up similarly.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_9-1-1
I also wonder EU countries, including Sweden, would actually allow telecom providers to share that information with other parties such as emergency services or whether that would be against data protection laws.
Besides, prior to the pandemic, there was also a high likelihood that I wouldn't be at home, if you called me on a random day at a random time, so even if my phone were tied to my address, it wouldn't be a good idea for emergency services to rely on that.
If they leave a voicemail, I'll get a transcript.
There are too many nuisance calls, there are too many people (and businesses) falling for scams, and there seems to be nothing telcos or governments are willing to do about it.
It's pretty much the same thing that's happened to Usenet and Email (and is now happening to the Web as well). John Gilmore's lament about crackdowns on open email relays is heartfelt, but ultimately naive. If I'm remembering correctly (and I'm probably not), it ran something like: We created a way for anyone anywhere in the world to talk to anyone else, and it wasn't an accident. The problem is of course, bad actors, and lowering costs means enabling vastly more bad actors.
Figuring out how to impose highly asymmetric costs --- and not necessarily financial ones --- on unwanted communication attempts, will win this.
The technical problem is reasonably straightforward. Generating widespread adoption is the real challenge, IMO.
Monetary or social costs were both asymmetrically in favor of the receiver because a long-distance call was expensive and a local spam call would eventually incur a high social cost (either in the innocent case of teenage prank calls being figured out by parents or the less innocent cases where the police or phone company might need to trace the source).
I have, in fact, gotten periodic spam calls, though only once or twice an SMS - usually trying to solicit me about my car's insurance policy having issues (I do not own a car).
I sort of wish I could convince my Android phone to treat all calls to my direct number from anyone but GV as spam, because I have never given that number to anyone.
- The US remains relatively high income / high wealth. Especially among the more vulnerable senior population.
- The regulatory environment in the US hasn't been successful, or much interested from appearances, in taking on spam.
- Uniform language. Virtually the entire country speaks a single language, English. That's roughly 300 million targets (minor children generally wouldn't count). The largest single European nationality would be Germany, with a total population of 84 million. It's not even possible to necessarily presume an entire country speaks one language, as with Switzerland. And though computer-generated calls are increasing in prevalence, most still use human speakers.
Effectively, it's opportunity, mechanism, and logistics.
But as costs fall and voice-processing (both comprehension and realtime generation) improve, I'd suggest increasing your vigilence around telephone hygiene.
This is a US mobile number that I've ported from carrier to carrier since the mid-00s. Haven't been particularly careful about where I use the number, which is probably how it got this bad.
Even when you consider most calls now for SIP/VoIP platforms (which is where a lot of these scammers get their DID/phone numbers from) are charging fractions of a cent for outbound calls, enumerating and then dialing entire NPA spaces gets prohibitively expensive after even five minutes of dialing waiting for someone to pick up, even for the most dedicated of scam call centers.
Doesn't mean they aren't dialing randomly to see who picks up, just I doubt they're dialing entire phone number spaces wholesale.
What can be observed going on is these scammers quite literally trade lists of leaked phone numbers and email addresses and they actively keep track of who responds, and who falls for their scam before sharing the list with others.
Jim Browning (a popular youtube scambaiter and infosec pro) has videos where you can watch it happening with your own eyes.
It seems like an old flea market where most people don't buy anything but the vendors all buy and sell old stuff from each other to supplement.
One time the guy told me that the person who referred me "preferred to remain anonymous".
I asked him if he realised that this is a violation of GDPR and that a typical candidate would recognize it as such?
No coherent answer.
Kinda makes me regret the few years my LinkedIn profile had my phone number public, but I do wonder how successful these questionable personal data marketplaces are. I certainly haven't had a conversation get beyond "this is spam".
Interesting resource nonetheless that supplements my day-to-day line of Devsecops.
This site and a few other OSINT tools was how I discovered who 'sold out' my CV to some of the questionable 'recruiting agencies'.
This basic script is designed to remove or greatly reduce that time-waste from the early process.
I'd argue that it makes early ghosting a non issue, by reducing the cost of the initial and clear response it cuts through multiple layers of that dance that the spam-cruiters go through.
You're also right about referrals and I don't think this is mutually exclusive with them, instead it is a complimentary passive search protocol.
Industry sanctioned nepotism doesn't feel like a good look for the SWE industry, especially given our diversity problems.
I don't think it's any less bad to hire someone you don't know all that well because you share friends than it is to hire people because they're you're close friend or a family member.
The point is that it's exclusionary to outsiders, and outsiders tend to be the exact people tech needs more of.
Actually it is; it's how the term is defined.
> nep·o·tism - /ˈnepəˌtizəm/ - noun - the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs. [0]
> Nepotism is a form of favoritism which is granted to relatives and friends in various fields, including business, politics, entertainment, sports, fitness, religion, and other activities. [1]
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Anepotism
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism
That's precisely the point - "close" relations. When we talk about business referrals, it by no means implied that the person being referred is a "friend" in the usual sense of the term (let alone relative). Usually it's just someone you vaguely know (by their work, and/or a chance encounter at a meetup or conference), but don't know too well personally.
And just because they come in via a referral does not mean, ipso facto, that "favoritism" is happening and all objectivity is thrown out the window in the evaluation process.
Our industry is uniquely, as in above-replacement-industry, plagued by a diversity problem, and I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends over other, more qualified candidates is a contributing factor to that diversity problem.
It is not guaranteed that this always happens, but I am asserting it often is (as evinced by the "lack of interview" or "going by reputation only" as reputation is rife with bias), and that is a bad thing.
Violence is completely counter to my way of being - so No.
What is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes?
We keep going in circles - with this idea that person that someone in the company already "knows" (or who came in via a referral anyway) gets the job at the expense not just of a comparably qualified (but not known to the company) candidate, a hypothetical more qualified candidate. You just keep assuming that this what happens when companies act on referrals (and implicitly, that it happens a lot).
That's now that I see happening, when referrals are made. But if it's what you want to believe, then it's what you want to believe - and there probably isn't anything I'll be able to say to dissuade you from this belief.
And I'm confused about where I said anything about certainty. I'm not talking about how all companies operate all of the time, I'm talking about how some companies operate an unfortunate number of times.
> Holding everything else constant, from job title to industry to location, female and minority applicants were much less likely to report receiving an employee referral than their white male counterparts. More specifically, white women were 12% less likely to receive a referral, men of color were 26% less likely and women of color were 35% less likely. [1]
This is not good. Can we agree on that?
[0] https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement
[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-to-use-employee-referrals-withou...
In between these opposite extremes -- your language clearly indicates that you think this level of what we might call "aggravated bias" (hiring not just someone in your network; but hiring them over a more qualified candidate, presumed to exist and be interested in your opportunity) is commonplace, or something close to it.
Such that in your mind, "including referrals in your hiring funnel" == aggravated bias (in the sense above), basically.
As to the bias stats you liked to: the findings interesting, to say the least -- if they can be validated. Unfortunately the link to the original Payscale "study" seems to be broken (if we can call it that -- since remember, this is the work of a private company, with products to push).
Can you show where I said anything approaching this? I do not believe this, nor do I believe I said or even suggested this to be the case.
You are quoting definitions which disagree with your assertion. You used the word incorrectly, and now you're doubling down on that rather than leave the word behind.
Better hope good recruiters aren't seeing this! ;)
But in this context, you used "nepotism" to mean "people one knows" and then leaned even further into saying it didn't mean "close relationships" but any relationships. That's just not what that word means, not how it's commonly used either. So that assertion is wrong.
I'm not sure a) why you think you have authority here, or b) why it's such a sticking point to the point that you've continued this conversation for over an entire day.
I think at this point the only real option you have is to admit the word must have either evolved since you learned it, or you may have learned it wrong/incompletely.
My use of the word "nepotism" was correct here, but more importantly, what the fuuuuuuck does it have to do with my larger point? This is, literally, the definition of pedantry.
It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this, or how it's undermining your primary point, but you do you.
Do you often abandon ideas because of a volume of people disagreeing with you? How do you differentiate that from falling victim to an ad populum logical fallacy?
> You've been antagonistic and personal to me
Apologies! Can you cite, specifically, where I was unambiguously this way towards you? I'd like to understand whether this is just you reading too much into something I said, or if I've genuinely made a mistake here. I suspect the former, but it could be the latter!
> rather than admit that nepotism means family and close friends, not "everyone I know,"
What's interesting here is that you think I ever said, "everyone I know". I certainly didn't mean that, and as far as I can tell, I never said that either. I look forward to seeing the specific language I used that caused your confusion!
> and it has hurt your core thesis
How would this hurt my core thesis, since it's not important to that thesis if the people being favored are close to the person in power?
> multiple people read your posted definitions and noted that they did not support your use of the word.
Noted incorrectly. There's nothing to be done if people write factually false statements on HN, but that's what they are; factually incorrect.
Further they're not "my* definitions, but definitions from prestigious institutions trusted to define English words.
> It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this
That implies there's something to see, when in fact there is not. What's actually weird is how you keep replying, yet with no new information or analysis.
> or how it's undermining your primary point
It cannot be undermining my primary point, as it's not related to my primary point.
> but you do you.
Oh I will, I do not need permission from you to do that. Again, I'm curious about why you take this position of authority, as if you have any control over my behavior at all.
So at least some people use the word that way.
If a hiring manager knows someone, the kind of worker and individual they are, they are in a great position to know if they should hire them.
People have always gone through their in-network to seek advice and find others to work with, since the beginning of time. It's how nearly anything really great or interesting gets done, actually.
Maybe we should shoot for doing better than how it's been done in the past? I think we can as an industry do a lot better than where we are currently.
I'm interested in hearing how you think the search for the most qualified candidates can be improved. Interviewing is, necessarily, a messy process and full of uncertainty.
Is it nepotism though? Your friends are not your family. Unless I'm missing some fine details of what nepotism means as a non native English speaker.
Besides, if you are a reliable employee, I doubt any reasonable company would miss out on an opportunity to consider a strong referral. Regardless of industry.
Referrals are welcome. Filling the managers roles with these type of relationships makes the workers below feel they have no opportunity at those top jobs.
The power base in the US is white middle class. It's not just software that is dominated by white men. Law, medicine, construction, management at corporations. Not just white men. Privileged white men and the few "diverse" people mostly come from a level of privilege that would make my white lucky ass sick to my stomach.
Nice comment.
It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that.
It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a position, but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions, and once you've found each qualified candidate, selecting the candidate that brings the largest difference in perspective (regardless of representation group) will be the best candidate. Given the saturation of straight white men in the SWE field, the odds that another straight white male will give the largest new perspective is not super high (though it is not zero).
The "action" here, if we need to walk away with one "thing" to do, is to saturate your pipeline with candidates from very diverse backgrounds, and then select the best candidate. It's a bullshit move to say, "only straight white men applied" if you did no work at all to reach out to other communities explicitly.
Your "action" doesn't fit with the reality I've experienced.
This is a wrong assumption, in my experience. As a rule of thumb, for not-principal/staff SWE roles, I would estimate that it takes:
1. 10+ resumes to find someone worth phone-screening
2. 10ish phone screens screens to find someone worth an in-person interview
3. 3ish in-persons to find someone worth an offer.
In other words, a hiring manager has to look at 300+ resumes to find one qualified candidate. So... imagine you get a reference from someone you trust. You go from 1 in 300 odds of finding someone who is basically qualified to 1 in 3.
This is after recruiters have pre-screened the resumes, btw. The candidate pool for Step #1 excludes all the people who apply to a senior SWE role with no Github portfolio, no relevant claimed skills, no degree and no work experience other than Burger King.
I'm curious to hear other people's experience, but I've literally never been in the position of "Do we hire candidate A or candidate B for this tech role?" It's always "Do we think A is good enough, or should we keep looking?"
> but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Sure, defining who is "optimal" is challenging but that's a cop-out. The situation is usually: Person A can't finish FizzBuzz (literally FizzBuzz) in 45 minutes in any language in coderpad, while Person B can do FizzBuzz, some easy recursion problem and maybe some kind of stats brain teaser. There is no world in which both of those candidates are "approximately the same".
Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
> Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
Do you hire for tech roles? Software engineers, data scientists, analysts and the like?
Also, having 3-5 people make it through your process isn't meaningful. You can always find n people make it all the way through if you wait long enough. The problem just that the (n-1)-th person will generally take another offer by the time you find the n-th person.
Like I said, I have never been in the position of having two qualified candidates at the same time for one role and having to pick which one I like better. My experience, by the way, seems to match that of everyone I'd discussed this with in real life.
You have to proactively attempt to break this cycle in order to make any real progress, and a few ways to do that include being intentional about how you find qualified candidates (growing your recruitment pipeline to source from non-traditional groups), and changing your interview process in ways that allow for candidates who are qualified to move forward together, rather than do some kind of false stack ranking of your candidates, creating this incorrect notion that "only one" person for any given role is qualified, which is objectively untrue.
Stack ranking is bullshit when applied to employee performance, why would it be anything but bullshit when applied to the interview process?
The world of ideas is so high-dimensional that sex & race impact very few of these dimensions. Most straight white men are not the same.
By what metric is software dominated by white men? Are we counting Indians as white?
But assuming 100% of white software developers are men, 54% is still not within the normal range of the word "dominated".
Here's where I disagree. You haven't doubled your salary BECAUSE of your policy of not working with recruiters, but rather DESPITE this policy.
Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise, especially at the higher levels. Exec roles are often handled by retained recruiting firms and aren't as well publicized as entry level and junior roles. So just saying "I will never work with a third party recruiter" can certainly be your policy, and you may save yourself a fair amount of time by sticking with it, but that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)
The reasons that there are so many incompetent recruiters are many, but a few are:
- low cost: companies hire entry level recruiters and pay them next to nothing in guaranteed compensation (mostly commission-based). The good ones will make the company a lot of money, and the bad ones can't afford to stay in the industry because they aren't making enough in commission - so they 'go away'.
- low skill: the skills required to be a good recruiter aren't typically taught in school, so they aren't coming out of college with a strong foundation. They need to learn and be successful quickly (because it's commission-based)
and
that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)
Are readers supposed to read this as a suggestion that missing out is synonymous with losing out? I kind of take exception to these phrases because it strips a lot of agency out of otherwise exceptional people who are more than capable of navigating their careers to where they want them to be, maybe not necessarily where you as a recruiter think they should be.
Seems to me the market is very strong for employees and those with in demand skills and experience to back them up are probably missing out on job x but probably aren’t losing out by any equal measure-all other considerations being equal. One of the most common refrains I've been hearing right here on HackerNews in response to the 'Great Resignation' isn't that people are leaving the workforce, they're just finally leaving jobs they've been wanting to anyway and taking their labor elsewhere.
So
That said, what does it really matter if someone decides they want more autonomy in who they decide to interview with? Shouldn’t we be encouraging more of this?
Especially given some of the fees that come with hiring through a recruiter?
If I took every recruiter call I receive, I'd be spending half my week talking to recruiters. All for a tiny, small, infinitesimal chance that they might find me a job that A) is in a field I want, B) at a company I want, and C) at a decent salary.
I've been unemployed with next to no professional network before. And I took those recruiter calls. And they were a waste of time. I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.
In the end, the only way I've ever gotten good jobs is through the professional network. It was faster to build a professional network from 0 by working on open source projects and going out to meetups than to go through a 3rd party recruiter.
It's somehow correlate, since one of the most potential client for recruiters are companies that hard to find employees. Though there are also companies that lack channel / networks to specific fields, it cannot be dismissed that the previous point still stand.
For example, if you don't have a LinkedIn profile, you will probably get far less incoming inquiries from hiring entities (external/internal recruiters, hiring managers, etc.). That's a decision many people make.
Everyone has autonomy in who they interview with - I'm not sure where that comment is coming from.
This isn't about autonomy or interviews. It's about the ability to say "yes" or "no" to additional information about opportunities. Nothing more.
EDIT: To address the Great Resignation thing, agreed there as well. I'm a resume writer/career advisor now and my business has been brisk. Lots of clients are changing industries to find more impactful work, better working conditions, etc. Obviously if someone IS leaving the workforce they aren't calling me to write their resume, but I'm seeing a lot of activity from people looking to find work they "feel better" about in one way or another.
It was meant as a statement of fact. To oversimplify, if you limit the information you are willing to receive, you won't have all the information you could have.
My main issue with the original post was that OP was crediting a policy of reduced information with doubling their salary. That just isn't the case.
But, if the company hires a few people they're unhappy with through a recruiter (which is bound to happen from random chance no matter how they hire), they have someone to blame. They can switch to another recruiter, and assure their further-ups that the problem has been addressed.
There are many corporate roles that are mostly about providing blame-shifting opportunities, but outsourced recruiting is an unusually pure one. Along with "networking"-logrolling, it's one of the things which I really can't stand about working in software development, and on darker days they makes me wonder if I shouldn't go be a hermit in a cabin in the woods or something instead.
What is that?
Why does everybody assume that the goal is to advance to an exec role?
I'm sure that you were a competent recruiter, but the reality is that I don't have the time or the energy to waste on you to figure out if you are or not.
I don't assume everyone is looking to advance to an exec role - in my experience, most actually are not looking for that at all. I tend to assume people aren't looking for exec roles.
"Advance your position" could refer to improved work/life balance, more time off, remote, whatever you value. I was referring to overall position (life quality), not on an org chart. I can see how that wasn't made explicitly clear.
I do ignore the vast majority of contacts due to the sheer overload of them, I don't have the energy or time to parse through each message and see if it's worth pursuing the recruiter in the future or not.
My CV is no unicorn, I have a lot of experience in different roles and company sizes but I'm not a deep specialist or a very sought after technologist, just a decent engineer. Even then I get dozens of contacts per month, it's impossible for me to actively engage with that...
If I decided to keep some recruiters in the loop when I look for new jobs, how should I do it? I can't just answer all these contacts and filter out, are there good places to match decent professional recruiters and job-seekers? I'd love to have an ongoing relationship with a good recruiter who could match me to openings offering things like a 4-day work week, etc., but usually I'd have to go searching for these openings and then contacting the recruiters for them, how can I invert this relationship?
I feel like tech recruiting became a new gold rush, noticed it got progressively worse the past 15 years with recruiters just blasting me with spam. The increasingly higher bonuses for hiring attracted a crowd that I'm not very fond of.
If you're getting a fair amount of incoming traffic, you're already optimized for discovery, so that is working. Telling recruiters "I'm only looking for jobs that fit these parameters" and then paying attention to the ones that are respectful of that will work to start a relationship. I had some relationships for the entire 20 years I was in the business, and some of those people I didn't make a dime off for maybe 15 of those years.
If you've gone on 30 interviews and never landed one job, that might be something you need to also consider and look inward. Going 0-for-30 is pretty unusual, unless you were accepting interviews for jobs you were clearly unqualified for.
Wouldn't that be an explanation for why there shouldn't be so many incompetent recruiters? Why don't the incompetent ones all "go away"?
There are probably other industries that have similar models where most of the workforce is newbies at all times, but I don't have an example that won't be dissected.
I would always suggest looking at their tenure. A new recruiter doesn't have the depth of client relationships to be all that helpful, but most new recruiters are 'sourcers' and not handling the client side (they are responsible for researching and bringing in candidates).
What I've started doing is only dealing with the ones who both show a little evidence of having seen my profile on LinkedIn (since this is generally the ultimate source of these contacts), and mention a specific opportunity (not just "full time Python role with my direct client").
That brings me to the second problem, which is that most of these third party recruiters are working for companies that are still series C and earlier. I've done the startup game twice now, and figured out that working for a company that's going to pay me partially in lottery tickets that won't pay out for 7-10 years isn't that great of an opportunity. There are the odd exceptions out there, but they are few and far between.
But that is level where normal developers are not finding themselves. I am senior developer but I don't imagine being approached for exec level role.
There are different worlds of recruiting - world where I am is low level spamming that I get every day and most of it is just predation on unhappy people that would be open to switch job.
World where there is super specialized recruiting like exec level or really niche skills might work as described but that is super specialized and most people are nowhere near that world.
Higher level candidates will probably attract higher level recruiters, because the amount of time to place someone making $100K is the same amount of time to place someone at $500K, with the only difference being a $25K fee for the first person and a $100K fee for the second.
Or I can place myself and have room to negotiate an additional $100k in my signing bonus.
I don’t network with recruiters. I network with people in my industry that can directly drive hiring decisions.
Over the next three years, I did build out my network of local external recruiters who had relationships with the hiring managers.
I hopped around between various corp dev job - one generic corp dev CRUD job looks about like any other - by leveraging recruiters. By the beginning of 2020, I was making $150K and hearing opportunities of $165K locally. Then Covid hit and external recruiters had absolutely nothing to offer me paying more than I what I was making.
I hopped on the FAANG bandwagon because of an internal recruiter in mid 2020. Almost two years later, I still haven’t had an external recruiter ping me about anything mildly interesting.
The same recruiters see I work for BigTech and they are still sending me “exciting opportunities for .Net leads paying up to $150K”.
Solution Architects are pre sales.
Consultants are post sale doing billable implementations. There is some overlap though. I do some SA type work and depending on the day of the week, I’m lumped in with the SA organization.
Out of curiosity, why did you (correctly) suspect I didn’t “grind leetCode”?
Since 2020, I’ve been working as a “cloud consultant” at BigTech. That’s all it says on my LinkedIn profile. Yet the recruiters from Facebook and Google are emailing me about senior software engineering and even engineering manager positions. I have never been (nor desire to be) a manager. Even internal recruiters aren’t really that good.
Another anecdote, I’ve had internal recruiters reach out to me at my current company on LinkedIn even though it shows I already work here.
On the other hand, my development background from 2008-2018 is doing C# CRUD “full stack development” the salary ceiling for that isn’t high. No matter what tools I say I’ve used - C#, Node, Python - they aren’t going to say “let’s pay him $200K+ to write a CRUD app!”. My one saving grace that let me overcome that without “grinding leetCode” is that all of the major cloud providers have internal cloud consulting divisions.
There’s some useful information in there, that the distribution of roles behind recruiters change as the jobs become higher level. I didn’t know that. And he hedged his statements all over. And then people still reply like he’s saying if you don’t pick up a cold FaceTime call from a recruiter while you’re in the middle of coding you’re going straight to hell.
I see this pattern so often. I only hope there’s this silent readership thinking “oh, interesting. Thanks.”
Once someone thinks "I hate recruiters; they are useless" it becomes very difficult to change that mindset.
FWIW, I've been in industry for 30 years and all but my first job out of college came through recruiters. I tell the bad ones to quit bugging me and I work cooperatively with the good ones to find positions that I might actually like.
I have always either had — or gone out of my way to establish — the contacts necessary to line up a job at the next company I wanted to work for.
I hardly need a recruiter to find interesting companies where I can do interesting work, and the kinds of companies I want to work for avoid (or outright prohibit) using external recruiters.
And software salaries get shared publicly on things like levels.fyi these days, so you need third party recruiters even less.
With that said, I don't have a hard line policy of never responding to them, but I pretty much never get contacted by a third party recruiter with something that looks even remotely good or interesting.
I think if the company is using a third party recruiter, the gig probably isn't very good. Obviously there are exceptions, but no great role is getting sourced through Cyber Coders.
I decided to apply to the company directly. They were happy to talk to me because my experience was a really good fit for them. I come to find out that the recruiter emailed them saying that I was a poor candidate and that he suggest they don’t talk to me. Luckily they didn’t listen to him.
I am also done with 3rd party recruiters.
It is a bit petty that they told the company that you were a poor candidate, but you seem to not understand what was happening. And it could have been they had already mentioned your name to them, and then had to explain why they suddenly were not representing you. I don't know, but that is a reasonable explanation.
I personally have had a mixed bag with recruiters: many I have dealt with are worthless in that they don't understand the jobs they are recruiting for (so give very bad matches to both sides), but I have been lucky twice and had recruiters give me great jobs and handle the pay negotiations so well that I probably got $20-40K/year more than I would have by myself (if I had somehow found those positions).
WA state law makes it very clear as a candidate I don’t need to share salary information, and by some readings of the statute it’s illegal for them to even ask.
My most recent job is at a very large public company where the salaries are well published (levels.fyi) - there was no need for me to give a detailed salary history of all my recent jobs.
If the value-add of a recruiter is getting a better negotiated salary, what is the value-minus of putting another point of failure between me and a job I want. Surely it’s possible that over time the minuses are greater than the pluses.
This is not quite true. They're optimizing for throughput, not max dollar value. If they optimized for the maximum amount of money they could get you that would come at the cost of their time which would lower their throughput of placing candidates and hence the maximum amount of money that they can personally earn in aggregate.
They'll still try to spin you that line though.
Recruiters comment on that: "They keep passing on everyone I refer"
Ended up getting a job elsewhere, and the recruiter still hit me up on "do you have any referrals?"
I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying somewhere, I probably will too, since we value similar things in the work.
What you've described from your own experience is the substance of what a professional network is, and has always been. LinkedIn connection requests are trying to create a digital product in the form of the real-world phenomenon that you've experienced and described. If we're going to call one of them a professional network, everyone in this subthread is saying, let's give the real thing the name professional network, and the imitation a different name.
(None of this is intended to disparage LinkedIn. It is what it is, but if it's trying to be a substitute for real relationships between humans, it will always be the shadow, not the substance.)
I don't think the type of network I've just described is imitating anything. They are mutually beneficial but purely professional relationships. The fact that the internet has enabled people to have a much larger number of superficial relationships doesn't mean that what the poster was describing is the only way to have a "real professional network". Yeah it's a professional network, but it's not the only kind.
It's a tough one, because while I can see that it is also a professional network, said network would be pretty offended if I called them that. So I don't necessarily disagree with you, or even with the other commenters, but there is at least some room for subjectivity about what to call your own personal relationships.
You might not want to label it as such, but that is exactly what a professional network is. People can genuinely be your friends and still be part of your network.
Edit to add: I have initiated contact before and been well received. Nobody contacts me. It's tiring to have to do 100% of the work to maintain these relationships.
Try messaging someone you used to work with to check in - you may enjoy catching up or even stumble into being able to give or receive help.
The times when I have contacted people, it's been about as well received as I'd expect a contact from a former coworker to be. It's just that nobody ever initiates. I'm not getting anything out of trying to maintain these relationships except stress, so, why bother?
And, now, someone (actually 3 someones, because I was at +3, now at 0) has gone and downvoted my original comment for whatever reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maintaining contact happens rarely. And no, a linkedin add doesn't count at maintaining contact if the last private message was exchanged on the last day of work.
I suspect there's a sort of introvert / extrovert miss match.
The "networking" was also very time consuming. It was also fun but if i had a wife and kids I wouldnt have had the time for it.
The good recruiters seemed to have a knack for finding the companies that were the right combination of rich and desperate whereas companies I found through my network were generally from companies that were always keen on talking to a decent technologist but werent exactly craving somebody with my precise skillset to start next week.
I wish this were true for me. I do have people I click with but I have a personal value not to work for anywhere whose main revenue source boils down to "more eyeballs / clicks" and this rules out pretty much everywhere my past coworkers/friends have gone to work.
I agree. Personally I'd include recruiters in that group of people as well.
I don't work with keyword monkeys...the ones that send you job opportunities for jr. sysadmin roles 20 years into your career, because a 10-year-old resume they dug up from somewhere mentioned bash shell scripting in there somewhere.
I work with a handful of recruiters I've developed a good relationship with and who know what I'm looking for.
I do have an exception, however, and it’s not recruiters that are affiliated with a particular company, it’s high quality recruiters that my friends refer me to and who will work on my behalf. I had one spend a TON of time really getting to know what I was looking for, what my skills were, and what made me happy, and he looked at companies with an eye toward making both me and the company happy long term, because he knew that’s where the big payoff was.
My recruiter started his career as a software engineer.
Not everyone is a superstar networker but be kind, supportive, and professional to your coworkers. People talk.
As the article said, most of the time, you're not actively job searching, but you generally do care about salary data points and what sort of roles are available. For unicorns, you can find salary info through levels.fyi, but for those not making those 300k+/yr, the pool of better paying jobs is much larger and recruiters still remain a useful source of data. Sniffing for roles is an underused technique. Recruiters have like 3 paragraphs to catch your attention, so they optimize for bang-for-the-buck. Which means they aren't going to offer EM roles if you don't already hold that title, even if the company has an opening. A lot of times, if your next career ladder rung is a title upgrade or a role pivot, you need to ask explicitly.
As for your policy, I feel like it's attributing all your chips into one thing while ignoring everything else you've done. Like many here, I've had my share of salary bumps over the course of my career, and each time it was through different methods (diagonal internal move, OSS lead, unicorn recruitment, promotions). It'd be naive to not have more than one tool in the arsenal.
Anymore I just ignore them all.
Meanwhile, I doubled my salary by responding to a recruiter.
Though FWIW, I was actively looking for new work at the time.
In my case, I doubled from $100K to $200K. I would not expect to double it again. I'd be lucky to even see 50%.
This is a massive privilege. A lot of companies interview in a way that I couldn't pass years ago, so I depended on external recruiters to get me jobs. This was basically how I made a living in the South without a CS or CE degree.
The universal truth I see throughout every career advice thread is always take this advice with a grain of salt.
It's certainly a privilege to be in a position where you'd still have an excess of inbound job opportunities even without 3rd party recruiters. But if that's the position you're in, it's one of the more effective strategies I've seen to increase signal:noise.
Cyber Coders, I think that is the actual name, is pretty bad. They use a lot of automation to build funnels and send out messages automatically. There are several thousand other recruiting firms that do the same thing with more or less technology.
That being said their goal isnt to waste your time. They are just playing a numbers game. They are trying to hit the postgre DBA who just got told their contract is ending with an email about a postgre DBA contract that starts ASAP. If you are that person and you get that email you might have good results.
I think people get angry when recruiters don't personalize messages or make sure that they are actually qualified for a job or that they actually are helpful during the interview process. But they sold for 105 million in 2013. Their model works despite having one of the worst reputations in the business. They generate a shit load of revenue by spamming massive amounts of people and getting enough emails to the right person at the right time.
If you view third party recruiters as someone who is going to be your job agent and work for you, you're going to have a bad time. If you think of them as street vendors who are slinging wares of questionable quality and price and who offering no refund no return one supply items... You might have a better experience and save yourself a lot of grief.
TLDR: Recruiting companies print money by getting the right email to the right person at the right time. They don't work for you. Don't expect their service to be tailered for you.
[1] https://www.cybercoders.com/insights/press-release-cybercode...
- If I am interested in the company I will reply right away.
- Somewhat/not really interested ignore first email they send out and if they followup a reply I then email them stating I am not looking for work now but could change my mind in the future.
- Not interested in company at all just ignore the unsolicited response.
I have also completely given up on startups as the comp they have been getting back to me with is 50-70% lower than my TC and its a waste of my time. Your time is the most important resource you have, don't waste it on unsolicited responses from recruiters in positions that are not right or companies you have no desire to work for.
1. Internal company recruiters. They couldn't care less about contacting you directly unless things have changed in today's market (My last interaction with in house recruiter was circa 2010).
2. Scummy recruiting farms where they hire a bunch of people on commissions and they spam anyone and everyone
3. Recruiters who actually have relationships with a customer, prospect good candidates like a salesperson, keep their pipeline full and understand the hiring needs. They work diligently to find good candidates who fit the job description. They do exist but are rare unfortunately.
I have no problem with #3 above and I have worked with some great ones in the past and right now as a hiring manager, working with one who is trying to find a senior level candidate for a while now (lot of work there).
For the most part, I just say ignore recruiters entirely, unless the job is for a great company and there are no red flags, instead opting to network and send emails directly to people in charge of hiring.
He spent time explaining the role, the skills, and the goals, and offered feedback throughout the process.
I’ve accepted a job through a very good internal recruiter once in 2015.
I can distinguish between a 2 and a 3 in a 5 minute phone call.
I don’t understand all the hate about recruiters. I cut off the bad ones and the folks left are great. The overhead is quite low.
100% agree. I'd go a step further and say: don't bother applying for any job on Indeed where they say "we're looking to fill a contract position with <insert some info about another company (a top industry producer!)>" because they're just a front for those same recruiting farms.
I wish this were always true. When I worked as a recruiter, I saw referrals routinely get tossed onto the stack of resumes with no special preference. How candidates are treated completely depends on the preferences of the hiring manager & corporate red tape, even at smaller companies.
My success rate from my application being submitted by a recruiter to a phone screen with the client company is 100%. My non rejection rate was close to that.
That’s when I was hopping around in corp dev. I have a specialty now that’s slightly more niche. I am working for by far the largest company in that niche so I don’t really need the middlemen anymore. If I ever decide to leave my current employer, no one is going to ignore my resume.
Safe to say the quality of tech recruiters in New Zealand is even lower than those elsewhere.
Most recruiters in NZ start from labourer/contracting/HR firms and then move into tech because it's better paid. Whereas in Australia you get people who trained specifically to be a tech recruiter, or migrated to recruitment from tech (usually BA and QA type roles).
Can vouch for this. Made that mistake. Never again.
Let say you started at 50k (which is very low) and you doubled your salary 4 times (what is plenty ?). Then you make now 800k. Which is unlikely, so your main argument is probably wrong
Sometimes you get multiple contacts from different recruiters with the same company on the same day.
If they won't tell you what company is interested, they don't have a contract with that company.
Don't be open and honest with a recruiter if they aren't open and honest with you.
A. Fuck no. You aren't modifying my resume. I created it to be presented exactly as I have laid it out. I made it to stand out, not be standardized with a hundred other resumes
B. I don't use Microsoft stuff, like many other engineers
Usually if a third-party recruiter says Company XYZ is looking for people and I'm actually interested in that company, I'll just go shoot an e-mail to that company directly with my resume and not respond to the recruiter. I highly encourage everyone to do the same.
Now I only leave my email on my resume. And the only recruiters I'll ever talk to are ones who directly work for the company I'm applying to.
This is a given. Recruiters are there to help you get access to companies you don't have referrals in. They're good for those from other states or countries, or from a different social class.
But yes, I agree with you that most third party recruiters suck. I'd say there are some very small boutique firms out there that don't suck though. Generally, the larger the recruiting agency, the shittier they are.
As you said, using my network, be it tight or loose threads (colleagues to acquaintances or even the knowledge of an organization) helped me exclusively.
Even the affiliated ones are problematic many times. My latest experience is a recruiter hired by the organization advising me to improve the cosmetics of my CV (i.e. lie about my past, exclude an incomplete but important education), organised the interview and gave an interview preparation with stale and generic 'advise' you can find on internet word by word, which was useless as the topic of the interview was something else and with someone else than predicted. They seemed to operated based on a script that was prepared to give the impression of caring and making actual work, however the content of the work was mere scheduling.
If the job was good and you liked working there - and you had the right attitude - then it's your job. Recruiters and even companies make it harder for a resume to get to the hiring manager than it ever used to be.
I've never found this to be true.
I also have found through experimentation that posting one liners like "how much?" just results in the recruiter reverting to their own script of "objection handlers"
The size and clarity of the message really does say "this isn't a conversation", "no bullshit" and "let's not fuck around here"
This is my own experience though. I've been running with it and refining for about 6 months to a year. Maybe It could be better. :)
If I saw this text in a response, personally (and I'm not a recruiter), I'd move on since the person seems hard to handle.
But yeah my approach is different in the first place. I only respond to recruiters who seem to put good thought and background research into their conversation starter.
You're probably right that a different response would work well for you.
Though if a recruiter wasn't willing to read through that for the ~$30k payday I'd represent if they are successful, maybe that's one that I don't want to work with either.
But we all gravitate towards people who we think we'd fit with. Maybe someone skips over me for coming across as a stuffy and a lot of work and maybe someone else says "finally a type-a jackass like me! we're gonna crush this thing"
ha ha ha
"Thanks for reaching out, could you send along the company name, a job description and total compensation details for the role?"
Get to the core of what you're asking. The rest of the response is needlessly long-winded. You don't want them to waste your time, and that is a fair ask in our industry, but you also don't need to waste theirs.
I'm going to agree that the "if you want me, do some work first" thing seems a bit overkill. For me, usually just a single sentence asking for salary range and job description gives me more than enough to figure out whereabouts in the spectrum they are.
This is the way I think about it:
1) there are different types of recruiters. At least in the city where you are, I can tell you that there are actually some good recruiting firms that consistently send appealing opportunities while avoid wasting your time with emails about lowballers, if you just spend the 30 mins upfront to chat with them about your expected salary range and specialization. These recruiters understand that there's an entire subsection of the workforce that is very capable but has zero online presence, and they build their own moat by connecting w/ professionals directly, to build a long term, high quality, proprietary network. Being part of such networks and having the recruiter sift and prescreen jobs for you can be valuable. For one-off linkedin cold mailers, the signal to noise ratio is generally pretty low IME because they optimize for volume. While they can give me data points about what lowballers offer, I personally haven't gained anything from this info, so I'd optimize elsewhere. YMMV.
2) you can often infer salary range from the company name and job title alone. As a rule of thumb, if it's an no-name company, they're almost always going to lowball if you're at senior level. If your goal is to raise your salary quickly, then rather than looking at sideways increments, you'll want to target "obvious" upgrades (e.g. if one is junior, look for "senior" roles; if you're senior at a local non-US company, look for US-based multinationals; or just go for broke and try for unicorns exclusively)
There's ALWAYS the option of trying to go from "No Name" -> "Big Name" but I also feel like that can be a harder path to take. When the person reaching out is a "Meta" or a "Netflix" I know that I don't need to ask how much.
I'm pretty sure the number I got there would be a 4x or 5x... in Meta's case though, it's the leetcode stopping me (2 mediums in 45 minutes? Maybe if I wasn't dad to a toddlerI could study enough to get there, though my other problem is I keep getting bored of the grind and wind up building cool shit for fun instead), in the Netflix case it's because they keep saying "NO" (hahahahaha)
The optimal path here for the bulk of the developers in the middle of the pack is to make a move when the person reaching out has a role at a different no-name shop that is 50% higher than their current.
Remember there are a few vectors for that big salary bump. One where you were grossly underpaid from the moment you were hired, but another one that pops up might be that you've been in the role for a couple years and you have been so busy and engaged that you didn't even NOTICE that the market popped in the meantime, your no-name-company doesn't really pay attention to keeping up with the market and the persona reaching out is ALSO picking you for a spot that has a significant increase in responsibility.
I do think that the "reply to everyone" model starts to fall down once you're at an Uber, or some other big logo.
The best part about advice is once you've heard it you can choose to ignore it on a case by case basis.
:D
I've PERSONALLY only ever heard the "I ignore recruiters" jokes so the idea that they're this tremendous fountain of untapped knowledge was pretty wild to me.
OOOH!! One more thing about the leetcode grind. I'd ALSO argue that if you're in the middle of your grind and a 50% raise comes along, it's probably a clever move to pause the grind for long enough to take the raise and then get back to work on the grind while you're making way more.
I think it's worth noting that 50% bumps were historically nowhere as realistic as they are today with the current job market. At least from my convos w/ recruiters over the years, large bumps would normally imply some very tangible upgrade, like a corresponding job title change. A 30-50k bump back in ~2015 typically meant moving from a dev role to a role w/ significant leadership/managerial responsibilities.
Being able to command 50% bumps without a significant change in levels of responsibilities in today's market is definitely an anomaly from a historical perspective, but under these circumstances it definitely makes sense to consider lateral job changes to get in on those juicy market dynamics.
Just because you guys don't like them doesn't mean many other people love those areas, please stop unnecessarily dumping on cities you don't like.
If you're married with kids, NYC doesn't make sense. If you're single with passions outside work - it's great.
NYC makes me feel more human and connected, even if that means higher taxes, smaller apartment, and generally more discomfort on a daily basis.
But I guess NYC can grow on you in time?
The west coast felt judgmental and divisive. I couldn't always express myself for fear of alienation. I do not have strong views and I (used to?) consider myself liberal (I'm not American).
I really enjoy how conversationally adept the average New Yorker is. It's simply more fun to be with people. And the diversity is refreshing. I'm a software dev more by circumstance, not temperament. I used to only talk to ~30 y/o tech men/women. Now my day includes a sweet 75 year old lady, academics, health workers, and plenty of ~30 y/o folks who are living interesting lives without a mold.
I kept my job and moved here, taking a 10% haircut thanks to taxes. Oh well. All the big tech firms have a physical presence in NYC (FB, GOOG, AMZN..). There's less kool-aid drinking startups, but I'm ok with that. It's a big city, you can have your pick. I think as a tech worker, you have the breathing room to give up the top 10% opportunities in the field and still be a top 1% earner in the larger society (with more job satisfaction).
Hm, and here I was, thinking that different people like living in different places for different reasons!
The coffee and pastries nearby aren't as fun as Brooklyn though.
Your union?
Also remember that in some countries you income is public record that can be looked up by anyone.