Poll: Do you get spammed by tech recruiters?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3301667

by whather • 15 years ago

24 50 15 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

mgkimsal• 15 years ago

I wanted to choose the second option, but chose the third because overall, they're terrible.

http://michaelkimsal.com/blog/dear-consultant/

95% of the stuff I get is untargeted and useless. The few people that actually read my resume online - http://michaelkimsal.com/resume - know when I'm available, and know what my terms are (no, I won't relocate to Colorado for a $45k/year job - don't send me junk or call me for this sort of stuff).

I don't really mind the emails too much, because I just delete the ones that make it past the spam filter.

On rare occasions, I'll get an email or call from a recruiter who has actually read my resume and notes, and indicates as much, and asks me for people I may know. The people who sound intelligent and have taken the time to read about me, call me up, and can pronounce my name - hey, I give them a few minutes of help. But almost no one is that professional.

joshu• 15 years ago

As a hiring manager, I agree. I just get spammed. They aren't recruiting, they are headhunting - just finding people on linkedin and asking if they want new jobs.

What's worse is that they feel the need to CALL MY NUMBER, which they appear to be getting from our domain registration (which is used only for that!)

sgnome• 15 years ago

I get spammed by them all the time and they never send jobs relevant to what I've posted on LinkedIn, etc.

notphilatall• 15 years ago

What amazes me the most is that recruiters today are largely as awkward and ineffective as they were ten years ago. Maybe it's just that the worst recruiters are also the noisiest, but I would think that enough recruiters would have learned that building relationships is far more valuable than mass-emailing.

As a developer, if you're in my rolodex as a recruiter / talent agent with a clue, I'll likely reach out when I'm considering career options -- even if it's several years down the road. As a recruiter, once you gather enough developers into that relationship, you should have your bonus-based salary covered... right?

Edit: I wrote a quick one-pager that I routinely send to recruiters who are particularly bad at their supposed job, http://notphil.com/recruiter_tips.html

Someone• 15 years ago

"I would think that enough recruiters would have learned that building relationships is far more valuable than mass-emailing"

Is it? Let's play devil's advocate. I think the following are at least somewhat true statements:

1) most vacancies are for run-of-the-mill jobs. Hence, the average recruiter has more of those vacancies than those that would help "building a relationship". Chances are even that most recruiters have only run-of-the-mill jobs on offer. Given that, they cannot afford to spend much time aiming precisely. So, they use buckshot instead.

2) if a recruiter finds you a job you like, you should be off the market for years (freelancing excluded). If a recruiter needs to land x jobs per year, and people stay in those jobs for y years on average, he needs a) x good vacancies per year, and b) relationships with about x times y good developers. I do not know what are realistic values for x and y, but I guess x cannot be much smaller than 25 (otherwise, one could easily run for a month without placing somebody anywhere. That probably would upset his boss, or worry the self-employed recruiter), and y probably would be around 5 years or more. So, a 'good' recruiter would need a relationship with over 100 people. Once one knows those people, that is doable (working full time, that is about two hours a month per person to keep up with LinkedIn profiles, blogs, whatever), but finding them in the first place will be a challenge.

3) it may be more profitable to get a good relationship with employers than with developers because those employers will bring in the vacancies without which you cannot do anything.

4) pay for typical recruiters may be too low to attract people with the combination of technical and social skills needed to do the job well.

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

I voted the 3rd option, though I really wanted a fourth, "I avoid all but a very few recruiters." I can think of two or three recruiters who have contacted me with actual relevant jobs. Once, I was actually shocked at how accurately I fit the position's requirements.

I have been placed in a few jobs by recruiters.

I rarely, if ever, call a recruiter back. And I never return any contact if they say something like, "we'll see if we have anything that fits," or especially if they want me to come by in person (those are the sleaziest).

kaffeinecoma2• 15 years ago

I get this "let's meet in person" come-on by recruiters all the time, and find it really creepy. When I ask why, they say something like "I like to form a personal relationship with all my potential clients" or some BS like that.

What are they really trying to do? Is this some way for them to have "dibs" on you, in case you somehow manage to get an interview with one of their client companies independently?

Evgeny• 15 years ago

My guess would be that they want to see if a candidate is cleanly shaved, neatly dressed and can communicate in person?

DarkShikari• 15 years ago

"I like to form a personal relationship with all my potential clients"

And dishonest as well. You're not the client; you're the product.

saraid216• 15 years ago

For me at least, it's harder to pick apart what someone says out loud, but if you write it down and hand it to me, I can re-read it at leisure and tell you in minute detail all the idiocies.

Spoken word coding would kill me.

ultrasaurus• 15 years ago

For low-quality recruiters it's about their value maximizing function (odds you'll take job * odds they'll take you): - visiting them in person shows willingness to accept arbitrary tasks (or desperation, either way it shows that you're likely to accept a non-ideal job) - they want to see that you won't embarras them (since all they know about you is buzzwords on your resume and that you're the kind of person who responds to unsolicited recruiting)

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

I was warned years and years ago that these calls and visits are a waste of time by a friend. A few years ago, though, I got such a call and decided to give it a shot. I figured, sure, maybe they just want to make sure you're presentable in person. They said they had several positions they wanted to discuss with me.

So I went to their office in SF. I had to wait around for awhile before finally being led back by what I can only describe as a bimbo recruiter. I sat at her desk among a see of other recruiters (most on phones) as she plodded through my resume and did God knows what on her computer. Basically, she completely failed to comprehend anything about my skill set and, in person, did that recruiter thing where they repeatedly mention jobs wholly unrelated to anything in your past.

Then they wanted references. Without any job having even been specified. I refused, stating that I only give references when an offer is on the table. They kept prying, saying they needed to vet me before presenting me (again, to no job that had been mentioned). Basically, I think they were just trying to pump me for contact.

Eventually, they gave up and went on to ask about past salary. As a matter of principle, I refuse to give this out. If you don't know what I'm worth, you shouldn't be in the business. They continued to pry, for some reason refusing to take "none of your business" for an answer. Finally, she asked if I could meet with some other guy.

So I sit in another room for ten minutes until this guy finally walks in. Turns out he's just there to try and break me for salary info. I keep telling him various version of, "I have a policy of never discussing past salary," to no avail. Finally he says, "look, I understand if you were underpaid," (I wasn't), "but you can either tell us, or there's nothing more we can do here." I said, "okay," and walked out.

A week later I got an email from the same idiots about another position completely unrelated to my skillset. I responded, telling them that I thought they were downright creepy and not to contact me again. He emailed me back to "disagree". I blacklisted their domain in my email client.

So, basically, my impression is that at best you are dealing with someone who values their time above yours, and more likely someone who is trying to pump you for information.

kd0amg• 15 years ago

I think if I ever get that suggestion, my response will be something like, "Ok. I can generally be found at the following location during working hours: ...." (which wouldn't be too difficult for them to find out if they really cared to).

ja27• 15 years ago

I get about 1 every other day. I ignore them. They generally are so clueless that they're not worth my time. If I ever wanted one, I know a couple recruiters that know what they're doing.

moomin• 15 years ago

Do what I do: set up gmail rules to delete the email and send a canned reply. If enough people do this, the spam recruiters will be effectively DDoSing themselves.

jon914• 15 years ago

I get mostly relevant opportunities, but they never acknowledge that I'm already running my own company, even when contacting me via LinkedIn where that's pretty obvious.

These aren't exactly no-name companies or recruiting firms but the actual companies themselves - we're talking about Zynga, Playdom, ngmoco, etc.

Is this something other founders have found?

binarymax• 15 years ago

My standard response is I charge £300 per hour. They tell me they'll keep me on file and disconnect pretty quickly.

ehynds• 15 years ago

Nothing pisses me off more than when a recruiter calls my work line to pitch their openings, which they seem to be doing more and more lately. For that reason I vote #3.

kaffeinecoma2• 15 years ago

I also get about 5 per day, and more than that if I've tweaked my profile on LinkedIn or similar sites recently.

Dear recruiters: adding "Urgent requirement!!!" to the subject line, or a "X-MSMail-Priority: High" header really does not make the offering more interesting to me.

Apreche• 15 years ago

I get a lot. The problem is that almost all of them are not offering realistic opportunities. They are all start-ups that are offering not enough money, expect you to work more than 40 hours a week, and forget vacation days and benefits.

Don't call me unless you are offering a huge pile of cash and/or 30+ vacation days.

SomeCallMeTim• 15 years ago

Amen. :)

In my case they almost all want me to work in Silicon Valley. I live in Boulder, and it would take a lot to convince me to leave.

I've had offers of VP-level equity, but what I want at this point is founder-level equity. So I'm doing my own thing.

fennecfoxen• 15 years ago

I get the occasional recruiter email, and mostly I don't mind it, except for the one doofus recruiter at Meru. I specifically call him a doofus because:

- I told him politely exactly what he was doing wrong and why I wasn't interested (including that he was recruiting me to the wrong team with the wrong programming language experience)

- He sent me the exact same pitch a few months later

- I replied again, mocking him and his company openly, telling him "feel free to contact me like this again in the future; I'll tell all my buddies in engineering about it and we'll all laugh at you (and recruiters in general)."

- In response he said "We should grab a coffee and talk more in detail about your advice."

Uh-huh.

tovmeod• 15 years ago

I don't mind so much but it is because I am looking for a job right now. Lets see if they continue to spam me after I get a job

veyron• 15 years ago

I deleted my linkedin account thanks to the glut of recruiters trying to grab me.

dredmorbius• 15 years ago

I've thinned mine very markedly. Seems to help. Deletion would be a next step.

rhnet• 15 years ago

I'm still in school and only do internships/co-ops but I still get bombarded with calls and emails for fulltime. I have a canned response for the emails now.

I wish recruiters would spend a little more time looking at my resume to see that all my past jobs have intern in the title and that I don't graduate for a while. The 'Senior Hadoop Engineer' position doesn't really fit me...

tlrobinson2• 15 years ago

I started a Tumblr a couple months ago called Awkward Recruiter. Haven't added much to it yet though... http://awkwardrecruiter.tumblr.com/

Feel free to submit stuff.

eridius• 15 years ago

I just got an email today from a recruiter advertising a contracting position... at the company I already work for (full-time).

tlrobinson2• 15 years ago

I know someone who was contacted for a job he had recently quit.

I've also had multiple recruiters contact me for the same job after telling them I wasn't interested.

quartzmo• 15 years ago

Why are recruiters so convinced that my inevitable destiny is to move to the Bay Area?

samsoffes2• 15 years ago

Because there are a lot of awesome jobs here :)

quinndupont• 15 years ago

Usually I find them rather annoying, but I do like the smug sense of "I'm so in demand!" Then, they inevitably say something suggesting that I'm like, the 1000th person they have contacted today.

dkastner• 15 years ago

I read your Hacker News post and was very impressed by your skills. I would like to talk to you about a career opportunity that I'm sure you would find very interesting. Please contact me if you are interested.

badclient• 15 years ago

Even funnier are seemingly personalized emails I get from Valley M&A firms for a start-up of mine that died two years ago. They are all very interested in its M&A potential. Ha.

noodle• 15 years ago

I get a lot. And I've seen both sides of it, both as someone who was referred to a job by a good recruiter and as someone who has interviewed a lot of people referred by various recruiters.

I don't mind the ones that know the tech industry and actually make effort pairing people with positions that fit them. There aren't many of those out there, but they tend to produce higher quality candidates and consequently, get their people hired.

I do mind the ones that are spammers or more predatory. Just wastes my time, both as a job seeker and as someone with a hand in the hiring process.

dustingetz• 15 years ago

i think, the better the seeker's skills, the less helpful a recruiter is. recruiters want to fill positions quickly, the employers that use recruiters want to fill positions quickly. as such they are more worried about getting someone at "market salary" than a rockstar. "market salary" can mean a lot of things, but in the contexts I usually see it, it means something between "our business requires competent, experienced non-experts" and "warm bodies please, we bill by the hour". disclaimer: I make a market salary.

damncabbage• 15 years ago

It's a nice problem to have people contacting you with positions; my print designer partner would love to be in a similar spot. :(

Having said that, though, I receive a lot of phone calls from recruiters who've found my LinkedIn profile... But not the big notice that says I'm not looking for any PHP-related positions. I feel like every profile I have needs to have a "No PHP, no contracting, no moving to Canberra" notice stuck at the top.

There are some great recruiters (http://stevegilles.com/ is one such guy in Sydney), but it's unfortunate that there are just so many dropkicks that don't even do the bare minimum before contacting you.

grifaton• 15 years ago

We have a long-running (and open) challenge at work to recruit a cold-calling recruiter (of whom we seem to get rather a lot) to our HR team.

No luck yet...

rdouble• 15 years ago

What's the deal with recruiter email that has a from field with a different name than the person writing the message?

Something like, "From: Bob Williams"

Hi, this is Stacey Fink from techwaveconsult.com... ...bla bla...

This happens a lot on LinkedIn, too. Am I the only person who gets these?

ryguytilidie• 15 years ago

Tech Recruiter here at a SF startup. Maybe it helps, but I have engineers constantly tell me that I am the best at what I do that they have ever met. However, I am 100% aware that most of my colleagues are bottom-feeding dickheads who know nothing about tech or recruiting and almost everyday I wake up embarrassed to be doing what I am doing to some degree.

However, I got into the field basically by chance. I was an intern at NASA, working as a researcher who wrote a bit of python. The day they were making me a full time offer there were a bunch of funding cuts and the only open role left over was a recruiter, so that was the job I got. Since then I have worked for Facebook, Google and a startup in SF, where I currently am. I feel like I excel at what I do because I legitimately care and understand technology, but I also understand that most people in the field have zero experience with tech and have decided that this is pretty profitable and enough like sales they will do okay :\.

I guess at this point I am coming off a bit like the Christian guy on reddit who apologizes to everyone for the people in his religion being kind of insane and awful, but if it helps, there are some of us who legitimately try really hard and really do understand the technology. Unfortunately, as the OP hypothesized, the bad ones are more noticeable because they are louder, send more emails and say stupider things. In my typical day I try to reach out to around 10, super elite people for a role after I have researched them on Github and and their blog. At some of the more sweatshoppey recruiting firms they are calling 40-50 people a day based on one word like "java" being in a resume and then hoping everything works out. This is shitty recruiting and it needs to end. We have a lot of kids straight out of school making 80k/yr to cold call spam people all day and it is seriously embarrassing to the profession. I guess this is a long way of apologizing for the rest of my colleagues.

Arrow• 15 years ago

I've been thinking about this alot lately. I some ideas and would like to bounce them off of you. Email me if you're interested (bloggingarrow at gmail dot com). You can check out my blog at expertdisruption dot com if you want to get a bit of an idea, although my thinking has been evolving and I haven't been able to keep completely updated.

barrkel• 15 years ago

I work for a US company, most of my LinkedIn contacts and the like are in the US, but I live in the UK. I infer that these are the reasons I have never been contacted by a recruiter after some 10 years in the industry.

samsoffes2• 15 years ago

Blog post about the worst recruiters I've ever experienced: http://samsoff.es/posts/the-worst-recruiters

unit3• 15 years ago

I've never met a recruiter who even understands what I do. They're universally terrible.

aledalgrande2• 15 years ago

3 for me. Recruiters are mostly useless, as are project managers.

aledalgrande2• 15 years ago

Oh a downvote because I touched the holy project managers! Ah well.

frederico• 15 years ago

Dear ____

Please let me know if you or someone you know is interested in position x.

Also please contact me in the future if you're ready for a spot.

Thanks -Random Recruitment message template A

smerritt• 15 years ago

I voted for option #3; I recently tried to work with a technical recruiting agency, and based on my experience, I don't plan on ever doing it again. They were a bunch of email-phobic telephone-happy people who just flung every job in their database at me regardless of what I told them I wanted. A simple keyword-matching algorithm would have been an improvement.

The long version:

It started with a phone call one day; I was very discontented at my (then) job, and I'd contacted a couple of companies on my own already. I got a cold call from a recruiter, and instead of my usual please-go-away response, I decided to see how working with a recruiter might be. I'm already job-hunting; what's the worst that can happen? So, I asked this person (call them Alice) to please email me over some information about jobs they knew about that fit my skill set, and then I hung up.

The next day, instead of an email with jobs in it, I got an email from Alice asking to set up another phone call. I wasn't too happy about this, since I worked in a small, open-plan office and there was no place to make a quick phone call without being overheard, and I didn't want to open that can of worms with my (then) boss. I explained this, but Alice insisted on a phone call, and I caved in.

A few days later, I phoned Alice from a nearby coffee shop (for privacy from my boss). We went over my resume, which was online already; we talked about what kind of jobs I wanted, which I had said before in an email; and Alice said she'd forward my resume on to her colleagues.

Now, I'd thought that since Alice was a recruiter, she'd forward my resume to people with open positions to fill. Not so! This recruiting agency had two parts; recruiters like Alice who went out and found candidates, and other recruiters who worked with hiring managers. Alice had just forwarded my resume to all the hiring-side recruiters. The next morning, by the time I got to work, I had emails from Bob, Carol, Dave, Edna, Fred, and George. Each email talked, in the vaguest possible terms, about "exciting opportunities" with "awesome companies". And each one wanted me to set up another damn phone call.

As if that wasn't annoying enough, four of them had also left me voicemails telling me that they'd sent me email asking to schedule phone calls. In case I'd forgotten how to read, maybe?

Bob wouldn't talk via email; I tried, but he just wouldn't do it. I told Bob that I wanted a job that let me telecommute a day or two per week; he told me that no really profitable company ever let its employees telecommute, but he'd dig around his B-list and see what he could dredge up. Gee, thanks, jerk. Strike one.

Carol also wouldn't talk via email. I told Carol that I wanted a job that let me telecommute a day or two per week; she introduced me to a hiring manager who said, in no uncertain terms, that telecommuting would never happen on his team. Strike two.

Dave would use email, but he kept sending me job after job with no relation to my skills or what I was looking for. Strike three; I'm out. The rest of them were no better anyway.

In the end, it was a big waste of time. Every job they sent me was also posted on the company in question's web site as well as Github Jobs, Craigslist, or some other job board. All the recruiters did is burn up a bunch of my cell minutes and raise my blood pressure.

(Happy ending: I wound up finding an awesome job by talking to some former coworkers of mine.)

ctataryn• 15 years ago

I run a JVM user group (http://wjpg.ca) and even before our inaugural meeting a local recruiter spammed the group. Nobody knows how to do business anymore in this field, it's all just spray and pray now...

gorbachev• 15 years ago

I get spam from the typical keyword monkey factories. I love the Interwoven they keep offering me, because ten years ago I once worked on a project that used it. The jr. sys admin opportunity I was informed about was really great, too. Too bad I'm not a sys admin, and with 15 years in the business, I really wouldn't be interested in a jr anything position.

I get a lot of good emails from recruiters and people looking to hire as well.

The spam from the keyword monkeys all looks the same. It's a mass email produced with a template. Usually the only personal thing in the email is the To: field.

Poll: Do you get spammed by tech recruiters?

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