Recruit this

http://blog.samuellevy.com/post/44-recruit-this.html

by samuellevy • 13 years ago

38 29 13 years ago

blog.samuellevy.com

vinceguidry2• 13 years ago

Three rules for dealing with recruiters.

Don't let them near your cell phone number. Keep it off your profile. Put a Google Voice number in there instead. It's like Craigslist, there are advantages to using them, but you need to wear your big boy pants and take some simple steps to protect your privacy.

Recruiters are not technical and never will be. "I think I'll quit programming and start recruiting" -- No one, ever. Do not expect them to know anything about the jobs they're pitching. They're sales types, skilled at making connections with people, not machines. Try to appreciate that instead of demanding they learn two difficult skill-sets just for a fairly-poorly compensated job.

Keep each email to a single question until you've established that the opportunity is worth pursuing. Don't let them set the direction of the discussion until then. In the situation described, I would have simply asked, over and over again, "What is the salary range offered?" until they coughed up a number.

A recruiter found me my current job. I might be here a month until another recruiter will find me another making more money.

MisterBastahrd2• 13 years ago

Technical recruiters are hardly poorly compensated. They rarely work more than 40 hours a week and any recruiter worth a crap will be making and sustaining 6 figures within 3 years.

Peroni2• 13 years ago

Not sure what the situation is in the US but I have yet to meet a single successful recruiter in the UK that works less than a 60 hour week. Recruiter hours on this side of the world are quite notorious.

cimorene12• 13 years ago

I use Google Voice for job hunting, but I had a random thought about Burner when it first came out. It can be used for the same purpose and you can get rid of the number if you no longer want to be in contact with the recruiter. I think that Burner was originally intended to be used in romantic situations, but I find that the employment context might be interesting as well. http://burnerapp.com/

Peroni2• 13 years ago

Recruiters are not technical and never will be. "I think I'll quit programming and start recruiting" -- No one, ever.

I guess I'm the exception to the rule then. I studied software development in a prestigious university and worked as a developer for a few years and left because I simply didn't enjoy it and wasn't making as much money as I hoped. Admittedly I wasn't the greatest developer in the world but I was at the very least average. I left development to work in sales and eventually and (unintentionally) fell into recruitment. I currently work as an inhouse recruiter for a large development company and make significantly more money than what I could have expected had I stayed in development.

for a fairly-poorly compensated job.

Base salaries in agency recruitment are poor but if you do nothing more than hit your targets then you'll comfortably clear £60k a year in the UK whilst still in your early twenties. There are plenty of recruiters who would struggle to print 'hello world' in any language that still clear six figures a year.

Your advice about protecting your cell phone number is absolutely spot on though.

darylfritz2• 13 years ago

I get tired of them never disclosing the client. If they're soliciting me while I'm currently at a position that they can only assume I'm happy with, they need to present a pretty damn good case to get me out it; ambiguity just won't cut it.

pyre2• 13 years ago

They don't want you to just say, "Oh, Company X is hiring, I'll decline this, and send my resume directly."

jaggederest• 13 years ago

Then they should provide value.

vinceguidry2• 13 years ago

The way to get this information is to signal interest. What they're trying to prevent is you just getting the name of the company and then you going around them and applying directly. Honestly, the name of the company doesn't matter while you're in the pre-screening stage. Ask questions like, "what is the environment like? Is it a large company? Who will I be reporting to? Is it just dev or are there other roles I'll need to fill?" Eventually you'll satisfy their prescreening and they'll open up.

Matt_Mickiewicz2• 13 years ago

Half the time there is no client... They are just luring you in, and once they have your resume, it gets spammed out to as many employers as the have in their address book. Your resume gets used as "bait" in order for them to find new clients.

Even at DeveloperAuction we get clueless recruiters pitching us Java Engineers in NYC (We're rails in SF) and sending us "blinded" resumes with personally identifiable contact details removed. It's craziness!

darylfritz2• 13 years ago

That's my biggest concern. The other is, often I find their claims to be mis-repesented. "We have a large media client downtown" really meant "a company of 20 people, and 3 developers". If they had told me the name, I would have seen right through the BS.

ecspike• 13 years ago

The upside of Silicon Valley is 99% of the time, they disclose the client on first contact.

ankitoberoi• 13 years ago

and thats because the scene @ SV is more evolved. They understand that they have little, if any, chance of converting from a normal to hot lead, without disclosing the name.

kaffeinecoma• 13 years ago

Well I was with him up until:

   Three days later (on a Monday), she calls me, and tells me
   that she has organised an interview for me for Tuesday afternoon.

   What?  I went to the interview [...]

Why would you go on an interview under these circumstances? You're just giving positive reinforcement to their bad behavior.

samuellevy• 13 years ago

OP here. I went to the interview to see if I could salvage some work out of it (I'm a contractor, and quite often a skilled contractor would suit better than another full-time employee). The person I interviewed with (he was tech lead in the company) was actually quite happy with the idea, but he couldn't get it past HR.

ryanSrich• 13 years ago

Yeah I'm not understanding those questioning you going to the interview both here on HN and in the comments on your post.

Why wouldn't you go to the interview? The recruiter seemed to be so out of the loop that you may have missed a great opportunity had you not gone. Also self promotion and meeting new people in your field is never a bad thing.

inopinatus• 13 years ago

Actually by going to the interview you probably ended any chance of freelancing for them for the next 6-12 months. A standard arrangement is that they would've had to pay the recruiter a 25% annual salary equivalent in fees if there's a hire once the introduction has been made. How do you think recruiters make their money? Irrespective of any other reason given, it's no surprise HR said no.

benjamincburns• 13 years ago

Recruiters, especially those who work for third-party recruiting firms, are sales people. They have a series of incentives that only loosely align with "find good candidates" and almost never align with "don't piss off said candidates." There are some very good recruiters out there, most seem to be employed directly by the company they're recruiting for, but the rest of the lot might as well be in low-end used car sales.

If they set up an interview that you didn't request, that you don't want, and you go to it - you're the one to blame. Chances are you contributed to part of their incentive pay by participating in that interview. Further, they're not 'taking "no" for an answer' because you're not telling them "no."

Matt_Mickiewicz2• 13 years ago

Yeah, the incentives are really screwed up.

Firms like Riviera Partners in SanFran have different tiers of clients. Some pay 33% on base salary, others 25%... guess what interviews you'll be pushed into first?

If you pass, you probably won't even hear about the job openings at the companies that are "only" paying 25% commissions, even if it's potentially a better fit for you.

iguana• 13 years ago

The correct way to deal with recruiters, especially if you're currently doing freelance work: find the name of the company, insist that you're not interested in the role, then contact the company directly.

Also, don't call it freelancing, call it consulting, and charge more.

ChristianMarks• 13 years ago

The latest: a recruiter submitted my resume to D.E. Shaw without asking. The recruiter calls, I tell them I'm grieving a loss in my family and at the same time I'm on a death march--can we discuss this later. I then receive an email informing me that my resume has been submitted. I made the mistake of picking up the phone when they call to hector me about submitting to the recruitment process. I'm afraid they left the company with the impression that I was initially interested, but changed my mind.

In some cases they can be aggressive and schedule interviews, or act as if we had spoken previously and that my memory was defective. I don't tolerate gaslighting and tell them. I never hear from them again.

rogerbinns• 13 years ago

I have a prominent link at the top of CV/Resume/linkedin to my "Note to recruiters" which helps with all this - http://www.rogerbinns.com/recruiters.html

For example it says to name the company (and why) and that if the recruiter has trust issues with their client that I don't want to get involved. It becomes very obvious which recruiters have actually read the note to make sure the company and I are possibly matched, versus those that are indistinguishable from spammers.

Several years ago I was interviewing somewhere and Googled the job blurb. There were over 100 recruiters who had copied the job details from the company website and pretended it was their own client. (I checked with the company - they had in house recruiters and did not accept external ones - all those external ones were charlatans.)

Thankfully there are some good recruiters out there, but sadly they are seriously outnumbered.

EnderMB• 13 years ago

> Several years ago I was interviewing somewhere and Googled the job blurb. There were over 100 recruiters who had copied the job details from the company website and pretended it was their own client. (I checked with the company - they had in house recruiters and did not accept external ones - all those external ones were charlatans.)

I use LinkedIn, and have a personal website with my CV on it, and I experience this almost daily.

Recently, I've started keeping a list of all the recruiters that spam me or try to get in contact with me. I know quite a few of the companies in my area that are hiring so I usually run these names past people that work there and more often than not these recruiters will just scrape sites like Stack Overflow Careers to find companies that are hiring, only to sell people already on their books.

The worst I've experienced is when one of the large agencies in Bristol were hiring. My company received a phone call from a hurried man saying "Something is wrong, I need to speak to EnderMB". The second I picked up the phone, fearing the worst, this guy told me he was a recruiter and asked if I was happy at my job. After some harsh words he hung up, and then sent me a message on LinkedIn asking me to recommend other developers to him. Half an hour later, the phone rung again with someone saying that they needed to speak to someone else at the company. The boss gave the phone over, and it was the same guy again, doing the same thing to everyone in the company on my LinkedIn friends list. I checked with the hiring company and they'd blacklisted this guy and his company before, but they had tried to sell developers to him under another holding company.

Recruitment is entirely out of hand now. The only recruiters I've ever wanted to deal with are internal recruiters who seem to actually give a shit about getting good talent to their company.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

I imagine there are recruiters for every type of profession (I know for sure that "executive" recruiters exist). The question is, is it this bad in those other industries? Is IT particularly bad because it's intangible and an 'average person' doesn't know the first thing about the inside of a computer vs the inside of a car?

maresca• 13 years ago

I've had to login to my phone provider's website and block numbers on two separate occasions. If I don't pick up after calls/voicemails every day for a week straight and you continue to call, you are doing your job wrong.

rusbra• 13 years ago

Great Point... I deal with recruiters all the time that just don't get the point but every once in a while you encounter a good one here and there.

Recruit this

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