What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages

http://blog.alinelerner.com/what-i-learned-from-reading-8000-recruiting-messages/

by mrfusion • 12 years ago

87 57 12 years ago

blog.alinelerner.com

linker3000• 12 years ago

I learned that the author hasn't checked out their web site from a phone. A big subscription window pops up, overhangs the right half of the screen and can't be closed because you can't reach the button. Couldn't read article.

windsurfer• 12 years ago

Works fine here: http://i.imgur.com/fG4I3Q3.png

cordite• 12 years ago

I wish that subscription window happened near the end, not at the beginning when I'm reading the first paragraph--that's just distracting.

leeny3• 12 years ago

fixed!

leeny3• 12 years ago

author here. thanks; fixing this right now.

thomasfromcdnjs• 12 years ago

Highly recommend reading all of her post, very genuine and insightful view of recruiting.

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103540

As I mentioned in those comments, the statistical analysis is a bit arbitrary and not very scientific.

tjradcliffe• 12 years ago

Even if the statistical analysis was sound the conclusions don't follow. The "effect" of personalized responses may be due to multi-colinearity: personal letters may be written only in cases when there is a genuine personal connection, so adding personalization may have no effect in other circumstances.

There are other issues as well, but that's the most obvious. The whole thing is a cautionary tale of not doing data analysis when you don't have appropriate training and experience.

mavelikara2• 12 years ago

From a quick scan I could not find the author discussing it, but I found it amusing that the response rates did not increase as the bid-to-ask ratio increased past 1.1. I think this is because a job which advertises pay significantly more than what the engineer's preferred salary is signals that the job could be out of their league.

zippergz• 12 years ago

Or that there's some other reason it's undesirable and they have to pay people a lot to do it...

mavelikara2• 12 years ago

Good point.

ilghiro• 12 years ago

I think you've missed something here, the response rate does increase, it's the % of offers that fall into that category that is represented by the bell curve.

codegeek2• 12 years ago

No brainer about a few things. No matter what anyone says, unless a recruiter gives you the following information, I am not interested:

- Salary Range. yes, a range. don't give me crap like "market rate" and "depends on experience". That's the same as saying "we won't tell you". It is understood that not everyone can negotiate the same amount of money but the range is crucial to know. For example, if I want to get paid 150K base salary and the range says 100-120K, I am not going to be bothered any further.

- Name of the client/company: Please don't play games with this one. Either you tell me the name or I am out. I don't wanna hear "Fortune 500 client with great benefits". really ?

- What are they looking for? Ok this one is subjective and sometimes difficult for a recruiter to explain. Totally understood. But please work with the hiring manager on understanding their requirement more. I blame hiring managers more on this one. I have got calls saying "we need an excellent C++ developer but donno any further details". Umm no.

- Location: Where will I need to be ? If you don't know, then I am not going to guess. I cannot move to Austin from New York (well I can't) Only when I know these things at a minimum from a recruiter, they will get my attention.

hiring_sucks• 12 years ago

Exactly on point for salary and company.

There have been many, many letters that I ignore because they don't include a salary range. By not being open about it from the beginning, I become inherently suspicious of any offer given. Not only that, but if a range is not given and they offer me less than what I'm making now, I'll be pissed as I just wasted a day or more going through this process.

Also, if I don't know who the company is, I immediately decline. There are certain companies and industries which I am morally opposed to, and if the company believes so strongly that they cannot reveal themselves then the first question that comes to mind is "what is the mystery company doing so bad that they are afraid to let potential candidates know their name?"

Matt_Mickiewicz• 12 years ago

This is exactly what motivated us to start Hired. The entire industry is rife-full of dodgy players, grey-hat tactics, and bait & switch games.

I agree 100% that everybody should demand full transparency, about salary, company name, benefits, signing bonus, company culture, tech stack, etc. before they even waste 30 minutes on a phone call.

It's absolutely INSANE in this competitive market to expect someone to jump on a 30 minute phone call to learn basic details about the company & the position.

Iftheshoefits2• 12 years ago

I'm guessing that most of the time a recruiter won't tell you the company name the reasoning is less about trying to keep the company's business a secret out of fear of some moral objection by a candidate and more about misplaced fear (that you'll go to the company directly instead of through them) or marginal ethics (e.g. the recruiter's company basically lifted the job description from the employer's job ad and re-branded it with the recruiter's info to make it look like they've got a contact--in which case the fear mentioned above isn't misplaced, I suppose).

jerdfelt• 12 years ago

In my experience, recruiters that don't name companies will often cut and paste part of the job description from the company. Often a search with some choice phrases from the job description will find the company the recruiter is trying to hide.

IkmoIkmo• 12 years ago

100% of the time in my personal experience hah.

githulhu• 12 years ago

If they told you the company, what would stop you from just bypassing the recruiter and going straight to the company?

kstenerud2• 12 years ago

What purpose would that serve? Why go to the trouble of cold-calling a company when I already have an inside track via this recruiter?

netcan2• 12 years ago

Because you're spamming jobs in the same way they're spamming applicants. Why do the extra work?

Seriously though, I think this is false logic by the recruiters. Most people will go through the channel that's open to them, where they have been contacted. They're not going to try and find the right contact at the company. There's a tradeoff between people going around you and people ignoring you. I think ignoring is a bigger problem. A job that consists of keywords for an unspecified company with an unspecified salary is just not noticeable.

bunderbunder• 12 years ago

How about some sort of agreement between the recruiter and the company that the company will forward resumes they receive to the recruiter?

If the whole arrangement is laid out such that there's a semi-adversarial relationship between the person who has the opening and the person who's trying to fill it, count me out. That situation will infect any interaction that comes out of it.

balls1873• 12 years ago

I would go through the recruiter simply because it's going to be a warm lead, vs having to go through submitting my resume through email/online.

Also, if you use the relationship right, recruiters will do a lot of the upfront work for you.

netcan2• 12 years ago

Salary range & company is stupid games.

Sometimes this is recruiters trying to maintain power. More often it's hiring managers being poor communicators. A lot of people have similar problems with simple marketing communication, like an elevator pitch, ad headline or a CV. Vague generalities feel like they capture more and they don't want to limit themselves. An SMS gateway that also does email brands itself Total Digital Communications Solution. Nice and broad. People who need a way of sending text messages do not look at that and go, I have a digital communications problem that needs solving.

"What are they looking for?" is a harder problem. This one is hard to know so inherently hard to explain. I always feel that describing it in terms of "skills and experience" is the problem. Wouldn't it be better just to say what they will be doing.

You will need to be the primary person maintaining and adding features to software written in PHP & C++ over the last 8 years. You will be assisted by a tenured intern and a graphic designer. We have a long wishlist of features and no documentation.

Our finances thus far consist of three bank accounts, six credit cards, a shoebox full of receipts and an audit conducted by the Republic Of Dagestan Tax Authority. We are a 2 year old startup experiencing hockey puck growth. We've added up all the money investors gave us and the money that came through stripe. We then subtracted the money in our account and came up with an estimate of the content of the shoebox. Your first task will be to open said shoebox and make sure that its content is similar to the product of the above arithmetic.

jedberg2• 12 years ago

Where I work, we have people doing the same job, some making 150K, some making 330K+. And if someone applied and was really good and we needed to give them 350K to get them in the door, we'd do that.

Would you want to see the range as 150-350K+? I mean I guess it at least tells you something, but at the same time, we don't want to scare off someone who's looking for 350 who would assume they either won't get it or won't like the people they are working with just because they might make 150, or maybe think the role is beneath them because it could pay as low as 150.

Basically, we want to have a chance to have a discussion with them about what they are looking for in a job and how much they are looking for. Putting a range in there squelches that discussion, whether justified or not.

ps. To head off the obvious question, it's the same job role but the expectations and criteria for success are obviously different for the 150 vs. the 350.

Iftheshoefits2• 12 years ago

Provide the range for the corresponding "expectations and criteria for success."

The person earning the high end of that scale is almost certainly not working in the same role as the person earning the low end. Their jobs are different, even if the HR-mandated job title is the same. It shouldn't be difficult for the person responsible for supervising and hiring for the roles to write up job descriptions that accurately reflect that difference, and provide a corresponding gradient of ranges that is appropriate, but doesn't include such a wide salary range.

If it's not possible to do this, I'd submit to you it's very likely that: the person earning the low end of the range is getting shafted, the person earning the high end is (relatively) over-compensated, or your organization has/had some serious lapses in distributing tasks and organizing your talent around the jobs to be accomplished for the company's mission. All of these things are negative indicators, in my opinion, so why shouldn't a prospective candidate view them as such when presented with that information?

JSeymourATL• 12 years ago

But please work with the hiring manager on understanding their requirement more. I blame hiring managers more on this one.

True. Recruiting Failure starts with disengaged, inattentive leadership hoping a 3rd party will magically fill their empty seats.

sriram_sun3• 12 years ago

I blame hiring managers more on this one.

I used to work for a team lead who took a lot of time prepping recruiters on what he wanted. He took time to write up a good job description which stated that what kind of past experience would be a good match and which ones were _not_ a good match. Then applicants were asked to take an online 30min C++ test which tested some very basic skills. This weeded out about 95%.

Almost everyone was given a contract to hire offer. If you are good enough, you "rake it in" during the 3-6 months or so to make up for the "risk" you are taking as a contractor.

madcaptenor• 12 years ago

For ads posted by recruiters on job boards, it's surprising how often you can Google a key phrase from the ad and figure out what company it is. I'm not sure if this works with mails from recruiters - I've never gotten those at a time when I was looking to move on from my current job. It reminds me of how you can catch student plagiarism by Googling the sentence that sounds like they didn't write it.

mcknz• 12 years ago

I've done this as well, and it's interesting/demoralizing to see how many different recruiters or placement agencies are trying to fill what looks to be the exact same job.

codegeek2• 12 years ago

This is a great point and I have successfully used it myself. It is really that simple sometimes. In fact, some recruiters will leave out the name of the company but will leave other unique piece of information that only applies to that company lol.

computerjunkie2• 12 years ago

Totally agree.

>> Salary Range.

Too many times I see "Competitive", "Highly Competitive" "Plus Good Benefits" - you are simply wasting my time. Write out the benefits in point form and also add the salary.

>> Name of the client/company.

I want to know who the company is straight away rather than wasting 3 - 7 days waiting of your phone call or email about more information on the company. Why do recruiters even do this?

">>> What are they looking for?"

Another classic blunder recruiters do. The best one is when they list some technologies, for example "Our stack is, Python, C++, C, HTML, CSS, etc." - etc.? Really? Its unprofessional in my eyes.

Location:

"Various" "enter_vague_region" - unprofessional and lazy.

Human resources will not find good employees doing this. They seem like headless chickens throwing unnecessary buzzwords into requirements. Why is there so much confusion?

RecruiterBill2• 12 years ago

There are many reasons Recruiters don't share information like a company name out of the gate. I'm not saying I agree with these practices or the reasons behind them but I'm sure they have them for reasons. Here's a couple.

1) It's a highly competitive business and not every engineer engaged with is ethical or trustworthy - after all we're all human. As most engineers hold anyone in the staffing industry in such high regard (they're all the same right?) and Recruiters only make money by filling a job they may be concerned with an engineer taking the lead they provided and simply applying to the job in order to avoid the Recruiter interaction completely (Wait... people avoid recruiters?!?). This is something that happens more often than you'd believe, for many reasons. Maybe you had a bad experience with a Recruiter in the past? Maybe you, like many engineers, are under the false impression that Recruiters get paid out of the money the company would have paid you? Most times, I believe, Recruiters aren't trying to be deceitful but rather are concerned with protecting themselves.

2) The most important thing to remember when you get any communication from a Recruiter is that they are simply making an attempt to start a conversation. Believe me the Recruiter hopes that this is the right position for you but most importantly they want to engage you in their service. It's about much more than any single opportunity they are sending your way. (NOTE: this can vary between corporate recruiting and agency recruiting)

If only all Recruiters knew how to communicate these things.... Unfortunately, like in any industry, recruiting has rock-stars who can be outnumbered by roadies just along for the ride.

It's a broken industry. Plain and simple. Some of us are trying really hard to fix it.

curun1r• 12 years ago

I blame hiring managers more on this one. I have got calls saying "we need an excellent C++ developer but donno any further details"

I'm not sure if I'm one of those hiring managers that you'd blame, but I can see recruiters hiring for my positions saying something similar. The reason for it is that I have very little in the way of specific technology requirements. I'm much more concerned with finding intelligent, inquisitive engineers that are willing to grow into whatever parts of the job they don't already have covered. I don't want engineers who limit the possible solutions to technologies they're familiar with...I want them to stay somewhat on top of what's going on in the industry and always be choosing the best technology to solve each problem they're given.

Because of this, I'll have a few core technology requirements (usually language or platform, only because we have existing code that needs to be maintained) and then the rest of my requirements are around development philosophy. I need to feel comfortable that a new hire has embraced not just agile practices but the philosophy behind it. If they're not comfortable developing without a spec or they're comfortable producing something with insufficient test coverage, that will cause friction with the rest of the team. If they're uncomfortable doing their own devops work or being responsible for their code in production, they're likewise not a fit for my team. And lastly, the team is responsible for solving everything and a lot of developers have problems being vulnerable enough to ask the team for help. I don't want developers that get stuck and waste 2 days banging their head against the problem.

But these kinds of requirements don't translate well to HR, so they get expressed similar to what you wrote. And it's not because they're not s well-thought-out on my part as the hiring manager, they're just more complex than "5 years of C++." Though even that has hidden complexity...I'll take the right 1 year of experience over the wrong 5 years.

furyofantares• 12 years ago

I suppose you'd need a much bigger sample size but I'd be very interested in a continued analysis on how many of those that responded went on to get offers and how many accepted. The comment about salary ranges got me thinking about this, giving me a range probably increases my response rate but then if I am later offered the low end of the range am I less likely to accept than it I hadn't been given the range? Maybe, so it isn't at all clear to me that maximizing response rate maximizes hiring rate.

cpfohl• 12 years ago

Gateway errors all over for me...

VLM• 12 years ago

A fun secondary analysis would be cost estimate. So a truly personal message might cost an hour of labor, but a form letter costs only a few seconds to make sure you're sending the correct letter. On the scale of $ expended per decent candidate, form letters would appear to be much better than personal messages, even if they are less effective.

WRT "Instead I wrote a little script that hashed messages with an edit distance" an alternative, possibly faster strategy, might be vocabulary. Look at the form letters full of meaningless idioms and cliches, total corporate-speak, all "believe" and "passionate" (that word is only used in cheap pr0n and corporate speak) and "casual" (See commentary on "passionate") and "challenge" "fit" "strong" (what is this ESPN Sportscenter or a recruitment email?) and "Agile" (which has been poisoned in the market to mean absolutely nothing now) How the corporate-speak form letters avoided classics like the phrase "work life balance" is a mystery. Words like "opportunity" and "experience" are kind of on the bubble and generally indicate corporate-speak. Relative lack of corporate-speak vocabulary in the personalized written by and for humans messages is also apparent.

(edited to add, an interesting difficult startup idea would be addons for word processors or web browsers which highlight corporate-speak words and phrases to dramatically improve writing styles. Any time "key takeaways" or "metric" appears in the text box its underlined in yellow or something.)

Lambent_Cactus• 12 years ago

"Despite the title of this post, reading almost 8,000 messages and scoring them for how personal they were was clearly intractable."

Big data!

ColinWright• 12 years ago

    Note that all the graphs in this post
    are interactive, so you can hover and
    do other fun things.

        502 Bad Gateway
        nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

minimaxir2• 12 years ago

The graphs are using plot.ly, which are externally hosted.

I don't understand the appeal of interactive charts for simple, static data.

elmuchoprez• 12 years ago

I found the use of slightly different shades of the same color to differentiate data bars to be incredibly frustrating, which made me assume this was written by a marketer and not someone with a technical background. Fair or not, that instantly made the message less interesting to me.

Anyways, just an interesting take on another type of factor that can impact recruiting messaging.

sriram_sun3• 12 years ago

I'd like to pick on the point that Founders and Engineers are as guilty as Recruiters in terms of sending boiler plate messages.Recruiter: 53%, Founder: 49%, Engineer: 47%.

A recruiter's _only_ job is to recruit talented people. A founder/engineer has other things to do. Yes they should be spending a significant portion of their time recruiting. How realistic is that expectation though?

Also, how do the %s above add to 100 unless there is a significant overlap between Engineers and Founders?

notastartup• 12 years ago

Being sent on a goose chase. Been to interviews where the recruiter sent me for a role that didn't exist. Had recruiters call from blocked numbers.

When a recruiter from a recruitment company contacts me on linkedin, I immediately flag and block them.

pyrrhotech• 12 years ago

Salary range is the most crucial point. I would not take a sub $120k job under any circumstances, so please don't waste my time. Sub $140k would have to be a very good opportunity at a rocket ship with boatloads of equity. If you want responses, be honest and up front on what you are willing to pay, then we can start to filter through the other information.

leeny3• 12 years ago

Author of the original post here. Happy to answer any questions!

sriram_sun3• 12 years ago

Nice articles in general! The MS vs BS was spot on. So are the observations on GitHub projects in "Lessons from a year's worth of hiring data"

dang• 12 years ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=What+I+learned+from+reading+8%2C00...

What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages

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