11 ms·

Google recruitment mistakes: part 3

100 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

avindroth 10y ago
It doesn't take much to piss someone off. But it also doesn't take much to win someone's love and respect. A Korean journalist (from here on referenced as Ms. Kim) once interviewed Guus Hiddink, the football coach for 2002 World Cup SK National Team. The SK team had placed fourth, an unprecedented miracle. Hiddink instantly became a household name in Korea. After the World Cup, countless journalists interviewed him; but Kim sought to foster this relationship — to win Hiddink's love and respect. Upon finishing the interview, Kim, the journalist, handed Hiddink a portable drive with highlights of all the matches he coached this World Cup. She gleefully recommended that he watch them on the flight back home. Hiddink was so touched by her care that he took her out for lunch two days later. This time, Ms. Kim brought kimchi that her grandmother made, and shared that story at the table. Kim and Hiddink kept in touch, and five years later, Hiddink came to her wedding. Hiddink flew half-way around the globe for the wedding of a journalist — whose initial meeting was a typical interview. Hundreds of people interviewed Hiddink. But only one managed to get him to come to her wedding. And all she spent was a little time, care, and attention.
- huac 10y ago
  that actually sounds like a lot of effort
  - aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 10y ago
    A lot of effort on somebody's part. Probably an intern.
  - avindroth 10y ago
    Recordings of matches were just raw video files. No editing or anything. "Highlights" must have given the wrong impression!
- busyant 10y ago
  I thought the punch line was going to be that Hiddink was duped into installing malware on his laptop that recorded and broadcast his tactical plans for future matches.
- hasenj 10y ago
  It would be rather hubristic for a random Joe developer to want that kind of treatment. You're not a national hero.
MelmanGI 10y ago
Seems down, Google Cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Pb4VPWYBhQIJ:https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2016/08/29/recruitment-mistakes-3/&num=1&lr=lang_de%7Clang_en&hl=en&gl=de&tbs=lr:lang_1de%7Clang_1en&strip=0&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Pb4VPWY...
mianos 10y ago
An automated github keyword search to shotgun job offers? Pretty much like the rest of the place. A couple of hundred guys wrote some scripts to automate everything a few years back, then retired to their isolated clubhouse. That is the only logical explanation to lack of useful contact with the outside world. (The bot that posts to hacker news once every 13.87 articles saying 'Hi I am Tony from this project and we really do care' is a similarly poor imitation of a real person BTW).
- tonyfromgoogle 10y ago
  hi, i'm tony from the couple of hundred guys automation scripting project at google. we really do care from our isolated clubhouse. we also eat a lot of caviar and spend most of our days peering down at humanity through the cameras in our death laser space satellites wondering why you believe such dumb shit about us.
  - jschwartzi 10y ago
    You guys have death laser satellites? How do I get a job working on the death laser firmware?
    - tonyfromgoogle 10y ago
      hi, i'm tony from the death laser satellites team. we really do care, but we also don't exist.
raverbashing 10y ago
While I agree with the sentiment, and Google recruiters have shown to be disconnected from the candidates several times, I disagree with the tone of the message (However I can't condone their recruiter's behaviour - on average - as well) I know, so many "amazing career opportunities" show up in my inbox from people that can't even read that I'm not in the US and send me "no visa sponsorship" openings there. Those get the 'report as spam' treatment
- tdkl 10y ago
  The tone of the message is appropriate to the state of acceptance of his initial wish stating "Thank you, no". This kind of behaviour irks me in RL too. If someone can't respect your decision of a polite "thank you, but no", then still keeps riling at it, then there's perhaps no other way for them to realize that.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  My favorite "opportunities" are all the short-term contract gigs in places I've never heard of. Oh, and because it's a short-term gig there's no relocation assistance. Oh, and the gig has nothing to do with any of my professional experience.
mabbo 10y ago
Years ago I had a rather poor internship with Google. Wrong team, wrong time, wrong me at the time. No one's fault really, but no one would call it a success. Their recruiter contacted me a couple years ago using the sentence "everyone who worked with you had great things to say about you!". I replied back "really? Who in particular?". Things went downhill from there. I really do wish their recruiters (or all recruiters really) did a better job of remembering what their company's previous interactions with candidates were.
- mooreds 10y ago
  Or at least not lie. I am guessing that they could have referenced the internship without saying "everyone had great things to say" and that would would have at least started the conversation on the right foot
- argonaut 10y ago
  I think you have to put things in the right perspective. The bar for a software engineering internship (for a student) is not that high. The expectations are not that high. When I was in college, I knew several fellow students who were bored with their projects, felt like they didn't get along with their team, and didn't really do anything useful, who got return offers (which implies positive feedback). Did you deliver any code features / bug fixes during the internship, even if you hated it and/or the code got thrown away? There is a good chance that is considered enough for an internship. I'm pretty sure one of my internship project's code got thrown out at a company, but I still got a return offer. For some reason I doubt the recruiter would lie about something like this. Perhaps the recruiter couldn't name names because the feedback was years-old and/or anonymized?
  - mabbo 10y ago
    Given the lengthy apology afterwards, I suspect it was more like "People love to be told they're great, let's start with that".
    - argonaut 10y ago
ancymon 10y ago
I think it's kind of overreaction and a waste of time responding that way. What is he tring to prove by responding in that maner and publishing it on the blog?
- gaius 10y ago
  People can write whatever they like in their blogs, that's kinda the point of them.
ohitsdom 10y ago
Is this really necessary? If you get this worked up about contact from a recruiter, I imagine you also might write back to every piece of direct mail junk mail telling them how your interests don't align and to please stop contacting you. Why not just delete it or reply no thank you? Google is a massive company, and unless they are specifically head-hunting you, it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site. You're going to get picked up by automated scripts for big hiring campaigns. Accept it, and don't waste time or mental energy getting frustrated or mad about it.
- detaro 10y ago
  This part 3. The previous posts make it pretty clearly that he did the "polite no, thank you." before.
  - justin66 10y ago
    And he'll have to do it again, since Google (and other companies) clearly does not maintain a blacklist of the sort he wants them to. It's the part where he gets all Wrath of Khan about it that is a little entertaining.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      > ... does not maintain a blacklist of the sort he wants them to. I wonder why... Is the potential for one person changing their mind worth the negativity? I've also been contacted repeatedly by Google's recruiters, even though I live nowhere near a Google campus, and have no desire to move back to that area. Technical solutions not always being practical in meat space and all that, but seems like a backoff like we would implement against an API which isn't responding would not be a terrible idea here.
      - wcummings 10y ago
        I'm sure they use some kind of CRM to keep track of all their candidates, they could just mark them "do not contact"
untilHellbanned 10y ago
TL;DR = Humble brag
- sanowski 10y ago
  this 100x over
petters 10y ago
Wow, what an overreaction. Just politely reply no.
kelvin0 10y ago
I've never had ANY good experiences with ANY recruiters in my career so far. Ditto with most HR of ANY company I've worked for. That being said, being miffed because the recruiter didn't research him thoroughly (because he is such a special 'snowflake'?) seems like a bit of a stretch. But then again, who I am to talk? I've never had such offers from ABC Company's subsidiuaries.
- scient 10y ago
  Have you ever considered that the issue could be you, not HR/recruiters? Not trying to insult here in any way. People at times are super oblivious to small stuff that causes huge issues.
  - kelvin0 10y ago
    Actually, I just remembered I did have 1 recruiter do a fantastic job which landed my my first job in Video games. And yes you are correct in pointing out I could be the problem, however in my case the only interaction I've ever had with recruiters was very courteous but they always seem to be "shooting from the hip" and simply contacting me in a haphazard way without any real or concrete offers other than to expand their contact portfolios? Never any follow through or any contact after the first initial email. As stated before, I did my best to help them help me. I just simply ain't no rockstar/ninja/10x dev enough for them I guess. As for HR, their incompetence seems more due to the fact that: 1) There seems to be a turnaround rate in HR departments, which if harvested could power a small city 2) The head of HR is usually not given the power to enact proper recruitment efforts (see #1) 3) The level of disorganization is at best amateurish. This is not a personal statement against any HR employees, which seem like great people who are stuck in sinking ship.
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  I got my current job via an EXCELLENT recruiter from an agency. I had been of the view based on my experience that I should have a one page resume. Rather than just setting it aside, the recruiter actually specifically asked me to submit another resume with more. I did, and it was what they were looking for, so I got interviewed and got hired. During the same time, I was working with a couple of headhunters to find a place for me, some good, some bad. One got me an interview pretty easily, for a job I didn't really fit too well with, but that was cultural really. But that guy was really helpful, and really on task. I had another one though that was super unhelpful because he wanted to talk on the phone before hooking me up with any given job posting, and would only be willing to talk to me during work hours... when I was at work. You WILL have hit and miss experiences with recruiting, but there's good ones out there.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Let me reply to this automated email, post about it on my blog and hopefully get some lulz. This being HN, I was hoping for something better from the link.
PaulHoule 10y ago
Google+? I'd rather work on accounts receivable for a ball bearing factory.
guy_c 10y ago
"... I do not wish to work for Google. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever." Are you really sure? How about in 15 years when nearly all programming jobs have been replaced with AI[1]. Programmers are jobless, hungry, homeless and without any access to healthcare. However Google bizarrely needs some keyboard firmware written because AI is pretty shitty when it comes to keyboard firmware. [1] maybe even less dramatic, how about a year 2000 dot-com-style crash when you are out of work for 12 months?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- kuschku 10y ago
  Many – including myself – would rather then go and work in a supermarket or even work with the garbage disposal men than working with Google. Many people just have strict morals and refuse to work for multinationals that try to use their market power and might to influence local laws, or think they’re above the law. Again others dislike the corporate culture.
ehosca 10y ago
I'm sorry but I don;t understand why you are posting this? This is a personal correspondence between you and Google and I'm not sure why it needs to be made public. Do you also post every other conversation you have with every other entity?
- Terr_ 10y ago
  > This is a personal correspondence No it isn't, that's the problem: It's impersonal bulk-email that pretends to be personalized.
subway 10y ago
You're not wrong, Walter.
LargeCompanies 10y ago
Another Stupid post about us privileged techies complaining about recruiters for the point of reverse bragging. Recruiters are awesome and if you are smart(you should be you work in this field) you should know how to use recruiters to your benefit! 1. Don't ever give them your real phone number or email address. Give them your spam email address and number. 2. If they are so bold to hunt you down and call you at your place of work get them fired and or shame them publicly. Doubtful this happens a lot 3. When they are chasing you... Jack up your price and get the best deal ever(money, benefits, work location). I never understood these silly complaints about recruiters minus to me it sounding like reverse bragging.
- dpkirchner 10y ago
  The sarcastic passive aggressive personality in me wants to say "Man, that must have been really rough on you. I'm sorry you had to say no."
amyjess 10y ago
What pisses me off is when companies get my contact information off Monster and then try to recruit me for a job in another city or a contract position. My profile on Monster, and on other sites, explicitly states that I am not interested in relocation and I will only accept full-time employment. And I know for a fact that these recruiters are getting my information from Monster because I get a flood of calls and emails every time I update my profile there (which I haven't done in a while because I just started a new job and thus I'm not looking anymore, so fortunately the calls have died down lately). Most of these are Indian recruiters hawking positions at no-name companies, but I've received a disproportionately large amount of emails from Amazon. Every few months, I'll get another email saying they're checking in on me and that they've got positions open for me.
- fecak 10y ago
  Your first mistake is having a profile on Monster. Recruiters that use Monster are probably the bottom-feeders most in the industry hate, and the reason they are on Monster is that is where you can generally find the bottom of the talent pool. I don't think I've known any decent industry pro (I recruit engineers for startups) in 10 years that has posted their info to Monster.
fecak 10y ago
Recruiter here, though of the agency variety (even less popular than the internal recruiters). Google has no real excuse not to have a better candidate database in place where this kind of thing doesn't happen. This person's information (email, GitHub account, LinkedIn, name, web pages, etc.) should all be entered into a system and marked as "DO NOT CALL" based on his previous interactions with Google. Google recruiters should be required to check the name and contact info of anyone before they send any correspondence - that only takes a minute. The Google recruiter might be required to do this already and just didn't do his/her job properly, but I can't imagine a company like Google doesn't have this system in place. The recruiter appears to have done some minimal level of research on the candidate, but it's hard to tell that the recruiter discovered anything other than the fact that this person had a GitHub account. Some recruiters looking for software engineers of any kind will contact anyone with a GitHub account, as most of those people will be developers. The recruiter could have done a bit more, and most recruiters could do a bit more research. All this said, if this candidate actually wanted to work for Google, this blog post never gets written. Candidates will accept a bit of laziness from the recruiter if it's from a desirable company. If this person was interested in Apple and this same email came from an Apple recruiter, the response is probably "Sure, let's talk!". Because it's Google, and because this person (unlike many in the world) doesn't want to work for Google and really wants us to know that he doesn't want to work for Google, this is supposed to be interesting. This kind of thing happens thousands of times a day. It's not unique or interesting.
- brudgers 10y ago
  One reason that people like the author might not be on a 'do not call' list is that long lists of crappy leads are often what gets passed to the new sales person [and what is recruiting other than a sales process?]. I mean why waste good leads on someone who is just learning the ropes and might screw up a slam dunk or why pass good leads to someone who may not be cut out to handle the high rate of rejection and will move on to a better match for their talents in a few months?
qwertyuiop924 10y ago
For a company who specializes in data and search, Google is remarkably disorganized and doesn't seem to have the right data. Mind, this is far from the first case of Google being disconnected from the outside world. Like Google's lack of support for web standards, while loudly supporting them. Or not communicating vital information to YouTube's creators when they screw up, and disable monetization on all videos for no reason, or unsubscribe people seemingly randomly. I could keep going, but I think you get the picture.
jeffbush 10y ago
A while back, as spent 3 months sourcing my own candidates as an engineering manager and it was enlightening. I spent a while on each candidate, finding their github repo, personal webpages, and the roles they had held, then wrote a personalized note explaining who I was, what I was doing and why I thought their experience was useful. Out of hundreds of emails I sent, I got a handful of responses. I had a few takeaways: - People with really good information on-line get tons of responses. Someone from LinkedIn confirmed that a small number of profiles get most hits. - Most public information about engineers is total crap. Most LinkedIn profiles have no detail to determine if someone is a fit. I looked at the profiles of some of my coworkers who I thought were really good and there was nothing interesting in them. Most github repos have not substantive or interesting projects. Looking at github was a big waste of time. - Being a recruiter is hard work. It's exhausting looking through profiles and dismaying to get rejected and ignored all the time, especially when you've spent time researching people. - Often you need to contact people several times before they will respond, even if they are interested. I've found this even when I've been contacted by recruiters: I think "interesting, I'll get back to them" and forget about it. Recruiting is a volume game. Carpet bombing is the only effective strategy in my experience, which is why recruiters do it. It's simply not worth doing that much research up front. Also, bear in mind that the recruiting staff is usually divided into recruiters and sourcers. The latter are who are doing a lot of the contacting, and their job is mainly to find lots of profiles, not do deep research. Once they get a response, the recruiter takes over and does more of the relationship building and candidate vetting. Given low response rates, this is also a more effective strategy.
- rusabd 10y ago
  we sourced all our candidates through https://lispjobs.wordpress.com https://lispjobs.wordpress.com . Given hard requirement of relocation to Australia Adelaide that was very efficient and pleasant experience. We also tried recruiters and stackoverflow. One recruiter was very good at selling himself to upper management and was pushing unqualified engineers into our throats. Stackoverflow was less targeted than lispjobs blog, but much better than typical recruitment company. lispjobs was so good that another our practice of flying candidates in to spend a week of hacking together after brief phone screen wasn't that expensive at all.
knocte 10y ago
That is not really constructive. If I were him, I would have replied with something really interesting for anyone at Google (I'm guessing actually recruiters would not care), for example, what would it take me take a job at Google? Certainly I'm not so arrogant to say I would never accept a job at Google. You will never know the future, so you will never know if 3 years from now Google would be funding the side-project of your dreams... But even then, there are some things about Google that bother me. And this is what I would have written in an email to a recruiter. Some examples below: - Stop spending resources on developing bad languages such as Go. (Or at least, really improve it please by adding generics and removing ignoring-errors-by-default. And merge it with Dart, or just throw Dart down the toilet please...) - Stop tracking everyone and be more like duckduckgo. - Take down GooglePlus, it doesn't make any fucking point nowadays, it's just useless and shameful. - Resurrect GoogleReader (I still sometimes begin to write "reader.goo" when I open a tab nowadays), or at least make the code opensource and publish it. - Open source the software that brings automation to google cars. We need accountability and transparency here. - Stop the inclusion of proprietary software in Android. And stop blackmailing smartphone manufacturers by forcing them to include these services. - After you have fixed Go (and flushed Dart), stop pushing for Python so much. If I get hired I don't want to write code that is going to be broken 6 months down the road. - Same thing as previous bullet, but Java. Move Android to be Swift or C# based. - Deprecate the stupid GoogleWallet thing and just adopt bitcoin, for once. - Don't ever stop organizing Google Summer Of Code please (not everything in this comment was going to be criticism). If these items get fulfilled, I would be less annoyed about working for Google.
greggyb 10y ago
Best advice I ever saw about dealing with recruiters, from someone on this site, though I don't remember who you are; sorry, internet-friend: Hi $recruiter, I appreciate you taking the time to reach out about this opportunity. Luckily, I am quite happy at $current_employer and not currently pursuing other options. I do have one question for you, though. Right now, what would a typical salary range look like for someone with my background and level of experience for a position like this? Thanks, greggyb I'd say anecdotally that I get an answer more than half the time with a salary range, sometimes based on the position they're hiring for, and sometimes their ballpark based on my profile. It's not scientific, but it is helpful to keep a pulse on the types of opportunities and compensation available.
- fecak 10y ago
  This is great advice. I'm a recruiter known for being critical of recruiter behavior, and when people claim that recruiters are mostly worthless to them, I encourage them to simply use recruiters for this kind of information. An experienced recruiter, specifically an agency recruiter with a wide variety of clients, should be able to give you a fairly solid expectation on your marketability and market value. Instead of wasting the opportunity, a reply like this can be quite useful. If the recruiter doesn't reply, don't respond to them again.

100 points by ashitlerferad 10y ago

It doesn't take much to piss someone off. But it also doesn't take much to win someone's love and respect. A Korean journalist (from here on referenced as Ms. Kim) once interviewed Guus Hiddink, the football coach for 2002 World Cup SK National Team. The SK team had placed fourth, an unprecedented miracle. Hiddink instantly became a household name in Korea. After the World Cup, countless journalists interviewed him; but Kim sought to foster this relationship — to win Hiddink's love and respect. Upon finishing the interview, Kim, the journalist, handed Hiddink a portable drive with highlights of all the matches he coached this World Cup. She gleefully recommended that he watch them on the flight back home. Hiddink was so touched by her care that he took her out for lunch two days later. This time, Ms. Kim brought kimchi that her grandmother made, and shared that story at the table. Kim and Hiddink kept in touch, and five years later, Hiddink came to her wedding. Hiddink flew half-way around the globe for the wedding of a journalist — whose initial meeting was a typical interview. Hundreds of people interviewed Hiddink. But only one managed to get him to come to her wedding. And all she spent was a little time, care, and attention.

huac 10y ago
that actually sounds like a lot of effort
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 10y ago
  A lot of effort on somebody's part. Probably an intern.
- avindroth 10y ago
  Recordings of matches were just raw video files. No editing or anything. "Highlights" must have given the wrong impression!
busyant 10y ago
I thought the punch line was going to be that Hiddink was duped into installing malware on his laptop that recorded and broadcast his tactical plans for future matches.
hasenj 10y ago
It would be rather hubristic for a random Joe developer to want that kind of treatment. You're not a national hero.

MelmanGI 10y ago

Seems down, Google Cache version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Pb4VPWYBhQIJ:https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2016/08/29/recruitment-mistakes-3/&num=1&lr=lang_de%7Clang_en&hl=en&gl=de&tbs=lr:lang_1de%7Clang_1en&strip=0&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Pb4VPWY...

mianos 10y ago

An automated github keyword search to shotgun job offers? Pretty much like the rest of the place. A couple of hundred guys wrote some scripts to automate everything a few years back, then retired to their isolated clubhouse. That is the only logical explanation to lack of useful contact with the outside world. (The bot that posts to hacker news once every 13.87 articles saying 'Hi I am Tony from this project and we really do care' is a similarly poor imitation of a real person BTW).

tonyfromgoogle 10y ago
hi, i'm tony from the couple of hundred guys automation scripting project at google. we really do care from our isolated clubhouse. we also eat a lot of caviar and spend most of our days peering down at humanity through the cameras in our death laser space satellites wondering why you believe such dumb shit about us.
- jschwartzi 10y ago
  You guys have death laser satellites? How do I get a job working on the death laser firmware?
  - tonyfromgoogle 10y ago
    hi, i'm tony from the death laser satellites team. we really do care, but we also don't exist.

raverbashing 10y ago

While I agree with the sentiment, and Google recruiters have shown to be disconnected from the candidates several times, I disagree with the tone of the message (However I can't condone their recruiter's behaviour - on average - as well) I know, so many "amazing career opportunities" show up in my inbox from people that can't even read that I'm not in the US and send me "no visa sponsorship" openings there. Those get the 'report as spam' treatment

tdkl 10y ago
The tone of the message is appropriate to the state of acceptance of his initial wish stating "Thank you, no". This kind of behaviour irks me in RL too. If someone can't respect your decision of a polite "thank you, but no", then still keeps riling at it, then there's perhaps no other way for them to realize that.
jschwartzi 10y ago
My favorite "opportunities" are all the short-term contract gigs in places I've never heard of. Oh, and because it's a short-term gig there's no relocation assistance. Oh, and the gig has nothing to do with any of my professional experience.

mabbo 10y ago

Years ago I had a rather poor internship with Google. Wrong team, wrong time, wrong me at the time. No one's fault really, but no one would call it a success. Their recruiter contacted me a couple years ago using the sentence "everyone who worked with you had great things to say about you!". I replied back "really? Who in particular?". Things went downhill from there. I really do wish their recruiters (or all recruiters really) did a better job of remembering what their company's previous interactions with candidates were.

mooreds 10y ago
Or at least not lie. I am guessing that they could have referenced the internship without saying "everyone had great things to say" and that would would have at least started the conversation on the right foot
argonaut 10y ago
I think you have to put things in the right perspective. The bar for a software engineering internship (for a student) is not that high. The expectations are not that high. When I was in college, I knew several fellow students who were bored with their projects, felt like they didn't get along with their team, and didn't really do anything useful, who got return offers (which implies positive feedback). Did you deliver any code features / bug fixes during the internship, even if you hated it and/or the code got thrown away? There is a good chance that is considered enough for an internship. I'm pretty sure one of my internship project's code got thrown out at a company, but I still got a return offer. For some reason I doubt the recruiter would lie about something like this. Perhaps the recruiter couldn't name names because the feedback was years-old and/or anonymized?
- mabbo 10y ago
  Given the lengthy apology afterwards, I suspect it was more like "People love to be told they're great, let's start with that".
  - argonaut 10y ago

ancymon 10y ago

I think it's kind of overreaction and a waste of time responding that way. What is he tring to prove by responding in that maner and publishing it on the blog?

gaius 10y ago
People can write whatever they like in their blogs, that's kinda the point of them.

ohitsdom 10y ago

Is this really necessary? If you get this worked up about contact from a recruiter, I imagine you also might write back to every piece of direct mail junk mail telling them how your interests don't align and to please stop contacting you. Why not just delete it or reply no thank you? Google is a massive company, and unless they are specifically head-hunting you, it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site. You're going to get picked up by automated scripts for big hiring campaigns. Accept it, and don't waste time or mental energy getting frustrated or mad about it.

detaro 10y ago
This part 3. The previous posts make it pretty clearly that he did the "polite no, thank you." before.
- justin66 10y ago
  And he'll have to do it again, since Google (and other companies) clearly does not maintain a blacklist of the sort he wants them to. It's the part where he gets all Wrath of Khan about it that is a little entertaining.
  - falcolas 10y ago
    > ... does not maintain a blacklist of the sort he wants them to. I wonder why... Is the potential for one person changing their mind worth the negativity? I've also been contacted repeatedly by Google's recruiters, even though I live nowhere near a Google campus, and have no desire to move back to that area. Technical solutions not always being practical in meat space and all that, but seems like a backoff like we would implement against an API which isn't responding would not be a terrible idea here.
    - wcummings 10y ago
      I'm sure they use some kind of CRM to keep track of all their candidates, they could just mark them "do not contact"

untilHellbanned 10y ago

TL;DR = Humble brag

sanowski 10y ago
this 100x over

petters 10y ago

Wow, what an overreaction. Just politely reply no.

kelvin0 10y ago

I've never had ANY good experiences with ANY recruiters in my career so far. Ditto with most HR of ANY company I've worked for. That being said, being miffed because the recruiter didn't research him thoroughly (because he is such a special 'snowflake'?) seems like a bit of a stretch. But then again, who I am to talk? I've never had such offers from ABC Company's subsidiuaries.

scient 10y ago
Have you ever considered that the issue could be you, not HR/recruiters? Not trying to insult here in any way. People at times are super oblivious to small stuff that causes huge issues.
- kelvin0 10y ago
  Actually, I just remembered I did have 1 recruiter do a fantastic job which landed my my first job in Video games. And yes you are correct in pointing out I could be the problem, however in my case the only interaction I've ever had with recruiters was very courteous but they always seem to be "shooting from the hip" and simply contacting me in a haphazard way without any real or concrete offers other than to expand their contact portfolios? Never any follow through or any contact after the first initial email. As stated before, I did my best to help them help me. I just simply ain't no rockstar/ninja/10x dev enough for them I guess. As for HR, their incompetence seems more due to the fact that: 1) There seems to be a turnaround rate in HR departments, which if harvested could power a small city 2) The head of HR is usually not given the power to enact proper recruitment efforts (see #1) 3) The level of disorganization is at best amateurish. This is not a personal statement against any HR employees, which seem like great people who are stuck in sinking ship.
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
I got my current job via an EXCELLENT recruiter from an agency. I had been of the view based on my experience that I should have a one page resume. Rather than just setting it aside, the recruiter actually specifically asked me to submit another resume with more. I did, and it was what they were looking for, so I got interviewed and got hired. During the same time, I was working with a couple of headhunters to find a place for me, some good, some bad. One got me an interview pretty easily, for a job I didn't really fit too well with, but that was cultural really. But that guy was really helpful, and really on task. I had another one though that was super unhelpful because he wanted to talk on the phone before hooking me up with any given job posting, and would only be willing to talk to me during work hours... when I was at work. You WILL have hit and miss experiences with recruiting, but there's good ones out there.

JustSomeNobody 10y ago

Let me reply to this automated email, post about it on my blog and hopefully get some lulz. This being HN, I was hoping for something better from the link.

PaulHoule 10y ago

Google+? I'd rather work on accounts receivable for a ball bearing factory.

guy_c 10y ago

"... I do not wish to work for Google. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever." Are you really sure? How about in 15 years when nearly all programming jobs have been replaced with AI[1]. Programmers are jobless, hungry, homeless and without any access to healthcare. However Google bizarrely needs some keyboard firmware written because AI is pretty shitty when it comes to keyboard firmware. [1] maybe even less dramatic, how about a year 2000 dot-com-style crash when you are out of work for 12 months?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kuschku 10y ago
Many – including myself – would rather then go and work in a supermarket or even work with the garbage disposal men than working with Google. Many people just have strict morals and refuse to work for multinationals that try to use their market power and might to influence local laws, or think they’re above the law. Again others dislike the corporate culture.

ehosca 10y ago

I'm sorry but I don;t understand why you are posting this? This is a personal correspondence between you and Google and I'm not sure why it needs to be made public. Do you also post every other conversation you have with every other entity?

Terr_ 10y ago
> This is a personal correspondence No it isn't, that's the problem: It's impersonal bulk-email that pretends to be personalized.

subway 10y ago

You're not wrong, Walter.

LargeCompanies 10y ago

Another Stupid post about us privileged techies complaining about recruiters for the point of reverse bragging. Recruiters are awesome and if you are smart(you should be you work in this field) you should know how to use recruiters to your benefit! 1. Don't ever give them your real phone number or email address. Give them your spam email address and number. 2. If they are so bold to hunt you down and call you at your place of work get them fired and or shame them publicly. Doubtful this happens a lot 3. When they are chasing you... Jack up your price and get the best deal ever(money, benefits, work location). I never understood these silly complaints about recruiters minus to me it sounding like reverse bragging.

dpkirchner 10y ago
The sarcastic passive aggressive personality in me wants to say "Man, that must have been really rough on you. I'm sorry you had to say no."

amyjess 10y ago

What pisses me off is when companies get my contact information off Monster and then try to recruit me for a job in another city or a contract position. My profile on Monster, and on other sites, explicitly states that I am not interested in relocation and I will only accept full-time employment. And I know for a fact that these recruiters are getting my information from Monster because I get a flood of calls and emails every time I update my profile there (which I haven't done in a while because I just started a new job and thus I'm not looking anymore, so fortunately the calls have died down lately). Most of these are Indian recruiters hawking positions at no-name companies, but I've received a disproportionately large amount of emails from Amazon. Every few months, I'll get another email saying they're checking in on me and that they've got positions open for me.

fecak 10y ago
Your first mistake is having a profile on Monster. Recruiters that use Monster are probably the bottom-feeders most in the industry hate, and the reason they are on Monster is that is where you can generally find the bottom of the talent pool. I don't think I've known any decent industry pro (I recruit engineers for startups) in 10 years that has posted their info to Monster.

fecak 10y ago

Recruiter here, though of the agency variety (even less popular than the internal recruiters). Google has no real excuse not to have a better candidate database in place where this kind of thing doesn't happen. This person's information (email, GitHub account, LinkedIn, name, web pages, etc.) should all be entered into a system and marked as "DO NOT CALL" based on his previous interactions with Google. Google recruiters should be required to check the name and contact info of anyone before they send any correspondence - that only takes a minute. The Google recruiter might be required to do this already and just didn't do his/her job properly, but I can't imagine a company like Google doesn't have this system in place. The recruiter appears to have done some minimal level of research on the candidate, but it's hard to tell that the recruiter discovered anything other than the fact that this person had a GitHub account. Some recruiters looking for software engineers of any kind will contact anyone with a GitHub account, as most of those people will be developers. The recruiter could have done a bit more, and most recruiters could do a bit more research. All this said, if this candidate actually wanted to work for Google, this blog post never gets written. Candidates will accept a bit of laziness from the recruiter if it's from a desirable company. If this person was interested in Apple and this same email came from an Apple recruiter, the response is probably "Sure, let's talk!". Because it's Google, and because this person (unlike many in the world) doesn't want to work for Google and really wants us to know that he doesn't want to work for Google, this is supposed to be interesting. This kind of thing happens thousands of times a day. It's not unique or interesting.

brudgers 10y ago
One reason that people like the author might not be on a 'do not call' list is that long lists of crappy leads are often what gets passed to the new sales person [and what is recruiting other than a sales process?]. I mean why waste good leads on someone who is just learning the ropes and might screw up a slam dunk or why pass good leads to someone who may not be cut out to handle the high rate of rejection and will move on to a better match for their talents in a few months?

qwertyuiop924 10y ago

For a company who specializes in data and search, Google is remarkably disorganized and doesn't seem to have the right data. Mind, this is far from the first case of Google being disconnected from the outside world. Like Google's lack of support for web standards, while loudly supporting them. Or not communicating vital information to YouTube's creators when they screw up, and disable monetization on all videos for no reason, or unsubscribe people seemingly randomly. I could keep going, but I think you get the picture.

jeffbush 10y ago

A while back, as spent 3 months sourcing my own candidates as an engineering manager and it was enlightening. I spent a while on each candidate, finding their github repo, personal webpages, and the roles they had held, then wrote a personalized note explaining who I was, what I was doing and why I thought their experience was useful. Out of hundreds of emails I sent, I got a handful of responses. I had a few takeaways: - People with really good information on-line get tons of responses. Someone from LinkedIn confirmed that a small number of profiles get most hits. - Most public information about engineers is total crap. Most LinkedIn profiles have no detail to determine if someone is a fit. I looked at the profiles of some of my coworkers who I thought were really good and there was nothing interesting in them. Most github repos have not substantive or interesting projects. Looking at github was a big waste of time. - Being a recruiter is hard work. It's exhausting looking through profiles and dismaying to get rejected and ignored all the time, especially when you've spent time researching people. - Often you need to contact people several times before they will respond, even if they are interested. I've found this even when I've been contacted by recruiters: I think "interesting, I'll get back to them" and forget about it. Recruiting is a volume game. Carpet bombing is the only effective strategy in my experience, which is why recruiters do it. It's simply not worth doing that much research up front. Also, bear in mind that the recruiting staff is usually divided into recruiters and sourcers. The latter are who are doing a lot of the contacting, and their job is mainly to find lots of profiles, not do deep research. Once they get a response, the recruiter takes over and does more of the relationship building and candidate vetting. Given low response rates, this is also a more effective strategy.

rusabd 10y ago
we sourced all our candidates through https://lispjobs.wordpress.com https://lispjobs.wordpress.com . Given hard requirement of relocation to Australia Adelaide that was very efficient and pleasant experience. We also tried recruiters and stackoverflow. One recruiter was very good at selling himself to upper management and was pushing unqualified engineers into our throats. Stackoverflow was less targeted than lispjobs blog, but much better than typical recruitment company. lispjobs was so good that another our practice of flying candidates in to spend a week of hacking together after brief phone screen wasn't that expensive at all.

knocte 10y ago

That is not really constructive. If I were him, I would have replied with something really interesting for anyone at Google (I'm guessing actually recruiters would not care), for example, what would it take me take a job at Google? Certainly I'm not so arrogant to say I would never accept a job at Google. You will never know the future, so you will never know if 3 years from now Google would be funding the side-project of your dreams... But even then, there are some things about Google that bother me. And this is what I would have written in an email to a recruiter. Some examples below: - Stop spending resources on developing bad languages such as Go. (Or at least, really improve it please by adding generics and removing ignoring-errors-by-default. And merge it with Dart, or just throw Dart down the toilet please...) - Stop tracking everyone and be more like duckduckgo. - Take down GooglePlus, it doesn't make any fucking point nowadays, it's just useless and shameful. - Resurrect GoogleReader (I still sometimes begin to write "reader.goo" when I open a tab nowadays), or at least make the code opensource and publish it. - Open source the software that brings automation to google cars. We need accountability and transparency here. - Stop the inclusion of proprietary software in Android. And stop blackmailing smartphone manufacturers by forcing them to include these services. - After you have fixed Go (and flushed Dart), stop pushing for Python so much. If I get hired I don't want to write code that is going to be broken 6 months down the road. - Same thing as previous bullet, but Java. Move Android to be Swift or C# based. - Deprecate the stupid GoogleWallet thing and just adopt bitcoin, for once. - Don't ever stop organizing Google Summer Of Code please (not everything in this comment was going to be criticism). If these items get fulfilled, I would be less annoyed about working for Google.

greggyb 10y ago

Best advice I ever saw about dealing with recruiters, from someone on this site, though I don't remember who you are; sorry, internet-friend: Hi $recruiter, I appreciate you taking the time to reach out about this opportunity. Luckily, I am quite happy at $current_employer and not currently pursuing other options. I do have one question for you, though. Right now, what would a typical salary range look like for someone with my background and level of experience for a position like this? Thanks, greggyb I'd say anecdotally that I get an answer more than half the time with a salary range, sometimes based on the position they're hiring for, and sometimes their ballpark based on my profile. It's not scientific, but it is helpful to keep a pulse on the types of opportunities and compensation available.

fecak 10y ago
This is great advice. I'm a recruiter known for being critical of recruiter behavior, and when people claim that recruiters are mostly worthless to them, I encourage them to simply use recruiters for this kind of information. An experienced recruiter, specifically an agency recruiter with a wide variety of clients, should be able to give you a fairly solid expectation on your marketability and market value. Instead of wasting the opportunity, a reply like this can be quite useful. If the recruiter doesn't reply, don't respond to them again.