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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

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"
      - protomyth 10y ago
        Must have since they knew not to recruit people working for certain other companies.
      - falcolas 10y ago
        Discounting the motivations behind recruiter's cold calls for a moment; people do change. Someone who felt comfortable telling Google to haul off one year might feel different one or four years down the line. Making the assumption that they didn't burn bridges, re-contacting them a respectable amount of time later may result in a different outcome.
        vonmoltke 10y ago
        If I change my mind, I will contact them. Repeatedly hitting me up with impersonal contacts I don't want is not going to do it. In fact, it will make me lessl likely to change my mind.
    - DannyBee 10y ago
      Even if they maintained a blacklist, in this case, it was 5 years since they last contacted him according to this site.
    - Taylor_OD 10y ago
      Blame the 100's of recruiters working for google on contract and a internal CRM that likely doesnt work very well. Add in the idea that everyone is looking around eventually and you have people reaching out to you weekly about things you already said no to in the past.
    - serge2k 10y ago
      > Is the potential for one person changing their mind worth the negativity? I didn't read this and come away feeling any more negative about google.
  - ashitlerferad 10y ago
    They certainly do maintain such a blacklist.
- thavalai 10y ago
  Sounds like "before" was five years ago. I'm curious to read parts 1 & 2, wish there were clear links to them in "Part 3".
  - greggyb 10y ago
    Part one is linked, though not clearly, from the article.[0] Checking the category under which this was posted, Rants, gets you to number two in a single page where a good old Mark I eyeball grep is enough to get you there with some brief scrolling.[1] (I was curious, too.) [0] https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2011/12/13/google-fail/ https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2011/12/13/google-f... [1] https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2012/08/21/recruitment-mistakes-2/ https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2012/08/21/recruitm...
4ad 10y ago
> it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site. If a company wants to hire me, I expect them to spend hours going through my site and assess my previous open source work, and how and why I might be fit for them, etc. If they don't do at least that, there's nothing for me there. And yeah, Google is spamming me too, like the author of the article.
- justin66 10y ago
  They're not going to invest hours in you until they've determined that you're at least minimally interested.
  - 4ad 10y ago
    My own employment history in the past 10 years or so clearly demonstrates this is not the case. Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager). A job they needed done, and a job they clearly understood I was an expert in. I am am talking about senior-level jobs here, where the employee is hired because of his specific skill set and expertise in some particular domain. If the company does something that doesn't require any particular expertise, and no particular skill set, or if they don't know what they need, yeah... I don't want to be working there. Why would I? I would be selling myself short, and I would not advance in my technical career. Companies can very well assess whether someone is interested in the job. They can't know without asking if someone is willing to tolerate the company, but they should be able to tell whether someone would likely be interested in a particular job. And if someone likes a job, most likely they won't mind the company, so it's worthwhile for the company to reach out. Companies should also be able to assess with good reliability how qualified is someone for a particular job before contacting that person. If they can't, they either don't know what they need, or they are looking at the wrong person to hire.
    - justin66 10y ago
      > Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager). I'm honestly curious what they would have done during that time. I mean, are you literally saying it took them days or weeks of constant analysis to decide whether to approach you about coming in for an interview?
FussyZeus 10y ago
> 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. Every time I see someone bring up this rough point the time gets shorter. "I'm important, I don't have 5 minutes to look at your personal page!" or some variant of that. It's ridiculous. If I'm reaching out to someone to start hiring, I'd be looking at personal pages, github pages, looking through their code, etc. The only reason you wouldn't is if you don't actually give a shit and you're just working through a list of candidates and trying to get your conversion rate up. Plus someone who goes around recruiting without looking at WHO they're recruiting is not somebody I'd work for...
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Yes If google is serious about hiring "the best" (which is debatable) they should definitely be paying more attention and not just spamming people
  - deelowe 10y ago
    There's a pretty low signal to noise ratio on recruiting. They typically don't start going into a candidate's details until they've managed to get a resume.
  - blakeyrat 10y ago
    But we don't know if this recruiter is hiring "the best" or just some schlub to sit behind a phone and tell small business owners how to update their email signatures. Not every one of Google's 61,000 employees is "OMG super A+ number one hot code engineer geek!"
    - FussyZeus 10y ago
      CSR's don't generally have github pages.
      - blakeyrat 10y ago
m52go 10y ago
Recruiting is a sales process just like any other. No one would ever say it's unfair to expect a business developer to spend 5 minutes researching a prospect just because he/she sells for a big firm and doesn't have the time. Come on. This is their JOB.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  When they have someone they specifically want to recruit/headhunt, I would expect them to spend at least 5 minutes research.
  - valarauca1 10y ago
    Your argument boils down to: Large corporations do not have to sell employment. Potential employees should feel honored to merely be contacted on the basis of an opportunity. This sounds a lot like a cargo cult, or some weird corporatism worship. Frankly if I'm contacted by a recruiter who is a direct employee of a company, and it is blatantly obvious I'm receiving a form letter based on a keyword search of a resume data base. I know exactly what my role will be at this company, an employee ID in a database row.
    - deong 10y ago
      I don't think the argument is that you must feel "honored". Just not personally affronted by it. I work for a company that has open developer positions. None of them are related to keyboard firmware, but if you told me nothing about a potential candidate except that he'd been doing keyboard firmware for fun, my first instinct would be, "great! Let's see if he wants to come in for an interview". Don't we all spout the company line about how specific skills are less important than "passion" or whatever? Well, then don't bitch if someone contacts you about something other than the specific skills on your CV. You don't have prostrate yourself before their glorious presence, but I don't see a reason to get upset about it.
    - madeofpalk 10y ago
      No, it doesn't. You're putting an awful lot of words in my mouth there. Generally speaking, they'll be two types of recruiting companies like this are doing: 1) General filling headcount. X department has N open roles for developers who they need suitable people for. It doesn't really matter who the person is, as long as they're suitable (and they'll figure that out with screening calls and interviews). These are the types of roles that these shotgun form emails are sent out to. 2) Headhunting specific people (for specific roles). A company is after someone in particular who they already know about, or they're after a fairly specific type of person (for an IMPORTANT role) so they'll do a bit research on who they want to approach. Of course I don't think anyone should feel honoured to receive a form email. I just don't think it's worth getting your knickers in a twist over it. They irritate me slightly, but I get over it. If I wrote a 1000 word article on every piece of recruiter spam[1] I receive I wouldn't have time to do actual work. [1] Amusing anecdote: One day In the office a whole bunch of phones and computers when off. I assumed it was a whole company email, but nope - it was a recruiter who had emailed everyone looking for MERN developers.
Terr_ 10y ago
> it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes The problem isn't that they don't look or give careful consideration... The problem is that they LIE about it to the people they contact.
YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago
>> Why not just delete it or reply no thank you? Uh, at a guess: because if you don't expect to get a job at Google the next best way to pad your CV is to make it very publicly known that you've turned down an offer from Google?

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"
    - protomyth 10y ago
      Must have since they knew not to recruit people working for certain other companies.
    - falcolas 10y ago
      Discounting the motivations behind recruiter's cold calls for a moment; people do change. Someone who felt comfortable telling Google to haul off one year might feel different one or four years down the line. Making the assumption that they didn't burn bridges, re-contacting them a respectable amount of time later may result in a different outcome.
      - vonmoltke 10y ago
        If I change my mind, I will contact them. Repeatedly hitting me up with impersonal contacts I don't want is not going to do it. In fact, it will make me lessl likely to change my mind.
  - DannyBee 10y ago
    Even if they maintained a blacklist, in this case, it was 5 years since they last contacted him according to this site.
  - Taylor_OD 10y ago
    Blame the 100's of recruiters working for google on contract and a internal CRM that likely doesnt work very well. Add in the idea that everyone is looking around eventually and you have people reaching out to you weekly about things you already said no to in the past.
  - serge2k 10y ago
    > Is the potential for one person changing their mind worth the negativity? I didn't read this and come away feeling any more negative about google.
- ashitlerferad 10y ago
  They certainly do maintain such a blacklist.
thavalai 10y ago
Sounds like "before" was five years ago. I'm curious to read parts 1 & 2, wish there were clear links to them in "Part 3".
- greggyb 10y ago
  Part one is linked, though not clearly, from the article.[0] Checking the category under which this was posted, Rants, gets you to number two in a single page where a good old Mark I eyeball grep is enough to get you there with some brief scrolling.[1] (I was curious, too.) [0] https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2011/12/13/google-fail/ https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2011/12/13/google-f... [1] https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2012/08/21/recruitment-mistakes-2/ https://asylum.madhouse-project.org/blog/2012/08/21/recruitm...

4ad 10y ago

> it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site. If a company wants to hire me, I expect them to spend hours going through my site and assess my previous open source work, and how and why I might be fit for them, etc. If they don't do at least that, there's nothing for me there. And yeah, Google is spamming me too, like the author of the article.

justin66 10y ago
They're not going to invest hours in you until they've determined that you're at least minimally interested.
- 4ad 10y ago
  My own employment history in the past 10 years or so clearly demonstrates this is not the case. Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager). A job they needed done, and a job they clearly understood I was an expert in. I am am talking about senior-level jobs here, where the employee is hired because of his specific skill set and expertise in some particular domain. If the company does something that doesn't require any particular expertise, and no particular skill set, or if they don't know what they need, yeah... I don't want to be working there. Why would I? I would be selling myself short, and I would not advance in my technical career. Companies can very well assess whether someone is interested in the job. They can't know without asking if someone is willing to tolerate the company, but they should be able to tell whether someone would likely be interested in a particular job. And if someone likes a job, most likely they won't mind the company, so it's worthwhile for the company to reach out. Companies should also be able to assess with good reliability how qualified is someone for a particular job before contacting that person. If they can't, they either don't know what they need, or they are looking at the wrong person to hire.
  - justin66 10y ago
    > Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager). I'm honestly curious what they would have done during that time. I mean, are you literally saying it took them days or weeks of constant analysis to decide whether to approach you about coming in for an interview?

FussyZeus 10y ago

> 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. Every time I see someone bring up this rough point the time gets shorter. "I'm important, I don't have 5 minutes to look at your personal page!" or some variant of that. It's ridiculous. If I'm reaching out to someone to start hiring, I'd be looking at personal pages, github pages, looking through their code, etc. The only reason you wouldn't is if you don't actually give a shit and you're just working through a list of candidates and trying to get your conversion rate up. Plus someone who goes around recruiting without looking at WHO they're recruiting is not somebody I'd work for...

raverbashing 10y ago
Yes If google is serious about hiring "the best" (which is debatable) they should definitely be paying more attention and not just spamming people
- deelowe 10y ago
  There's a pretty low signal to noise ratio on recruiting. They typically don't start going into a candidate's details until they've managed to get a resume.
- blakeyrat 10y ago
  But we don't know if this recruiter is hiring "the best" or just some schlub to sit behind a phone and tell small business owners how to update their email signatures. Not every one of Google's 61,000 employees is "OMG super A+ number one hot code engineer geek!"
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    CSR's don't generally have github pages.
    - blakeyrat 10y ago

m52go 10y ago

Recruiting is a sales process just like any other. No one would ever say it's unfair to expect a business developer to spend 5 minutes researching a prospect just because he/she sells for a big firm and doesn't have the time. Come on. This is their JOB.

madeofpalk 10y ago
When they have someone they specifically want to recruit/headhunt, I would expect them to spend at least 5 minutes research.
- valarauca1 10y ago
  Your argument boils down to: Large corporations do not have to sell employment. Potential employees should feel honored to merely be contacted on the basis of an opportunity. This sounds a lot like a cargo cult, or some weird corporatism worship. Frankly if I'm contacted by a recruiter who is a direct employee of a company, and it is blatantly obvious I'm receiving a form letter based on a keyword search of a resume data base. I know exactly what my role will be at this company, an employee ID in a database row.
  - deong 10y ago
    I don't think the argument is that you must feel "honored". Just not personally affronted by it. I work for a company that has open developer positions. None of them are related to keyboard firmware, but if you told me nothing about a potential candidate except that he'd been doing keyboard firmware for fun, my first instinct would be, "great! Let's see if he wants to come in for an interview". Don't we all spout the company line about how specific skills are less important than "passion" or whatever? Well, then don't bitch if someone contacts you about something other than the specific skills on your CV. You don't have prostrate yourself before their glorious presence, but I don't see a reason to get upset about it.
  - madeofpalk 10y ago
    No, it doesn't. You're putting an awful lot of words in my mouth there. Generally speaking, they'll be two types of recruiting companies like this are doing: 1) General filling headcount. X department has N open roles for developers who they need suitable people for. It doesn't really matter who the person is, as long as they're suitable (and they'll figure that out with screening calls and interviews). These are the types of roles that these shotgun form emails are sent out to. 2) Headhunting specific people (for specific roles). A company is after someone in particular who they already know about, or they're after a fairly specific type of person (for an IMPORTANT role) so they'll do a bit research on who they want to approach. Of course I don't think anyone should feel honoured to receive a form email. I just don't think it's worth getting your knickers in a twist over it. They irritate me slightly, but I get over it. If I wrote a 1000 word article on every piece of recruiter spam[1] I receive I wouldn't have time to do actual work. [1] Amusing anecdote: One day In the office a whole bunch of phones and computers when off. I assumed it was a whole company email, but nope - it was a recruiter who had emailed everyone looking for MERN developers.

Terr_ 10y ago

> it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes The problem isn't that they don't look or give careful consideration... The problem is that they LIE about it to the people they contact.

YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago

>> Why not just delete it or reply no thank you? Uh, at a guess: because if you don't expect to get a job at Google the next best way to pad your CV is to make it very publicly known that you've turned down an offer from Google?