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I take it one step further: the email address on my resume is a black hole. Its only purpose is to feed an autoresponder who kicks back a warm, generic, email
by lwhalen 10y ago
I take it one step further: the email address on my resume is a black hole. Its only purpose is to feed an autoresponder who kicks back a warm, generic, email thanking the recruiter for their time, acknowledging they have a difficult job, and lays out my requirements for any position: what I am and am not interested in doing, my salary/hourly/per-project requirements, my location requirements (100% remote), etc. At the bottom, there's another email alias along the lines of 'yesireallydidreadthisgiganticemail2017@mydomain.com' that goes straight to me. I ask the recruiters to not email that address unless they've read the whole thing, and their position matches my requirements. I get 200+ emails to the catch-all autoresponder a month, and maybe 1 (qualified!) reply to the 'its really me' alias every six months. About once a month, I get an email to the 'its really me' alias from a recruiter expressing joy, amusement, and thanks for spelling out what I'm looking for so early in the process. All in all, it's a far more pleasant way to go about passively searching for The Next Big Role(tm).
- chadscira 10y agoThe "100% remote" requirement is a filter in itself. Out of 200 job offers from recruiters you're lucky if one is open to a remote placement. Nevertheless I think being out there and reducing your time invested in this slow process is still worth it, and a great idea.
- 27182818284 10y agoI think you're right to thank them for their difficult job. I seriously got bored just reading the description of your setup. What percent get through to the second email? Is it like 10%? 50%?
- nso 10y agoYou did get bored, didn't you. He detailed the numbers in his post.
- lazyasciiart 10y agoThey said 200 emails/month to the general and one every six months to the second email, so that's well under 1%
- ad-hominem 10y agoAlmost exactly 0.5%
- data4science 10y ago(1 per month + (1 per 6 months)/6) / (200 per month) = 0.58%. The more important nugget is that he is contacted about two attractive opportunities a year for his passive method that have a fairly high probability of leading to offers if he is interested. This enables him to: 1. Accurately appraise his worth to companies, 2. Quickly scale to a much higher number of interesting opportunities through the 14 worthwhile recruiters per year that already value his conduct (even if only 2 per year have opportunities with appropriate fit) by actively involving their aid if he becomes dissatisfied with his current employer/role (or they become dissatisfied with him), 3. Identify hiring trends in his field. I for one think it is a brilliant strategy, and I'll probably adopt it myself!
- ryandrake 10y agoHave you ever actually got a job that you accepted through this method? Also, what wizardry did you use to get 200+ recruiter E-mails a month? Do you just have a highly optimized resume out there on all the job sites or something?
- sqeaky 10y agoI get between 30 and 50 a month and all I really did was setup a linked in profile.
- ryandrake 10y agoIncredible--would you mind sending me your LI profile (privately of course, email in my HN profile)? I'd love to see an example of a profile that generates that much interest, even if it's mostly low signal.
- yareally 10y agoMaybe I am mistaken, but I thought that much recruiter interest on linked in is pretty typical. I live in the Mid Western United States and what was previously mentioned is also true here from my observations. Most of it comes down to having the right keywords and tags I believe. Having .net/java/mobile in your profile nets a lot of messages where I am. Words like Scala/Python/Node/Ruby/etc gets you a bit more. 80% of it is for jobs within the surrounding city, 10% for within the state and 10% out of state. That said, most of these jobs you could also find without the recruiters as well, but sometimes ones from internal recruiters (and if you're lucky a developer/dev manager) are useful.
- ryandrake 10y agoInteresting. I suppose if I were to ever get 20+ recruiter contacts per month I would retract my previous comment about replying to each of them being cheap time-wise. Admittedly, I'm not in the market for a developer position, and I deliberately down-play my development experience in my profile, which probably reduces my contact count substantially. I should conduct an experiment wherein I stuff my resume and LinkedIn profile with programming languages and framework keywords for a month and record whether it has an effect on recruitment volume. I suspect it would.
- chadgeidel 10y agoI'd pay at least a few dollars per month / tens of dollars per year for this service. I'm not kidding. Dear HN reader, please steal this idea!
- nawitus 10y agoIf everyone does this, then recruiters will simply start to spam the yesireallydidreadthisgiganticemail2017@mydomain.com emails without reading the autogenerated "profile".
- bluebomb 10y agothen we make them go through an animated slideshow and do a quiz to get to an email address
- pucado 10y agoAnd when that gets rigged by some wicked OCR, then a Super Mario simulation where the princess is the realdeal@email.com, and every 10 coins or every level would get them an additional resume-info nugget to consume. Okay maybe I took it too far.
- zedadex 10y agoTurns out Bowser was just trying to hire a competent plumber.
- sqeaky 10y agoBut at least a few people would be employed making this system.
- jrickert 10y agoAnd we have AI that can play Super Mario now.
- bnj 10y agoGot to keep that arms race going! You didn't take it too far, someone build the first online recruiter focused video game where the prize at the end of each level is the contact details for a more-and-more suitably qualified candidate.
- crestedtazo 10y agoThank you for your contribution