7 ms·

The Tenacity of Tech Recruiters

132 points by smnplk 10y ago

pinewurst 10y ago
Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319428
jxramos 10y ago
My impression is that those on the bottom of the recruiter rung do the really desperate stuff like hounding you with several weeks of emails every few days, calling you at your office, etc. If you're so unlucky to be a dead ringer for a position and have a rookie recruiter thinking they can wrangle you in, hold on to your seats. I'd highly recommend folks read "Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy", great perspectives given from all three parties involved in this land of recruitment. Also covers some history that may no longer be well known why the state of affairs is as such.
mywittyname 10y ago
I'd write these emails all day every day for the money recruiters make.
- popcorncolonel 10y ago
  Do they make a lot? How comparable is it to engineer salary?
  - matthewmacleod 10y ago
    Their fee is typically a percentage of the first year's salary for the role their candidate fills. I've seen them request up to 30%, but in my experience they settle for 10-15% depending on the situation. For a skilled recruiter, this can accrue pretty quickly; at the rate of one role filled per month, they're bringing in equivalent to an average engineer's salary. Of course I'm ignoring overheads there, and if they're working for a recruitment firm they'll be personally receiving commission rather than an individual fee. But my experience in the UK was that there were a few powerful and well-connected independent recruiters who had most of the good candidates and interesting companies on their books - I imagine it could add up pretty quickly!
    - zippergz 10y ago
      It's much like the real estate business (in the US, at least). There are a handful of people who can do extremely well, and then a long tail who think it looks like easy money but end up making very little.
    - user5994461 10y ago
      > But my experience in the UK was that there were a few powerful and well-connected independent recruiters who had most of the good candidates and interesting companies on their books Care to share names?
  - user5994461 10y ago
    10-20% for the usual recruiters. 30-35% for the good ones.
feverishaaron 10y ago
It's shameful. I had to make my Instagram private, because I had a recruiter texting me and noting I was at Disneyland, suggesting I could get in touch while in line for rides.
- amorphid 10y ago
  That is simultaneously both awesome and creepy.
  - gjtorikian 10y ago
    I'm struggling to find the "awesome" part. I've been harassed on Instagram by people asking me to update an open source project I let go of five years ago. While it may seem neat and flattering, the reality is that it's incredibly disturbing.
    - rfrank 10y ago
      It's a reality of the data vacuum cleaner era, the house that adtech and social media built.
    - amorphid 10y ago
      I think awesome depends on the sensibilities of the person being stalked, and the sweetness of the opportunity. I concur that the creep factor likely trumps the awesome factor. Still, if a recruiter popped out of my closet with a million dollar opportunity, there's nothing to say that I can't take the opportunity, and then call the cops.
- popcorncolonel 10y ago
  That's hilarious.
- logicallee 10y ago
  I don't know, if they're managing your private life this well (I mean what they wrote is pretty credible: perhaps getting a better job while you're on vacation is a great use of your time standing in line at disneyland) I would give them the benefit of the doubt and see how they are at managing my career for me. I mean, what -- after all that work, are they going to get back to me with bad offers? (worse than the place I'm staying)? Doesn't make much sense to me. . . .
nailer 10y ago
Needs to mention that they were 'looking through my GitHub'
- tpaschalis 10y ago
  Oh, look! A couple of stolen Javascript (it's always Javascript) frameworks, as well as a fork of TensorFlow!
  - Pica_soO 10y ago
    And they read your thesis- and all the papers you released. They know what you where a expert in!
  - Ralfp 10y ago
    I've starred the FB's fastText on Github. This was enough to start getting emails from recruiters looking for AI developers in my area. Sigh...
- tgragnato 10y ago
  Yup this happened to me too ! Fortunately, they have been blacklisted for phishing (google safebrowsing) just a couple of days later. Have they exaggerated ?
ng12 10y ago
Today I got an email sent to my work email (which they must have guessed, it's not public) that asked how I liked working at a company I left years ago. That was a fun one.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Judging from my experience, the next one will be to place you at the company you already are.
symlinkk 10y ago
Boo hoo, you have people knocking on your door to give you a comfortable job. I wish I had that problem.
- ipsin 10y ago
  Tech recruiters at cold-call end of the Talent Acquisition Funnel aren't offering you a comfortable job, though. They're searching on LinkedIn and offering you to throw at a company with Similarly Aligned Keywords to see if you stick. I want to believe that there are higher-quality recruiters out there, ones who understand employee fit from both sides, but I haven't had the privilege of meeting one.
  - freework 10y ago
    Any job with a paycheck on a regular basis is a high quality job, for me at least.
    - khedoros1 10y ago
      With the tech job market right now, most tech workers can find jobs that pay the bills easily, so they'll tend to raise their level of discrimination a little. So they look for the one that pays a little more, is working with some neat technology, and basically works with their schedule (Or whichever other list of nice-to-haves). When you can afford to be picky, "high quality" takes on a different meaning.
      - maym86 10y ago
        Exactly. But the point is that is a luxury for most people. Having recruiters chase you and being irritated by it lacks some awareness of how hard it is for some people to earn a living. It is hard to sympathize with people for having to ignore a few emails every day.
        khedoros1 10y ago
        That part of it isn't lost on me. Although, I think being irritated by people (recruiters) harassing you is natural, but complaining about it to someone vying in a less-lively job market is insensitive, and I wouldn't expect that person to sympathize in the least.
kerkeslager 10y ago
Recruiters get put on my autoresponder list. The automatic response says "This is an automated response. Your message was caught by a filter and automatically archived" right at the top, followed by an explanation that I don't work with third-party recruiters. About once a year I check what messages were caught by the recruiter filter and I always discover a few recruiters who have responded (apparently manually) multiple times to my autoresponder, receiving the same response every time. Their messages are usually something like "I understand why you feel that way but we're not like other recruiters, we think you'd be a really good match for X company working with a decaying technology you haven't worked in for 10 years". It's "tenacity", but I can't imagine conversing with autoresponders is very effective.
- objclxt 10y ago
  > It's "tenacity", but I can't imagine conversing with autoresponders is very effective. Particularly at the bottom end recruitment can be a scummy industry (just like anywhere that's sales and commission led, I suppose). Back when I worked at a ~100 person company as a hiring manager I had recruiters pull all kinds of crazy. Recruiters submitting fake resumes to find out what positions are open, waiting for me outside the office to shove resumes into my hands, get genuine resumes from candidates not working with them, send them to me, and then claim to represent them...and that's before you get onto the black market for leads and the like.
andrewstuart 10y ago
It's too easy to bash recruiters on HN. They exist because people want jobs and employers give them money to find people.
- averagewall 10y ago
  Exactly. When I used to be looking for work, I never liked being the one trying to hound companies begging for work. Some people are suited to that kind of work and some aren't. It makes perfect sense for people to specialize so programmers do programming and recruiters do job matching.
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  I appreciate the value in theory, but practically tech recruitment seems to be a bit silly. Recruiters have a habit of cornering the market; if they have all the best candidates on their books, employers are almost obliged to indulge what's effectively rent-seeking behaviour. Ideally it would be much better if qualified candidates speak directly to employers and lose the go-between, who doesn't add a huge amount of value (though they can to some extent take a bit of the work out for the candidate, and possible negotiate salary and benefits more forcefully). To me the much bigger problem in tech recruitment is the difficulty of finding permanent staff rather than contractors. I don't know what the state of the market is in the US, but in London good permanent staff are becoming as rare as hens' teeth. The natural outcome of a seller's market, I suppose.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    There are many companies that you cannot enter without going through a recruiters or an employee referring you.
  - smsm42 10y ago
    They have potential to add huge value for candidates. I.e., if I looked for a job, I'd appreciate somebody to take the annoying part - scheduling, initial talking/pitching, resume sending, introductions, filtering out obvious mismatches, negotiating good terms, etc. - and only do the actual interviewing and deciding. But from what I hear, most recruiters are underqualified to do that, and/or prefer to play simple numbers game - spam enough people and you may get lucky.
AnimalMuppet 10y ago
Pro tip: Annoying me is not the most effective way to get me to do what you want.
dsr_ 10y ago
Here's the other end, recruiters hoping to sell you candidates: ---- I emailed you about your opening last week. I'm just checking to see if you are still searching for great candidates. If so, I can help! I have a great candidate who you may want to interview. If not, let me know what positions you are looking to fill and I will get to work. CyberCoders is a pay for performance, nationwide recruiting firm that focuses on exceptional local candidates who meet your needs. Best part? We stand behind all of our candidates and will replace them if for any reason they do not work out. ----- That sounds nice, doesn't it? Except that I don't have a position open at the moment, nor did I last week, and how exactly are they representing "a great candidate" when they don't even know what we're looking for? Naturally I wrote back saying that this was great and they should send me the resume immediately. They haven't responded...
- zippergz 10y ago
  I'm generally much more pro-recruiter than the crowd here at HN, but I filter anything from Cybercoders directly to the trash, both as a candidate and a hiring manager.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    CyberCoders and their overposting siblings is why I don't bother with LinkedIn job ads anymore.
    - convolvatron 10y ago
      i recently had an exchange with 'Bill' from Cybercoders. 'found your resume, looks fantastic, check out this job posting' - oh, i think i know the company, would love to work with them, let me know two weeks later - 'found your resume, looks fantastic, check out this job posting' - don't you remember me? there was a similar posting, and you didn't get back to me, ok, no matter. 'can i call you on friday' didn't bother calling. a week later starts leaving daily voice mails. i mistakenly answer, lie, and told him i just started at another job a week later 'found your resume, looks fantastic...'
- 10y ago
mrbill 10y ago
It's missing a bit about how the job is in a city that you last lived in three employers ago. I'm continually having to tell cold-contact recruiters that I don't live in Austin anymore, having moved to Houston twelve years ago.
- tracker1 10y ago
  Yeah... getting called from a resume/profile over a decade old isn't much fun.
orcdork 10y ago
The tenacity of blog posts about tech recruiters -- Dear hackernews/reddit/socialmediathatsslightlyoffthemainstreamsoicanappearedgybutstillconnectwithmytargetdemographic My name is Person McPerson. Here in MajorTechHubCity where there's so many work opportunities, i get so many work opportunities that it actually annoys me so much that I'll spend all of 30 seconds to write a blog post about getting so many work opportunity emails. Once, I was offered a job in a programming language that hasn't been mainstream for at least 4 months! That language was ruby for all those interested. Ruby! Don't make me spit out my own coffee in indignation. I obviously tracked down the person that wrote the email and gave them whatfor. Well, actually I just pressed the "I don't know this person" button. It's a difficult life, and i hope you empathize with my plight. It really is, as the beatles put it, a hard day's night answering all these linkedin messages. I don't actually answer them though. That's for suckers. You're not some kind of ruby using sucker are you? Sincerely yours, Person McPerson. (available for remote work, 3 days a week due to my digital nomad lifestyle, please email me)
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Thank you. (disclaimer: not a recruiter) I like HN, but the attitude towards recruiters here is so ugly and smug and superior. We get it. You are so annoyed by all these companies who want to hire you. You have the power to merely pick up the phone and work at Google tomorrow if it pleased you. You drive a Tesla and have a supermodel girlfriend too. Great. Congratulations. You're awesome. For the rest of us mortals, it's nice to have someone reach out and offer to put us in touch with someone looking to hire us. This is a LUXURY not available to the vast majority of workers in the world. Be a little grateful for a change. Sure, a lot of the jobs might be "bottom of the barrel" type jobs but you never know, and it never hurts to be civil and treat these folks with a little empathy.
  - AnimalMuppet 10y ago
    > For the rest of us mortals, it's nice to have someone reach out and offer to put us in touch with someone looking to hire us. And I have at least once taken the job, too. Once is enough that it's worthwhile to let them call me. That said, if you try to repeatedly pester me, I'm going to try my best to lose you, whether you're a recruiter or not. You want to let me know you have something that I might be interested in? Fine. I'll listen. I'll tell you if I'm interested. If not, don't ask me about that one again. If I say I'm not willing to look around right now, don't ask me again for six months. That is, I'll be civil and have empathy until I quit getting civility and empathy back.
mmanfrin 10y ago
My favorite recruiting emails are the ones where their name-replace code broke and left in {{first_name}} or something similar. Ah, yes, I must be the perfect fit for your role!
- tracker1 10y ago
  Why thank you {{recruiter_name}}, I realize that {{spammy_recruiting_company}} is great and that you really go the extra mile for your prospects, I'd love to hear more, but I'm really happy where I am, and as I just started am not actively looking.
douche 10y ago
My LinkedIn is completely blank - no bio, no picture, no skills, no education info, nothing about where I work, about four connections to former coworkers. I get emails almost every day from recruiters nonetheless. It's like the epitome of r-selection.
- user5994461 10y ago
  You'll get better quality lead with a filled profile.
- csnewb 10y ago
  I have a picture, my education listed (CS B.S. degree from top 30 university), prior internship (with short description), and my current position at a huge company in Silicon Valley (also with a short description). On average 1-2 recruiters look at my profile without contact. What the hell am I doing wrong?
pascalxus 10y ago
the desperation/amount of the recruiters is inversely proportional to the available housing surrounding the hiring company. Hence, most recruiters are all working for companies in or near SF, or Palo Alto: of which we've heard from 100s! Despite there being ample software companies in the east bay/tri-valley area, I haven't heard from a single recruiter, recruiting for a position in the tri-valley area - I imagine their doing just fine with their hiring. If companies are serious about hiring talent, they're going to need to start relocating to areas that candidates can get to/live in.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  This is so true. I live in an affordable area two hours from a minor tech hub. I get plenty offers for that hub, but next to nothing nearby. I have a good enough job so I have no interest in moving. Maybe 1/10 are interested in remote work, so I tend to at least hear them out.
sdboyer 10y ago
shit, if there were an actual company with real use for Merovingian numismatics, i would work there in a heartbeat
NikolaeVarius 10y ago
I had a funny one where during the AWS S3 outage a recruiter reached out to me saying that I most likely had free time due to the outage and i should use it talking to him...
gravyboat 10y ago
A recruiter contacted me a while back with a similar act, just completely clueless. I put out ridiculous terms and informed him of a handbook I've written to help him improve. He responded by saying he was interested but only if it had data driven facts (which it doesn't). I created a coupon code to give him a free copy of the book, he never cashed it in. Recruiters are all bullshit, assume everything they say is a lie.

132 points by smnplk 10y ago

Repost: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10319428

My impression is that those on the bottom of the recruiter rung do the really desperate stuff like hounding you with several weeks of emails every few days, calling you at your office, etc. If you're so unlucky to be a dead ringer for a position and have a rookie recruiter thinking they can wrangle you in, hold on to your seats. I'd highly recommend folks read "Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy", great perspectives given from all three parties involved in this land of recruitment. Also covers some history that may no longer be well known why the state of affairs is as such.

mywittyname 10y ago

I'd write these emails all day every day for the money recruiters make.

popcorncolonel 10y ago
Do they make a lot? How comparable is it to engineer salary?
- matthewmacleod 10y ago
  Their fee is typically a percentage of the first year's salary for the role their candidate fills. I've seen them request up to 30%, but in my experience they settle for 10-15% depending on the situation. For a skilled recruiter, this can accrue pretty quickly; at the rate of one role filled per month, they're bringing in equivalent to an average engineer's salary. Of course I'm ignoring overheads there, and if they're working for a recruitment firm they'll be personally receiving commission rather than an individual fee. But my experience in the UK was that there were a few powerful and well-connected independent recruiters who had most of the good candidates and interesting companies on their books - I imagine it could add up pretty quickly!
  - zippergz 10y ago
    It's much like the real estate business (in the US, at least). There are a handful of people who can do extremely well, and then a long tail who think it looks like easy money but end up making very little.
  - user5994461 10y ago
    > But my experience in the UK was that there were a few powerful and well-connected independent recruiters who had most of the good candidates and interesting companies on their books Care to share names?
- user5994461 10y ago
  10-20% for the usual recruiters. 30-35% for the good ones.

feverishaaron 10y ago

It's shameful. I had to make my Instagram private, because I had a recruiter texting me and noting I was at Disneyland, suggesting I could get in touch while in line for rides.

amorphid 10y ago
That is simultaneously both awesome and creepy.
- gjtorikian 10y ago
  I'm struggling to find the "awesome" part. I've been harassed on Instagram by people asking me to update an open source project I let go of five years ago. While it may seem neat and flattering, the reality is that it's incredibly disturbing.
  - rfrank 10y ago
    It's a reality of the data vacuum cleaner era, the house that adtech and social media built.
  - amorphid 10y ago
    I think awesome depends on the sensibilities of the person being stalked, and the sweetness of the opportunity. I concur that the creep factor likely trumps the awesome factor. Still, if a recruiter popped out of my closet with a million dollar opportunity, there's nothing to say that I can't take the opportunity, and then call the cops.
popcorncolonel 10y ago
That's hilarious.
logicallee 10y ago
I don't know, if they're managing your private life this well (I mean what they wrote is pretty credible: perhaps getting a better job while you're on vacation is a great use of your time standing in line at disneyland) I would give them the benefit of the doubt and see how they are at managing my career for me. I mean, what -- after all that work, are they going to get back to me with bad offers? (worse than the place I'm staying)? Doesn't make much sense to me. . . .

nailer 10y ago

Needs to mention that they were 'looking through my GitHub'

tpaschalis 10y ago
Oh, look! A couple of stolen Javascript (it's always Javascript) frameworks, as well as a fork of TensorFlow!
- Pica_soO 10y ago
  And they read your thesis- and all the papers you released. They know what you where a expert in!
- Ralfp 10y ago
  I've starred the FB's fastText on Github. This was enough to start getting emails from recruiters looking for AI developers in my area. Sigh...
tgragnato 10y ago
Yup this happened to me too ! Fortunately, they have been blacklisted for phishing (google safebrowsing) just a couple of days later. Have they exaggerated ?

ng12 10y ago

Today I got an email sent to my work email (which they must have guessed, it's not public) that asked how I liked working at a company I left years ago. That was a fun one.

user5994461 10y ago
Judging from my experience, the next one will be to place you at the company you already are.

symlinkk 10y ago

Boo hoo, you have people knocking on your door to give you a comfortable job. I wish I had that problem.

ipsin 10y ago
Tech recruiters at cold-call end of the Talent Acquisition Funnel aren't offering you a comfortable job, though. They're searching on LinkedIn and offering you to throw at a company with Similarly Aligned Keywords to see if you stick. I want to believe that there are higher-quality recruiters out there, ones who understand employee fit from both sides, but I haven't had the privilege of meeting one.
- freework 10y ago
  Any job with a paycheck on a regular basis is a high quality job, for me at least.
  - khedoros1 10y ago
    With the tech job market right now, most tech workers can find jobs that pay the bills easily, so they'll tend to raise their level of discrimination a little. So they look for the one that pays a little more, is working with some neat technology, and basically works with their schedule (Or whichever other list of nice-to-haves). When you can afford to be picky, "high quality" takes on a different meaning.
    - maym86 10y ago
      Exactly. But the point is that is a luxury for most people. Having recruiters chase you and being irritated by it lacks some awareness of how hard it is for some people to earn a living. It is hard to sympathize with people for having to ignore a few emails every day.
      - khedoros1 10y ago
        That part of it isn't lost on me. Although, I think being irritated by people (recruiters) harassing you is natural, but complaining about it to someone vying in a less-lively job market is insensitive, and I wouldn't expect that person to sympathize in the least.

kerkeslager 10y ago

Recruiters get put on my autoresponder list. The automatic response says "This is an automated response. Your message was caught by a filter and automatically archived" right at the top, followed by an explanation that I don't work with third-party recruiters. About once a year I check what messages were caught by the recruiter filter and I always discover a few recruiters who have responded (apparently manually) multiple times to my autoresponder, receiving the same response every time. Their messages are usually something like "I understand why you feel that way but we're not like other recruiters, we think you'd be a really good match for X company working with a decaying technology you haven't worked in for 10 years". It's "tenacity", but I can't imagine conversing with autoresponders is very effective.

objclxt 10y ago
> It's "tenacity", but I can't imagine conversing with autoresponders is very effective. Particularly at the bottom end recruitment can be a scummy industry (just like anywhere that's sales and commission led, I suppose). Back when I worked at a ~100 person company as a hiring manager I had recruiters pull all kinds of crazy. Recruiters submitting fake resumes to find out what positions are open, waiting for me outside the office to shove resumes into my hands, get genuine resumes from candidates not working with them, send them to me, and then claim to represent them...and that's before you get onto the black market for leads and the like.

andrewstuart 10y ago

It's too easy to bash recruiters on HN. They exist because people want jobs and employers give them money to find people.

averagewall 10y ago
Exactly. When I used to be looking for work, I never liked being the one trying to hound companies begging for work. Some people are suited to that kind of work and some aren't. It makes perfect sense for people to specialize so programmers do programming and recruiters do job matching.
matthewmacleod 10y ago
I appreciate the value in theory, but practically tech recruitment seems to be a bit silly. Recruiters have a habit of cornering the market; if they have all the best candidates on their books, employers are almost obliged to indulge what's effectively rent-seeking behaviour. Ideally it would be much better if qualified candidates speak directly to employers and lose the go-between, who doesn't add a huge amount of value (though they can to some extent take a bit of the work out for the candidate, and possible negotiate salary and benefits more forcefully). To me the much bigger problem in tech recruitment is the difficulty of finding permanent staff rather than contractors. I don't know what the state of the market is in the US, but in London good permanent staff are becoming as rare as hens' teeth. The natural outcome of a seller's market, I suppose.
- user5994461 10y ago
  There are many companies that you cannot enter without going through a recruiters or an employee referring you.
- smsm42 10y ago
  They have potential to add huge value for candidates. I.e., if I looked for a job, I'd appreciate somebody to take the annoying part - scheduling, initial talking/pitching, resume sending, introductions, filtering out obvious mismatches, negotiating good terms, etc. - and only do the actual interviewing and deciding. But from what I hear, most recruiters are underqualified to do that, and/or prefer to play simple numbers game - spam enough people and you may get lucky.

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

Pro tip: Annoying me is not the most effective way to get me to do what you want.

dsr_ 10y ago

Here's the other end, recruiters hoping to sell you candidates: ---- I emailed you about your opening last week. I'm just checking to see if you are still searching for great candidates. If so, I can help! I have a great candidate who you may want to interview. If not, let me know what positions you are looking to fill and I will get to work. CyberCoders is a pay for performance, nationwide recruiting firm that focuses on exceptional local candidates who meet your needs. Best part? We stand behind all of our candidates and will replace them if for any reason they do not work out. ----- That sounds nice, doesn't it? Except that I don't have a position open at the moment, nor did I last week, and how exactly are they representing "a great candidate" when they don't even know what we're looking for? Naturally I wrote back saying that this was great and they should send me the resume immediately. They haven't responded...

zippergz 10y ago
I'm generally much more pro-recruiter than the crowd here at HN, but I filter anything from Cybercoders directly to the trash, both as a candidate and a hiring manager.
- rhizome 10y ago
  CyberCoders and their overposting siblings is why I don't bother with LinkedIn job ads anymore.
  - convolvatron 10y ago
    i recently had an exchange with 'Bill' from Cybercoders. 'found your resume, looks fantastic, check out this job posting' - oh, i think i know the company, would love to work with them, let me know two weeks later - 'found your resume, looks fantastic, check out this job posting' - don't you remember me? there was a similar posting, and you didn't get back to me, ok, no matter. 'can i call you on friday' didn't bother calling. a week later starts leaving daily voice mails. i mistakenly answer, lie, and told him i just started at another job a week later 'found your resume, looks fantastic...'
10y ago

mrbill 10y ago

It's missing a bit about how the job is in a city that you last lived in three employers ago. I'm continually having to tell cold-contact recruiters that I don't live in Austin anymore, having moved to Houston twelve years ago.

tracker1 10y ago
Yeah... getting called from a resume/profile over a decade old isn't much fun.

orcdork 10y ago

The tenacity of blog posts about tech recruiters -- Dear hackernews/reddit/socialmediathatsslightlyoffthemainstreamsoicanappearedgybutstillconnectwithmytargetdemographic My name is Person McPerson. Here in MajorTechHubCity where there's so many work opportunities, i get so many work opportunities that it actually annoys me so much that I'll spend all of 30 seconds to write a blog post about getting so many work opportunity emails. Once, I was offered a job in a programming language that hasn't been mainstream for at least 4 months! That language was ruby for all those interested. Ruby! Don't make me spit out my own coffee in indignation. I obviously tracked down the person that wrote the email and gave them whatfor. Well, actually I just pressed the "I don't know this person" button. It's a difficult life, and i hope you empathize with my plight. It really is, as the beatles put it, a hard day's night answering all these linkedin messages. I don't actually answer them though. That's for suckers. You're not some kind of ruby using sucker are you? Sincerely yours, Person McPerson. (available for remote work, 3 days a week due to my digital nomad lifestyle, please email me)

ryandrake 10y ago
Thank you. (disclaimer: not a recruiter) I like HN, but the attitude towards recruiters here is so ugly and smug and superior. We get it. You are so annoyed by all these companies who want to hire you. You have the power to merely pick up the phone and work at Google tomorrow if it pleased you. You drive a Tesla and have a supermodel girlfriend too. Great. Congratulations. You're awesome. For the rest of us mortals, it's nice to have someone reach out and offer to put us in touch with someone looking to hire us. This is a LUXURY not available to the vast majority of workers in the world. Be a little grateful for a change. Sure, a lot of the jobs might be "bottom of the barrel" type jobs but you never know, and it never hurts to be civil and treat these folks with a little empathy.
- AnimalMuppet 10y ago
  > For the rest of us mortals, it's nice to have someone reach out and offer to put us in touch with someone looking to hire us. And I have at least once taken the job, too. Once is enough that it's worthwhile to let them call me. That said, if you try to repeatedly pester me, I'm going to try my best to lose you, whether you're a recruiter or not. You want to let me know you have something that I might be interested in? Fine. I'll listen. I'll tell you if I'm interested. If not, don't ask me about that one again. If I say I'm not willing to look around right now, don't ask me again for six months. That is, I'll be civil and have empathy until I quit getting civility and empathy back.

mmanfrin 10y ago

My favorite recruiting emails are the ones where their name-replace code broke and left in {{first_name}} or something similar. Ah, yes, I must be the perfect fit for your role!

tracker1 10y ago
Why thank you {{recruiter_name}}, I realize that {{spammy_recruiting_company}} is great and that you really go the extra mile for your prospects, I'd love to hear more, but I'm really happy where I am, and as I just started am not actively looking.

douche 10y ago

My LinkedIn is completely blank - no bio, no picture, no skills, no education info, nothing about where I work, about four connections to former coworkers. I get emails almost every day from recruiters nonetheless. It's like the epitome of r-selection.

user5994461 10y ago
You'll get better quality lead with a filled profile.
csnewb 10y ago
I have a picture, my education listed (CS B.S. degree from top 30 university), prior internship (with short description), and my current position at a huge company in Silicon Valley (also with a short description). On average 1-2 recruiters look at my profile without contact. What the hell am I doing wrong?

pascalxus 10y ago

the desperation/amount of the recruiters is inversely proportional to the available housing surrounding the hiring company. Hence, most recruiters are all working for companies in or near SF, or Palo Alto: of which we've heard from 100s! Despite there being ample software companies in the east bay/tri-valley area, I haven't heard from a single recruiter, recruiting for a position in the tri-valley area - I imagine their doing just fine with their hiring. If companies are serious about hiring talent, they're going to need to start relocating to areas that candidates can get to/live in.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
This is so true. I live in an affordable area two hours from a minor tech hub. I get plenty offers for that hub, but next to nothing nearby. I have a good enough job so I have no interest in moving. Maybe 1/10 are interested in remote work, so I tend to at least hear them out.

sdboyer 10y ago

shit, if there were an actual company with real use for Merovingian numismatics, i would work there in a heartbeat

NikolaeVarius 10y ago

I had a funny one where during the AWS S3 outage a recruiter reached out to me saying that I most likely had free time due to the outage and i should use it talking to him...

gravyboat 10y ago

A recruiter contacted me a while back with a similar act, just completely clueless. I put out ridiculous terms and informed him of a handbook I've written to help him improve. He responded by saying he was interested but only if it had data driven facts (which it doesn't). I created a coupon code to give him a free copy of the book, he never cashed it in. Recruiters are all bullshit, assume everything they say is a lie.