34 ms·

What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

174 points by lynnetye 8y ago

whataretensors 8y ago
These are all half-truths meant to avoid the real answer. They want high IQ ambitious people who don't suffer from mental illness. They will put you through strenuous interview processes as a makeshift filter for high IQ. No technical interview question I've ever been asked has anything to do with "self awareness" as Tammy pointed out. In fact self-awareness for the hyper-productive is a negative for the organization, as that individual eventually realizes they deserve a significant share of what they create and aren't getting it.
sparrish 8y ago
"Think of your resume like a poem." Roses are red, Violets are blue, I need a job, You're hiring, right?
- falcolas 8y ago
  "... I need a job, and you're hiring, too."
  - sparrish 8y ago
    Submit a pull request. We'll put that in the next iteration. <grin>
  - devmunchies 8y ago
    I need a job, `isHired = true`
- bitwize 8y ago
  Great problem solver Codes in whatever language Works for market rates
- dasmoth 8y ago
  Snowdrops are white?
nlstitch 8y ago
I think recruiters should actually start giving a shit about the lives of engineers before making demands. - Actually try to get to know and understand a person - Dont use fill-in templates - Have some actual knowledge of tech (java != .net) - Dont make offerings for positions I worked on 10 years ago during college. - Dont be greedy. To just name a few...
- jjjensen90 8y ago
  I would add to that: - Don't try to recruit me for the company I work for - Don't constantly ask me for referrals for a $500 bonus from your $20k fee
  - t1o5 8y ago
    - And don't ask me if I know "Tomcat programming language"
    - coldcode 8y ago
      I would like to here what they say when you say yes.
      - t1o5 8y ago
        The recruiter said 'I will get back soon' after when I told 'Tomcat is not a programming language'. I never heard from that recruiter again.
- sparrish 8y ago
  You're thinking of "professional recruiters". The ones listed here are just the technical hiring managers at their companies saying what they look for.
- lynnetye 8y ago
  To be completely honest, I also felt a lot of frustration towards recruiters when I first started working on Key Values. (It might be one of the reasons why I built it...) In the last year though, I've met a wide variety of people with a wide variety of responsibilities, approaches, and backgrounds, yet they all share the same job title. There are certainly awful recruiters out there, but there are also some really fantastic ones! (Just like how there are both awful and fantastic devs out there.) I've gotten to see both sides of job searching/hiring and it has been eye opening. Both sides have similar complaints of the other, which is why the process looks so darn similar to dating. My guess is that founders, CTOs, and recruiters would all probably make a list similar to yours: - Actually try to get to know and understand our company - Don't use fill-in templates - Have some actual knowledge of our industry/product - Don't focus on positions you worked on 10 years ago during college - Don't be greedy
nikanj 8y ago
I'm surprised none of them mentioned the abominable "culture match". I've heard repeated complaints that it's much more important to be a brogrammer who likes craft beers, than it is to be any good at the actual programming.
- sparrish 8y ago
  They did. Sarah Arcoleo - "It’s important to me and our whole team that we are bringing on new team members who align to our company culture and values."
- chatmasta 8y ago
  I’ve been consulting the past year and a half. Recently I decided to contact some companies just to see what the landscape was like, and if I could maybe find an interesting opportunity that also paid well. On one of the first calls I had, the recruiter heavily implied that I was “not a culture fit” after I explained that I’m only interested in a job if it pays more than I currently make consulting (this particular job paid about half that). I’m not socially inept, I know how to speak politely and it was definitely polite. I mentioned it on the first call because I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time (mine included) interviewing for a job that I wouldn’t take. The HR lady seemed completely taken aback and offended... says “we’re looking for people passionate about the problems we’re solving, even if it means taking a pay cut.” Get the f- out of here with that BS. That really grinds my gears. The company is allowed to be profit seeking but the employees are not? No thanks. I’ll stick with consulting... I like having multiple clients over one employer. I like that there are no “interviews,” just my own confidence and sales skills to pitch proposals to clients. I like the respect that clients show me that no employer ever has. I like the autonomy, the lifestyle. And yes I like getting paid more than I would at a local job. There’s nothing wrong with that.
  - nwsm 8y ago
    "I like having multiple clients over one employer. I like that there are no “interviews,” just my own confidence and sales skills to pitch proposals to clients. I like the autonomy, the lifestyle." I agree the comments on salary are ridiculous, but the last paragraph implies heavily that you are not actually a "good culture fit" for a non-consulting job.
danesparza 8y ago
I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful 'what engineers want from technical recruiters' post.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Wouldn't that just say, "To be left alone"?
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    No. When you're thinking about leaving your current job anyway, the right phone call can be golden. But, if I tell you that I'm not interested now, and probably won't be for at least the next six months, don't call me back next week.
- ng12 8y ago
  Two things: 1. Actually read my resume before sending me an email. 2. Don't offer me a pay cut to work at your silly startup.
  - CryoLogic 8y ago
    Hate that. Worst is "here is my salary range, does that work for you?" and than they say "lets have you interview first, and see if it's a good fit." - after interview "our max salary for engineers is 60% of your current pay and our benefits suck - but we have free soda and chips!"... thanks for wasting my time.
- amildie 8y ago
  Knowing that java and javascript are two different things would be a nice, although utopic, start.
  - booleandilemma 8y ago
    “Do you have any experience with APIs?”
  - 8y ago
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cleansy 8y ago
I love how they have a "share on hackernews" button on the side. As if hn let's you submit more than one url at a time. So the other way around: I would love to see tech recruiters with actual technical understanding.
- a_lifters_life 8y ago
  These aren't "technical recruiters" they're recruiter's of technical professionals.
  - cleansy 8y ago
    They used this term for themselves. > Greg Banks: Recruiting Manager at Digit, previously a technical recruiter at CourseHero. > Lana Herzig: Technical Recruiter at Dia&Co, previously at Quartet.
    - a_lifters_life 8y ago
      Yeah, well its a misnomer. Lol.
falcolas 8y ago
In my opinion: - designing your resume - EQ - having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company - Think of your resume like a poem - visual representation of their experience/resume These are great criteria for hiring a designer or marketing personnel, but these are TERRIBLE criteria for hiring a technical person. In my fantasy world, a technical resume is in a monospaced font and is eminently readable; I would expect the resume to look good in a code editor. My fantasy applicant would be very precise in the tech they list, and when asked questions, they would gripe about that technology all day long; if they can't complain about its shortcomings and pitfalls, they didn't use it. They would not match the job criteria on the posting exactly, because the criteria on the job posting is for some fantasy developer that doesn't actually exist. I would instead expect them to have figured out the core of the actual stack and list it instead. Sadly, my fantasy world doesn't exist, and we have to pretend we're designers to work around people like this who have no idea how to hire actual technical people.
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
  A good balance between highly technical and creatively designed is to write your resume with TeX.
  - dabockster 8y ago
    Is that more of a recommendation or a hard requirement? I've been using a bland resume that I thought would check all the boxes inside an ATS.
    - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
      Just a recommendation. TeX is a very engineer-oriented design tool. An interesting way to spruce up your resume.
    - alxlaz 8y ago
      It's a very good recommendation. Simply being aware that TeX/LaTeX is a thing (it's very recognizable) is something that I tend to appreciate in an engineer.
alxlaz 8y ago
I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me sum up the recruiting industry in a single quote from this material: > Watch for spelling and grammar. [..] After conducting my own A/B tests on this matter, the data showed that candidates who had untidy resumes faired less (sic!) than those with well written ones. Edit: I was going to write a longer post about what I am more interested in seeing as an engineer who does the interviewing. But most of it was obvious stuff. Instead, here's what I don't look at: - What libraries you used. Languages, maybe -- libraries? If you're past junior level, I expect you'll be able to pick up a complex one, in a field you're familiar with, in a week or two. - Length of past tenures. I gave favourable feedback for a lot of kids who, early in their careers, left from two or three jobs in a row because they were hired by large companies who then proceeded to give them completely uninteresting work that was entirely below their programming skills, without any mentoring, any meaningful source of professional growth and any timeframe for when they'll get to do some actual programming. I'm talking kids who, fresh out of school, could write a decent kernel driver, but were asked to write automated tests for REST APIs. I was never wrong about this. - Hackatons, coding competitions and the like. The former are entirely unverifiable. I've seen plenty of people claiming they went to this hackathon and wrote this application that could potentially solve the problem of water crisis in Africa, using advanced GIS algorithms and numerical optimization and machine learning and whatnot. One of them even showed me the app on their phone. Then they don't know how to iterate through a list or find the race condition in three lines of code which contain literally nothing but a function name, an initialization, and a race condition. Copy-pasting from Stack Overflow is a useful skill to have when it sits on top of other skills. The latter tend to be completely unrelated to programming in the real world. - The length of the resume. If you have enough relevant experience to fill four pages of resume, then write four damn pages of resume. A one-page resume that drops three pages of relevant stuff will put you in the same basket as someone who can barely fill that page. It's not ballast, it's stuff I can ask you about in an interview. - Layout creativity, cleanliness, typography, visual identity and the like. Pick a CV template for Word (or, if you want me to instantly like you, LaTeX). This is Andrew S. Tanenbaum's resume: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf . When you can sport one that's more impressive than his in terms of content, look into making it pretty, too.
bitwize 8y ago
Crooters never seem to be asking a whole lot, as they always seem to think I'm a "great fit" for any company currently waving money under their nose. Of course it usually takes some prodding to discover that the crooter actually knows nothing about my background, is ill qualified to determine who is a fit, and I wouldn't want to work for their client anyway.
- EADGBE 8y ago
  Upvote for "crooter"
cuddlypsycho 8y ago
"EQ and self awareness" What a crock of sh*t!! This is what happens when you pack HR departments with humanities and gender studies majors. Personally I do not read any resumes, all the hiring I've done was either by referral or through online websites like angelList. This is my process: - Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a branch hopper (2 months there, 3 moths here etc) - Check your github for samples of your code and your work ethic. (If you don't know proper git branch management you are no good to us). Opensource contributions are a major +++ - Check your StackOverflow to see how good a communicator you are (best engineers are the best teachers) - Don't bother with social media .. unless I am looking for a good excuse not to hire you. If you don't have any of the above, I will not even spend 10 seconds on you.
- arthev 8y ago
  >"Personally I do not read any resumes" >"Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a branch hopper" So... you read resumes?
  - cuddlypsycho 8y ago
    It is different. An applicant is free to put whatever they want on a resume and I will have no way of verifying it without devoting a ton of time to the process. On LinkedIn they are less likely to make stuff up. The public nature of the process keeps people a bit more honest. So yes, if I get a .pdf/.txt/.word/etc resume emailed to me I will not read it.
    - querulous 8y ago
      my linkedin profile has me listed as an oscar winning actor
      - cuddlypsycho 8y ago
        Are you an Oscar winning actor?
ohazi 8y ago
I don't want weekly updates about key values in my inbox every week, I want the bottom quarter of my phone's screen back.
alkonaut 8y ago
If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound like sales pitches with vague language? “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy” “You’ll work close to the systems” “You’ll have a central role” What systems? What is the company even doing? What about fundamental things like - where is this? - exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here? - What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs? - What tech is used, ie what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit? These questions are literally never answered in first contacts from recruiters. And of course I’m not willing to compose a response or have even a 15 minute phone conversation or a lunch meeting with a recruiter for a job that might turn out to be in the wrong city. Is this some secret to the recruiting industry that it’s bad to give away details in the initial contact, so that the candidate doesn’t just apply directly to the company? Or do I have to high expectations on these contacts? Or do I have unusual bad luck with terrible recruiters. This is obviously the opposite of what recruiters want from candidates, it’s what candidates want from recruiters. But seeing as there is obviously a gap there - does anyone have any insight in this?
- Eire_Banshee 8y ago
  This could honestly warrant an entire separate post on its own.
- gervase 8y ago
  Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring. For example, the people who are writing the job descriptions got a 1-line email, "We need to expand the engineering team; could you take care of it? Thanks!", and so they're basically having to come up with all this on their own. Their first stop is probably a Google search: "example job description software engineering" Then, they replace the buzzwords with their own buzzwords, which they probably already know, and they're done. This takes much less time than scheduling time with the engineering team, and since they'll be doing the interviews anyway, what's the harm? Their part of the job is already done. The second part is that companies are doing the same thing that applicants are doing with their resumes; they don't want to put any red flags out there, in order to keep their possible pool of matches as large as possible. There's a chance they can persuade you to ignore a red flag if they talk to you; if they list it in the job description, there's a 0% chance. Examples of information that might be excluded: > where is this? - It's in the suburbs outside Reno, NV. > exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here? - You'll be maintaining our undocumented, 12-year old legacy backend. > What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs? - I literally have no idea, I was just given a budget and a number of slots to fill. > What tech is used - Something you've never heard of, running on top of PHP 4. > what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit? - We will literally take anyone who can FizzBuzz. Finally, there are some dog-whistle/shibboleth phrasing that seems perfectly clear to the person who wrote the description, but might not be clear to you. Examples: > “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy” - You'll be working on our product that is the closest to making money (or actually makes some! who knows). > “You’ll work close to the systems” - You'll be doing some DevOps as well. > “You’ll have a central role” - We have a small team. And so on.
CryoLogic 8y ago
TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with SPA experience AND was able to build REST API's. I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and back-end services. He was convinced JavaScript only runs on browsers and I was full of shit. That was at a big-name tech startup (one of: Lyft, AirBnB, Uber, Github). Other times I've been told by recruiters things like "Sorry, we want someone with at least 5 years of Ember3 experience, not Ember2". Stupid stuff like that. I don't know if the talent shortage is real, or if companies still haven't figured out recruiting. I think it's probably actually a combo of both. I now write my resumes full of fluffy buzzwords, my GitHub is full of animated GIFS and pretty pictures and I adjust the buzzwords based on the job posting. Much higher conversion rate.
- qohen 8y ago
  TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. You know what is impressive about (at least some) technical recruiters I've met? Despite not knowing much about tech, they can pull down $300K/yr (and this is not in SF or NYC).
  - yosito 8y ago
    Is that so?
    - qohen 8y ago
      Yep. This may not be 100% right, but: think about this -- imagine you're a recruiter who is a partner in a firm, not someone just starting out and getting paid very little. Let's say you place people with average salaries of $100K. Your firm may take 20% of that. Meaning that $300K would only require placing 15 people per year -- that's a little over 1 per month. Of course, you'd have to share the revenue, pay your share of expenses, etc. But let's say you can place 2 or 3 per month on average. Or 4, whatever. At some point soon, no matter the expenses and revenue-sharing, your cut should reach $300K. It may not be so easy to place one person every week or two. But you're working with other people and maybe you have some low-paid people to do the drudge-work of sifting through resumes and so on. * An interesting point, though, about making those big bucks: the first $300K recruiter I met, some years back, told me this -- yes, you could do well working with him...but he would only hire you if you got yourself trained elsewhere. Meaning, that you'd have take a much lower paying job to start (the number $30K comes to mind, but I don't know how accurate that is -- maybe there are commissions too for successful placements? --- and, in any case, it was a while ago). So, for at least your first job, you'd probably be working at a large outfit with a lot of people, which might be competitive, with a lot of turnover, perhaps because people wash out or whatever -- whenever I talk to a recruiting firm locally that I've dealt with for a while, most (or all) of the folks I knew previously have moved on. In other words, you might not make it through the prerequisite needed to get to the $300K guy's firm (and I'm assuming you probably wouldn't start at $300K, or anywhere near that, since you'd be a junior hire). * The second guy I met who told me he was getting $300K was more recent. He was an internal recruiter -- which struck me as a bit odd, given that he was working for a startup that wasn't very large, so, unless they were to suddenly grow fast, I don't know why they'd need a recruiter that expensive around on a long-term basis, even a very good one. (It appears he moved on after being there close to a year, so maybe they reached this conclusion too...or perhaps that's the gig -- you stay as long as you're needed then move on -- or perhaps he just found a better position elsewhere). * But what do I know? I mean, if I really understood recruiting, maybe I, too, would be making $300K as a recruiter. And, if recruiting occasionally proved to be less interesting than writing software, I'm sure I could come up with ways of amusing myself, such as, say, trolling my candidate-developers by scoffing at the existence of server-side JavaScript and seeing how long I could keep a straight face arguing with them :-)
kyberias 8y ago
"Our hiring philosophy at Alto leans on hiring for experience as opposed to potential." Wow! Refreshing.
ken 8y ago
> It may seem like common sense, but having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company (whether it’s the company’s mission, product, technical challenges, or its work environment) is important. This frustrates me so much. What if I can't find a company that offers any such thing? This seems like anti-common sense to me. If you have skills at carpentry, and do a professional job, you can get a job at any construction site. Nobody cares if you have a "deep, enthusiastic, genuine interest" in the type of structure, or the challenges of woodworking, or the layout of the job site. If you have skills at programming, though, you might not even get a job these days if you can't demonstrate that you're sufficiently passionate about what exactly the company does and how they do it. This isn't a blue/white-collar distinction. I once talked to the industrial design lead at Fluke, and asked if he ended up there because he had a particular interest in test and measurement. He laughed at me and said no, not at all. He just liked industrial design, and didn't much care where he did it, or what he was designing. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it sounds like you're searching for people with passion so you can get them to work unpaid overtime for you. I don't know why else it would matter.
- amorphid 8y ago
  The way I think of it is that we haven't yet figured out concrete ways to assess whether someone can or can't be an effective developer on a team. So if you want me to hire you, and I can't directly measure your skills (because I'm a suboptimal interviewer?), then I need data points that increase my confidence that you are more likely to work out. This is a 100% contrived, but here's an example... - I run a dev team largely using Microsoft tech - You are a Java developer - I had a Java developer try out the Microsoft stuff, and quit because they decided they didn't wanna go all in on C# - If you're work experience in largely in Java, but I see you spending a lot of time writing C# in your personal time, or somehow demonstrating a passion for you, I'm more likely to think you'll be a fit. Maybe asking people to demonstrate a passion for tech is related to feeling defensive about that tech. Plenty of back-end-y developers trash talk CSS and JavaScript. Someone who works on front-end stuff all day long might not like that trend, so they filter for people excited about JavaScript, and I can't say I'd blame them for that.
jaredhansen 8y ago
Note that what "technical recruiters" want is not guaranteed to match what the hiring firms themselves want. There may not be a great solution to this problem from an applicant's perspective (because if you fail to impress the recruiter, you may forfeit the opportunity to impress a manager in subsequent practice). Still, it's worth keeping in mind, not least because your ultimate success at the company depends more on what happens after the hire than before.
andrewstuart 8y ago
I fired one of my biggest clients because they appointed an HR manager who cared most about things like whether or not the career history timeline perfectly lined up and left nothing unaccounted for - like really cared - would knock someone back after 3 tech interviews if there was a glitch in the resume. I felt it was because she really had nothing tangible to contribute to the technical assessment process so felt she must do something. I can tell you this - I'm not wasting my time recruiting for a company that does that sort of thing. Why I point this out is that many of the things that these people say they want are things that are not really very important when trying to find very scarce technical talent, but such recruiting people are happy to throw away a great developer because some unimportant thing was not present.
edem 8y ago
How do I dismiss that subscribe box that takes uo a quarter of the screen on mobile?

174 points by lynnetye 8y ago

These are all half-truths meant to avoid the real answer. They want high IQ ambitious people who don't suffer from mental illness. They will put you through strenuous interview processes as a makeshift filter for high IQ. No technical interview question I've ever been asked has anything to do with "self awareness" as Tammy pointed out. In fact self-awareness for the hyper-productive is a negative for the organization, as that individual eventually realizes they deserve a significant share of what they create and aren't getting it.

sparrish 8y ago

"Think of your resume like a poem." Roses are red, Violets are blue, I need a job, You're hiring, right?

falcolas 8y ago
"... I need a job, and you're hiring, too."
- sparrish 8y ago
  Submit a pull request. We'll put that in the next iteration. <grin>
- devmunchies 8y ago
  I need a job, `isHired = true`
bitwize 8y ago
Great problem solver Codes in whatever language Works for market rates
dasmoth 8y ago
Snowdrops are white?

nlstitch 8y ago

I think recruiters should actually start giving a shit about the lives of engineers before making demands. - Actually try to get to know and understand a person - Dont use fill-in templates - Have some actual knowledge of tech (java != .net) - Dont make offerings for positions I worked on 10 years ago during college. - Dont be greedy. To just name a few...

jjjensen90 8y ago
I would add to that: - Don't try to recruit me for the company I work for - Don't constantly ask me for referrals for a $500 bonus from your $20k fee
- t1o5 8y ago
  - And don't ask me if I know "Tomcat programming language"
  - coldcode 8y ago
    I would like to here what they say when you say yes.
    - t1o5 8y ago
      The recruiter said 'I will get back soon' after when I told 'Tomcat is not a programming language'. I never heard from that recruiter again.
sparrish 8y ago
You're thinking of "professional recruiters". The ones listed here are just the technical hiring managers at their companies saying what they look for.
lynnetye 8y ago
To be completely honest, I also felt a lot of frustration towards recruiters when I first started working on Key Values. (It might be one of the reasons why I built it...) In the last year though, I've met a wide variety of people with a wide variety of responsibilities, approaches, and backgrounds, yet they all share the same job title. There are certainly awful recruiters out there, but there are also some really fantastic ones! (Just like how there are both awful and fantastic devs out there.) I've gotten to see both sides of job searching/hiring and it has been eye opening. Both sides have similar complaints of the other, which is why the process looks so darn similar to dating. My guess is that founders, CTOs, and recruiters would all probably make a list similar to yours: - Actually try to get to know and understand our company - Don't use fill-in templates - Have some actual knowledge of our industry/product - Don't focus on positions you worked on 10 years ago during college - Don't be greedy

nikanj 8y ago

I'm surprised none of them mentioned the abominable "culture match". I've heard repeated complaints that it's much more important to be a brogrammer who likes craft beers, than it is to be any good at the actual programming.

sparrish 8y ago
They did. Sarah Arcoleo - "It’s important to me and our whole team that we are bringing on new team members who align to our company culture and values."
chatmasta 8y ago
I’ve been consulting the past year and a half. Recently I decided to contact some companies just to see what the landscape was like, and if I could maybe find an interesting opportunity that also paid well. On one of the first calls I had, the recruiter heavily implied that I was “not a culture fit” after I explained that I’m only interested in a job if it pays more than I currently make consulting (this particular job paid about half that). I’m not socially inept, I know how to speak politely and it was definitely polite. I mentioned it on the first call because I didn’t want to waste anyone’s time (mine included) interviewing for a job that I wouldn’t take. The HR lady seemed completely taken aback and offended... says “we’re looking for people passionate about the problems we’re solving, even if it means taking a pay cut.” Get the f- out of here with that BS. That really grinds my gears. The company is allowed to be profit seeking but the employees are not? No thanks. I’ll stick with consulting... I like having multiple clients over one employer. I like that there are no “interviews,” just my own confidence and sales skills to pitch proposals to clients. I like the respect that clients show me that no employer ever has. I like the autonomy, the lifestyle. And yes I like getting paid more than I would at a local job. There’s nothing wrong with that.
- nwsm 8y ago
  "I like having multiple clients over one employer. I like that there are no “interviews,” just my own confidence and sales skills to pitch proposals to clients. I like the autonomy, the lifestyle." I agree the comments on salary are ridiculous, but the last paragraph implies heavily that you are not actually a "good culture fit" for a non-consulting job.

danesparza 8y ago

I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful 'what engineers want from technical recruiters' post.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
Wouldn't that just say, "To be left alone"?
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  No. When you're thinking about leaving your current job anyway, the right phone call can be golden. But, if I tell you that I'm not interested now, and probably won't be for at least the next six months, don't call me back next week.
ng12 8y ago
Two things: 1. Actually read my resume before sending me an email. 2. Don't offer me a pay cut to work at your silly startup.
- CryoLogic 8y ago
  Hate that. Worst is "here is my salary range, does that work for you?" and than they say "lets have you interview first, and see if it's a good fit." - after interview "our max salary for engineers is 60% of your current pay and our benefits suck - but we have free soda and chips!"... thanks for wasting my time.
amildie 8y ago
Knowing that java and javascript are two different things would be a nice, although utopic, start.
- booleandilemma 8y ago
  “Do you have any experience with APIs?”
- 8y ago

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cleansy 8y ago

I love how they have a "share on hackernews" button on the side. As if hn let's you submit more than one url at a time. So the other way around: I would love to see tech recruiters with actual technical understanding.

a_lifters_life 8y ago
These aren't "technical recruiters" they're recruiter's of technical professionals.
- cleansy 8y ago
  They used this term for themselves. > Greg Banks: Recruiting Manager at Digit, previously a technical recruiter at CourseHero. > Lana Herzig: Technical Recruiter at Dia&Co, previously at Quartet.
  - a_lifters_life 8y ago
    Yeah, well its a misnomer. Lol.

falcolas 8y ago

In my opinion: - designing your resume - EQ - having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company - Think of your resume like a poem - visual representation of their experience/resume These are great criteria for hiring a designer or marketing personnel, but these are TERRIBLE criteria for hiring a technical person. In my fantasy world, a technical resume is in a monospaced font and is eminently readable; I would expect the resume to look good in a code editor. My fantasy applicant would be very precise in the tech they list, and when asked questions, they would gripe about that technology all day long; if they can't complain about its shortcomings and pitfalls, they didn't use it. They would not match the job criteria on the posting exactly, because the criteria on the job posting is for some fantasy developer that doesn't actually exist. I would instead expect them to have figured out the core of the actual stack and list it instead. Sadly, my fantasy world doesn't exist, and we have to pretend we're designers to work around people like this who have no idea how to hire actual technical people.

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
A good balance between highly technical and creatively designed is to write your resume with TeX.
- dabockster 8y ago
  Is that more of a recommendation or a hard requirement? I've been using a bland resume that I thought would check all the boxes inside an ATS.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
    Just a recommendation. TeX is a very engineer-oriented design tool. An interesting way to spruce up your resume.
  - alxlaz 8y ago
    It's a very good recommendation. Simply being aware that TeX/LaTeX is a thing (it's very recognizable) is something that I tend to appreciate in an engineer.

alxlaz 8y ago

I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me sum up the recruiting industry in a single quote from this material: > Watch for spelling and grammar. [..] After conducting my own A/B tests on this matter, the data showed that candidates who had untidy resumes faired less (sic!) than those with well written ones. Edit: I was going to write a longer post about what I am more interested in seeing as an engineer who does the interviewing. But most of it was obvious stuff. Instead, here's what I don't look at: - What libraries you used. Languages, maybe -- libraries? If you're past junior level, I expect you'll be able to pick up a complex one, in a field you're familiar with, in a week or two. - Length of past tenures. I gave favourable feedback for a lot of kids who, early in their careers, left from two or three jobs in a row because they were hired by large companies who then proceeded to give them completely uninteresting work that was entirely below their programming skills, without any mentoring, any meaningful source of professional growth and any timeframe for when they'll get to do some actual programming. I'm talking kids who, fresh out of school, could write a decent kernel driver, but were asked to write automated tests for REST APIs. I was never wrong about this. - Hackatons, coding competitions and the like. The former are entirely unverifiable. I've seen plenty of people claiming they went to this hackathon and wrote this application that could potentially solve the problem of water crisis in Africa, using advanced GIS algorithms and numerical optimization and machine learning and whatnot. One of them even showed me the app on their phone. Then they don't know how to iterate through a list or find the race condition in three lines of code which contain literally nothing but a function name, an initialization, and a race condition. Copy-pasting from Stack Overflow is a useful skill to have when it sits on top of other skills. The latter tend to be completely unrelated to programming in the real world. - The length of the resume. If you have enough relevant experience to fill four pages of resume, then write four damn pages of resume. A one-page resume that drops three pages of relevant stuff will put you in the same basket as someone who can barely fill that page. It's not ballast, it's stuff I can ask you about in an interview. - Layout creativity, cleanliness, typography, visual identity and the like. Pick a CV template for Word (or, if you want me to instantly like you, LaTeX). This is Andrew S. Tanenbaum's resume: https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/home/cv.pdf . When you can sport one that's more impressive than his in terms of content, look into making it pretty, too.

bitwize 8y ago

Crooters never seem to be asking a whole lot, as they always seem to think I'm a "great fit" for any company currently waving money under their nose. Of course it usually takes some prodding to discover that the crooter actually knows nothing about my background, is ill qualified to determine who is a fit, and I wouldn't want to work for their client anyway.

EADGBE 8y ago
Upvote for "crooter"

cuddlypsycho 8y ago

"EQ and self awareness" What a crock of sh*t!! This is what happens when you pack HR departments with humanities and gender studies majors. Personally I do not read any resumes, all the hiring I've done was either by referral or through online websites like angelList. This is my process: - Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a branch hopper (2 months there, 3 moths here etc) - Check your github for samples of your code and your work ethic. (If you don't know proper git branch management you are no good to us). Opensource contributions are a major +++ - Check your StackOverflow to see how good a communicator you are (best engineers are the best teachers) - Don't bother with social media .. unless I am looking for a good excuse not to hire you. If you don't have any of the above, I will not even spend 10 seconds on you.

arthev 8y ago
>"Personally I do not read any resumes" >"Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a branch hopper" So... you read resumes?
- cuddlypsycho 8y ago
  It is different. An applicant is free to put whatever they want on a resume and I will have no way of verifying it without devoting a ton of time to the process. On LinkedIn they are less likely to make stuff up. The public nature of the process keeps people a bit more honest. So yes, if I get a .pdf/.txt/.word/etc resume emailed to me I will not read it.
  - querulous 8y ago
    my linkedin profile has me listed as an oscar winning actor
    - cuddlypsycho 8y ago
      Are you an Oscar winning actor?

ohazi 8y ago

I don't want weekly updates about key values in my inbox every week, I want the bottom quarter of my phone's screen back.

alkonaut 8y ago

If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound like sales pitches with vague language? “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy” “You’ll work close to the systems” “You’ll have a central role” What systems? What is the company even doing? What about fundamental things like - where is this? - exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here? - What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs? - What tech is used, ie what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit? These questions are literally never answered in first contacts from recruiters. And of course I’m not willing to compose a response or have even a 15 minute phone conversation or a lunch meeting with a recruiter for a job that might turn out to be in the wrong city. Is this some secret to the recruiting industry that it’s bad to give away details in the initial contact, so that the candidate doesn’t just apply directly to the company? Or do I have to high expectations on these contacts? Or do I have unusual bad luck with terrible recruiters. This is obviously the opposite of what recruiters want from candidates, it’s what candidates want from recruiters. But seeing as there is obviously a gap there - does anyone have any insight in this?

Eire_Banshee 8y ago
This could honestly warrant an entire separate post on its own.
gervase 8y ago
Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring. For example, the people who are writing the job descriptions got a 1-line email, "We need to expand the engineering team; could you take care of it? Thanks!", and so they're basically having to come up with all this on their own. Their first stop is probably a Google search: "example job description software engineering" Then, they replace the buzzwords with their own buzzwords, which they probably already know, and they're done. This takes much less time than scheduling time with the engineering team, and since they'll be doing the interviews anyway, what's the harm? Their part of the job is already done. The second part is that companies are doing the same thing that applicants are doing with their resumes; they don't want to put any red flags out there, in order to keep their possible pool of matches as large as possible. There's a chance they can persuade you to ignore a red flag if they talk to you; if they list it in the job description, there's a 0% chance. Examples of information that might be excluded: > where is this? - It's in the suburbs outside Reno, NV. > exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here? - You'll be maintaining our undocumented, 12-year old legacy backend. > What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs? - I literally have no idea, I was just given a budget and a number of slots to fill. > What tech is used - Something you've never heard of, running on top of PHP 4. > what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit? - We will literally take anyone who can FizzBuzz. Finally, there are some dog-whistle/shibboleth phrasing that seems perfectly clear to the person who wrote the description, but might not be clear to you. Examples: > “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy” - You'll be working on our product that is the closest to making money (or actually makes some! who knows). > “You’ll work close to the systems” - You'll be doing some DevOps as well. > “You’ll have a central role” - We have a small team. And so on.

CryoLogic 8y ago

TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with SPA experience AND was able to build REST API's. I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and back-end services. He was convinced JavaScript only runs on browsers and I was full of shit. That was at a big-name tech startup (one of: Lyft, AirBnB, Uber, Github). Other times I've been told by recruiters things like "Sorry, we want someone with at least 5 years of Ember3 experience, not Ember2". Stupid stuff like that. I don't know if the talent shortage is real, or if companies still haven't figured out recruiting. I think it's probably actually a combo of both. I now write my resumes full of fluffy buzzwords, my GitHub is full of animated GIFS and pretty pictures and I adjust the buzzwords based on the job posting. Much higher conversion rate.

qohen 8y ago
TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. You know what is impressive about (at least some) technical recruiters I've met? Despite not knowing much about tech, they can pull down $300K/yr (and this is not in SF or NYC).
- yosito 8y ago
  Is that so?
  - qohen 8y ago
    Yep. This may not be 100% right, but: think about this -- imagine you're a recruiter who is a partner in a firm, not someone just starting out and getting paid very little. Let's say you place people with average salaries of $100K. Your firm may take 20% of that. Meaning that $300K would only require placing 15 people per year -- that's a little over 1 per month. Of course, you'd have to share the revenue, pay your share of expenses, etc. But let's say you can place 2 or 3 per month on average. Or 4, whatever. At some point soon, no matter the expenses and revenue-sharing, your cut should reach $300K. It may not be so easy to place one person every week or two. But you're working with other people and maybe you have some low-paid people to do the drudge-work of sifting through resumes and so on. * An interesting point, though, about making those big bucks: the first $300K recruiter I met, some years back, told me this -- yes, you could do well working with him...but he would only hire you if you got yourself trained elsewhere. Meaning, that you'd have take a much lower paying job to start (the number $30K comes to mind, but I don't know how accurate that is -- maybe there are commissions too for successful placements? --- and, in any case, it was a while ago). So, for at least your first job, you'd probably be working at a large outfit with a lot of people, which might be competitive, with a lot of turnover, perhaps because people wash out or whatever -- whenever I talk to a recruiting firm locally that I've dealt with for a while, most (or all) of the folks I knew previously have moved on. In other words, you might not make it through the prerequisite needed to get to the $300K guy's firm (and I'm assuming you probably wouldn't start at $300K, or anywhere near that, since you'd be a junior hire). * The second guy I met who told me he was getting $300K was more recent. He was an internal recruiter -- which struck me as a bit odd, given that he was working for a startup that wasn't very large, so, unless they were to suddenly grow fast, I don't know why they'd need a recruiter that expensive around on a long-term basis, even a very good one. (It appears he moved on after being there close to a year, so maybe they reached this conclusion too...or perhaps that's the gig -- you stay as long as you're needed then move on -- or perhaps he just found a better position elsewhere). * But what do I know? I mean, if I really understood recruiting, maybe I, too, would be making $300K as a recruiter. And, if recruiting occasionally proved to be less interesting than writing software, I'm sure I could come up with ways of amusing myself, such as, say, trolling my candidate-developers by scoffing at the existence of server-side JavaScript and seeing how long I could keep a straight face arguing with them :-)

kyberias 8y ago

"Our hiring philosophy at Alto leans on hiring for experience as opposed to potential." Wow! Refreshing.

ken 8y ago

> It may seem like common sense, but having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company (whether it’s the company’s mission, product, technical challenges, or its work environment) is important. This frustrates me so much. What if I can't find a company that offers any such thing? This seems like anti-common sense to me. If you have skills at carpentry, and do a professional job, you can get a job at any construction site. Nobody cares if you have a "deep, enthusiastic, genuine interest" in the type of structure, or the challenges of woodworking, or the layout of the job site. If you have skills at programming, though, you might not even get a job these days if you can't demonstrate that you're sufficiently passionate about what exactly the company does and how they do it. This isn't a blue/white-collar distinction. I once talked to the industrial design lead at Fluke, and asked if he ended up there because he had a particular interest in test and measurement. He laughed at me and said no, not at all. He just liked industrial design, and didn't much care where he did it, or what he was designing. If I didn't know any better, I'd say it sounds like you're searching for people with passion so you can get them to work unpaid overtime for you. I don't know why else it would matter.

amorphid 8y ago
The way I think of it is that we haven't yet figured out concrete ways to assess whether someone can or can't be an effective developer on a team. So if you want me to hire you, and I can't directly measure your skills (because I'm a suboptimal interviewer?), then I need data points that increase my confidence that you are more likely to work out. This is a 100% contrived, but here's an example... - I run a dev team largely using Microsoft tech - You are a Java developer - I had a Java developer try out the Microsoft stuff, and quit because they decided they didn't wanna go all in on C# - If you're work experience in largely in Java, but I see you spending a lot of time writing C# in your personal time, or somehow demonstrating a passion for you, I'm more likely to think you'll be a fit. Maybe asking people to demonstrate a passion for tech is related to feeling defensive about that tech. Plenty of back-end-y developers trash talk CSS and JavaScript. Someone who works on front-end stuff all day long might not like that trend, so they filter for people excited about JavaScript, and I can't say I'd blame them for that.

jaredhansen 8y ago

Note that what "technical recruiters" want is not guaranteed to match what the hiring firms themselves want. There may not be a great solution to this problem from an applicant's perspective (because if you fail to impress the recruiter, you may forfeit the opportunity to impress a manager in subsequent practice). Still, it's worth keeping in mind, not least because your ultimate success at the company depends more on what happens after the hire than before.

andrewstuart 8y ago

I fired one of my biggest clients because they appointed an HR manager who cared most about things like whether or not the career history timeline perfectly lined up and left nothing unaccounted for - like really cared - would knock someone back after 3 tech interviews if there was a glitch in the resume. I felt it was because she really had nothing tangible to contribute to the technical assessment process so felt she must do something. I can tell you this - I'm not wasting my time recruiting for a company that does that sort of thing. Why I point this out is that many of the things that these people say they want are things that are not really very important when trying to find very scarce technical talent, but such recruiting people are happy to throw away a great developer because some unimportant thing was not present.

edem 8y ago

How do I dismiss that subscribe box that takes uo a quarter of the screen on mobile?