8 ms·
I feel like recruiters filtering by geography is a big issue at times. When I lived in Florida, I felt like I was invisible to potential employers. There were a
by octorian 8y ago
I feel like recruiters filtering by geography is a big issue at times. When I lived in Florida, I felt like I was invisible to potential employers. There were a handful of local options that didn't bite, and remote options never paid any attention to me.
The moment I relocated to Silicon Valley, I began getting bombarded by recruiters.
At my current job, I have a co-worker who told me that his classmates would often fake a Silicon Valley address (and stomach travel expenses for interviews), and it made a huge difference in the rate of companies contacting them back.
Of course most people who live in those dead towns aren't necessarily like us, and may not have degrees or experience in demanded fields. So I'm not sure our stories are applicable to the conversation.
- sytse 8y agoI think changing your LinkedIn location to San Francisco Bay area and explaining during the first call you intent to move there when you've found a job is acceptable to most companies. BTW we hire in 90% of the world at GitLab
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y agoI believe you that this is true for GitLab but I’d also imagine many companies getting somewhat pissed off about that disclosure on the first call. Interesting idea though, I may try it in the future just to see what happens.
- toomanybeersies 8y agoOn the contrary, I've seen and heard of a lot of companies that will not hire if you're not in the same city. They specifically say that you need to be in the city for interviews. They get too many applicants fishing for positions when there is no guarantee that the applicant is actually committed to moving.
- sytse 8y agoI can see that colocated companies would require you to fly in for interviews. Maybe some are open to grouping the interviews on the same day.
- dlopezgarsco 8y agoOfftopic: are developers with no ruby experience considered @gitlab? I've been thinking of applying for a long time but have no ruby experience at all.
- sytse 8y agoWe have vancancies for site reliability engineers and Go programmers. We used to hire people without Ruby experience to work on the Ruby codebase but it took significantly longer for them to be effective so we stopped doing that.
- ryandrake 8y agoThe modern equivalent of getting a 408 area code in order to avoid that recruiting filter.
- sotojuan 8y agoThe cynical side of me thinks that companies, particularly in populated areas, don't want to pay for relocation or travel for interviews. Their attitude might be "well, why would we pay for relocation/travel for someone in PA when we can probably find people in SF who already live here".
- octorian 8y agoAnd if they can't, somehow they'd rather recruit globally and play the visa lottery instead of simply recruiting from elsewhere in their own damn country.
- closeparen 8y agoFWIW, my brand-name SF employer believes that essentially all feasible Bay Area candidates have already been through its pipeline, and that future headcount growth will have to be elsewhere. Unfortunately it’s still not willing to consider remote, or to look anywhere between the top 3 most expensive US cities and the third world. At least the worldwide offices are first-party and have essentially the same people as work in the US, minus visa-related stress. You could say “pay more” but housing is a positional good - that strategy doesn’t scale.
- fapjacks 8y agoWell, it's the same thing it's always been about and always will be about as long as there is executive management: Trust is a one-way street.
- orbitur 8y agoJust anecdotal of course, but I live in a decent-sized-but-unimportant city and Bay Area recruiters have been hitting my LinkedIn inbox quite a bit in the last few months, when the last time I heard something from them was when I graduated university 6 years ago. My LinkedIn page is just a straight up listing of previous jobs, no descriptions, so I've found that kinda interesting.
- awat 8y agoGoing through this myself at the moment. Would love to move from the small city I work in remotely now to a larger city for more tech opportunities. But even within the same large multinational I work for if there isnt a sufficient salary bump compared to cost of living with no relocation leaving my small suburb I come out worse off then I started.