16 ms·

Technical Recruiting Needs to Focus on Selling the Position

151 points by leerob 8y ago

steelframe 8y ago
Perhaps what you really mean is that technical recruiting by Big Companies is broken?
- leerob 8y ago
  Not necessarily. Yes, as a company grows and it works to hire faster, it’s probable the quality of hiring/recruiting will decrease. That doesn’t mean that startups or small company have recruiting perfected.
- seattle_spring 8y ago
  Not really. I get way more horrible, poorly targeted recruiter spam from crappy SV startups than I do large companies. In fact, the large companies usually actually read my profile. Edit: It does depend on the "class" of large company though. I get truly shit-tier spam from C-list companies like GE, Boeing, or Panasonic ("Hey, interested in relocating to Missouri for a $18.27 hourly Java contract!?") Tier A companies like FB, Google, etc. always send great recruiting messages that suggest they read my profile and did at least some due diligence matching it to an appropriate position.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  I get much more inappropriate recruiting advances from startups and small companies than I do by big ones.
purplezooey 8y ago
"genuine, personal connections" Isn't that kind of a high bar to jump over for this?
- dvtrn 8y ago
  If as a recruiter, a job role that is 100% predicated on your ability to work with people, and sell people on why they should ostensibly hire other people, if you can't make even a basic personal connection with someone (you don't have to be their best friend and offer to give them a ride to the interview and wait outside in the car for them to come out-but I can tell the difference between someone who's interested to have a conversation and someone just trying to hit a goal and I bet you could too), probably the recruiting industry is a poor fit, career wise. It's the product of time and experience, but I can smell a "quota" recruiter a mile away. I do not want to work with them.
  - leerob 8y ago
    Absolutely agree. Plus, I’d rather set the bar high for hiring than settle for mediocrity.
    - chillydawg 8y ago
      Tell that to the mid level exec who's got 200 seats to fill to hit his bonus pot, after which he's outta there. Leaving the company to deal with the 190 terrible coders he hired, naturally.
      - dvtrn 8y ago
        Extending the metaphor to the most possible extreme of course allows us to make the endlessly convenient counterpoints, but I think this skips over a big portion of necessary nuance to why someone may feel a bit turned off by a robotic, starched and ultimately dispassionate experience with recruiters.
- bassman9000 8y ago
  Isn't the hiring process too? Standard today seems to be - 1-2 phone screen interviews - 1-2 remote coding exercises/interviews - 4-5 45-60min round of interviews, on site - Optionally, and extra interview day for culture fit Is asking the recruiter to actually look at your profile and take an interest too much to ask, given what they're asking you for, and given how the market, at least in SV-like areas, is today? It's great to work in this industry, don't get me wrong. But if some candidates don't want to even acknowledge automated requests, that's just how the market works.
  - lovetocode 8y ago
    This isn’t my experience. I have never done more than two interviews for a position. None of which involved coding or exercises. Perhaps this is the standard for businesses in the valley.
lxe 8y ago
This is about scale. Technical recruiters sometimes need to be able to reach out to hundreds and maybe thousands of candidates at once, and making "personal connections" does not scale in this case. Even if they automagically parse the keywords and plug them into a template, sometimes things are missed and mis-placed (Java vs JavaScript, etc...).
- leerob 8y ago
  I understand the current recruiting ecosystem is largely the way it is due to scale. Companies need a lot of talent and they need it last week. Hence, blasting out thousands of emails (e.g. the Amazon recruiter I mentioned). I’m simply trying to challenge that status quo. There has to be a better way. I’ll admit I don’t have the answer, largely because I’ve never worked as a recruiter, but it seems like the process is broken for recruitees.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  If the numbers being thrown around are accurate (e.g. $30,000 for a single hire) then the amount of time it’s reasonable to expect someone to spend on a single job is on the order of months. That time needn’t be spent all the end either. Someone could work his way up to knowing most of the several hundred experts in whatever technology in whatever city and have a nice little thing going. Of course that doesn’t scratch that get rich quick “scaling” itch that spamming my inbox with an automagic template does.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  But sending vague initial messages to hundreds of candidates and saying they are a great match and that they want to discuss over the phone can’t scale! It must be much better to just give the basic info (level, tech stack, location, salary range, job description ...) so that you don’t waste time calling people who will realize 10 minutes into the call that the position is in the wrong city or whatever. If such a message actually leads to a phone call, then it’s bound to be with the most desperte candidates and not with the best match candidates. If they send out a more detailed message to 1000 people, and get responses from 25, then there should be time to research these candidates further to build a personal connection, including having a phone call.
leerob 8y ago
I'm not sure why the title of the posting was changed. The title of the article is "Technical Recruiting is Broken".
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Personally, I found the (more specific) current title very helpful in deciding to click through. "Technical Recruiting is Broken" is awfully vague -- not to mention that I'm pretty sure I've seen blog posts with that title before -- and (for what it's worth) I would have continued scrolling right past it. You have a distinct, concrete facet of recruiting that you're talking about -- which is great! -- and the current HN title accurately reflects that.
  - cubano 8y ago
    "Technical Recruiting is Broken" is very click-baity IMO, as the "is broken" bon mot has become rather popular and reveals absolutely nothing about what the article is about.
    - leerob 8y ago
      True - perhaps my overly simplistic title was not the best choice. Well, thanks to the mods for rephrasing it.
rm999 8y ago
I'm not a recruiter, but I spend a lot of my time building up teams so I figure that makes me a de facto recruiter. I've personally gone both extremes: 1. Spamming linkedin, message boards, etc. 2. Seeking out specific candidates, emailing them, offering to grab coffee or do a call. I've had more success hiring with #2, in which regard I agree with the article. But it comes with a perverse side-effect: I am ignoring 95% of potential candidates, likely a similar group everyone else is ignoring. I am mostly contacting people with years of experience at good companies with a decent web presence. Because if I didn't, I wouldn't have time to do my other job duties. When I (or our internal technical recruiters) spam out a job we are giving more people a chance at the job, and are introducing fewer personal biases. I'm not saying either approach is right or wrong, I just think there's room for both. Maybe the ultimate solution is a single centralized marketplace for jobs, but it doesn't seem like there's been a clear winner in this space.
- leerob 8y ago
  Thanks for the insight. Some really good points here, especially: > When I (or our internal technical recruiters) spam out a job we are giving more people a chance at the job, and are introducing fewer personal biases. That is something I didn't even consider, but you're absolutely right. You're naturally going to be more attracted to candidates who fit your profile (unless, of course, you're _really_ aware of your unconscious bias). I think spamming LinkedIn can have success if you properly target and give ample information on who, what, and why. Something I didn't even consider until this was posted on Reddit was the fact that even though I have Java listed in "do not want", it's still going to be picked up as a keyword.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  Maybe you stumbled on an honest reason why recruiters exist?
lordnacho 8y ago
> Good recruiters focus on building relationships versus solving an immediate need. The problem is they get paid only when immediate needs are met. A placement is hard to do, but results in 25% of an annual salary when done. This results in two kinds of strategy: 1) Spammers. I get this all the time on both sides (as a hiring manager and as a potential hire). The worst is when I get forwarded someone's actual CV out of the blue. It's happened a couple of times recently: a guy who works at Google or Amazon at a high level has his CV sent to me by a recruiter who's never spoken to me. In both cases I found the person on LinkedIn and told them, much to their surprise. Of course there was never a conversation on the other side either. Normally it's not as egregious as this, but it's still not a way to do business. 2) Relationship people. These guys will actually take the time to meet with me and talk about what kind of stuff I do. Both as a hiring manager and a potential hire, there's no sense that they are bucketing me in either, we can potentially do either business. There's no sense of urgency either, just two people discussing the market. I've made business contacts through recruiters this way, nothing expected in return, no hard sell. I've told them we're not even using recruiters, and they still check in for a coffee now and again. I do try to throw something their way, esp when it comes to giving them candidates. The big problem for the good guys is they somehow have to get paid while maintaining all these low probability relationships. Not only that, they actually need to speak intelligently about every technology and business in the market. They need to know what kind of thing c++ is, how it's different from JS, and what kind of function it might be useful for. This is no easy task. You can easily see how someone needing to feed themselves could get desperate and go for some version of spamming.
- leerob 8y ago
  > The big problem for the good guys is they somehow have to get paid while maintaining all these low probability relationships. Not only that, they actually need to speak intelligently about every technology and business in the market. They need to know what kind of thing c++ is, how it's different from JS, and what kind of function it might be useful for. This is no easy task. Very good point. I have a few friends who are recruiters (with no technical experience before starting) and I had to give them the 101 on programming languages and how they differ ("No, C and C++ are not the same thing. There's also C#"). I can imagine a recruiter in today's landscape probably spends a decent amount of time learning about the tech industry just to keep up. I'm not sure I have a solution for monetizing the good relationships, though.
danielovichdk 8y ago
It often seems that recruiters think they are doing one a favor by offering you this shiny new job. I am so tired of the mono directional process where you have no idea really, what you are getting into before you have been working somewhere for at least 3 months. Recruiting is about personality and knowing how people thrive in a certain environment. They are so low in the food chain, IMO, that I find it really difficult to take any of them serious.
- leerob 8y ago
  > It often seems that recruiters think they are doing one a favor by offering you this shiny new job. Exactly. The people they're trying to recruit already have a job. So they're going to need to sell us on the position. _Especially_ if I've never heard of the company.
hash872 8y ago
Yes, spamming is bad, and yes, recruiters should read your profile prior to messaging, but for practical reasons the actual outreach message is gonna be largely not personalized other than with your name. Reading an individual developer's Medium posts and then crafting an individualized message based on that is, like, the definition of unscaleable. It's like insisting that cars not be manufactured in factories anymore, but instead be lovingly hand-crafted for each individual owner, one car at a time. This is obviously economically impossible. Also, in practice, the actual response rate for way-personalized messages isn't much higher. It just doesn't make sense in practice. If there are say 500 Node.js developers with the right amount of experience & CS degrees in a given metro area, the amount of time it would take to research each individual and craft a personalized message based on their Github or Medium posts or Stack Overflow answers or Twitter is literally 10,000x what it takes to just shoot each of then an InMail or e-mail. Again, a recruiter should read each profile to make sure they're on the right track, but the messages are likely going to be mass-produced
- leerob 8y ago
  /u/rm999 had experience with both spamming and personalized messages and had more success with the latter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186331
  - hash872 8y ago
    Without quantifying anything it's kind of meaningless. The point is that recruiting is a business process and that we should treat like any other type of process, by being systematic. The information we need is how many interested people responded with a generic message vs. how many responded to the personalized message, and the amount of time spent on each approach. Note that 'responded' here is defined as 'I'd like to pursue this opportunity' or 'I'd like to learn more' which then leads to them pursing the opportunity. Not social niceties like 'I'm not looking but it's wonderful that you took the time to read my Medium posts, you're so different from the other recruiters', etc.
raincom 8y ago
The business of recruiting has changed in the last two decades. In late 90's, recruiters used to know candidates in person, and know what they were doing, etc. Now recruiters work like assembly line workers or offshored workers, who have no clue beyond buzz words. If your profile matches with one of the buzz words, you get spam.
xavk 8y ago
> Good recruiters focus on building relationships versus solving an immediate need. This is exactly the focus of the startup we're launching in London this summer. I'd love to chat to people from HN about their experiences with this. Contact details on my profile.
- leerob 8y ago
  Thank you for setting a positive example of how recruiting should be done!
henrik_w 8y ago
This matches my experience too. In my opinion, the way to sell the job is to explicitly mention all the advantages - the company name, the tech stack, why it is a great place to work etc. The most annoying recruiters are the ones that have "a fantastic opportunity" and want to set up a phone call to sell it. I work in Stockholm, Sweden, and I have noticed that recruiters from England often try to talk to you instead of simply listing the position(s). Extra points for the recruiter if they write something indicating why I would be a good fit - only happens rarely. Also, checking back later (a year or two) to see if I am open to a change, even if I wasn't before, is OK by me. Sometimes you don't want to change, no matter what the offer is. We developers should not complain too much about recruiters though - we are extremely lucky to work in a field where there is such high demand. Most people aren't so lucky. I also think being contacted by a recruiter puts you in a great bargaining position: You are in a much better position to negotiate salary and benefits than if you applied directly. You already have a job, so if the offer isn’t interesting enough or good enough, you can just say no. I wrote a post similar to this a few years ago, making the above points: https://henrikwarne.com/2015/11/22/recruiting-software-developers-initial-contact/ https://henrikwarne.com/2015/11/22/recruiting-software-devel...
- leerob 8y ago
  Thanks for sharing your post. You make some similar points, but also a couple I hadn't hit on. > We developers should not complain too much about recruiters though - we are extremely lucky to work in a field where there is such high demand. Absolutely - That's something I wish I would have touched on in my post. I didn't want it to sound too "woe is me" that I have people reaching out to offer me a job. > I also think being contacted by a recruiter puts you in a great bargaining position I'll echo your points and salary and benefits, but also mentioned that sometimes recruiters will have an in with the hiring manager, versus going through HR when applying directly (which could get lost in a pile).
- nickjj 8y ago
  Being able to say no thanks is great in general. You always get the best deals when you don't need that "something" right now.
- 8y ago
opportune 8y ago
I’ve had recruiters try to set up a call before even telling me the name of the company, big red flag. Last time they did that it was because they wanted to hide that the position was machine learning to make murder robots
- leerob 8y ago
  I've had this happen a handful of times actually. I could be wrong, but I think their fear is that you would directly apply and bypass their services.
  - opportune 8y ago
    The thing is, when they do that you have no idea if it’s some shitty bodyshop looking for people with pulses or a cool company that you’d love to work for, so you have no opportunity to do research into the company before dedicating time to call someone. I don’t see the benefit of bypassing their services since recruiters are usually a decent foot in the door, but maybe I’m missing something
  - jacobyoder 8y ago
    The recruiters I've known would document their outreach to you, and notify the company that'd we'd spoken. If they'd specifically contacted me, the I bypassed them, they may still get paid somehow (but I'd lose whatever bargaining skills they might bring to the process)>.
    - leerob 8y ago
      Good to know. That makes sense.
    - hash872 8y ago
      >If they'd specifically contacted me, the I bypassed them, they may still get paid somehow This is not true at all
      - jacobyoder 8y ago
saagarjha 8y ago
Psst…you might want to blur those names out more (or even put boxes over them), since it’s possible to make them out if you squint.
- leerob 8y ago
  Thanks - I could see how if you really zoom in you might be able to make out some letters. Just deployed new images that are more blurred.
curtis 8y ago
Can we get rid of recruiters altogether? Yeah, I know that's an absurd idea, and I don't know any way we could really do that. But we are always going to have problems if we continue to insist on having non-technical people serve as the initial point of contact for technical positions.
- scarface74 8y ago
  I don’t need them to be technical. I just need them to put me in contact with companies, tell me where I am in the process and tell me the salary range. The last is the hardest to get from job listings.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  Met with a company at a conference last year. They were there at a booth saying "we're hiring people". Met, talked some, they indicated I wouldn't be a good fit. Got a call from a recruiter last week, and... have already had and passed a first call screen, another tech call set up for this week. I realize a lot can change in a 6 month period, but... it's also slightly frustrating. If I was paranoid, I might say it's ageism at play (I have visibly gray hair and certainly couldn't pass for late 20s anymore). But I suspect there's multiple factors at play here which still make 'going through a recruiter' somehow feel like a safer bet for some companies.
- jvreagan 8y ago
  Better yet, take the %age that goes to the recruiter and give it to the candidate. Seems like a better way to close new hires.
- marcinzm 8y ago
  As I see it technical people don't want to do the mundane repetitive and boring tasks that a recruiter does. And introverted technical people, which many are, especially don't want to spend significant time socializing with random other people. You can try to automate the whole process, which various companies are doing, but keeping the spam out is difficult. And bad automation is also even worse to deal with than a human recruiter.
augbog 8y ago
title is a bit click baity. It's not broken just poorly done. I agree with a lot of the thoughts though.
ryanianian 8y ago
I've started giving formulaic recruiter responses to recruiters that send formulaic inquiries. My response is along the lines of > Dear PERSON. Thanks for reaching out. I'm happy where I am but for $Y base salary with SOME_OTHER_BENEFITS I would consider a move. Let me know if that sounds reasonable for your team otherwise I will be in touch if anything changes. Feel free to reach out again in 6-12 months either way. This is a bit cold and focused on the money, but recruiters are usually sending the same emails anyway - as the article points out. Ultimately why waste everyone's time if you wouldn't really consider a move anyway? In the 4 months since I've been doing this, almost every recruiter that has responded has responded with "thanks for responding and thanks for being up front." To be "honest" with this approach, put a number in $Y that would really really make you consider changing jobs. 1.5x your current salary? Double if you're super happy where you are? Maybe SOME_OTHER_BENEFITS becomes "really high equity percentage" or "fully remote" or "work 3 days a week"? I put my $Y pretty high so most companies can't afford me, but I've got 1 or 2 companies that may be able to pay it in the pipe. Win-win.
- leerob 8y ago
  I really like this idea and I think I'm going to start using a similar approach. Thanks!
- rapfaria 8y ago
  If every recruiter has responded "thanks for responding and thanks for being up front.", it just means a wasted opportunity. Some of them could probably give you the $Y, but might think that the only thing you consider is money - and you know how HR is. I know the game sucks either way, but I'd rephrase your answer a little and use it as a second e-mail, not first.
  - ryanianian 8y ago
    It depends on how formulaic the recruiter inquiry was. Like the article I have a few things indicated on my profile and writings of things that I do and do not want to do. If it's clear they've done little work I will in turn do very little work. If they seem like they've taken a bit of an interest in me and are seemingly pleasant I'll be a bit more personalized and maybe not break out the salary requirements until the second email.
nkingsy 8y ago
In my most recent job search, I was really surprised to find that about half of my initial calls were with engineering managers, not recruiters. They're certainly in a better position to sell the company, but I found that I was uncomfortable asking the basic "how much, what are the benefits, what's the work life balance" type questions that I would generally want to get out of the way before being sold.
vkaku 8y ago
Oh Please. Anytime someone tries to hard sell a position, I'm usually just impressed by their sales skills but I know that it usually sends a red flag for me.
foobiekr 8y ago
"Executive recruiting" basically works this way. They talk to you about your history and interests and then follow up with a dossier of possible projects/GMs that they will introduce you to in order to see if there is a fit. The whole process is very personalized. This is basically the terminal point of engineering recruiting, though.
joeax 8y ago
The real problem is the signal-to-noise ratio in legitimate, well-focused recruiter emails to the typical recruiter spam one receives on a daily basis. I sometimes miss the legitimate emails, and although I am not usually looking, I like to respond with a friendly reply asking to keep in touch.
alkonaut 8y ago
Can someone with any insight in the recruiting business help me understand how the bad recruiters think? Typically you get a vague recruiter spam type message on email/LinkedIn which seems to deliberately avoid saying anything about the position. Based on this they want a phone call. why do they write the messages in a way they must surely understand does not make any employed developer eager to change jobs? Usually I answer that without more information up front I’m not interested in having a phone call, and I add some questions like “what in particular did you mean when you said I seemed like a good fit for this role?” or “what’s the role/seniority more exactly?” Invariably the answer to that is: ”I can’t disclose this other than over the phone” what? The recruiter now has to be 100% aware that they risk losing this candidate because they couldn’t reveal basic information about the position in an email. So why is that? Are these some kind of low level minion recruiters who work on a commission based on how many phone calls they do, rather than by commission for the actual recruiting? That’s the only reason I can think of! What actually is stopping recruiters from writing - you’ll work language Z mainly. The team uses tools X and Y. - The person they are looking for is a Senior back end developer - the work is product based, not contracting - the team is 40 people - The position is in northern City X with occasional travel WHY is it never like that? Why is it always some mumbling about “growth opportunities” and how I’m a “good match” and so on?
- pandaman 8y ago
  From my experience there could be different reasons: 1. They want to learn something they are not legally allowed to ask. Most likely your salary (not legal in California), but also citizenship (required for export license jobs but still illegal to ask in the US) , guess your age, gender, race etc. 2. They think they are very good at persuasion and will manage to sell you their crappy job if only they can get your ear. 3. As you said, some agencies have metrics they need to meet every month and those include number of calls. I learned this is from reading recruiters rants on Linkedin.
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    > citizenship (required for export license jobs but still illegal to ask in the US) Surely it cannot be illegal to ask about citizenship if it's a requirement for the job?
ctab 8y ago
The author of the OP lists in his LinkedIn profile things that he wants and does not want in a job, but saying "I am not interested in X" is a little counterproductive if that causes your profile to come up in keyword searches for "X". For related reasons I no longer mention on my resume that I have Magento experience. :)
bradknowles 8y ago
This is why I deleted my LinkedIn profile.
mnm1 8y ago
To be honest, without getting the salary range up front or within the first email exchange, I typically end the interaction there. I've had way too many days and weeks wasted only to find out the company can barely pay 2/3 of my current salary. I don't care how great the perks are or job is, if you can't pay competitively, I'm not wasting my time. The rest is just details including tech stack etc. The right amount of money for the right job could easily make me overlook such unimportant details (pretty much never happens). You want to sell the position? Offer a ton of money and the position sells itself. Don't have that? Offer a competitive salary with remote work. Don't want to do that? Fuck you, no one will shed tears for your bankrupt business.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
At the moment they focus on 10 years experience in a job that didn't exist 2 years ago.
testbotlo2 8y ago
My name is Mark. I work with C and C++ in computer graphics. I often receive 'Hey David, I was impressed with your marketing & sales skills'. Sigh.

151 points by leerob 8y ago

steelframe 8y ago

Perhaps what you really mean is that technical recruiting by Big Companies is broken?

leerob 8y ago
Not necessarily. Yes, as a company grows and it works to hire faster, it’s probable the quality of hiring/recruiting will decrease. That doesn’t mean that startups or small company have recruiting perfected.
seattle_spring 8y ago
Not really. I get way more horrible, poorly targeted recruiter spam from crappy SV startups than I do large companies. In fact, the large companies usually actually read my profile. Edit: It does depend on the "class" of large company though. I get truly shit-tier spam from C-list companies like GE, Boeing, or Panasonic ("Hey, interested in relocating to Missouri for a $18.27 hourly Java contract!?") Tier A companies like FB, Google, etc. always send great recruiting messages that suggest they read my profile and did at least some due diligence matching it to an appropriate position.
kasey_junk 8y ago
I get much more inappropriate recruiting advances from startups and small companies than I do by big ones.

purplezooey 8y ago

"genuine, personal connections" Isn't that kind of a high bar to jump over for this?

dvtrn 8y ago
If as a recruiter, a job role that is 100% predicated on your ability to work with people, and sell people on why they should ostensibly hire other people, if you can't make even a basic personal connection with someone (you don't have to be their best friend and offer to give them a ride to the interview and wait outside in the car for them to come out-but I can tell the difference between someone who's interested to have a conversation and someone just trying to hit a goal and I bet you could too), probably the recruiting industry is a poor fit, career wise. It's the product of time and experience, but I can smell a "quota" recruiter a mile away. I do not want to work with them.
- leerob 8y ago
  Absolutely agree. Plus, I’d rather set the bar high for hiring than settle for mediocrity.
  - chillydawg 8y ago
    Tell that to the mid level exec who's got 200 seats to fill to hit his bonus pot, after which he's outta there. Leaving the company to deal with the 190 terrible coders he hired, naturally.
    - dvtrn 8y ago
      Extending the metaphor to the most possible extreme of course allows us to make the endlessly convenient counterpoints, but I think this skips over a big portion of necessary nuance to why someone may feel a bit turned off by a robotic, starched and ultimately dispassionate experience with recruiters.
bassman9000 8y ago
Isn't the hiring process too? Standard today seems to be - 1-2 phone screen interviews - 1-2 remote coding exercises/interviews - 4-5 45-60min round of interviews, on site - Optionally, and extra interview day for culture fit Is asking the recruiter to actually look at your profile and take an interest too much to ask, given what they're asking you for, and given how the market, at least in SV-like areas, is today? It's great to work in this industry, don't get me wrong. But if some candidates don't want to even acknowledge automated requests, that's just how the market works.
- lovetocode 8y ago
  This isn’t my experience. I have never done more than two interviews for a position. None of which involved coding or exercises. Perhaps this is the standard for businesses in the valley.

lxe 8y ago

This is about scale. Technical recruiters sometimes need to be able to reach out to hundreds and maybe thousands of candidates at once, and making "personal connections" does not scale in this case. Even if they automagically parse the keywords and plug them into a template, sometimes things are missed and mis-placed (Java vs JavaScript, etc...).

leerob 8y ago
I understand the current recruiting ecosystem is largely the way it is due to scale. Companies need a lot of talent and they need it last week. Hence, blasting out thousands of emails (e.g. the Amazon recruiter I mentioned). I’m simply trying to challenge that status quo. There has to be a better way. I’ll admit I don’t have the answer, largely because I’ve never worked as a recruiter, but it seems like the process is broken for recruitees.
bradleyjg 8y ago
If the numbers being thrown around are accurate (e.g. $30,000 for a single hire) then the amount of time it’s reasonable to expect someone to spend on a single job is on the order of months. That time needn’t be spent all the end either. Someone could work his way up to knowing most of the several hundred experts in whatever technology in whatever city and have a nice little thing going. Of course that doesn’t scratch that get rich quick “scaling” itch that spamming my inbox with an automagic template does.
alkonaut 8y ago
But sending vague initial messages to hundreds of candidates and saying they are a great match and that they want to discuss over the phone can’t scale! It must be much better to just give the basic info (level, tech stack, location, salary range, job description ...) so that you don’t waste time calling people who will realize 10 minutes into the call that the position is in the wrong city or whatever. If such a message actually leads to a phone call, then it’s bound to be with the most desperte candidates and not with the best match candidates. If they send out a more detailed message to 1000 people, and get responses from 25, then there should be time to research these candidates further to build a personal connection, including having a phone call.

leerob 8y ago

I'm not sure why the title of the posting was changed. The title of the article is "Technical Recruiting is Broken".

wool_gather 8y ago
Personally, I found the (more specific) current title very helpful in deciding to click through. "Technical Recruiting is Broken" is awfully vague -- not to mention that I'm pretty sure I've seen blog posts with that title before -- and (for what it's worth) I would have continued scrolling right past it. You have a distinct, concrete facet of recruiting that you're talking about -- which is great! -- and the current HN title accurately reflects that.
- cubano 8y ago
  "Technical Recruiting is Broken" is very click-baity IMO, as the "is broken" bon mot has become rather popular and reveals absolutely nothing about what the article is about.
  - leerob 8y ago
    True - perhaps my overly simplistic title was not the best choice. Well, thanks to the mods for rephrasing it.

rm999 8y ago

I'm not a recruiter, but I spend a lot of my time building up teams so I figure that makes me a de facto recruiter. I've personally gone both extremes: 1. Spamming linkedin, message boards, etc. 2. Seeking out specific candidates, emailing them, offering to grab coffee or do a call. I've had more success hiring with #2, in which regard I agree with the article. But it comes with a perverse side-effect: I am ignoring 95% of potential candidates, likely a similar group everyone else is ignoring. I am mostly contacting people with years of experience at good companies with a decent web presence. Because if I didn't, I wouldn't have time to do my other job duties. When I (or our internal technical recruiters) spam out a job we are giving more people a chance at the job, and are introducing fewer personal biases. I'm not saying either approach is right or wrong, I just think there's room for both. Maybe the ultimate solution is a single centralized marketplace for jobs, but it doesn't seem like there's been a clear winner in this space.

leerob 8y ago
Thanks for the insight. Some really good points here, especially: > When I (or our internal technical recruiters) spam out a job we are giving more people a chance at the job, and are introducing fewer personal biases. That is something I didn't even consider, but you're absolutely right. You're naturally going to be more attracted to candidates who fit your profile (unless, of course, you're _really_ aware of your unconscious bias). I think spamming LinkedIn can have success if you properly target and give ample information on who, what, and why. Something I didn't even consider until this was posted on Reddit was the fact that even though I have Java listed in "do not want", it's still going to be picked up as a keyword.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
Maybe you stumbled on an honest reason why recruiters exist?

lordnacho 8y ago

> Good recruiters focus on building relationships versus solving an immediate need. The problem is they get paid only when immediate needs are met. A placement is hard to do, but results in 25% of an annual salary when done. This results in two kinds of strategy: 1) Spammers. I get this all the time on both sides (as a hiring manager and as a potential hire). The worst is when I get forwarded someone's actual CV out of the blue. It's happened a couple of times recently: a guy who works at Google or Amazon at a high level has his CV sent to me by a recruiter who's never spoken to me. In both cases I found the person on LinkedIn and told them, much to their surprise. Of course there was never a conversation on the other side either. Normally it's not as egregious as this, but it's still not a way to do business. 2) Relationship people. These guys will actually take the time to meet with me and talk about what kind of stuff I do. Both as a hiring manager and a potential hire, there's no sense that they are bucketing me in either, we can potentially do either business. There's no sense of urgency either, just two people discussing the market. I've made business contacts through recruiters this way, nothing expected in return, no hard sell. I've told them we're not even using recruiters, and they still check in for a coffee now and again. I do try to throw something their way, esp when it comes to giving them candidates. The big problem for the good guys is they somehow have to get paid while maintaining all these low probability relationships. Not only that, they actually need to speak intelligently about every technology and business in the market. They need to know what kind of thing c++ is, how it's different from JS, and what kind of function it might be useful for. This is no easy task. You can easily see how someone needing to feed themselves could get desperate and go for some version of spamming.

leerob 8y ago
> The big problem for the good guys is they somehow have to get paid while maintaining all these low probability relationships. Not only that, they actually need to speak intelligently about every technology and business in the market. They need to know what kind of thing c++ is, how it's different from JS, and what kind of function it might be useful for. This is no easy task. Very good point. I have a few friends who are recruiters (with no technical experience before starting) and I had to give them the 101 on programming languages and how they differ ("No, C and C++ are not the same thing. There's also C#"). I can imagine a recruiter in today's landscape probably spends a decent amount of time learning about the tech industry just to keep up. I'm not sure I have a solution for monetizing the good relationships, though.

danielovichdk 8y ago

It often seems that recruiters think they are doing one a favor by offering you this shiny new job. I am so tired of the mono directional process where you have no idea really, what you are getting into before you have been working somewhere for at least 3 months. Recruiting is about personality and knowing how people thrive in a certain environment. They are so low in the food chain, IMO, that I find it really difficult to take any of them serious.

leerob 8y ago
> It often seems that recruiters think they are doing one a favor by offering you this shiny new job. Exactly. The people they're trying to recruit already have a job. So they're going to need to sell us on the position. _Especially_ if I've never heard of the company.

hash872 8y ago

Yes, spamming is bad, and yes, recruiters should read your profile prior to messaging, but for practical reasons the actual outreach message is gonna be largely not personalized other than with your name. Reading an individual developer's Medium posts and then crafting an individualized message based on that is, like, the definition of unscaleable. It's like insisting that cars not be manufactured in factories anymore, but instead be lovingly hand-crafted for each individual owner, one car at a time. This is obviously economically impossible. Also, in practice, the actual response rate for way-personalized messages isn't much higher. It just doesn't make sense in practice. If there are say 500 Node.js developers with the right amount of experience & CS degrees in a given metro area, the amount of time it would take to research each individual and craft a personalized message based on their Github or Medium posts or Stack Overflow answers or Twitter is literally 10,000x what it takes to just shoot each of then an InMail or e-mail. Again, a recruiter should read each profile to make sure they're on the right track, but the messages are likely going to be mass-produced

leerob 8y ago
/u/rm999 had experience with both spamming and personalized messages and had more success with the latter. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186331 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19186331
- hash872 8y ago
  Without quantifying anything it's kind of meaningless. The point is that recruiting is a business process and that we should treat like any other type of process, by being systematic. The information we need is how many interested people responded with a generic message vs. how many responded to the personalized message, and the amount of time spent on each approach. Note that 'responded' here is defined as 'I'd like to pursue this opportunity' or 'I'd like to learn more' which then leads to them pursing the opportunity. Not social niceties like 'I'm not looking but it's wonderful that you took the time to read my Medium posts, you're so different from the other recruiters', etc.

raincom 8y ago

The business of recruiting has changed in the last two decades. In late 90's, recruiters used to know candidates in person, and know what they were doing, etc. Now recruiters work like assembly line workers or offshored workers, who have no clue beyond buzz words. If your profile matches with one of the buzz words, you get spam.

xavk 8y ago

> Good recruiters focus on building relationships versus solving an immediate need. This is exactly the focus of the startup we're launching in London this summer. I'd love to chat to people from HN about their experiences with this. Contact details on my profile.

leerob 8y ago
Thank you for setting a positive example of how recruiting should be done!

henrik_w 8y ago

This matches my experience too. In my opinion, the way to sell the job is to explicitly mention all the advantages - the company name, the tech stack, why it is a great place to work etc. The most annoying recruiters are the ones that have "a fantastic opportunity" and want to set up a phone call to sell it. I work in Stockholm, Sweden, and I have noticed that recruiters from England often try to talk to you instead of simply listing the position(s). Extra points for the recruiter if they write something indicating why I would be a good fit - only happens rarely. Also, checking back later (a year or two) to see if I am open to a change, even if I wasn't before, is OK by me. Sometimes you don't want to change, no matter what the offer is. We developers should not complain too much about recruiters though - we are extremely lucky to work in a field where there is such high demand. Most people aren't so lucky. I also think being contacted by a recruiter puts you in a great bargaining position: You are in a much better position to negotiate salary and benefits than if you applied directly. You already have a job, so if the offer isn’t interesting enough or good enough, you can just say no. I wrote a post similar to this a few years ago, making the above points: https://henrikwarne.com/2015/11/22/recruiting-software-developers-initial-contact/ https://henrikwarne.com/2015/11/22/recruiting-software-devel...

leerob 8y ago
Thanks for sharing your post. You make some similar points, but also a couple I hadn't hit on. > We developers should not complain too much about recruiters though - we are extremely lucky to work in a field where there is such high demand. Absolutely - That's something I wish I would have touched on in my post. I didn't want it to sound too "woe is me" that I have people reaching out to offer me a job. > I also think being contacted by a recruiter puts you in a great bargaining position I'll echo your points and salary and benefits, but also mentioned that sometimes recruiters will have an in with the hiring manager, versus going through HR when applying directly (which could get lost in a pile).
nickjj 8y ago
Being able to say no thanks is great in general. You always get the best deals when you don't need that "something" right now.
8y ago

opportune 8y ago

I’ve had recruiters try to set up a call before even telling me the name of the company, big red flag. Last time they did that it was because they wanted to hide that the position was machine learning to make murder robots

leerob 8y ago
I've had this happen a handful of times actually. I could be wrong, but I think their fear is that you would directly apply and bypass their services.
- opportune 8y ago
  The thing is, when they do that you have no idea if it’s some shitty bodyshop looking for people with pulses or a cool company that you’d love to work for, so you have no opportunity to do research into the company before dedicating time to call someone. I don’t see the benefit of bypassing their services since recruiters are usually a decent foot in the door, but maybe I’m missing something
- jacobyoder 8y ago
  The recruiters I've known would document their outreach to you, and notify the company that'd we'd spoken. If they'd specifically contacted me, the I bypassed them, they may still get paid somehow (but I'd lose whatever bargaining skills they might bring to the process)>.
  - leerob 8y ago
    Good to know. That makes sense.
  - hash872 8y ago
    >If they'd specifically contacted me, the I bypassed them, they may still get paid somehow This is not true at all
    - jacobyoder 8y ago

saagarjha 8y ago

Psst…you might want to blur those names out more (or even put boxes over them), since it’s possible to make them out if you squint.

leerob 8y ago
Thanks - I could see how if you really zoom in you might be able to make out some letters. Just deployed new images that are more blurred.

curtis 8y ago

Can we get rid of recruiters altogether? Yeah, I know that's an absurd idea, and I don't know any way we could really do that. But we are always going to have problems if we continue to insist on having non-technical people serve as the initial point of contact for technical positions.

scarface74 8y ago
I don’t need them to be technical. I just need them to put me in contact with companies, tell me where I am in the process and tell me the salary range. The last is the hardest to get from job listings.
mgkimsal 8y ago
Met with a company at a conference last year. They were there at a booth saying "we're hiring people". Met, talked some, they indicated I wouldn't be a good fit. Got a call from a recruiter last week, and... have already had and passed a first call screen, another tech call set up for this week. I realize a lot can change in a 6 month period, but... it's also slightly frustrating. If I was paranoid, I might say it's ageism at play (I have visibly gray hair and certainly couldn't pass for late 20s anymore). But I suspect there's multiple factors at play here which still make 'going through a recruiter' somehow feel like a safer bet for some companies.
jvreagan 8y ago
Better yet, take the %age that goes to the recruiter and give it to the candidate. Seems like a better way to close new hires.
marcinzm 8y ago
As I see it technical people don't want to do the mundane repetitive and boring tasks that a recruiter does. And introverted technical people, which many are, especially don't want to spend significant time socializing with random other people. You can try to automate the whole process, which various companies are doing, but keeping the spam out is difficult. And bad automation is also even worse to deal with than a human recruiter.

augbog 8y ago

title is a bit click baity. It's not broken just poorly done. I agree with a lot of the thoughts though.

ryanianian 8y ago

I've started giving formulaic recruiter responses to recruiters that send formulaic inquiries. My response is along the lines of > Dear PERSON. Thanks for reaching out. I'm happy where I am but for $Y base salary with SOME_OTHER_BENEFITS I would consider a move. Let me know if that sounds reasonable for your team otherwise I will be in touch if anything changes. Feel free to reach out again in 6-12 months either way. This is a bit cold and focused on the money, but recruiters are usually sending the same emails anyway - as the article points out. Ultimately why waste everyone's time if you wouldn't really consider a move anyway? In the 4 months since I've been doing this, almost every recruiter that has responded has responded with "thanks for responding and thanks for being up front." To be "honest" with this approach, put a number in $Y that would really really make you consider changing jobs. 1.5x your current salary? Double if you're super happy where you are? Maybe SOME_OTHER_BENEFITS becomes "really high equity percentage" or "fully remote" or "work 3 days a week"? I put my $Y pretty high so most companies can't afford me, but I've got 1 or 2 companies that may be able to pay it in the pipe. Win-win.

leerob 8y ago
I really like this idea and I think I'm going to start using a similar approach. Thanks!
rapfaria 8y ago
If every recruiter has responded "thanks for responding and thanks for being up front.", it just means a wasted opportunity. Some of them could probably give you the $Y, but might think that the only thing you consider is money - and you know how HR is. I know the game sucks either way, but I'd rephrase your answer a little and use it as a second e-mail, not first.
- ryanianian 8y ago
  It depends on how formulaic the recruiter inquiry was. Like the article I have a few things indicated on my profile and writings of things that I do and do not want to do. If it's clear they've done little work I will in turn do very little work. If they seem like they've taken a bit of an interest in me and are seemingly pleasant I'll be a bit more personalized and maybe not break out the salary requirements until the second email.

nkingsy 8y ago

In my most recent job search, I was really surprised to find that about half of my initial calls were with engineering managers, not recruiters. They're certainly in a better position to sell the company, but I found that I was uncomfortable asking the basic "how much, what are the benefits, what's the work life balance" type questions that I would generally want to get out of the way before being sold.

vkaku 8y ago

Oh Please. Anytime someone tries to hard sell a position, I'm usually just impressed by their sales skills but I know that it usually sends a red flag for me.

foobiekr 8y ago

"Executive recruiting" basically works this way. They talk to you about your history and interests and then follow up with a dossier of possible projects/GMs that they will introduce you to in order to see if there is a fit. The whole process is very personalized. This is basically the terminal point of engineering recruiting, though.

joeax 8y ago

The real problem is the signal-to-noise ratio in legitimate, well-focused recruiter emails to the typical recruiter spam one receives on a daily basis. I sometimes miss the legitimate emails, and although I am not usually looking, I like to respond with a friendly reply asking to keep in touch.

alkonaut 8y ago

Can someone with any insight in the recruiting business help me understand how the bad recruiters think? Typically you get a vague recruiter spam type message on email/LinkedIn which seems to deliberately avoid saying anything about the position. Based on this they want a phone call. why do they write the messages in a way they must surely understand does not make any employed developer eager to change jobs? Usually I answer that without more information up front I’m not interested in having a phone call, and I add some questions like “what in particular did you mean when you said I seemed like a good fit for this role?” or “what’s the role/seniority more exactly?” Invariably the answer to that is: ”I can’t disclose this other than over the phone” what? The recruiter now has to be 100% aware that they risk losing this candidate because they couldn’t reveal basic information about the position in an email. So why is that? Are these some kind of low level minion recruiters who work on a commission based on how many phone calls they do, rather than by commission for the actual recruiting? That’s the only reason I can think of! What actually is stopping recruiters from writing - you’ll work language Z mainly. The team uses tools X and Y. - The person they are looking for is a Senior back end developer - the work is product based, not contracting - the team is 40 people - The position is in northern City X with occasional travel WHY is it never like that? Why is it always some mumbling about “growth opportunities” and how I’m a “good match” and so on?

pandaman 8y ago
From my experience there could be different reasons: 1. They want to learn something they are not legally allowed to ask. Most likely your salary (not legal in California), but also citizenship (required for export license jobs but still illegal to ask in the US) , guess your age, gender, race etc. 2. They think they are very good at persuasion and will manage to sell you their crappy job if only they can get your ear. 3. As you said, some agencies have metrics they need to meet every month and those include number of calls. I learned this is from reading recruiters rants on Linkedin.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  > citizenship (required for export license jobs but still illegal to ask in the US) Surely it cannot be illegal to ask about citizenship if it's a requirement for the job?

ctab 8y ago

The author of the OP lists in his LinkedIn profile things that he wants and does not want in a job, but saying "I am not interested in X" is a little counterproductive if that causes your profile to come up in keyword searches for "X". For related reasons I no longer mention on my resume that I have Magento experience. :)

bradknowles 8y ago

This is why I deleted my LinkedIn profile.

mnm1 8y ago

To be honest, without getting the salary range up front or within the first email exchange, I typically end the interaction there. I've had way too many days and weeks wasted only to find out the company can barely pay 2/3 of my current salary. I don't care how great the perks are or job is, if you can't pay competitively, I'm not wasting my time. The rest is just details including tech stack etc. The right amount of money for the right job could easily make me overlook such unimportant details (pretty much never happens). You want to sell the position? Offer a ton of money and the position sells itself. Don't have that? Offer a competitive salary with remote work. Don't want to do that? Fuck you, no one will shed tears for your bankrupt business.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

At the moment they focus on 10 years experience in a job that didn't exist 2 years ago.

testbotlo2 8y ago

My name is Mark. I work with C and C++ in computer graphics. I often receive 'Hey David, I was impressed with your marketing & sales skills'. Sigh.