4 ms·

If you're ever planning on sending your CV to a recruiter, don't use LaTeX. Recruiters (reputation for being upgraded estate agents and scum of the earth aside)

by iuguy 16y ago

If you're ever planning on sending your CV to a recruiter, don't use LaTeX. Recruiters (reputation for being upgraded estate agents and scum of the earth aside) will want to remove any contact details from your CV to ensure that their client doesn't attempt to contact you except through them. This is why they'll push for word document versions. You might think, "Oh, well I'll just find a recruiter that won't do this" but depending on your chosen profession this may be harder than you think. You might think, "Ok, well I'll just create a PDF version without contact details on it" but that's not enough, because some recruiters actually don't put people forward because they sent PDFs, while telling them that they're putting them forward - the reason being that you're at the back of the queue not because of ability but because you're 'difficult' or they're not able to stick the recruiters logo on or easily paste into their template. Now if none of this is an issue for you, feel free to go ahead and submit a latex generated pdf. Sadly, Word is the lingua franca of recruitment. I've had two guys interview with me independently of a recruiter for positions after said recruiter told them they'd put them forward when they didn't - in both cases the used a Latex CV. Finally, formatting is relevant only to a point - if you've got experience in your field then that trumps any formatting. I've hired guys who use comic sans in their CV because they were bloody brilliant, not because they were funny.

chris_j 16y ago
OK, here's a question: why do companies use recruitment consultants? I've never heard a nice word said about them, certainly not in the tech/IT field. Not by people who work for companies hiring, not by jobs applicants. What value do they add, other than going through a big pile of CVs/resumes and turning it into a smaller pile of CVs/resumes (and, by the sounds of things, likely tossing out a whole load of excellent candidates in many cases)?
- iuguy 16y ago
  A recruiter would be better positioned to add value than I. I've dealt with recruiters on an employer and employee basis and it generally varies massively as to what you get. Out of all the recruiters I've known, there's only one that I have a long term relationship and would consider a friend. That's not a positive note for an industry, given that I've led recruitment in about 4 different jobs across two industries. If you imagine a pre-Internet world, recruiters would provide employers value by having a large potential labour pool, searching that pool for 'talent', then (allegedly) doing some sort of screening so that HR gets CVs that are relevant to the post. In the modern age, much of this could be bypassed but some companies (most notably larger companies) have exclusive contracts with large recruiters, meaning that if you want to work there you have to go through a specific recruiter. Madness, I know, and an industry ripe for disruption but full of people that would fight tooth and nail against it (and not just the recruiters but the employers in some cases).
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  - chris_j 16y ago
    I like it when you say "an industry ripe for disruption". Could you expend on why employers would fight tooth and nail against it in some cases? For example, are there employers that really are getting good value for money out of recruiters in this industry right now?
- ig1 16y ago
  The value recruiters provide isn't in filtering, it's in sourcing. It's very hard to source candidates. Job boards are more or less useless for companies advertising direct, as they're dominated by recruiters (who pay less for job adverts as they're bulk buying and can afford to spend more). Recruiters are also good at getting passive candidates by cold calling candidates whose details they've obtained through slightly iffy routes. For example a company won't buy the phone book of a competitor from a disgruntled employee and then start cold calling their staff to hire them away, but a third party recruiter will. I'm trying to raise financing at the moment to build a startup that will provide an alternative solution (a job site with intelligent candidate/job matching using the kind of techniques dating sites use). If anyone wants to see my pitch deck feel free to email me (even if you're not an investor, happy to share with anyone who's not a direct competitor).
  - chris_j 16y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. It makes a lot of sense that sourcing candidates is hard and that's where recruiters add value. I do it slightly ironic that you say that job boards are more or less useless and then you go on to say that it's recruiters that make them useless by clogging them up. I sent you an email regarding your startup since it interests me on an academic level and I'd love to learn a little more.
- larsberg 16y ago
  You can't imagine how large that pile of junk CVs/resumes is. When I was doing hiring (MSFT), having full-time recruiters working for me was key to getting the load down to something that was even remotely manageable. I can imagine that if your company was small enough that you didn't have the money to hire a full-time recruiter to source candidates, relying on third-party referrals would be a reasonable alternative. That said, almost 100% of the non-college hires I made were either personal recommendations from other members on the team or people whom I directly contacted after seeing their name pop up repeatedly in the context of interesting things.
- acdha 16y ago
  I think some of it is simply a lag in market adjustment: older managers/corporate culture tend to have pre-internet habits about hiring like the assumption that recruiters are necessary to find good candidates and frequently the system is structured in a way which complicates getting people without going through a recruiter. The root problem is that many places don't measure performance and so you get the same problems which are endemic in marketing where successes are credited to people but failures are seen as systemic. At the last few places, our recruiters literally failed to provide a single qualified candidate (or even strong resume) but this was usually excused as a tough market - and while good people are always in short supply, taking the 30% cut which normally goes to the recruiter and giving it to the person would certainly help.
lkozma 16y ago
That's ok, I don't plan to send it to any recruiter. The one contact I had with a recruiting company (big brand name) was when I applied to a job, I interviewed with some technical people at the company, they decided to hire me and they told the recruiting company to tell me I was hired. Some months went by, I got no message, so I took another job, and just for the sake of it I wrote the CTO to tell them they could've at least sent me a note that they weren't hiring me. Turns out the recruiting company misspelled my email address and they were still waiting for my answer and the position was unfilled. Everyone was apologetic but I couldn't go back as I committed to something else.
- kore 16y ago
  When you said that they decided to hire you, was that something they told you right after the interview? If so, I think it would've been prudent to follow up with both the CTO and the recruiter after a week or two had passed. Worst case you'll just look enthusiastic about your new job, and there's little harm in that. It's always possible for these sorts of little mishaps to happen, even if it weren't through a recruiter. A short email could've saved much confusion.
  - lkozma 16y ago
    No, they said "we will get in touch with you soon", which they tried to (as I found out later) via the recruiters, but I just assumed it was the usual (sadly) method of ignoring candidates they didn't choose. Since I had other applications going on, I just moved on. It was after 1-2 months that I contacted them.
wazoox 16y ago
From my experience, recruiters only ever send "big company" profiles: MSCE certified, Cisco whatever, Oracle yadda yadda, Java enterprise stuff and stuff, RedHat thingy and the likes. My interest in these sort of profiles is exactly equal to zero, because we use Debian, Perl, C and postgresql. And we haven't even got a single windows machine, and nobody in the team ever wore a tie in his whole life. Actual people I'm interested in have zero certs, may have zero diplomas, wear ragged jeans and flip-flops and beards, but they have friggin' code to show and run Linux (or some other Unix) on their personal computer. Anything else than displaying obvious ability to write code is meaningless to me. Since I explained this was the profiles I'm looking for, I didn't received any more résumés from recruiters. So it all depends very much on the sort of job you're looking for. My guess is if you're an hacker and you want to work in a startup, never mind the recruiters. Making a latex résumé is fine, because of the added bonus points.
- iuguy 16y ago
  It's an interesting comment and I know you're not alone, having worked with similar people in the past. Certs provide a baseline - if you have an MSCE it means you can use Windows, nothing more. For some positions it's a means of covering your arse which is useful when you're in a big company. Personally I prefer to judge people by their deeds rather than their words, or in this case letters. That's why we have a fairly gruelling test for positions these days.

by iuguy 16y ago

chris_j 16y ago

OK, here's a question: why do companies use recruitment consultants? I've never heard a nice word said about them, certainly not in the tech/IT field. Not by people who work for companies hiring, not by jobs applicants. What value do they add, other than going through a big pile of CVs/resumes and turning it into a smaller pile of CVs/resumes (and, by the sounds of things, likely tossing out a whole load of excellent candidates in many cases)?

iuguy 16y ago
A recruiter would be better positioned to add value than I. I've dealt with recruiters on an employer and employee basis and it generally varies massively as to what you get. Out of all the recruiters I've known, there's only one that I have a long term relationship and would consider a friend. That's not a positive note for an industry, given that I've led recruitment in about 4 different jobs across two industries. If you imagine a pre-Internet world, recruiters would provide employers value by having a large potential labour pool, searching that pool for 'talent', then (allegedly) doing some sort of screening so that HR gets CVs that are relevant to the post. In the modern age, much of this could be bypassed but some companies (most notably larger companies) have exclusive contracts with large recruiters, meaning that if you want to work there you have to go through a specific recruiter. Madness, I know, and an industry ripe for disruption but full of people that would fight tooth and nail against it (and not just the recruiters but the employers in some cases).
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- chris_j 16y ago
  I like it when you say "an industry ripe for disruption". Could you expend on why employers would fight tooth and nail against it in some cases? For example, are there employers that really are getting good value for money out of recruiters in this industry right now?
ig1 16y ago
The value recruiters provide isn't in filtering, it's in sourcing. It's very hard to source candidates. Job boards are more or less useless for companies advertising direct, as they're dominated by recruiters (who pay less for job adverts as they're bulk buying and can afford to spend more). Recruiters are also good at getting passive candidates by cold calling candidates whose details they've obtained through slightly iffy routes. For example a company won't buy the phone book of a competitor from a disgruntled employee and then start cold calling their staff to hire them away, but a third party recruiter will. I'm trying to raise financing at the moment to build a startup that will provide an alternative solution (a job site with intelligent candidate/job matching using the kind of techniques dating sites use). If anyone wants to see my pitch deck feel free to email me (even if you're not an investor, happy to share with anyone who's not a direct competitor).
- chris_j 16y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. It makes a lot of sense that sourcing candidates is hard and that's where recruiters add value. I do it slightly ironic that you say that job boards are more or less useless and then you go on to say that it's recruiters that make them useless by clogging them up. I sent you an email regarding your startup since it interests me on an academic level and I'd love to learn a little more.
larsberg 16y ago
You can't imagine how large that pile of junk CVs/resumes is. When I was doing hiring (MSFT), having full-time recruiters working for me was key to getting the load down to something that was even remotely manageable. I can imagine that if your company was small enough that you didn't have the money to hire a full-time recruiter to source candidates, relying on third-party referrals would be a reasonable alternative. That said, almost 100% of the non-college hires I made were either personal recommendations from other members on the team or people whom I directly contacted after seeing their name pop up repeatedly in the context of interesting things.
acdha 16y ago
I think some of it is simply a lag in market adjustment: older managers/corporate culture tend to have pre-internet habits about hiring like the assumption that recruiters are necessary to find good candidates and frequently the system is structured in a way which complicates getting people without going through a recruiter. The root problem is that many places don't measure performance and so you get the same problems which are endemic in marketing where successes are credited to people but failures are seen as systemic. At the last few places, our recruiters literally failed to provide a single qualified candidate (or even strong resume) but this was usually excused as a tough market - and while good people are always in short supply, taking the 30% cut which normally goes to the recruiter and giving it to the person would certainly help.

lkozma 16y ago

That's ok, I don't plan to send it to any recruiter. The one contact I had with a recruiting company (big brand name) was when I applied to a job, I interviewed with some technical people at the company, they decided to hire me and they told the recruiting company to tell me I was hired. Some months went by, I got no message, so I took another job, and just for the sake of it I wrote the CTO to tell them they could've at least sent me a note that they weren't hiring me. Turns out the recruiting company misspelled my email address and they were still waiting for my answer and the position was unfilled. Everyone was apologetic but I couldn't go back as I committed to something else.

kore 16y ago
When you said that they decided to hire you, was that something they told you right after the interview? If so, I think it would've been prudent to follow up with both the CTO and the recruiter after a week or two had passed. Worst case you'll just look enthusiastic about your new job, and there's little harm in that. It's always possible for these sorts of little mishaps to happen, even if it weren't through a recruiter. A short email could've saved much confusion.
- lkozma 16y ago
  No, they said "we will get in touch with you soon", which they tried to (as I found out later) via the recruiters, but I just assumed it was the usual (sadly) method of ignoring candidates they didn't choose. Since I had other applications going on, I just moved on. It was after 1-2 months that I contacted them.

wazoox 16y ago

From my experience, recruiters only ever send "big company" profiles: MSCE certified, Cisco whatever, Oracle yadda yadda, Java enterprise stuff and stuff, RedHat thingy and the likes. My interest in these sort of profiles is exactly equal to zero, because we use Debian, Perl, C and postgresql. And we haven't even got a single windows machine, and nobody in the team ever wore a tie in his whole life. Actual people I'm interested in have zero certs, may have zero diplomas, wear ragged jeans and flip-flops and beards, but they have friggin' code to show and run Linux (or some other Unix) on their personal computer. Anything else than displaying obvious ability to write code is meaningless to me. Since I explained this was the profiles I'm looking for, I didn't received any more résumés from recruiters. So it all depends very much on the sort of job you're looking for. My guess is if you're an hacker and you want to work in a startup, never mind the recruiters. Making a latex résumé is fine, because of the added bonus points.

iuguy 16y ago
It's an interesting comment and I know you're not alone, having worked with similar people in the past. Certs provide a baseline - if you have an MSCE it means you can use Windows, nothing more. For some positions it's a means of covering your arse which is useful when you're in a big company. Personally I prefer to judge people by their deeds rather than their words, or in this case letters. That's why we have a fairly gruelling test for positions these days.