6 ms·

This happened to me - got a call from a recruiter who said client needed 10 years. I replied 'I was a teenager back then' to which she said 'so you don't have e

by jarym 6y ago

This happened to me - got a call from a recruiter who said client needed 10 years. I replied 'I was a teenager back then' to which she said 'so you don't have enough experience?'. I responded 'Well I helped create the thing, it hasn't been around 10 years'. Silence followed, I was thoroughly dis-interested after that.

koheripbal 6y ago
> I was thoroughly dis-interested after that. Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. Recruiting people / HR are just an administrative barrier to get through. Once you speak to the actual team you'd be working with, you can start being more discerning of the quality of the people.
- mcherm 6y ago
  > Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. It shouldn't. A well-run company should refuse to work with recruiters who lack experience and intelligence.
- pcmoney 6y ago
  No, never this. If the hiring manager won’t be your manager or in the same tree, run. If they cant be bothered to read the job description they put out, run. If the technology is critical enough to need previous experience managers should know enough about it to not make this mistake. Hiring is the most important thing managers do. If they suck at that it really doesn’t matter if they are great at other things.
  - vmception 6y ago
    its shocking how many people here totally misunderstand the role and daily job of inhouse recruiters they churn out these job requirements daily the person you speak with on the phone wasn't involved with writing it, just correct them and get to the first technical person as soon as possible. this is done at companies of all sizes, whether it is IBM, Google, Uber, Pinterest, as well as expected in non-tech companies. you guys are in for a rude awakening if you think this is still an employees market in choosing companies based on the smallest, most irrelevant and nuanced signals of operational efficiency
    - pcmoney 6y ago
      I don’t think a lack of concern and thoughtfulness around hiring is an irrelevant or nuanced signal. Having been both a manager and an IC I strongly believe that hiring is of the utmost importance. The same thoughtfulness, care, and responsibility that goes into leading engineering teams that are in charge of mission critical systems must extend to the hiring process or else everything else is at risk. A single bad or even just not great hire can be devastating to a team. A company with a culture that is just recruiters funneling candidates thoughtlessly is guaranteed to fail over time. Sure if you need a job or aren’t in an employees market you might have to suck it up and take that job. I get that. I would advise saving a lot more than usual as that charade of hoop jumping is going to result in layoffs/bankruptcy in the mid to long term. Also, don’t expect them to be any more thoughtful in the layoffs than they were in the hiring. Sure a lot of big companies do thoughtless hiring and that might work for awhile when you just need to scale thoughtlessly but a lot of big companies also get their lunch eaten by smaller companies with more thoughtful managers (ex. IBM, MSFT pre Nadella, possibly Google now)
    - jarym 6y ago
      I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement. My dis-interest wasn't due to the recruiter but to do with whichever manager thought they needed needed more experience than the age of a product - either they are careless or don't care about a persons skillset. Could I have been wrong? Of course. All I said was I was dis-interested, I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
      - vmception 6y ago
        > I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me. That's really lucky. There are a lot of people who don't value my skillset who I thought should, and it isn't clear if people reach out to me because they like something I brought to the world that has caught on now, or if it is a totally random recruitment bot sending transactional messages. All while the things I was working on over the last decade were not respected at the time I was working on them. For employment, seems better for me to use variations of my name and more generic experience. Otherwise people just seem to want to have me in the room but not really interested in hiring me, or like they expect a more mythical and profound experience.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  > Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. Good recruiters are able to match a candidate's skills with the skills required for the role they're recruiting for. If they can't do that, they are bad at their job and are more often than not wasting the time you could be spending with a recruiter who knows the industry they're working in. If they got that aspect wrong, what else are they getting wrong? Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was?
  - aries1980 6y ago
    Recruiters often doesn't have the role. They try to stir up an interest in you, so with your nice CV they can approach the - just prospecting - client.
  - pm90 6y ago
    Recruiters have different levels of experience: same as software engineers. Some are just starting their career, some have more experience. Most recruiters didn't go to school for recruiting; they usually landed the job based mostly on their inter personal skills. Most lack any context around technology. In that light, making a judgement call about a team based solely on the recruited seems suboptimal. If they make mistakes, most would be happy if you point it out to them. Everyone is trying to help each other; don't let go of potentially great opportunities due to these misconceptions.
  - vkou 6y ago
    > Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was? You should pretend the recruiter - any recruiter is a compulsive liar, and put exactly zero value on whether or not they claim the role is a good fit. They are never going to interact with you again, they may not understand you or the role, and they are financially incentivised to bullshit to you. Ignore what they say, and judge whether or not the role is a good fit for yourself. I wouldn't hold a good recruiter as a positive sign for a job, nor would I hold a shitty recruiter as a red flag.
- webmaven 6y ago
  I think it is valid to have a preference for employers that care enough about recruiting to employ good recruiters.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    If you have infinite choices and time, sure. ...but if you're looking for the best jobs/pay/environment/company, then those are the only things you should be selecting on.
    - webmaven 6y ago
      Good recruiters are respectful of my time. Am I looking for the "best", or am I satisficing?
    - derefr 6y ago
      Bad recruiting produces badly-filtered coworkers, which translates to a bad environment.
- david38 6y ago
  The recruiter likely didn’t write the job description. The team that needs the person did. If they are so stupid as to do this, I wouldn’t want to work for them either.
  - rovr138 6y ago
    Usually the team does, HR reviews and makes corrections and then the recruiter gets it. HR is where things can go very wrong.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  > The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. How do you figure? If you're perfectly qualified for a job and they don't seem to recognize that, what are they selecting for? You don't think that incompetence would have an impact on the quality of the team you'd be joining?
- grawprog 6y ago
  Having never worked in a large enough company to have an hr department, this confuses me. My assumption is, a team needs personel and so the team manager makes a request to hr with a list of requirements for said recruit. Or at least that's how it seems like it should be. Along the way, should not someone who put together that list of requirements have some idea of what they were asking for? I've only worked at small enough business we had one general manager in charge of hiring. If one of the sections of our work needed employees, job postings would be created with those specific positions in mind, with the specific requirements of that position figured out by usually the most experienced person in that position and passed along to the manager. Again, this may just be my ignorance, but, if it wasn't the hr person that wrote the requirements, wouldn't it have been someone that should have known better?
TwoNineFive 6y ago
Lie to them. They want you to lie to them. They are DEMANDING that you lie to them. They will PUNISH you if you don't lie to them. So lie. It's what they want. And if you don't, someone else will.
- derefr 6y ago
  People say this about spammers (“there’s always some other sucker”) but scam-baiting still seems to work to diminish the number of scams/spam in the world. Perhaps we need recruiter-baiters: people who will, as a hobby, intentionally get recruiters to pass them on to companies, at which point they will (under an assumed identity) say or do something so egregious that it will poison the recruiter’s relationship with the company.

by jarym 6y ago

koheripbal 6y ago

> I was thoroughly dis-interested after that. Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. Recruiting people / HR are just an administrative barrier to get through. Once you speak to the actual team you'd be working with, you can start being more discerning of the quality of the people.

mcherm 6y ago
> Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. It shouldn't. A well-run company should refuse to work with recruiters who lack experience and intelligence.
pcmoney 6y ago
No, never this. If the hiring manager won’t be your manager or in the same tree, run. If they cant be bothered to read the job description they put out, run. If the technology is critical enough to need previous experience managers should know enough about it to not make this mistake. Hiring is the most important thing managers do. If they suck at that it really doesn’t matter if they are great at other things.
- vmception 6y ago
  its shocking how many people here totally misunderstand the role and daily job of inhouse recruiters they churn out these job requirements daily the person you speak with on the phone wasn't involved with writing it, just correct them and get to the first technical person as soon as possible. this is done at companies of all sizes, whether it is IBM, Google, Uber, Pinterest, as well as expected in non-tech companies. you guys are in for a rude awakening if you think this is still an employees market in choosing companies based on the smallest, most irrelevant and nuanced signals of operational efficiency
  - pcmoney 6y ago
    I don’t think a lack of concern and thoughtfulness around hiring is an irrelevant or nuanced signal. Having been both a manager and an IC I strongly believe that hiring is of the utmost importance. The same thoughtfulness, care, and responsibility that goes into leading engineering teams that are in charge of mission critical systems must extend to the hiring process or else everything else is at risk. A single bad or even just not great hire can be devastating to a team. A company with a culture that is just recruiters funneling candidates thoughtlessly is guaranteed to fail over time. Sure if you need a job or aren’t in an employees market you might have to suck it up and take that job. I get that. I would advise saving a lot more than usual as that charade of hoop jumping is going to result in layoffs/bankruptcy in the mid to long term. Also, don’t expect them to be any more thoughtful in the layoffs than they were in the hiring. Sure a lot of big companies do thoughtless hiring and that might work for awhile when you just need to scale thoughtlessly but a lot of big companies also get their lunch eaten by smaller companies with more thoughtful managers (ex. IBM, MSFT pre Nadella, possibly Google now)
  - jarym 6y ago
    I am fairly certain it wasn't the recruiter who put in the experience requirement. My dis-interest wasn't due to the recruiter but to do with whichever manager thought they needed needed more experience than the age of a product - either they are careless or don't care about a persons skillset. Could I have been wrong? Of course. All I said was I was dis-interested, I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me.
    - vmception 6y ago
      > I had better opportunities with people who I understood and who understood me. That's really lucky. There are a lot of people who don't value my skillset who I thought should, and it isn't clear if people reach out to me because they like something I brought to the world that has caught on now, or if it is a totally random recruitment bot sending transactional messages. All while the things I was working on over the last decade were not respected at the time I was working on them. For employment, seems better for me to use variations of my name and more generic experience. Otherwise people just seem to want to have me in the room but not really interested in hiring me, or like they expect a more mythical and profound experience.
heavyset_go 6y ago
> Why? The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. Good recruiters are able to match a candidate's skills with the skills required for the role they're recruiting for. If they can't do that, they are bad at their job and are more often than not wasting the time you could be spending with a recruiter who knows the industry they're working in. If they got that aspect wrong, what else are they getting wrong? Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was?
- aries1980 6y ago
  Recruiters often doesn't have the role. They try to stir up an interest in you, so with your nice CV they can approach the - just prospecting - client.
- pm90 6y ago
  Recruiters have different levels of experience: same as software engineers. Some are just starting their career, some have more experience. Most recruiters didn't go to school for recruiting; they usually landed the job based mostly on their inter personal skills. Most lack any context around technology. In that light, making a judgement call about a team based solely on the recruited seems suboptimal. If they make mistakes, most would be happy if you point it out to them. Everyone is trying to help each other; don't let go of potentially great opportunities due to these misconceptions.
- vkou 6y ago
  > Are you willing to waste time and money going through the interview process just to find out that the role isn't a good fit, even though the recruiter said it was? You should pretend the recruiter - any recruiter is a compulsive liar, and put exactly zero value on whether or not they claim the role is a good fit. They are never going to interact with you again, they may not understand you or the role, and they are financially incentivised to bullshit to you. Ignore what they say, and judge whether or not the role is a good fit for yourself. I wouldn't hold a good recruiter as a positive sign for a job, nor would I hold a shitty recruiter as a red flag.
webmaven 6y ago
I think it is valid to have a preference for employers that care enough about recruiting to employ good recruiters.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  If you have infinite choices and time, sure. ...but if you're looking for the best jobs/pay/environment/company, then those are the only things you should be selecting on.
  - webmaven 6y ago
    Good recruiters are respectful of my time. Am I looking for the "best", or am I satisficing?
  - derefr 6y ago
    Bad recruiting produces badly-filtered coworkers, which translates to a bad environment.
david38 6y ago
The recruiter likely didn’t write the job description. The team that needs the person did. If they are so stupid as to do this, I wouldn’t want to work for them either.
- rovr138 6y ago
  Usually the team does, HR reviews and makes corrections and then the recruiter gets it. HR is where things can go very wrong.
nickysielicki 6y ago
> The experience and intelligence of the recruiter has almost zero correlation to the experience and intelligence of the people you'd be working with. How do you figure? If you're perfectly qualified for a job and they don't seem to recognize that, what are they selecting for? You don't think that incompetence would have an impact on the quality of the team you'd be joining?
grawprog 6y ago
Having never worked in a large enough company to have an hr department, this confuses me. My assumption is, a team needs personel and so the team manager makes a request to hr with a list of requirements for said recruit. Or at least that's how it seems like it should be. Along the way, should not someone who put together that list of requirements have some idea of what they were asking for? I've only worked at small enough business we had one general manager in charge of hiring. If one of the sections of our work needed employees, job postings would be created with those specific positions in mind, with the specific requirements of that position figured out by usually the most experienced person in that position and passed along to the manager. Again, this may just be my ignorance, but, if it wasn't the hr person that wrote the requirements, wouldn't it have been someone that should have known better?

TwoNineFive 6y ago

Lie to them. They want you to lie to them. They are DEMANDING that you lie to them. They will PUNISH you if you don't lie to them. So lie. It's what they want. And if you don't, someone else will.

derefr 6y ago
People say this about spammers (“there’s always some other sucker”) but scam-baiting still seems to work to diminish the number of scams/spam in the world. Perhaps we need recruiter-baiters: people who will, as a hobby, intentionally get recruiters to pass them on to companies, at which point they will (under an assumed identity) say or do something so egregious that it will poison the recruiter’s relationship with the company.