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> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I o

> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it. I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchange 2000. I had no experience with Exchange 2000, so I told them, and watched their faces drop. That was specifically why they wanted to speak to me. The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. I'm surprised I'm not still doing time for murder. What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it. I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.

arethuza 6y ago
I get as angry with recruiters as everyone else, but then I remember then time where I worked for a company that shared a floor of a serviced office building with a recruitment company. They were brutal in their treatment of staff - they were too cheap to get rooms for staff appraisals so they would do them in the coffee area we shared with them so we could hear how they were treated by their management - seeing people (men and women) in tears was pretty much a daily event.
- dmos62 6y ago
  Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an isolated case.
  - slimsag 6y ago
    My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours. She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired. Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you. Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.
    - eecc 6y ago
      Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech. Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)
      - dunefox 6y ago
        At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.
        arethuza 6y ago
        In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem. This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....
        dunefox 6y ago
        That's actually a genius idea. I wonder how much money is wasted on such things.
        arethuza 6y ago
        I wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)
  - arethuza 6y ago
    It was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years ago). I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!
    - ezconnect 6y ago
      I once coded for a recruitment agency and they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit.
      - goatinaboat 6y ago
        they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay
        estaseuropano 6y ago
        Just like the real estate agent is incentivised to get you a higher price for your home? No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.
        giantg2 6y ago
        I think a lot of people aren't aware of the studies that support your real estate claim. Velocity and volume are the name of the game.
        chrisbennet 6y ago
        "The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivized to help you negotiate higher pay" Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."
  - projectileboy 6y ago
    Nope. Sales is sales is sales. It’s a pretty harsh world. If you’ve been a solid performer for years, maybe you can miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.
    - arethuza 6y ago
      I used to know a chap who was a successful partner at a top UK law firm - he had a very successful run of work that lasted for years and made a lot of money for everyone. However, eventually he it came to an end and he had a less than successful month - he got the same bollocking about performance as everyone else, and in front of his entire team too. Some organisations are just run like that.
      - slt2021 6y ago
        the thing with sales is one you develop a sales skill and network - you go and set up your own shop and become an equity owner. consider sales as a learning experience to set up your own shop
    - toyg 6y ago
      Glengarry Glensales, basically...
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I imagine a lot of people here would consider it pretty awful if they would be routinely punished because something happened totally out of their control--like a decision maker at a customer changing jobs tanking an "in the bag" deal. Yet that sort of thing happens all the time in sales. Sales is especially harsh in some environments. I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.
    - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
      My brother worked in commission-based sales for a while. He said the performance bonus structure was awful. It was basically based on your performance increase, rather than your absolute performance. So the top performer would likely get the lowest bonus because it's hard to improve when you're already at the top. If 100% of your calls led to a sale, you might get a good bonus the first year, but you will have made it impossible to get anything in subsequent years. It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus. What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    " I really hope that that's an isolated case." On a global scale? Sadly no. I rather suspect the tech sector is a very safe space, in that regard. Because of demand and supply. But overall life is cheap on this planet.
  - acdha 6y ago
    Sadly, it’s not as rare as it should be. Most of us here have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn’t respect you much and is confident that you can easily be replaced. Unless there’s a union the odds are pretty good that you can find a manager like that at a large organization once you get out of the high-status areas - especially when it’s something like an outsourced labor company where margins are low and replacing people doesn’t have much visible impact on customers. At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.
- mattkevan 6y ago
  Used to work at a place that shared a kitchen with a recruitment company and the same thing would happen. Very awkward to have to make a coffee right next to someone in floods of tears getting absolutely monstered by their manager. Like Lord of the Flies in shiny suits.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    A colleagues referred to one of their managers as the Terminator because of the warmth and charisma she displayed.
  - laurentdc 6y ago
    Most of my friends from university who went into recruiting burned out and quit within 6 months. The turnover (especially in temp agencies) is insane
    - cosmodisk 6y ago
      It's a sales job and a hard one and most people are crap at it,hence the churn. I've spoken to a few in their early 20s that were very good but then they aren't your usual Java is the same as JavaScript type of people.
ChrisRR 6y ago
I learned that quickly, so when I go into an interview I'm always honest and take a couple of extra CVs just in case the recruiter has changed something. At one interview they told me they thought I would be a good fit, but couldn't hire me at my requested salary. I hadn't put down a requested salary, the recruiter had put down an unreasonably high salary and almost cost me the job
practicalpants 6y ago
Yep, for my first programming job out of college a recruiter arranged an onsite interview for a Java role, when I was under every impression it was for Ruby/Rails. I don't know Java. The first interviewer laughed and walked out. I explained things to the recruiter, he cursed, said he would "visit the Ruby team upstairs". He actually managed to setup an impromptu on-site interview with the Ruby team on that same day. I got the job.
- goodlinks 6y ago
  This makes me chuckle, and its a nice story cos you got a job :).. All the controls in the world mean bugger all when ultimately the deciding factor is a human. No one ever wants to admit that the world runs on trust and respect :).
- dempseye 6y ago
  The recruiter did good work here. I suspect this was a screw up in internal HR. The external recruiter has absolutely no incentive to send you for an interview you will bomb out of.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    I'm not sure. Recruiters can spray and pray with candidates the way candidates can spray and pray with applications. They're not going to be great quality, but if you're paid commission on a hire and the recruitment channel can handle the load... what's to stop the recruiter?
    - pc86 6y ago
      Aside from it destroying future business (we've had recruiters change candidates' resumes on us and that recruiter is blacklisted - by name - forever, to anyone who will listen), most contracts will have a 30-day clause where if the employee leaves for any reason within 30 days the fee is returned. Some even have if employee is fired within 30 days that the next placement fee is discounted.
ilaksh 6y ago
I had a front-end long-term contract many years ago that required expertise with C#, WPF, Silverlight and something else I forget. I had those things covered, but I soon learned that I was also supposedly an expert in SharePoint and an experienced graphic artist. The reality is that if they had given me any requirements for SharePoint I could have built that for them even though I had never used it. But graphic design I had no interest in. A few weeks in there was a lunch with recruiters and contractors for the project and one of the other recruiters (not the one who submitted me for the job) asked me something like, "when did you first realize that you loved to draw?" or something. I told her honestly I was horrible at drawing and not interested in it. One of the reasons I got fired from that contract eventually (aside from a fight with a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality and was holding the project up in his backend role) was that they were disappointed with my lack of interesting user interface designs. I never told anyone I was a graphic artist. Even if I did have that skill (or interest) (which I had neither), I was too busy dealing with new WPF/XAML/C# features and software design etc.
- toyg 6y ago
  > a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality I bet the Alan Partridge jokes were flying...
habosa 6y ago
This is why some recruiters demand a DOCX of a resume, not just a PDF. They edit them before submitting them to postings. Sometimes they're honest edits to improve your chances, but mostly it's lying to get you in the door.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  Only sending PDFs sounds like a an easy way to weed this category out.
  - paranoidrobot 6y ago
    As mentioned in another post on this thread, a lot of recruiters will happily copy/paste from your PDF to their template.
    - NullPrefix 6y ago
      Level 2 would be a jpeg, I guess.
- mnd999 6y ago
  I’ve been using latex for my CV for years. If they ask for an editable version I just send them the .tex file. I’ve never come across any edited versions at interview.
  - bluenose69 6y ago
    Years ago, I recall someone musing about sending dvi files to an administrator, when asked for Word/Wordperfect files.
  - snickerer 6y ago
    The same here! I tell them that I don't own MS Word and that I don't know how to use it. If that's deal-breaker then I don't want to work with this recruiter. But I must add that I am only looking for C Linux coder contracts.
  - 6y ago
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx file, or a PDF? The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.
- arethuza 6y ago
  It's trivial to convert PDFs these days to Word documents - Word actually opens PDFs as editable. I suppose you could print out your CV and scan it into a PDF to prevent that - but then there is OCR...
  - MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    I must be behind the times. You're right of course that with OCR, and the right typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.
    - hutzlibu 6y ago
      But I doubt anyone would take the hazzle of doing OCR. Because it is still a lot of work to spot misstakes (which still do happen, also with standardfonts). Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can see, that it was scanned in.
      - emodendroket 6y ago
        Because they don’t want your direct contact information in there, for one thing.
- zo1 6y ago
  Intermediary recruiters are well-known for asking for editable formats, e.g. docx. So technically you can stop them from editing your CV, but non-technically they can just decline to represent/use you. Or, they might just copy-paste your PDF into a new doc and present that to the potential employer.
slezyr 6y ago
> What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it They get a bonus for hire.
devenblake 6y ago
Reading all these replies and - what the hell? Are recruiters really that common? Are bad recruiters really that common? I wasn't aware this was even a thing.
- avereveard 6y ago
  yes, even on larger agencies, you can find shitty recruiters that think their work is to move meat around. once a recruiter made me run trough 5 interviews. I had a full time job at a time, with a decent pay, and explicitly stated my requested salary upfront. after the whole charade, which burned a significant amount of my vacation days since I was working at another city at the moment, they just came out and said the budget for the position was less than the asking price, but feel convinced it would have been a great opportunity for me. goddamn scum. oh, and the "opportunity" went into bankruptcy forced liquidation two years later.
- michaelt 6y ago
  Recruiters are quite common in cities with a lot of jobs going, and industries with a lot of demand. In terms of bad recruiters: A recruitment agency will often get a fee of ~20% of an employee's first year's salary - meaning they are extremely motivated. That high level of motivation has some benefits - for candidates, they'll happily take care of any BS like entering your details into different companies' candidate tracking systems, writing carefully customised cover letters for each job, following up with companies after interviews and so on. And for employers, recruiters will deal with grubby business like cold-calling candidates and will often have access to more candidates. It also has a bunch of disadvantages - recruiters will happily post fake high-salary jobs to gather resumes, add lies to candidates' resumes, help candidates cheat on work-sample tests, send generous 'gifts' to hiring teams that take their candidates, apply high-pressure sales tactics to wavering candidates, call candidates they placed after a year or two and encourage them to move jobs, and copy the contact database any time they leave a job.
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    I’ve found some are very good at what they do but many more are just going for raw body count.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Yeah, recruiters are incentivised to sell you to a company, that's when they get paid. I believe a lot of companies have a clause that the recruiter only gets paid if the new employee works at the company for an X amount of time, but I suspect they gamble on the employee blending in. But it's damaging, and the company will not be pleased with the recruiter if they find out they've scammed them into hiring.
hutzlibu 6y ago
"At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while. " I feel you, but right now I am more concerned about quite some other broken processes to the point of ... what is actually working right? And then after a while I realize again - actually quite a lot. It just works not by my high theoretical standards.
michaelcampbell 6y ago
Similar situation for me on the other side. Interviewing a guy that would be my colleague. Asked him a few things about his resume, he gave me an odd look then asked, "May I see that?" When I handed it to him he scanned it over, handed it back to me and said, "This is an utter fabrication." We hired him (interview went on discussing the job, his actual background, etc.) and he was really good, but I don't know what my bosses did with that recruiting agency, if anything. Above my pay grade, that. This was early 1990's, so this charlatanery is not new.
- DiggyJohnson 6y ago
  This is a wonderful vignette. Efficient use of dialogue.
pacman2 6y ago
"The whole recruitment process seems broken " The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in the and, the market might have collapsed already. ""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons So most good candidates and most good companies have long exited the official job market and work with referrals or whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a job, the other side will never believe it.
- tempodox 6y ago
  In Johnathan Swift's “Gulliver's Travels” (published 1726) it is stated that fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market. Your comment describes a situation where exactly that happened. It is frustrating to see such an important (and simple) lesson, known literally for centuries, get forgotten or ignored.
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    > fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market Can you expand on the quote from Gulliver's Travels? It's been decades since I read it and I can't think of where in the book it could have been from, I don't remember much economics being in the book...
    - miobrien 6y ago
      They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.[330] [330] An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust have been made capital. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm
throwanem 6y ago
That's pretty wild! I've worked with a fair number of recruiters at this point, from both sides of the table, and the next one I see pull something like that will be the first.
klingon78 6y ago
MOVA stands for “multiple object versionless architecture”, which is something I’d imagine any experienced full-stack developer should be able to handle- if it were real.
- jameshart 6y ago
  Yes, the SVO - Single Versioned Object - architecture is much trickier to implement.
- jackhack 6y ago
  Did anyone else catch the hilarity of their animal choice on that fake book cover? A Lion! (Lyin') I guess a "Bull" relieving itself would have been too obvious?
- KSS42 6y ago
  Someone should develop this as a standard. There must some initiative that can be renamed to MOVA.
winfred 6y ago
>I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. I have a fake programming language on my resume, has been there for years. To top it off, I used a well known video game cheat code. I've been hired several times with that on my resume, so far no one has ever mentioned it.
- batch12 6y ago
  I also have years of experience in Konami Code.
  - MikeBVaughn 6y ago
    Thirty lives worth of years?
- Pxtl 6y ago
  So what, you've listed like 5 years experience in UUDDLRLRBA?
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    "iddqd" maybe? IIRC that is god mode in doom. It's been like 20 years, its getting a little foggy. Edit: I recalled correctly, IDDQD was the cheat code for god mode in the original doom. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iddqd https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iddqd
- hattar 6y ago
  There are so many programming languages out there, as a hiring manager it’s not uncommon for me to see resumes with languages I’ve never heard of and probably don’t care much about. The cheat code just depends on how it has been inserted into the resume. If I threw out every resume with some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem, etc. I’d probably never hire anyone
  - DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
    > some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem I don't dock points for layout issues (unless they say they have experience in front-end work...), but spelling and grammar is exactly what you should be getting right in an resume. I don't meant to say I would be unreasonable pedant about the use of prepositions, and I'd probably overlook an MS Office autocorrect (like how Excel always changes "HSA" to "HAS", grrr) - and small mistakes must never invalidate someone immediately - but it means I'm going to be in the session with a dim view of the candidate until and unless they demonstrate otherwise. That said, recruiters and agencies do edit resumes - so if something seems off with a resume (e.g. "20 years experience with Rust") then I do have a policy of directly contacting the candidate with the resume attached and asking them to verify that this is the resume they wrote. It's also why I sign my own resume PDF with my AATL certificate and mention that fact when I get to contact the hiring manager (e.g. "oh hey, did you have a chance review my signed resume? if it wasn't a signed PDF please let me know, thanks!)
leetrout 6y ago
This happened to me with Hired back in ~2014. They put Ruby / Rails on my resume because I'd used Django. I don't know how common the practice is but it's made me leery of external recruiters and placement services ever since.
moomin 6y ago
When I was fresh out of college, a recruiter altered my university grades. I literally asked to see the paper they were holding and told them it wasn’t right. They offered me the job.
zikduruqe 6y ago
Now days recruiters are lazy, they just put the word "DevOps" in and call it the day.
- brigandish 6y ago
  I wonder if that's a factor in the rise of new industry terms - I think devops is quite a good descriptor but it's still quite unnecessary, operations (or the like) is perfectly good - but, for a while at least, it does help mark you out from the crowd.
JAM1971 6y ago
> The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. It's been a while, but when I doing technical interviews I would give the candidate a copy of the resume that I had and ask them "Before we start, is this your resume? Is everything on it accurate?"
DoubleGlazing 6y ago
Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and magically my CV had modified itself to say I had 7 years of Java experience. I told them I did not put that on my CV, I actually had my own copy with me and showed them that. We all realised the recruiter changed my CV. They apologised and wished me luck. Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me and berating me for not going along with the ruse. He said "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?" Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.
- lwigo 6y ago
  Recruiters will straight up ask for .DOC versions, too. The gall.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Never send doc. Always pdf. Next time I'm lookin I'm gonna send a jpeg for shits n giggles. Same goes for references, always, "available on request for the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't have them. Go find your own clients".
    - andjd 6y ago
      At least do a png. JPEG compression is murder to text.
      - TeMPOraL 6y ago
        This may be a benefit in this case, as sneaky edits to a JPEG full of text will show up as a difference in patterns of artifacts - original text will be compressed twice, while the edits just once (or once and zero if they save the edited image to PNG). Takes a bit of time and skill to make this unnoticeable.
ndespres 6y ago
Had a similar experience when I showed up to an interview for a Windows sysadmin job that a recruiter had arranged. First thing they said was "so your resume says you have 5 years of AS/400 system administration experience?" I think I was 22 years old at the time and had never seen AS/400 in my life, and told them so. They showed me a copy of my resume which had AS/400 and a few other skills falsely inserted by the recruiter. They appreciated my honesty and did call me back for another open position later, and told me they'd fired that recruiter.
bsharitt 6y ago
I had a recruiter dress up my (at the time) plain sysadmin resume as a .NET developer with sysadmin experience and I got blindsided by what the position I was interviewing for actually was when I got there. What a waste of everyone's time. And to this day it's always third party recruiters reaching out to me for positions I'd be "a great fit for", even though even though they're only loosely related to what I've I've done. I tried to avoid external recruiters for the most part these days.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
  When looking for a job after university, I once got invited to an interview via a recruiter who - as they do - said I'd be a great fit. I booked a train ticket for the Monday interview, with multiple hours of leeway, and said I'd be glad to attend. On the Friday morning before the interview, the recruiter gave me a rough idea of what kind of technical questions they'd ask me. They were nothing like my area of expertise. If something like this happened to me today, I'd cancel the interview, apologise to all the parties, and wouldn't drive there on the day of the interview. But I was a poor student, I didn't drive, I'd already bought the train ticket and, with the limited funds I had, being able to go to any further interviews was contingent on me getting paid expenses for this interview. So I spent the weekend dreading the interview, skipped Monday's lectures, and went to my ritual humiliation. During one excruciating question about AC motors, I came within seconds of telling the interviewers that it wasn't going to work out. But, to ensure I got the train fare back, I had to do appear to be trying my hardest. Every person involved lost out that day.
noneeeed 6y ago
That's why I always take multiple copies of my CV with me to any interview that's arranged through a recruiter and give the interviewer one at the beginning of the interview. I once had a recruiter do the opposite to yours and remove something really important that I'd included specifically for the kind of role they put me forward for. They had just decided that they didn't think it was important. The interviewer disagreed and we spent a while talking about it. The interviewer in that case referred to the recruiter as "the car salesman" throughout the interview. He said the guy was a bit rubbish, but better than all others they'd tried. They were a small firm so had turned to recruiters to take some of the workload. I think he was regretting it.
pradn 6y ago
> I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. I do technical interviews and I never look at CVs before doing the interview. I do this to avoid bias. I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job. Also, people are adaptable, and soft skills matter a lot. So the error bars for recruiting even based on hard skills on a resume are really large.
- tasty_freeze 6y ago
  > I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job. I don't agree. If I'm interviewing someone straight out of college there are things I wouldn't expect them to really know and focus on whether they are focused and motivated enough to learn those things on the job. If the person at 15 years experience and doesn't know things which are a normal part of the kind of job I do, it would be a deal breaker.
  - pradn 6y ago
    Where I work, the interview is based on the level we're hiring for, not their background. If someone's expected to perform as a mid-level engineer, it doesn't matter to me how long they've worked as long as they can solve the technical problem as expected for someone of that level. It's a different philosophy, and has it's pros and cons.
  - mdpye 6y ago
    I try to let the expectations for the interview be set by the expectations they will find when they start. It's useful to know what you're looking for when you go out in to the market...
- bhandziuk 6y ago
  What if there is something interesting on their CV worth exploring?
  - pradn 6y ago
jcpham2 6y ago
Exchange 4.5< admin popping in to say hi. The management interface to 2000 was basically the same as 2003 & 2007, it wasn’t until 2010 iirc that the web based interface + everything is cloud doctrine hit.
- brigandish 6y ago
  Where were you when I needed you in the interview? ;-P I don't remember the year it happened but it could even have been 2001, even 6 months to a year at that time would count as "extensive", I suppose. Can't say I had extensive 5.5 experience at that point either, to be fair. They were probably concerned about their upgrade path from NT to 2000 and active directory more than just the mail server. I'll never know!
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Recruiters are very different from “the good ol’ days,” when they acted more like talent agents. I was a hiring manager for decades, and appreciated recruiters that acted as advocates for their prospects; even when I ended up not hiring the prospect. Nowadays, it’s all tag searches and fake “personalized” emails. If I have “I once had a cup of coffee” in my CV, I’m a “Java guru.” I regularly send people interested in working with me to things like my SO Story[0], and they regularly ignore it. Nowadays, I have the rare luxury of choosing with whom I want to work. If folks don’t want to work with me, then let’s not waste each other’s time. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall
djrogers 6y ago
I just went through a little job hunt - 4 companies, 3 sets of interviews, 2 offers. Was never once asked for a resume. I assume everyone just looked at my LinkedIn profile, or just figured they'd learn everything they needed from talking to me.
duxup 6y ago
I've had a recruiter from a recruiting agency and a HR person at a company (different jobs) ask me to update my resume with something I wasn't comfortable with. I didn't do it, both still offered me interviews and the focus of the interview was those technologies. I pointed out that it wasn't on my resume and yup it wasn't, everyone seemed confused. At the time I was trying to break into the industry and didn't feel like telling them. I really just want to talk to some technical folks at the company, 10 minutes and if they're honest we probably both know if I'm a good fit or not... but rather it's recruiter and HR filters up the wazoo. The whole thing is a stupid game where companies, recruiters, and etc don't know what they're talking about, play alphabet soup, ghost people ... and then get upset when it happens to them... The whole process seems disconnected and shockingly dishonest.
Zenst 6y ago
Oh my experiences of the CV days when agencies would take your CV and send the client their formatted one (your contact details excluded of course) saw many fun times , today they kinda push the work onto you and just robot send what you give them for most area's. Some contract work with good earning rates for agencies will still see them tailor your CV somewhat, but for most for the best focusing on relevant area's for the role. But a few of my more interesting experiences in the past in interviews regarding CV's have been: 1) Them having somebody else's CV content with my name attached - had that a few times 2) Them having 3 versions of your CV and first question is which one do I use and why I always carried a copies of my original printed out on nice paper. 3) Being interviewed for a different job than applied (my CV and experience covered wide area) for and not finding out until the offer came thru. 4) Turning up at an interview expected to speak Hungarian as I had Hungarian notation upon my CV. 5) Many instances of reused aberrations or when one letter be mistyped by agency making for much fun, maybe been bitrot/errors at play thinking about how some of those transpired. But often my favourites would be when you turn up and the interviewer is down to earth and starts by glancing over the cv he got and pops it into the bin saying, we don't need that and gets into some technical questions and banter. Those always enjoyable and in a way often been a sign of a good boss - somebody who can cut thru the crud and get down to the issue at hand without the song and dance.
jldugger 6y ago
Well, they did mention headhunters specifically, so maybe they knew the dynamic full well.
mgarfias 6y ago
This is why I don't hand out my resume as a word (or whatever doc). It goes out as a PDF. My assumption is that someone smart enough to edit it, is smart enough to know that adding needed shit to the resume is a bad idea.
aidenn0 6y ago
My dad had a recruiter delete his PhD from the education section. During the interview a topic related to his thesis came up, he mentioned his thesis and the interview was over because "we don't hire people with PhDs"
- ycombinete 6y ago
  What a bizzare disqualification criteria!
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    I can think of two reasons: 1. Having interviewed otherwise similarly qualified recent graduates, those with PhDs absolutely were worse on average at writing code[A]. 2. Having a PhD raises the salary you can get at other jobs (less true today then 25 years ago when it happened, but still somewhat true), so if the job isn't paying particularly high rates then they either worry about retention or quality (i.e. you can either get a better paying job elsewhere because of the PhD or you can't despite the PhD, neither of which bodes well for the company hiring). #1 didn't really apply to my dad since he had over 10 years of industry experience at that point, but might be the reason for the policy. A: I don't know why this is so. I suspect it's a combination of factors; those with good practical skills may be lured away from academia after one of their previous 2 degrees and never get a PhD; the PhDs looking for industry jobs are already those who were disqualified from academia for some reason? I never pursued any education after my B.S. so can really only speculate.
cptskippy 6y ago
I had a similar experience when I decided to move on from my first job. I naively accepted a recruiter's request to help and ended up going on a couple interviews where I was completely out of my depth. 5 minutes into the second such interview I asked the interviewer to see the job requirements and handed them a copy of my resume. I then explained that I didn't have any of the qualifications they were looking for, not even relevant experience, and noped my way out the door. I received a nice email from the interviewer thanking me for not wasting their time and saying they'd keep my real resume on file if they had anything come up. I fired the recruiter that day.
TheRealDunkirk 6y ago
Really, the breakdown was with the recruiter doing that without telling you. Flip side: I helped interview someone to replace me for an old position. He was put forward by a recruiting company as having had .NET and Ruby on Rails experience. I asked if he had done any Rails projects. "Oh yes, 2 or 3." Because of time, I didn't press further. We knew we were hiring a junior guy, and I didn't want to tangle with specifics, or trying to smoke out how much he knew through technical questions. I'm a brutally honest person, and I can never quite catch myself being naive at the wrong moment... When the time came to hand off the Rails project to him, I told him it was written in Rails, and he literally opened a browser, went to Google, and typed in "Ruby on Rails" in front of me. And that's when I knew the recruiter had lied FOR him, and coached him to just go along with the lie. At least THIS guy had THAT going for him. When I told my new management about the lie, knowing what was coming, I just got a stupid look, and a "Well, this can be an opportunity to learn something new." It took him 3 years to rewrite my 3-month Rails app in .NET, and I've heard it doesn't work. Yes, recruitment is broken. In this example, it was an utter lack of care to follow up on malfeasance from a recruiting firm. They got what they ultimately wanted -- a warm body on an H1-B visa -- and that's what they'll continue to get with their process.
lmilcin 6y ago
I meet couple of recruiters who insist on me sending them CV as DOC. I tell them that I have carefully typeset my CV in LaTeX in PDF and I am not willing to rewrite it to Word. Usually this is the end of it and they just take my PDF. I have once been on an interview and interviewer pulled out my CV, obviously horribly mangled in Word. I told him that no, this isn't my CV and that I take too much pride in whatever I make including my CV to make such horribly looking document. I have once met recruiter who insisted I rewrite my CV to include description of my experience with everything that was listed in the ad. I told them that this is my CV and it already lists a lot of stuff and it doesn't make sense for me to list obvious things (like knowledge of Excel) or things I have no experience with and that in general the CV is about me and not about the ad contents. I got no reply.
- pasc1878 6y ago
  Re word documents do go in document systems in the hiring firm so they might be the one asking for that. As for the latter. You don't have one CV you have a separate CV for each application and tune it to the ad. The ad is what the hiring firm is interested in and if you fit their needs and not does the firm fit your needs, that is for you to discover from the ad or from the interview process
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    My history of projects and technologies I worked with do not change depending on who asks.
donatj 6y ago
We interviewed a person a number of years ago now in a similar boat. We'd asked him how proficient he was with a number of technologies he'd listed on his resume, and he didn't seem to know what any of them were. Finally, frustrated, we asked him why he'd put these things on his resume. He said "my recruiter told me to". Sigh. I don't know for certain but I believe we didn't work with that recruiter again.
DebtDeflation 6y ago
>The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end It is. Have you filled out an online job application lately? I've abandoned multiple opportunities when I was directed to an online application that looked like it was written in the 1990s and literally asked me to rekey every bit of info that is already on my CV. There's no reason for a job application to ask for anything other than name and email with a button to upload your CV in this day and age.
ArchOversight 6y ago
This happened to me as well. I am so glad I had a copy of my CV with me that I could hand over. The recruiter had copy and pasted from my perfectly formatted LaTeX typeset resume and changed what I did and when. They were looking for someone to help them migrate from one system to another and I didn't have experience in the first to help with that.
makecheck 6y ago
Recruiting should require basic familiarity with the target industry, and knowledge of what type of background is actually relevant to a position. The overwhelming majority of random recruiter messages I’ve received over the years have basically just shown the cluelessness of the recruiter.
shoguning 6y ago
Is there any reason to use a 3rd party recruiter? The listings are all public, just submit a resume. All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the runaround from recruiters.
stiray 6y ago
Just a question, is it common in your country to actually bother with recruiters? I ignore them by default as I consider it a slimy business and quite frankly I dont care what they have to say. If I am interested into working for some company, I will send them an email, regardless if they are recruiting or not and I was rejected in around 30% (but I do have something to show in my resume or even if they ignore it, in my hobby projects). 3rd party recruiting, with their generic letters? Come on, at least try. But I must say this is something relatively new to me, I started to get those letters on linkedin like 2-3 years ago, is this like a common practice?
thamer 6y ago
I had a recruiter ask me for a .doc version of my CV, which I had written with LaTeX. I explained to him that I had no way to do that, and after he insisted I understood that the point was for him to pad it with skills that prospect employers might be interested in.
krageon 6y ago
> The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while. Exactly this. The most depressing thing to me is that whenever I suggest to my colleagues that 99% of the work we'd hire someone for anyone with half a brain could learn in a few weeks (I work in an office for a big company), they still insist on listing all sorts of required skills. Even though the people we land with job adverts like that don't usually have the skills and then get hired anyway.
franga2000 6y ago
A lot of comments under here are talking about recruiters changing CVs, but I can't imagine why anyone would do that. Like, what is the incentive there? Are these "outsourced" recruiters that get paid regardless of the quality of the candidate? Is that a thing? (I genuinely don't know, I've only ever talked to in-house recruiters that had their incentives aligned with the company so there's no reason for them to lie about candidates)

arethuza 6y ago

I get as angry with recruiters as everyone else, but then I remember then time where I worked for a company that shared a floor of a serviced office building with a recruitment company. They were brutal in their treatment of staff - they were too cheap to get rooms for staff appraisals so they would do them in the coffee area we shared with them so we could hear how they were treated by their management - seeing people (men and women) in tears was pretty much a daily event.

dmos62 6y ago
Jeez louise, imagine working somewhere where coworkers are regularly abused to tears. I really hope that that's an isolated case.
- slimsag 6y ago
  My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours. She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired. Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you. Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.
  - eecc 6y ago
    Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech. Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)
    - dunefox 6y ago
      At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.
      - arethuza 6y ago
        In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem. This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....
        dunefox 6y ago
        That's actually a genius idea. I wonder how much money is wasted on such things.
        arethuza 6y ago
        I wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)
- arethuza 6y ago
  It was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years ago). I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!
  - ezconnect 6y ago
    I once coded for a recruitment agency and they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay
      - estaseuropano 6y ago
        Just like the real estate agent is incentivised to get you a higher price for your home? No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.
        giantg2 6y ago
        I think a lot of people aren't aware of the studies that support your real estate claim. Velocity and volume are the name of the game.
      - chrisbennet 6y ago
        "The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivized to help you negotiate higher pay" Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."
- projectileboy 6y ago
  Nope. Sales is sales is sales. It’s a pretty harsh world. If you’ve been a solid performer for years, maybe you can miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    I used to know a chap who was a successful partner at a top UK law firm - he had a very successful run of work that lasted for years and made a lot of money for everyone. However, eventually he it came to an end and he had a less than successful month - he got the same bollocking about performance as everyone else, and in front of his entire team too. Some organisations are just run like that.
    - slt2021 6y ago
      the thing with sales is one you develop a sales skill and network - you go and set up your own shop and become an equity owner. consider sales as a learning experience to set up your own shop
  - toyg 6y ago
    Glengarry Glensales, basically...
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I imagine a lot of people here would consider it pretty awful if they would be routinely punished because something happened totally out of their control--like a decision maker at a customer changing jobs tanking an "in the bag" deal. Yet that sort of thing happens all the time in sales. Sales is especially harsh in some environments. I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.
  - Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
    My brother worked in commission-based sales for a while. He said the performance bonus structure was awful. It was basically based on your performance increase, rather than your absolute performance. So the top performer would likely get the lowest bonus because it's hard to improve when you're already at the top. If 100% of your calls led to a sale, you might get a good bonus the first year, but you will have made it impossible to get anything in subsequent years. It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus. What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  " I really hope that that's an isolated case." On a global scale? Sadly no. I rather suspect the tech sector is a very safe space, in that regard. Because of demand and supply. But overall life is cheap on this planet.
- acdha 6y ago
  Sadly, it’s not as rare as it should be. Most of us here have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn’t respect you much and is confident that you can easily be replaced. Unless there’s a union the odds are pretty good that you can find a manager like that at a large organization once you get out of the high-status areas - especially when it’s something like an outsourced labor company where margins are low and replacing people doesn’t have much visible impact on customers. At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.
mattkevan 6y ago
Used to work at a place that shared a kitchen with a recruitment company and the same thing would happen. Very awkward to have to make a coffee right next to someone in floods of tears getting absolutely monstered by their manager. Like Lord of the Flies in shiny suits.
- arethuza 6y ago
  A colleagues referred to one of their managers as the Terminator because of the warmth and charisma she displayed.
- laurentdc 6y ago
  Most of my friends from university who went into recruiting burned out and quit within 6 months. The turnover (especially in temp agencies) is insane
  - cosmodisk 6y ago
    It's a sales job and a hard one and most people are crap at it,hence the churn. I've spoken to a few in their early 20s that were very good but then they aren't your usual Java is the same as JavaScript type of people.

ChrisRR 6y ago

I learned that quickly, so when I go into an interview I'm always honest and take a couple of extra CVs just in case the recruiter has changed something. At one interview they told me they thought I would be a good fit, but couldn't hire me at my requested salary. I hadn't put down a requested salary, the recruiter had put down an unreasonably high salary and almost cost me the job

practicalpants 6y ago

Yep, for my first programming job out of college a recruiter arranged an onsite interview for a Java role, when I was under every impression it was for Ruby/Rails. I don't know Java. The first interviewer laughed and walked out. I explained things to the recruiter, he cursed, said he would "visit the Ruby team upstairs". He actually managed to setup an impromptu on-site interview with the Ruby team on that same day. I got the job.

goodlinks 6y ago
This makes me chuckle, and its a nice story cos you got a job :).. All the controls in the world mean bugger all when ultimately the deciding factor is a human. No one ever wants to admit that the world runs on trust and respect :).
dempseye 6y ago
The recruiter did good work here. I suspect this was a screw up in internal HR. The external recruiter has absolutely no incentive to send you for an interview you will bomb out of.
- viraptor 6y ago
  I'm not sure. Recruiters can spray and pray with candidates the way candidates can spray and pray with applications. They're not going to be great quality, but if you're paid commission on a hire and the recruitment channel can handle the load... what's to stop the recruiter?
  - pc86 6y ago
    Aside from it destroying future business (we've had recruiters change candidates' resumes on us and that recruiter is blacklisted - by name - forever, to anyone who will listen), most contracts will have a 30-day clause where if the employee leaves for any reason within 30 days the fee is returned. Some even have if employee is fired within 30 days that the next placement fee is discounted.

ilaksh 6y ago

I had a front-end long-term contract many years ago that required expertise with C#, WPF, Silverlight and something else I forget. I had those things covered, but I soon learned that I was also supposedly an expert in SharePoint and an experienced graphic artist. The reality is that if they had given me any requirements for SharePoint I could have built that for them even though I had never used it. But graphic design I had no interest in. A few weeks in there was a lunch with recruiters and contractors for the project and one of the other recruiters (not the one who submitted me for the job) asked me something like, "when did you first realize that you loved to draw?" or something. I told her honestly I was horrible at drawing and not interested in it. One of the reasons I got fired from that contract eventually (aside from a fight with a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality and was holding the project up in his backend role) was that they were disappointed with my lack of interesting user interface designs. I never told anyone I was a graphic artist. Even if I did have that skill (or interest) (which I had neither), I was too busy dealing with new WPF/XAML/C# features and software design etc.

toyg 6y ago
> a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality I bet the Alan Partridge jokes were flying...

habosa 6y ago

This is why some recruiters demand a DOCX of a resume, not just a PDF. They edit them before submitting them to postings. Sometimes they're honest edits to improve your chances, but mostly it's lying to get you in the door.

NullPrefix 6y ago
Only sending PDFs sounds like a an easy way to weed this category out.
- paranoidrobot 6y ago
  As mentioned in another post on this thread, a lot of recruiters will happily copy/paste from your PDF to their template.
  - NullPrefix 6y ago
    Level 2 would be a jpeg, I guess.
mnd999 6y ago
I’ve been using latex for my CV for years. If they ask for an editable version I just send them the .tex file. I’ve never come across any edited versions at interview.
- bluenose69 6y ago
  Years ago, I recall someone musing about sending dvi files to an administrator, when asked for Word/Wordperfect files.
- snickerer 6y ago
  The same here! I tell them that I don't own MS Word and that I don't know how to use it. If that's deal-breaker then I don't want to work with this recruiter. But I must add that I am only looking for C Linux coder contracts.
- 6y ago

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx file, or a PDF? The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.

arethuza 6y ago
It's trivial to convert PDFs these days to Word documents - Word actually opens PDFs as editable. I suppose you could print out your CV and scan it into a PDF to prevent that - but then there is OCR...
- MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  I must be behind the times. You're right of course that with OCR, and the right typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    But I doubt anyone would take the hazzle of doing OCR. Because it is still a lot of work to spot misstakes (which still do happen, also with standardfonts). Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can see, that it was scanned in.
    - emodendroket 6y ago
      Because they don’t want your direct contact information in there, for one thing.
zo1 6y ago
Intermediary recruiters are well-known for asking for editable formats, e.g. docx. So technically you can stop them from editing your CV, but non-technically they can just decline to represent/use you. Or, they might just copy-paste your PDF into a new doc and present that to the potential employer.

slezyr 6y ago

> What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it They get a bonus for hire.

devenblake 6y ago

Reading all these replies and - what the hell? Are recruiters really that common? Are bad recruiters really that common? I wasn't aware this was even a thing.

avereveard 6y ago
yes, even on larger agencies, you can find shitty recruiters that think their work is to move meat around. once a recruiter made me run trough 5 interviews. I had a full time job at a time, with a decent pay, and explicitly stated my requested salary upfront. after the whole charade, which burned a significant amount of my vacation days since I was working at another city at the moment, they just came out and said the budget for the position was less than the asking price, but feel convinced it would have been a great opportunity for me. goddamn scum. oh, and the "opportunity" went into bankruptcy forced liquidation two years later.
michaelt 6y ago
Recruiters are quite common in cities with a lot of jobs going, and industries with a lot of demand. In terms of bad recruiters: A recruitment agency will often get a fee of ~20% of an employee's first year's salary - meaning they are extremely motivated. That high level of motivation has some benefits - for candidates, they'll happily take care of any BS like entering your details into different companies' candidate tracking systems, writing carefully customised cover letters for each job, following up with companies after interviews and so on. And for employers, recruiters will deal with grubby business like cold-calling candidates and will often have access to more candidates. It also has a bunch of disadvantages - recruiters will happily post fake high-salary jobs to gather resumes, add lies to candidates' resumes, help candidates cheat on work-sample tests, send generous 'gifts' to hiring teams that take their candidates, apply high-pressure sales tactics to wavering candidates, call candidates they placed after a year or two and encourage them to move jobs, and copy the contact database any time they leave a job.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  I’ve found some are very good at what they do but many more are just going for raw body count.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

Yeah, recruiters are incentivised to sell you to a company, that's when they get paid. I believe a lot of companies have a clause that the recruiter only gets paid if the new employee works at the company for an X amount of time, but I suspect they gamble on the employee blending in. But it's damaging, and the company will not be pleased with the recruiter if they find out they've scammed them into hiring.

hutzlibu 6y ago

"At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while. " I feel you, but right now I am more concerned about quite some other broken processes to the point of ... what is actually working right? And then after a while I realize again - actually quite a lot. It just works not by my high theoretical standards.

michaelcampbell 6y ago

Similar situation for me on the other side. Interviewing a guy that would be my colleague. Asked him a few things about his resume, he gave me an odd look then asked, "May I see that?" When I handed it to him he scanned it over, handed it back to me and said, "This is an utter fabrication." We hired him (interview went on discussing the job, his actual background, etc.) and he was really good, but I don't know what my bosses did with that recruiting agency, if anything. Above my pay grade, that. This was early 1990's, so this charlatanery is not new.

DiggyJohnson 6y ago
This is a wonderful vignette. Efficient use of dialogue.

pacman2 6y ago

"The whole recruitment process seems broken " The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in the and, the market might have collapsed already. ""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons So most good candidates and most good companies have long exited the official job market and work with referrals or whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a job, the other side will never believe it.

tempodox 6y ago
In Johnathan Swift's “Gulliver's Travels” (published 1726) it is stated that fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market. Your comment describes a situation where exactly that happened. It is frustrating to see such an important (and simple) lesson, known literally for centuries, get forgotten or ignored.
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market Can you expand on the quote from Gulliver's Travels? It's been decades since I read it and I can't think of where in the book it could have been from, I don't remember much economics being in the book...
  - miobrien 6y ago
    They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.[330] [330] An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust have been made capital. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/829/829-h/829-h.htm

throwanem 6y ago

That's pretty wild! I've worked with a fair number of recruiters at this point, from both sides of the table, and the next one I see pull something like that will be the first.

klingon78 6y ago

MOVA stands for “multiple object versionless architecture”, which is something I’d imagine any experienced full-stack developer should be able to handle- if it were real.

jameshart 6y ago
Yes, the SVO - Single Versioned Object - architecture is much trickier to implement.
jackhack 6y ago
Did anyone else catch the hilarity of their animal choice on that fake book cover? A Lion! (Lyin') I guess a "Bull" relieving itself would have been too obvious?
KSS42 6y ago
Someone should develop this as a standard. There must some initiative that can be renamed to MOVA.

winfred 6y ago

>I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. I have a fake programming language on my resume, has been there for years. To top it off, I used a well known video game cheat code. I've been hired several times with that on my resume, so far no one has ever mentioned it.

batch12 6y ago
I also have years of experience in Konami Code.
- MikeBVaughn 6y ago
  Thirty lives worth of years?
Pxtl 6y ago
So what, you've listed like 5 years experience in UUDDLRLRBA?
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  "iddqd" maybe? IIRC that is god mode in doom. It's been like 20 years, its getting a little foggy. Edit: I recalled correctly, IDDQD was the cheat code for god mode in the original doom. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iddqd https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iddqd
hattar 6y ago
There are so many programming languages out there, as a hiring manager it’s not uncommon for me to see resumes with languages I’ve never heard of and probably don’t care much about. The cheat code just depends on how it has been inserted into the resume. If I threw out every resume with some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem, etc. I’d probably never hire anyone
- DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
  > some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem I don't dock points for layout issues (unless they say they have experience in front-end work...), but spelling and grammar is exactly what you should be getting right in an resume. I don't meant to say I would be unreasonable pedant about the use of prepositions, and I'd probably overlook an MS Office autocorrect (like how Excel always changes "HSA" to "HAS", grrr) - and small mistakes must never invalidate someone immediately - but it means I'm going to be in the session with a dim view of the candidate until and unless they demonstrate otherwise. That said, recruiters and agencies do edit resumes - so if something seems off with a resume (e.g. "20 years experience with Rust") then I do have a policy of directly contacting the candidate with the resume attached and asking them to verify that this is the resume they wrote. It's also why I sign my own resume PDF with my AATL certificate and mention that fact when I get to contact the hiring manager (e.g. "oh hey, did you have a chance review my signed resume? if it wasn't a signed PDF please let me know, thanks!)

leetrout 6y ago

This happened to me with Hired back in ~2014. They put Ruby / Rails on my resume because I'd used Django. I don't know how common the practice is but it's made me leery of external recruiters and placement services ever since.

moomin 6y ago

When I was fresh out of college, a recruiter altered my university grades. I literally asked to see the paper they were holding and told them it wasn’t right. They offered me the job.

zikduruqe 6y ago

Now days recruiters are lazy, they just put the word "DevOps" in and call it the day.

brigandish 6y ago
I wonder if that's a factor in the rise of new industry terms - I think devops is quite a good descriptor but it's still quite unnecessary, operations (or the like) is perfectly good - but, for a while at least, it does help mark you out from the crowd.

JAM1971 6y ago

> The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. It's been a while, but when I doing technical interviews I would give the candidate a copy of the resume that I had and ask them "Before we start, is this your resume? Is everything on it accurate?"

DoubleGlazing 6y ago

Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV. Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and magically my CV had modified itself to say I had 7 years of Java experience. I told them I did not put that on my CV, I actually had my own copy with me and showed them that. We all realised the recruiter changed my CV. They apologised and wished me luck. Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me and berating me for not going along with the ruse. He said "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?" Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.

lwigo 6y ago
Recruiters will straight up ask for .DOC versions, too. The gall.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Never send doc. Always pdf. Next time I'm lookin I'm gonna send a jpeg for shits n giggles. Same goes for references, always, "available on request for the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't have them. Go find your own clients".
  - andjd 6y ago
    At least do a png. JPEG compression is murder to text.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      This may be a benefit in this case, as sneaky edits to a JPEG full of text will show up as a difference in patterns of artifacts - original text will be compressed twice, while the edits just once (or once and zero if they save the edited image to PNG). Takes a bit of time and skill to make this unnoticeable.

ndespres 6y ago

Had a similar experience when I showed up to an interview for a Windows sysadmin job that a recruiter had arranged. First thing they said was "so your resume says you have 5 years of AS/400 system administration experience?" I think I was 22 years old at the time and had never seen AS/400 in my life, and told them so. They showed me a copy of my resume which had AS/400 and a few other skills falsely inserted by the recruiter. They appreciated my honesty and did call me back for another open position later, and told me they'd fired that recruiter.

bsharitt 6y ago

I had a recruiter dress up my (at the time) plain sysadmin resume as a .NET developer with sysadmin experience and I got blindsided by what the position I was interviewing for actually was when I got there. What a waste of everyone's time. And to this day it's always third party recruiters reaching out to me for positions I'd be "a great fit for", even though even though they're only loosely related to what I've I've done. I tried to avoid external recruiters for the most part these days.

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
When looking for a job after university, I once got invited to an interview via a recruiter who - as they do - said I'd be a great fit. I booked a train ticket for the Monday interview, with multiple hours of leeway, and said I'd be glad to attend. On the Friday morning before the interview, the recruiter gave me a rough idea of what kind of technical questions they'd ask me. They were nothing like my area of expertise. If something like this happened to me today, I'd cancel the interview, apologise to all the parties, and wouldn't drive there on the day of the interview. But I was a poor student, I didn't drive, I'd already bought the train ticket and, with the limited funds I had, being able to go to any further interviews was contingent on me getting paid expenses for this interview. So I spent the weekend dreading the interview, skipped Monday's lectures, and went to my ritual humiliation. During one excruciating question about AC motors, I came within seconds of telling the interviewers that it wasn't going to work out. But, to ensure I got the train fare back, I had to do appear to be trying my hardest. Every person involved lost out that day.

noneeeed 6y ago

That's why I always take multiple copies of my CV with me to any interview that's arranged through a recruiter and give the interviewer one at the beginning of the interview. I once had a recruiter do the opposite to yours and remove something really important that I'd included specifically for the kind of role they put me forward for. They had just decided that they didn't think it was important. The interviewer disagreed and we spent a while talking about it. The interviewer in that case referred to the recruiter as "the car salesman" throughout the interview. He said the guy was a bit rubbish, but better than all others they'd tried. They were a small firm so had turned to recruiters to take some of the workload. I think he was regretting it.

pradn 6y ago

> I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. I do technical interviews and I never look at CVs before doing the interview. I do this to avoid bias. I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job. Also, people are adaptable, and soft skills matter a lot. So the error bars for recruiting even based on hard skills on a resume are really large.

tasty_freeze 6y ago
> I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job. I don't agree. If I'm interviewing someone straight out of college there are things I wouldn't expect them to really know and focus on whether they are focused and motivated enough to learn those things on the job. If the person at 15 years experience and doesn't know things which are a normal part of the kind of job I do, it would be a deal breaker.
- pradn 6y ago
  Where I work, the interview is based on the level we're hiring for, not their background. If someone's expected to perform as a mid-level engineer, it doesn't matter to me how long they've worked as long as they can solve the technical problem as expected for someone of that level. It's a different philosophy, and has it's pros and cons.
- mdpye 6y ago
  I try to let the expectations for the interview be set by the expectations they will find when they start. It's useful to know what you're looking for when you go out in to the market...
bhandziuk 6y ago
What if there is something interesting on their CV worth exploring?
- pradn 6y ago

jcpham2 6y ago

Exchange 4.5< admin popping in to say hi. The management interface to 2000 was basically the same as 2003 & 2007, it wasn’t until 2010 iirc that the web based interface + everything is cloud doctrine hit.

brigandish 6y ago
Where were you when I needed you in the interview? ;-P I don't remember the year it happened but it could even have been 2001, even 6 months to a year at that time would count as "extensive", I suppose. Can't say I had extensive 5.5 experience at that point either, to be fair. They were probably concerned about their upgrade path from NT to 2000 and active directory more than just the mail server. I'll never know!

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Recruiters are very different from “the good ol’ days,” when they acted more like talent agents. I was a hiring manager for decades, and appreciated recruiters that acted as advocates for their prospects; even when I ended up not hiring the prospect. Nowadays, it’s all tag searches and fake “personalized” emails. If I have “I once had a cup of coffee” in my CV, I’m a “Java guru.” I regularly send people interested in working with me to things like my SO Story[0], and they regularly ignore it. Nowadays, I have the rare luxury of choosing with whom I want to work. If folks don’t want to work with me, then let’s not waste each other’s time. [0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

djrogers 6y ago

I just went through a little job hunt - 4 companies, 3 sets of interviews, 2 offers. Was never once asked for a resume. I assume everyone just looked at my LinkedIn profile, or just figured they'd learn everything they needed from talking to me.

duxup 6y ago

I've had a recruiter from a recruiting agency and a HR person at a company (different jobs) ask me to update my resume with something I wasn't comfortable with. I didn't do it, both still offered me interviews and the focus of the interview was those technologies. I pointed out that it wasn't on my resume and yup it wasn't, everyone seemed confused. At the time I was trying to break into the industry and didn't feel like telling them. I really just want to talk to some technical folks at the company, 10 minutes and if they're honest we probably both know if I'm a good fit or not... but rather it's recruiter and HR filters up the wazoo. The whole thing is a stupid game where companies, recruiters, and etc don't know what they're talking about, play alphabet soup, ghost people ... and then get upset when it happens to them... The whole process seems disconnected and shockingly dishonest.

Zenst 6y ago

Oh my experiences of the CV days when agencies would take your CV and send the client their formatted one (your contact details excluded of course) saw many fun times , today they kinda push the work onto you and just robot send what you give them for most area's. Some contract work with good earning rates for agencies will still see them tailor your CV somewhat, but for most for the best focusing on relevant area's for the role. But a few of my more interesting experiences in the past in interviews regarding CV's have been: 1) Them having somebody else's CV content with my name attached - had that a few times 2) Them having 3 versions of your CV and first question is which one do I use and why I always carried a copies of my original printed out on nice paper. 3) Being interviewed for a different job than applied (my CV and experience covered wide area) for and not finding out until the offer came thru. 4) Turning up at an interview expected to speak Hungarian as I had Hungarian notation upon my CV. 5) Many instances of reused aberrations or when one letter be mistyped by agency making for much fun, maybe been bitrot/errors at play thinking about how some of those transpired. But often my favourites would be when you turn up and the interviewer is down to earth and starts by glancing over the cv he got and pops it into the bin saying, we don't need that and gets into some technical questions and banter. Those always enjoyable and in a way often been a sign of a good boss - somebody who can cut thru the crud and get down to the issue at hand without the song and dance.

jldugger 6y ago

Well, they did mention headhunters specifically, so maybe they knew the dynamic full well.

mgarfias 6y ago

This is why I don't hand out my resume as a word (or whatever doc). It goes out as a PDF. My assumption is that someone smart enough to edit it, is smart enough to know that adding needed shit to the resume is a bad idea.

aidenn0 6y ago

My dad had a recruiter delete his PhD from the education section. During the interview a topic related to his thesis came up, he mentioned his thesis and the interview was over because "we don't hire people with PhDs"

ycombinete 6y ago
What a bizzare disqualification criteria!
- aidenn0 6y ago
  I can think of two reasons: 1. Having interviewed otherwise similarly qualified recent graduates, those with PhDs absolutely were worse on average at writing code[A]. 2. Having a PhD raises the salary you can get at other jobs (less true today then 25 years ago when it happened, but still somewhat true), so if the job isn't paying particularly high rates then they either worry about retention or quality (i.e. you can either get a better paying job elsewhere because of the PhD or you can't despite the PhD, neither of which bodes well for the company hiring). #1 didn't really apply to my dad since he had over 10 years of industry experience at that point, but might be the reason for the policy. A: I don't know why this is so. I suspect it's a combination of factors; those with good practical skills may be lured away from academia after one of their previous 2 degrees and never get a PhD; the PhDs looking for industry jobs are already those who were disqualified from academia for some reason? I never pursued any education after my B.S. so can really only speculate.

cptskippy 6y ago

I had a similar experience when I decided to move on from my first job. I naively accepted a recruiter's request to help and ended up going on a couple interviews where I was completely out of my depth. 5 minutes into the second such interview I asked the interviewer to see the job requirements and handed them a copy of my resume. I then explained that I didn't have any of the qualifications they were looking for, not even relevant experience, and noped my way out the door. I received a nice email from the interviewer thanking me for not wasting their time and saying they'd keep my real resume on file if they had anything come up. I fired the recruiter that day.

TheRealDunkirk 6y ago

Really, the breakdown was with the recruiter doing that without telling you. Flip side: I helped interview someone to replace me for an old position. He was put forward by a recruiting company as having had .NET and Ruby on Rails experience. I asked if he had done any Rails projects. "Oh yes, 2 or 3." Because of time, I didn't press further. We knew we were hiring a junior guy, and I didn't want to tangle with specifics, or trying to smoke out how much he knew through technical questions. I'm a brutally honest person, and I can never quite catch myself being naive at the wrong moment... When the time came to hand off the Rails project to him, I told him it was written in Rails, and he literally opened a browser, went to Google, and typed in "Ruby on Rails" in front of me. And that's when I knew the recruiter had lied FOR him, and coached him to just go along with the lie. At least THIS guy had THAT going for him. When I told my new management about the lie, knowing what was coming, I just got a stupid look, and a "Well, this can be an opportunity to learn something new." It took him 3 years to rewrite my 3-month Rails app in .NET, and I've heard it doesn't work. Yes, recruitment is broken. In this example, it was an utter lack of care to follow up on malfeasance from a recruiting firm. They got what they ultimately wanted -- a warm body on an H1-B visa -- and that's what they'll continue to get with their process.

lmilcin 6y ago

I meet couple of recruiters who insist on me sending them CV as DOC. I tell them that I have carefully typeset my CV in LaTeX in PDF and I am not willing to rewrite it to Word. Usually this is the end of it and they just take my PDF. I have once been on an interview and interviewer pulled out my CV, obviously horribly mangled in Word. I told him that no, this isn't my CV and that I take too much pride in whatever I make including my CV to make such horribly looking document. I have once met recruiter who insisted I rewrite my CV to include description of my experience with everything that was listed in the ad. I told them that this is my CV and it already lists a lot of stuff and it doesn't make sense for me to list obvious things (like knowledge of Excel) or things I have no experience with and that in general the CV is about me and not about the ad contents. I got no reply.

pasc1878 6y ago
Re word documents do go in document systems in the hiring firm so they might be the one asking for that. As for the latter. You don't have one CV you have a separate CV for each application and tune it to the ad. The ad is what the hiring firm is interested in and if you fit their needs and not does the firm fit your needs, that is for you to discover from the ad or from the interview process
- lmilcin 6y ago
  My history of projects and technologies I worked with do not change depending on who asks.

donatj 6y ago

We interviewed a person a number of years ago now in a similar boat. We'd asked him how proficient he was with a number of technologies he'd listed on his resume, and he didn't seem to know what any of them were. Finally, frustrated, we asked him why he'd put these things on his resume. He said "my recruiter told me to". Sigh. I don't know for certain but I believe we didn't work with that recruiter again.

DebtDeflation 6y ago

>The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end It is. Have you filled out an online job application lately? I've abandoned multiple opportunities when I was directed to an online application that looked like it was written in the 1990s and literally asked me to rekey every bit of info that is already on my CV. There's no reason for a job application to ask for anything other than name and email with a button to upload your CV in this day and age.

ArchOversight 6y ago

This happened to me as well. I am so glad I had a copy of my CV with me that I could hand over. The recruiter had copy and pasted from my perfectly formatted LaTeX typeset resume and changed what I did and when. They were looking for someone to help them migrate from one system to another and I didn't have experience in the first to help with that.

makecheck 6y ago

Recruiting should require basic familiarity with the target industry, and knowledge of what type of background is actually relevant to a position. The overwhelming majority of random recruiter messages I’ve received over the years have basically just shown the cluelessness of the recruiter.

shoguning 6y ago

Is there any reason to use a 3rd party recruiter? The listings are all public, just submit a resume. All my offers came from applying direct. Always got the runaround from recruiters.

stiray 6y ago

Just a question, is it common in your country to actually bother with recruiters? I ignore them by default as I consider it a slimy business and quite frankly I dont care what they have to say. If I am interested into working for some company, I will send them an email, regardless if they are recruiting or not and I was rejected in around 30% (but I do have something to show in my resume or even if they ignore it, in my hobby projects). 3rd party recruiting, with their generic letters? Come on, at least try. But I must say this is something relatively new to me, I started to get those letters on linkedin like 2-3 years ago, is this like a common practice?

thamer 6y ago

I had a recruiter ask me for a .doc version of my CV, which I had written with LaTeX. I explained to him that I had no way to do that, and after he insisted I understood that the point was for him to pad it with skills that prospect employers might be interested in.

krageon 6y ago

> The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while. Exactly this. The most depressing thing to me is that whenever I suggest to my colleagues that 99% of the work we'd hire someone for anyone with half a brain could learn in a few weeks (I work in an office for a big company), they still insist on listing all sorts of required skills. Even though the people we land with job adverts like that don't usually have the skills and then get hired anyway.

franga2000 6y ago

A lot of comments under here are talking about recruiters changing CVs, but I can't imagine why anyone would do that. Like, what is the incentive there? Are these "outsourced" recruiters that get paid regardless of the quality of the candidate? Is that a thing? (I genuinely don't know, I've only ever talked to in-house recruiters that had their incentives aligned with the company so there's no reason for them to lie about candidates)