14 ms·

The Recruiter Honeypot

655 points by male_salmon 14y ago

TamDenholm 14y ago
This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags. Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy.
- bartonfink 14y ago
  I mentioned the exact same thing to someone a couple of weeks ago - I think her name was Stella, and she's been posting for a startup recently. I'm not a professional contractor like many, but I do like doing freelance gigs to supplement my day-job income. However, finding suitable gigs, dealing with negotiations and chasing down deadbeat clients make it really unpleasant given what I really want to do is make some extra cash after hours. I don't want to deal with all the overhead of running my own business atop managing my own career and family. I would happily give up a percentage of my rate to someone who could get me ~15 hours a week worth of work at a market rate and insulate me from a lot of the overhead that I simply don't have time to deal with. Just like Hollywood stars focus on being Hollywood stars and leave the business of Hollywood to agents, I'd like to focus on my strengths and leave the business to someone else.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    But Hollywood stars sit on set 12 hours a day, for a 16 week shoot, as does the rest of the crew. If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made. I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work. My apologies if this seems overly aggressive I am just interested in how this could work - we could alll fit in 10 hours a week for beer tokens
    - bartonfink 14y ago
      I think you've overlooked the point that I already have a job. I'm "on set" 10 hours a day already.
    - greghinch 14y ago
      I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly as good.
      - deleted 14y ago
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      - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
        My question and same to @bartonfink is still what is the work? If I am say design and build a rest backend for a company, and its say two months work at 45 hrs a week, doing 15 hrs a week telling them it will take six months cos I have other clients is a sure way not to get the gig So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams, I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself thank you
        greghinch 14y ago
        the work is designing and building web applications. almost all coding, a small amount of training/consulting. generally i come into projects that were already built at least part way by someone else and need to be fixed up and have features added. though i am also doing one right now from the ground up with a small team. most of my projects involve small remote teams as well. right now i work with 2 startups and 1 large company, as well as do occasional consulting with another large company (this is usually less than 5 hours every month). i'm all about simplicity and breaking things down into small pieces, so on all projects i am able to deliver and launch features regularly with 10-20 hrs of work a week on each. my total billable hours for the week usually are in the 40ish range. i've found all the work through referrals pretty much, so i can't say exactly how to find it for others. i will say put as much as you can out in open source, that is the best "sales" technique i've had (often "referrals" have come from someone i've only interacted with in the open source community). also, be consistent with your deliveries, and open and honest about scheduling, as well as when something is going to take longer than you estimated. surprisingly few contractors are good at communication it seems. often i come into projects for people who were abandoned by a developer and even when they were working together only got spotty communication from that dev.
  - shalmanese 14y ago
    10X Management is trying to do this: http://www.10xmanagement.com/ http://www.10xmanagement.com/
    - bartonfink 14y ago
      Interesting. Doesn't look like they're up and running yet, but I'll keep my eye on them. Thanks for the link!
      - shalmanese 14y ago
        Last I heard, they were not quite ready to take on more clients at the moment so they closed signup until they could scale their services better.
    - altay 14y ago
      Thanks for the shout-out, Hang! Altay from 10x Management here. Yup, we're doing this, and ramping up quickly. Feel free to get in touch (email in profile) if you want to learn more.
  - snowwindwaves 14y ago
    Try http://www.evisors.com http://www.evisors.com they match clients to consultants and take care of the payment side of things
  - mark_integerdsv 14y ago
    15 hours a week? Jesus... I spend half of that in meetings. I really need to reconfigure my schedule! I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam. First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non technical I might add) management. You'll get a salary and a fancier title than 'contractor' something like... Say... 'consultant' yes! Consultant! That's gonna bump up the hourly rate... But not YOUR hourly rate of course, that of the Firm my friend. I guess my bitterness in this regard is quite obvious but here in South Africa, this type of thing is utterly rife. You have a few managers who have swept in over time on the winds of apathy and who for some I fathomable reason have good, big contracts and a slew of underpaid 'consultants' who run around doing their bidding. You seem to believe that this relationship will play out the other way round where you are earning that 'market rate' and for a small percentage of that you'll have in your employ not only someone who'll ensure you're always employed but who is also a personal assistant that runs your admin? That's called: 'a boss.' Please correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems you have the world (as I know it) bass ackwards and programmers are not Hollywood stars, not where I come from.
    - smackay 14y ago
      Any wave of disruption cast towards recruiters is going to have to destroy consulting houses as proof of it's efficacy. The time and effort required to find work/workers that bartonfink mentions has to be expended by either the employer or the employee. In both cases this a poor use of time so the heavy-lifting of placing people is either done by recruiters or temp agencies. Anything that disrupts this has to make the process effortless, or nearly so, and generate better results so the employer/employee can by-pass the middle-men completely. An unlikely outcome but one which would be welcome almost universally, excluding the obvious casualties of this change.
- greghinch 14y ago
  I've often thought the same thing since becoming a full time freelancer, the talent agency model. The problem to overcome is that, much like most recruiters I've dealt with, it's hard to find someone who isn't a technical developer to understand how to fill a technical developer role. There's a lot more complexity to understanding the work from the outside than there is understanding the work of say an actor. I no more want someone representing me who's saying "ok I have a guy here who has HTML, PHP, Javascript, and CSS, and I see you have all of those on your job requirements, this is a match right?" than I like hearing the opposite from a recruiter. Essentially you're going to need to find developers who want to do sales, a tough find if I've ever heard one.
  - zavulon 14y ago
    Non-developer recruiters who really want to understand technology can learn it. My girlfriend is one, I've got her this book - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004V9HC48/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004V9HC48/, which her boss since made mandatory for all recruiters in their company. Of course, that's not enough by itself, and it's a long process, but there are recruiters who do go through all the trouble of learning technology.
  - altay 14y ago
    This is what we're doing at 10x Management (http://10xmanagement.com http://10xmanagement.com). I'm a YC alum and experienced web dev freelancer. I also play a lot of music so, through serendipitous connections in that world, met some music managers, and realized what they do for their music clients would be really useful for me as a freelance programmer. So we started with them representing me -- taking care of the business end of my freelancing -- and it worked out so well that we've partnered to create 10x Management, to expand the model. I bring the tech experience, and they bring the talent agency experience.
- gruseom 14y ago
  i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy. That's actually an interesting idea. Please write it!
- charlesdm 14y ago
  Had this idea as well. I assume this could work for highly sought after consultant/contractor profiles, more than pure developers. Might also be quite hard to scale this up to many people as the fees you can collect from agreements will be limited (as opposed to actors).
- shpiel 14y ago
  I recently worked with a recruiting agency that operated like a talent agency. The receiiters were not paid on comission. Instead, a team worked with me, and each pitched different companies to me. They prepped me for interviews, analyzed my strengths and weaknesses, and reviewed my past work and projects. In the end I had to choose between two offers. They encouraged me to take the slightly lesser paying one because they thought I would be happier in that position. Talent agency model is definitely the way to go.
  - salemh 14y ago
    Where was this geographically (San Fran? In the US at all?) I was a Contingent (third-party) Technical Recruiter for 2.5 years (and hopefully never again, sans a cool company such as the above) and would love to work in that model. I only had the opportunity with something similar when our sales (the folks who got the requisitions / open orders) had many openings in similar "verticals." E.G. five different companies all looking for Java SE developers, with slight variations, but, for strong candidates I/we could get them several interviews, sometimes multiple offers. Would be much more fulfilling. In most markets, however, this is (if the relationships are not established with multiple companies (which it sounds like the case in your situation)) "skill marketing" or trying to gain a sales foothold into a company by "marketing" a candidate to the company. At one of my former employers, the relationships were solid enough to where we created a few positions for some great candidates as we understood the departments needs. This is not typical at all, so finding a few companies actually making this a standard model would be fascinating (I imagine boutique retainer-model recruiting).
    - shpiel 14y ago
      This was in Boston. But the company is national. My understanding is that they did try to build relationships with employers and would do a site visit with the employer before taking them on. (I had to go the receiiters office for a mock interview.) They have also been around for a long time. Granted I am also relatively inexperienced. Self-taught and only worked in the field for 2 years. Maybe it would not work as well for someone with more experience. Their name was Jobspring btw.
- brc 14y ago
  Well, my disruption idea is to break the entire recruiting process into a value chain, and create little markets for each piece. So a company can list a position on the site (or maybe even on an existing site). But, instead of either a recruitment agency doing everything, or the company doing everything, they can break down the process and take bids on each step. So maybe one person is really good at sorting a pile of CVs into a shortlist. Maybe another is good at phone screening. The company can outsource (via the site) any or all of the parts that go into filling a position. Providers (which would be individuals or small companies) bid for these tasks in an open marketplace along the lines of elance. Effectively it is taking the roles of the recruiter and busting them down into pieces, and allowing different people to specialise into different things. It's no more fleshed as an idea than that, but the basic concept is that a recruiter is considered by many to be overpaid, but fulfills a necessary evil. By allowing companies to directly outsource individual pieces they can utilise what they need from a recruiter without having to pay for the whole amount. And a skilled recruiter can get good work under their own banner without all the overhead of having to get an office and form a company, and themselves become freelance agents for hire.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    Who is going to glue all these pieces together? I think overhead of managing all these small steps would exceed time savings you get from outsourcing. Overhead would be in: 1) Teaching ALL participants about job to fill. 2) Dealing with job seeker's frustration when he would need to answer the same questions to different people in the process. 3) Restricting access to potentially sensitive personal information.
    - brc 14y ago
      The site manages the entire process. It's both workflow manager and marketplace in one. The process of filling a position is pretty generic - you could satisfy something like 90% of hirings with a standard process. Think of it like a series of boxes on a page. The choices are 'Do this myself' and 'outsource' this. As the tasks get completed the next step happens, and the site manages the whole process. The job seeker would not have to answer questions at each step of the way. The information would be saved in the system so that each person managing the step (whether internal or outsourced) can see the output from the previous step. The steps are something like : write ad, sort responses, initial screening, organise interviews, interview, negotiate offers. The company would choose which of these they want to handle in-house, and which they want to outsource. You could come up with a few templates to cover a large proportion of hiring in industries. Restricting access is just done with the same types of legal terms that existing recruitment agents use. The site would include a reputational factor, the same as any other online marketplace. So someone who wants to have a at-home job sorting through CVs isn't going to start leaking the information if they want to get more work from a client. Ideally the jobs would be listed on the site itself, but there's no reason it can't be used to manage jobs that are listed on existing (and popular) sites. The idea would be to leverage the network effect of other sites while building a base of clients for the site itself. So initially listings would be on the site as well as other popular sites. Over time, a strategy would be devised to drive the popularity of the site itself as a place for jobseekers to find work.
- cliftonmckinney 14y ago
  So I think you have to look at why external recruiters are successful: (The following refers to most, but certainly not all) They're generally loathed by developers for a multitude of reasons, they charge ridiculous rates, they come back and poach their placements, and commit a plenty of other sins. Yet they're still out there, plugging away and jamming my LinkedIn feed... The only reason they still manage success is because the alternatives have to be even worse. Despite the ridiculous environment we're in right now, there are still folks out there who are interested in leaving their current jobs for greener pastures. But Dice.com isn't getting it done for these folks, and even if it is their resumes are getting buried beneath piles of unqualified candidates and/or getting filtered out by terribly built filtering software or, even worse, HR folks who mistake Java for Javascript. I think the way you disrupt the recruiting industry is by significantly improving the alternatives. That or providing a completely new alternative that's wildly better. Word of mouth has always been the better alternative. It works like a charm until networks are exhausted. Maybe that's the place to start.
iuguy 14y ago
This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters. Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus. [1] - uk.linkedin.com/pub/markov-bambam/15/643/a56
- Kronopath 14y ago
  I want to read his dissertation. "Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."
  - nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
    I don't know what any of that means, but I know it sounds like the best dissertation ever.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Could happen.
  - nl 14y ago
    His other well known paper (Decoupling IPv7 from Replication in Link-Level Acknowledgements) is available from MIT[1] [1] http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686.Markov+Bambam.You+R.+Mom.html http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686...
    - jonmrodriguez 14y ago
      Haha, figure 1 is just awesome.
      - nl 14y ago
        I liked "we deployed 00 Commodore 64s across the 10-node network, and tested our kernels accordingly"
deleted 14y ago
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forrestthewoods 14y ago
What is the contractual result for breaking a no-poach clause? Should companies inform their employees of no-poach agreements and request to be told when anyone is contacted by a recruiter from Company X? There is an on-going anti-trust lawsuit about no poach policies involving Google, Apple, Intel, Pixar, and more. How does that play into things?
- bjt 14y ago
  The standard remedy for any breach of contract is a lawsuit for damages. You claim that the recruiter's breaking of the contract cost you X dollars, and you sue for X. If you think can convince the court the recruiter was especially naughty, ask for punitive damages too. http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Damages http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Damages The Google/Apple/etc case is a bit different because it's between competitors, not between two parties to a given contract. Antitrust is about preventing/punishing anticompetitive agreements and behaviors.
- radley 14y ago
  Actually "no poach" aka "non-compete" clauses are void in California: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Exceptions_-_valid_non-compete_agreements_in_California http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Exceptions_-... So she really had no grounds to demand and expect it.
  - forrestthewoods 14y ago
    Wait, it doesn't seem like a no poach contract with a recruiter would fall under the same laws. In California an employee is almost always free to quit and work for a direct competitor if that's what they want. However, if a recruiter signs a no poach contract stating they won't contact employees with other job opportunities for 18 months that's an entirely separate issue and doesn't seem like it would be covered by the same law.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  That part of the article was nonsense. First of all, you're not buying a slave. No-poach agreements are collusion and should not even be legal. Second, agencies aren't placing people and then turning around and trying to steal them again. They just have your profile in a database, when a match comes up for a job they shoot you a mail. They don't remember that they placed you and they don't care. They make money by placing labor which has a very high fail rate so they live or die by volume. There's no time to consult a matrix to see what stupid clauses are between who, the employee will have to keep this sort of thing in mind. Remember, an employee taking a job and then leaving after a week for another $1k is going to hurt the employee more than anyone else involved so it makes sense the employee is the only one who needs to care about it.
robk 14y ago
The Kernel (UK) had a nice expose on recruiter tactics recently as well. http://www.kernelmag.com/topic/the-kernel-recruitment-report/ http://www.kernelmag.com/topic/the-kernel-recruitment-report...
jdcryans 14y ago
I was intrigued reading this to see what my inbox would say about Meebo's recruiting. In May 2010 a recruiter spammed the Hadoop mailing lists with a "Data Engineer (Analytics)" in MV. A month later I was blessed with an email from the same recruiter for the same job sent to my @apache address. Another month later he posted the job on LI's Hadoop group. Fast-forward one year, a new recruiter spammed the mahout user mailing list saying he was looking for "Engineers with Machine Learning expertise". Finally 2 months later I got an email sent to my @apache address from the second recruiter for a "Data Engineering Lead" position. So it seems that they haven't used LI a lot and mostly rely on those "other channels" and direct emails. I personally find it disrespectful to send recruiting emails to user mailing lists but I guess recruiters don't know/care about it.
starship 14y ago
"Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year." Wait a second, he was interviewing 100X more people than he was hiring??? Does that seem a little extreme to anyone, or is it just me?
- modoc 14y ago
  Depends on your pool. Small companies need to be absolutely brutal about only hiring the best people, with the best skills, and the best fit for the company. I went to a local university career fair looking for two different junior level folks. I took back over 40 resumes, made 3 follow-up phone screens, and 0 hires. 500 real interviews for 4 hires is a bit much, but in general I pass on people all the time.
  - starship 14y ago
    I've done the same (50 resumes for two positions, phone interviews with 15-20, follow-up in-person interviews with 4). That's 10X interviews. But 100X? Assuming anyone he hires goes through multiple follow-up interviews, I don't see what information he's getting from these interviews that couldn't be handled by a subordinate or by email. Evaluating someone for "fit" is impossible in a short interview like that.
- zeroonetwothree 14y ago
  Each candidate probably had more than one interview. 100 interviews for each hire is not all that high, especially if you don't have a lot of intern conversion hires (that's why larger companies can hire more efficiently).
- arupchak 14y ago
  That's not uncommon, assuming that an initial phone screen counts as an interview. I have had stretches where it took me talking to ~80 candidates between initial phone screens, random chats, etc over two months before finding someone to hire. And to be clear, I am not claiming that I found the 'best' person out of 80 people. 'Best' is a very custom definition depending on the environment, role, and fit.
mindjiver 14y ago
"JavaScript engineer", really?
- brianpan 14y ago
  Elaine is one of the founders of Meebo, so yes, JavaScript engineer.
- simonw 14y ago
  http://www.quora.com/Startups/Why-are-front-end-developers-so-high-in-demand-at-startups-if-front-end-development-is-relatively-easier-than-other-fields-of-engineering/answer/Simon-Willison http://www.quora.com/Startups/Why-are-front-end-developers-s...
  - noarchy 14y ago
    The trend of calling someone an "engineer" for all sorts of things may puzzle people who live in places where the title of "engineer" is regulated. Depending on how far you want to take it, the term can really lose its meaning. Is a supermarket stocker a "display engineer"? They do have to make considerations for aesthetics, space, and so forth...
trustfundbaby 14y ago
And here I was thinking I was special because I was getting two (sometimes 3) recruiting emails a day on Linkedin ... smh.
andrewstuart 14y ago
Is it only recruiters approaching people about work? I would have imagined many employers are directly approaching people in much the same manner as recruiters.
Rodeoclash 14y ago
We're attempting to fix the way freelancers are recruited at agencies / startups by changing the pricing model. At the moment with recruiters, the incentive is to place as many people as quickly as possible as you get a commission for each placement. By changing the model to a subscription you can then open the market place up and make it very transparent. No more hiding peoples contact details from the employee, no more hiding the employers name from the job seeker. We're only in Melbourne, Australia at the moment but if we get interest, we'll try and increase our reach. If you are in Melbourne and you're a freelancer / agency / startup, we'd love to talk: http://www.dragonflylist.com http://www.dragonflylist.com
- bartonfink 14y ago
  Rodeo - I'm currently planning a move down under (my wife just spooked me by wanting to push the timeframe up to next year instead of 2015). Mind if I reach out to you sometime to chat about the market there and whether what you're doing would make sense for someone in my position? I'd be much obliged.
  - Rodeoclash 14y ago
    No problem, you can reach out to me on my homepage; http://www.richardson.co.nz http://www.richardson.co.nz
  - RileyJames 14y ago
    You won't have any trouble getting a tech job here. Huge demand at the moment, not enough talent. Email riley@dragonflylist.com if you want to chat more.
- dools 14y ago
  Have you guys checked out recruitloop.com.au? They're on the same road: ie. changing the industry by changing the incentives (their's is an hourly pay model).
  - RileyJames 14y ago
    Yea we've seen recruitloop. Anyone attempting to solve recruitment problems is a friend of ours. We're primarily looking at the needs of freelancers in creative and digital industries at this point. Keen to meet the recruitloop team, we'll be in Sydney at the end of next month, do you know them?
koide 14y ago
This only emphazises how different the world for programmers is in the USA (especially in the SF area) compared to the rest of the world. I only get three or four emails a year on linkedin, of them one's from Facebook, the other from Google, and the others are from local companies. This kind of make me envious and wanting to be there for a while., to experience how's it like to be valued and sought after.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  You don't feel valued and sought after - more like spammed. It will quickly become very apparent that they haven't bothered reading or understanding your CV/resume and will say all sorts of stuff that obviously isn't true. The top of my CV/resume has a prominent "Note to recruiters" so it is trivial to tell if they did any work at all. The recruiters operate in the same way as spammers. They send email far and wide to see if they can get any bites. If you want to be valued and sought after I suggest you start reading all the emails about helping out folks in Nigeria.
- angelbob 14y ago
  If you envy our level of spam, change the address on your LinkedIn profile and/or make a new honeypot one. Like the original article, you can actually find out empirically! Then write a blog post about it.
  - koide 14y ago
    Only in how it shows the level of opportunities. But it's a good idea to experience it for myself.
- vonmoltke 14y ago
  That's about the level I get here in Dallas. All the pings I get from Seattle and SV are from the really big players, and I occasionally get a ping from a niche employer (Eaton and Idaho National Laboratory, for example) due to my EE and signal processing background.
phillmv 14y ago
>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model. I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bullshit. You're just attempting (rationally, I might add) to depress the market for your existing talent. First and for all, especially in the climate we're in, banning two or three recruiting agencies isn't really going to hurt the chances of an employee who could be persuaded to leave. Secondly, if your employee can be persuaded to leave in the first place that's on you, not the recruiter! I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet, but when the time comes I think I'll find it hard to hold it against them. Edit: mandatory notice of: great article, would read again, A++!
- hollerith 14y ago
  I do not have any ideas on how to disrupt the head-hunting industry, but I have a historical anecdote that might be relevant. In the late 1970s I worked for a contractor who would sometimes hire comp-sci majors to help him. The contractor or small-business person or whatever you call him specialized in developing software for the IBM 5110, which before the IBM PC was the low end of IBM's computer offerings. He told me of another contractor like himself who had an unreasonable client. The client was so unreasonable, IBM got involved in mediating the dispute, he told me. I got the impression that IBM also helped match contractors to clients.
- emmett 14y ago
  No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed. It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.
  - phillmv 14y ago
    > you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat. You don't even need to know that in order to recruit people. -- I feel that NDAs are kind of bullshit too, but they're typically not as expressly oppressive. Unless they stretch into noncompetes, which are incredible bullshit.
civilian 14y ago
I friended Pete London on linkedin, because having connections with fictional recruiter honeypots is awesome. http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=60565153 http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=60565153
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  Here's what I got here: You and this LinkedIn user don’t know anyone in common You can only view the profiles of users within your network.
  - civilian 14y ago
    Try doing an advanced search for firstname: Pete lastname: London region: San Francisco Bay Area
l3amm 14y ago
Being a good external recruiter in Silicon Valley is a tricky balancing act. Everyone in the Valley wants the superstars, so competition is ridiculous. Additionally, cultural fit in small startups is of utmost importance, so you have to learn the culture of the company your engaged with. The culture is also highly insular and revolves around being a jedi master of code, so if you're a recruiter you're expected to have a deep understanding of the technical needs of the company in addition to the cultural ones. Plus most startups want people who have an active understanding of new languages/frameworks/methodologies, so you also have to have thorough knowledge of the bleeding edge of tech. Lastly, this person needs to have good in-person skills, network, and ability to sell a position against whatever the competition is offering. Since each company is different, every time you get a new client you need to recalibrate and get up to speed on what they need. This is why it's rare to find a truly good external recruiter (and impossible to find a good contingency recruiter for a short term engagement). In my opinion the best arrangements are long-term engagements, giving the recruiting firm time to understand exactly what you're looking for and calibrate their searches against that. Of course these engagements are expensive and time-consuming, so it's also why I'm a big fan of internal recruiters since they a) absorb and presumably live your culture and b) can have a much deeper understanding of your technology and team dynamics.
glimcat 14y ago
This raises the question of A/B testing fake LinkedIn profiles to optimize for the sort of leads you want.
- deleted 14y ago
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dennisgorelik 14y ago
"No poaching" requirement is a mistake. Small subset of recruiters that she was working with represents only minor danger to her company anyway (considering how many recruiters are out there). By dropping "no poaching" restriction Elaine would be able to hire better recruiters. Other than that - the article was an insightful read.
bobbles 14y ago
I wish there was a job search website where to actually advertise a position there were mandatory requirements like the company name and salary being displayed as part of the ad. Whats the reasoning behind posting completely vague job descriptions (sometimes the location isn't even provided!). I Would say 90% of the job postings I see online don't even give me enough information to want to contact them.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  How would job board enforce that?
  - bobbles 14y ago
    Mandatory form fields? Is that what you mean?
    - dennisgorelik 14y ago
      What would prevent recruiter from putting fake data into these fields? For salary it could be "negotiable" or "competitive". For company name it could be name of recruiting company (not actual employer) or just plain fake. Besides, sometimes employers don't want to advertise their openings publicly (may be to avoid getting flooded by irrelevant applications or prevent panic among existing employees).
      - mgkimsal 14y ago
        Everything would need to be vetted and approved manually. There would be a sort of self-selection that would come in to play - the only companies that would advertise there would be companies that are comfortable being public with that sort of specific information. The salary one would probably need to be a range - $60k-$75k, for example. This sets expectations on both sides, although it might not stop a lot of misfit submissions, but those aren't generally stopped now anyway.
      - chris_wot 14y ago
devsatish 14y ago
the most idiotic move a recruiter does is sending emails to work email address. That's a big no no. It's easy to guess a work email address, but sending a job offer to it? that's stupid. Also same with calling the company switchboard and asking for my name and leaving job offer info in voice mail. crap!
dennisgorelik 14y ago
--- http://www.meebo.com/jobs/ http://www.meebo.com/jobs/ Meebo.com will be shutting down on July 11, 2012. Meebo has been acquired by Google! --- So Meebo was a recruiting operation for Google. It puts that article in a new light.
- JamesLeonis 14y ago
  It used to be a cool web based IM client. I used it on the fly when I wasn't at my computer but still wanted to talk online with friends.
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    Building IM client is an interesting approach to attract developers and train development team.
pacomerh 14y ago
If recruiters actually gave job seekers asserted information about what companies need, this recruiting business would be a desert.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
canttestthis 14y ago
>However, I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder. Could someone elaborate?
- angelbob 14y ago
  Anybody she was getting recruiting emails from was trying to poach her (a founder). Silicon Valley is small, incestuous and political. If all your competitors, other portfolio companies, etc. are getting recruiting emails from you, including their founders, you are going to seem either tone-deaf with bad recruiters or like you're trying to offend people you shouldn't offend. Also, founders basically never say "yes".
peterwwillis 14y ago
"Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn". You might be thinking, “Really? This is obvious!” Uh... No, I wasn't thinking that, since there's a ton of places for recruiters to find candidates and LinkedIn is only one of them. Is this some kind of viral marketing piece for LinkedIn or something? I have gotten maybe 6 recruiting messages on LinkedIn in my life. I finally deleted my account after the password debacle, it was so useless. Like a business contact sheet for people I already had contacts for. On the other hand, Monster.com is where most of the recruiters seem to come at me from. I get on average 8 positions sent to me a week when i'm not looking for work. My google voice gets less recruiter spam, but I had to set a separate GV line up just to catch all the recruitemarketer calls.
- untog 14y ago
  Then you must be in a tiny minority. I get an LinkedIn message every other day, pretty much. I closed my Monster account years ago after getting e-mails of insanely inaccurate matches in cities thousands of miles away.
  - vtry 14y ago
    Yeah, LinkedIn is awesome, it's the future of finding a job second only to your "connections".
    - untog 14y ago
      I actually disagree. All I've ever gotten from LinkedIn is recruiter spam.
nothacker 14y ago
Awesome post, but I'd like to see the backing data.
azakai 14y ago
> We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring Whoa, wasn't there just a lawsuit where no-poach deals were determined highly illegal?
- salemh 14y ago
  Much different circumstance (more collusion) if you are thinking of the Google/Apple/Intel lawsuit: "Apple, Google, Intel fail to dismiss staff-poaching lawsuit | Reuters" http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/us-apple-poaching-lawsuit-idUSBRE83I0VF20120419 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/us-apple-poaching-... Or Google: https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=google+settlement+apple+employee+poach https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=1&source...
  - rprasad 14y ago
    Different circumstances, but still illegal in California because it restricts the freedom of employment of Meebo's employees. No-poaching clauses are illegal in California, but poaching clauses can contain "referral fees" under which the poaching company must pay the original employer a substantial amount of money (usually, a year's salary of the employee poached) if they hire one of its employees during or within a year after the end of the contract period.
rdl 14y ago
How many females were on the recruiting team? (i.e., how statistically significant was all of them getting pregnant in the same month...)?
- Tichy 14y ago
  Pregnancy is probably infectious. Also having landed a job at a company that is doing well is a high risk factor for pregnancy.
  - rdl 14y ago
    I remember Google advertising themselves as family friendly in the mid 2000s as a recruiting strategy; I guess if people are coming back after even 6 months out, it could be a worthwhile strategy.
Peroni 14y ago
There is a significant flaw in the logic here. Create a fictitious individual where, prior to linkedin, the only place Pete London existed was his own personal website. I used to be a recruiter and egotistical as it may sound, I considered myself one of the better ones. My previous history on HN should back that up. I never, ever used linkedin when searching for decent people yet even I wouldn't have found Pete London. The best developers I encountered over the years were people who came recommended by other developers or people I met face to face at meet-ups. If no-one but the creator knew Pete London existed then the only thing this experiment proves is that most recruiters aren't very good at using search engines. That's all. The one point I agreed with significantly is hiring internal recruitment specialists. I've given a talk on that exact issue in the past and I am in the process of writing a blog post on my updated perspective of that approach.
dspillett 14y ago
> In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! That is not at all unusual. When we got rid of a useless lummox a year or two ago, he gave his recruiter (the same agency we got him from) all out contact details (if you are out there, thanks for that...). Within a week of him leaving that agency called three of us claiming to be looking for a reference but immediately asking if we could be called out of work ours to reduce disruption. One of us let that happen and it turns out they were trying to get us on their books (err, no thanks, we don't want to be associated with the other "quality" peopel on your books!). Similarly the company got several calls from them most of which involved lies ("I was talking to <person x> earlier today" when <person x> had been on holiday all week). In summary: 1. Recruiters will hit you from both ends. They make money out of both ends so it suits their business model. 2. Recruiters lie. Repeatedly. Constantly.
city41 14y ago
One of the best things I did was take down my LinkedIn account. I've gone from numerous recruiters contacting me to very few. But the ones who do contact me find me through my github account, my stackoverflow account or my website. These recruiters are of much higher quality, have much more compelling job opportunities and job opportunities that match me much better. I also no longer have to politely decline recruiters constantly.
monatron 14y ago
I remember doing something similar to this after I graduated from college ('09) but a bit backwards. I was totally frustrated by the lack of responses to resumes that were flying from my outbox like cards from a blackjack shoe -- so I created a help-wanted ad on craigslist for a job that I thought I would qualify for and might have a chance of landing. The resumes I got were from people with 3-5 years experience, masters degress, laundry list of skillsets, etc. Needless to say, the whole experience was disheartening -- but it taught me to be creative in my approach to the job market and that generally the "resume" based approach to finding a "match" (employer<->employee) is deeply flawed.
hirehand 14y ago
Recruiting is difficult, especially for initial hires. Often time founders are hiring for skilled positions that they themselves are not familiar with. Thus, they turn to recruiters. However, with the good that recruiters bring, the bad comes as well. That's why I am starting HireHand. We are different than traditional recruiters and will assist by screening candidates for skilled positions using screeners will matching skills. You get a filtered set of candidates and can interview for "fit" rather than skill. We charge a small fee based on the number of candidates you have us screen, and do not charge a percentage of salary. Check us out: http://www.hirehand.com http://www.hirehand.com
vineet 14y ago
Great article. I was however confused by "I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder". Was he saying this just because founders in SV are not a good fit to Meebo? Or are they bad employees? Or that it is considered bad to poach to hire a founder?
- lizzard 14y ago
  She. Did you really read the article and not notice it was written by a woman? On a blog titled "Elaine Wherry"?
  - vineet 14y ago
    Yes, I meant she. It really was a typo. (I realized it not because of the name - I have seen very weird names before. I realized it because of her picture on the about page.) Regardless, my question above is still open.
- lsc 14y ago
  dono what she was trying to say, but eh, a google recruiter emailed me tonight, and I was thinking of what a horrible employee I'd be for them. good founders generally make bad employees, unless by employee you really mean contractor; we make fine contractors. (not to say I'm a good founder... that, well, it has yet to be seen. But I'm certainly the type that would prefer to work for himself.)
leeny 14y ago
Very interesting read full of good data and some interesting takeaways (especially about LinkedIn). One thing I wonder about is given how boilerplate and sparse the honeypot's blog was, how little information there was to go on, and how uninspired the self-description was, I can't help but wonder if the good recruiters were the ones who didn't bother contacting him. As a side note, I'm also confused as to why the metric for a good recruiter was figuring out that the profile was a fake (kind of in line with Peroni's comment above). Or was it considered good that he/she chose to use the phone as a recruiting tactic?
normalized 14y ago
I am a co-founder of a startup. My takeaways from this article are: 1) Get a recruiter in-house. 2) Treasure the recruiter as much as the tech talent. 3) External Recruiters will violate non-poaching agreements. 4) It is still useful to have a non-poaching agreement, as it helps as a mild deterrent. 5) Dread thy fellow startup more than a large company.

655 points by male_salmon 14y ago

This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags. Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy.

bartonfink 14y ago
I mentioned the exact same thing to someone a couple of weeks ago - I think her name was Stella, and she's been posting for a startup recently. I'm not a professional contractor like many, but I do like doing freelance gigs to supplement my day-job income. However, finding suitable gigs, dealing with negotiations and chasing down deadbeat clients make it really unpleasant given what I really want to do is make some extra cash after hours. I don't want to deal with all the overhead of running my own business atop managing my own career and family. I would happily give up a percentage of my rate to someone who could get me ~15 hours a week worth of work at a market rate and insulate me from a lot of the overhead that I simply don't have time to deal with. Just like Hollywood stars focus on being Hollywood stars and leave the business of Hollywood to agents, I'd like to focus on my strengths and leave the business to someone else.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  But Hollywood stars sit on set 12 hours a day, for a 16 week shoot, as does the rest of the crew. If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made. I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work. My apologies if this seems overly aggressive I am just interested in how this could work - we could alll fit in 10 hours a week for beer tokens
  - bartonfink 14y ago
    I think you've overlooked the point that I already have a job. I'm "on set" 10 hours a day already.
  - greghinch 14y ago
    I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly as good.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      My question and same to @bartonfink is still what is the work? If I am say design and build a rest backend for a company, and its say two months work at 45 hrs a week, doing 15 hrs a week telling them it will take six months cos I have other clients is a sure way not to get the gig So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams, I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself thank you
      - greghinch 14y ago
        the work is designing and building web applications. almost all coding, a small amount of training/consulting. generally i come into projects that were already built at least part way by someone else and need to be fixed up and have features added. though i am also doing one right now from the ground up with a small team. most of my projects involve small remote teams as well. right now i work with 2 startups and 1 large company, as well as do occasional consulting with another large company (this is usually less than 5 hours every month). i'm all about simplicity and breaking things down into small pieces, so on all projects i am able to deliver and launch features regularly with 10-20 hrs of work a week on each. my total billable hours for the week usually are in the 40ish range. i've found all the work through referrals pretty much, so i can't say exactly how to find it for others. i will say put as much as you can out in open source, that is the best "sales" technique i've had (often "referrals" have come from someone i've only interacted with in the open source community). also, be consistent with your deliveries, and open and honest about scheduling, as well as when something is going to take longer than you estimated. surprisingly few contractors are good at communication it seems. often i come into projects for people who were abandoned by a developer and even when they were working together only got spotty communication from that dev.
- shalmanese 14y ago
  10X Management is trying to do this: http://www.10xmanagement.com/ http://www.10xmanagement.com/
  - bartonfink 14y ago
    Interesting. Doesn't look like they're up and running yet, but I'll keep my eye on them. Thanks for the link!
    - shalmanese 14y ago
      Last I heard, they were not quite ready to take on more clients at the moment so they closed signup until they could scale their services better.
  - altay 14y ago
    Thanks for the shout-out, Hang! Altay from 10x Management here. Yup, we're doing this, and ramping up quickly. Feel free to get in touch (email in profile) if you want to learn more.
- snowwindwaves 14y ago
  Try http://www.evisors.com http://www.evisors.com they match clients to consultants and take care of the payment side of things
- mark_integerdsv 14y ago
  15 hours a week? Jesus... I spend half of that in meetings. I really need to reconfigure my schedule! I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam. First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non technical I might add) management. You'll get a salary and a fancier title than 'contractor' something like... Say... 'consultant' yes! Consultant! That's gonna bump up the hourly rate... But not YOUR hourly rate of course, that of the Firm my friend. I guess my bitterness in this regard is quite obvious but here in South Africa, this type of thing is utterly rife. You have a few managers who have swept in over time on the winds of apathy and who for some I fathomable reason have good, big contracts and a slew of underpaid 'consultants' who run around doing their bidding. You seem to believe that this relationship will play out the other way round where you are earning that 'market rate' and for a small percentage of that you'll have in your employ not only someone who'll ensure you're always employed but who is also a personal assistant that runs your admin? That's called: 'a boss.' Please correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems you have the world (as I know it) bass ackwards and programmers are not Hollywood stars, not where I come from.
  - smackay 14y ago
    Any wave of disruption cast towards recruiters is going to have to destroy consulting houses as proof of it's efficacy. The time and effort required to find work/workers that bartonfink mentions has to be expended by either the employer or the employee. In both cases this a poor use of time so the heavy-lifting of placing people is either done by recruiters or temp agencies. Anything that disrupts this has to make the process effortless, or nearly so, and generate better results so the employer/employee can by-pass the middle-men completely. An unlikely outcome but one which would be welcome almost universally, excluding the obvious casualties of this change.
greghinch 14y ago
I've often thought the same thing since becoming a full time freelancer, the talent agency model. The problem to overcome is that, much like most recruiters I've dealt with, it's hard to find someone who isn't a technical developer to understand how to fill a technical developer role. There's a lot more complexity to understanding the work from the outside than there is understanding the work of say an actor. I no more want someone representing me who's saying "ok I have a guy here who has HTML, PHP, Javascript, and CSS, and I see you have all of those on your job requirements, this is a match right?" than I like hearing the opposite from a recruiter. Essentially you're going to need to find developers who want to do sales, a tough find if I've ever heard one.
- zavulon 14y ago
  Non-developer recruiters who really want to understand technology can learn it. My girlfriend is one, I've got her this book - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004V9HC48/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004V9HC48/, which her boss since made mandatory for all recruiters in their company. Of course, that's not enough by itself, and it's a long process, but there are recruiters who do go through all the trouble of learning technology.
- altay 14y ago
  This is what we're doing at 10x Management (http://10xmanagement.com http://10xmanagement.com). I'm a YC alum and experienced web dev freelancer. I also play a lot of music so, through serendipitous connections in that world, met some music managers, and realized what they do for their music clients would be really useful for me as a freelance programmer. So we started with them representing me -- taking care of the business end of my freelancing -- and it worked out so well that we've partnered to create 10x Management, to expand the model. I bring the tech experience, and they bring the talent agency experience.
gruseom 14y ago
i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy. That's actually an interesting idea. Please write it!
charlesdm 14y ago
Had this idea as well. I assume this could work for highly sought after consultant/contractor profiles, more than pure developers. Might also be quite hard to scale this up to many people as the fees you can collect from agreements will be limited (as opposed to actors).
shpiel 14y ago
I recently worked with a recruiting agency that operated like a talent agency. The receiiters were not paid on comission. Instead, a team worked with me, and each pitched different companies to me. They prepped me for interviews, analyzed my strengths and weaknesses, and reviewed my past work and projects. In the end I had to choose between two offers. They encouraged me to take the slightly lesser paying one because they thought I would be happier in that position. Talent agency model is definitely the way to go.
- salemh 14y ago
  Where was this geographically (San Fran? In the US at all?) I was a Contingent (third-party) Technical Recruiter for 2.5 years (and hopefully never again, sans a cool company such as the above) and would love to work in that model. I only had the opportunity with something similar when our sales (the folks who got the requisitions / open orders) had many openings in similar "verticals." E.G. five different companies all looking for Java SE developers, with slight variations, but, for strong candidates I/we could get them several interviews, sometimes multiple offers. Would be much more fulfilling. In most markets, however, this is (if the relationships are not established with multiple companies (which it sounds like the case in your situation)) "skill marketing" or trying to gain a sales foothold into a company by "marketing" a candidate to the company. At one of my former employers, the relationships were solid enough to where we created a few positions for some great candidates as we understood the departments needs. This is not typical at all, so finding a few companies actually making this a standard model would be fascinating (I imagine boutique retainer-model recruiting).
  - shpiel 14y ago
    This was in Boston. But the company is national. My understanding is that they did try to build relationships with employers and would do a site visit with the employer before taking them on. (I had to go the receiiters office for a mock interview.) They have also been around for a long time. Granted I am also relatively inexperienced. Self-taught and only worked in the field for 2 years. Maybe it would not work as well for someone with more experience. Their name was Jobspring btw.
brc 14y ago
Well, my disruption idea is to break the entire recruiting process into a value chain, and create little markets for each piece. So a company can list a position on the site (or maybe even on an existing site). But, instead of either a recruitment agency doing everything, or the company doing everything, they can break down the process and take bids on each step. So maybe one person is really good at sorting a pile of CVs into a shortlist. Maybe another is good at phone screening. The company can outsource (via the site) any or all of the parts that go into filling a position. Providers (which would be individuals or small companies) bid for these tasks in an open marketplace along the lines of elance. Effectively it is taking the roles of the recruiter and busting them down into pieces, and allowing different people to specialise into different things. It's no more fleshed as an idea than that, but the basic concept is that a recruiter is considered by many to be overpaid, but fulfills a necessary evil. By allowing companies to directly outsource individual pieces they can utilise what they need from a recruiter without having to pay for the whole amount. And a skilled recruiter can get good work under their own banner without all the overhead of having to get an office and form a company, and themselves become freelance agents for hire.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  Who is going to glue all these pieces together? I think overhead of managing all these small steps would exceed time savings you get from outsourcing. Overhead would be in: 1) Teaching ALL participants about job to fill. 2) Dealing with job seeker's frustration when he would need to answer the same questions to different people in the process. 3) Restricting access to potentially sensitive personal information.
  - brc 14y ago
    The site manages the entire process. It's both workflow manager and marketplace in one. The process of filling a position is pretty generic - you could satisfy something like 90% of hirings with a standard process. Think of it like a series of boxes on a page. The choices are 'Do this myself' and 'outsource' this. As the tasks get completed the next step happens, and the site manages the whole process. The job seeker would not have to answer questions at each step of the way. The information would be saved in the system so that each person managing the step (whether internal or outsourced) can see the output from the previous step. The steps are something like : write ad, sort responses, initial screening, organise interviews, interview, negotiate offers. The company would choose which of these they want to handle in-house, and which they want to outsource. You could come up with a few templates to cover a large proportion of hiring in industries. Restricting access is just done with the same types of legal terms that existing recruitment agents use. The site would include a reputational factor, the same as any other online marketplace. So someone who wants to have a at-home job sorting through CVs isn't going to start leaking the information if they want to get more work from a client. Ideally the jobs would be listed on the site itself, but there's no reason it can't be used to manage jobs that are listed on existing (and popular) sites. The idea would be to leverage the network effect of other sites while building a base of clients for the site itself. So initially listings would be on the site as well as other popular sites. Over time, a strategy would be devised to drive the popularity of the site itself as a place for jobseekers to find work.
cliftonmckinney 14y ago
So I think you have to look at why external recruiters are successful: (The following refers to most, but certainly not all) They're generally loathed by developers for a multitude of reasons, they charge ridiculous rates, they come back and poach their placements, and commit a plenty of other sins. Yet they're still out there, plugging away and jamming my LinkedIn feed... The only reason they still manage success is because the alternatives have to be even worse. Despite the ridiculous environment we're in right now, there are still folks out there who are interested in leaving their current jobs for greener pastures. But Dice.com isn't getting it done for these folks, and even if it is their resumes are getting buried beneath piles of unqualified candidates and/or getting filtered out by terribly built filtering software or, even worse, HR folks who mistake Java for Javascript. I think the way you disrupt the recruiting industry is by significantly improving the alternatives. That or providing a completely new alternative that's wildly better. Word of mouth has always been the better alternative. It works like a charm until networks are exhausted. Maybe that's the place to start.

iuguy 14y ago

This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters. Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus. [1] - uk.linkedin.com/pub/markov-bambam/15/643/a56

Kronopath 14y ago
I want to read his dissertation. "Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."
- nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
  I don't know what any of that means, but I know it sounds like the best dissertation ever.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Could happen.
- nl 14y ago
  His other well known paper (Decoupling IPv7 from Replication in Link-Level Acknowledgements) is available from MIT[1] [1] http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686.Markov+Bambam.You+R.+Mom.html http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686...
  - jonmrodriguez 14y ago
    Haha, figure 1 is just awesome.
    - nl 14y ago
      I liked "we deployed 00 Commodore 64s across the 10-node network, and tested our kernels accordingly"

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

forrestthewoods 14y ago

What is the contractual result for breaking a no-poach clause? Should companies inform their employees of no-poach agreements and request to be told when anyone is contacted by a recruiter from Company X? There is an on-going anti-trust lawsuit about no poach policies involving Google, Apple, Intel, Pixar, and more. How does that play into things?

bjt 14y ago
The standard remedy for any breach of contract is a lawsuit for damages. You claim that the recruiter's breaking of the contract cost you X dollars, and you sue for X. If you think can convince the court the recruiter was especially naughty, ask for punitive damages too. http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Damages http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Damages The Google/Apple/etc case is a bit different because it's between competitors, not between two parties to a given contract. Antitrust is about preventing/punishing anticompetitive agreements and behaviors.
radley 14y ago
Actually "no poach" aka "non-compete" clauses are void in California: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Exceptions_-_valid_non-compete_agreements_in_California http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Exceptions_-... So she really had no grounds to demand and expect it.
- forrestthewoods 14y ago
  Wait, it doesn't seem like a no poach contract with a recruiter would fall under the same laws. In California an employee is almost always free to quit and work for a direct competitor if that's what they want. However, if a recruiter signs a no poach contract stating they won't contact employees with other job opportunities for 18 months that's an entirely separate issue and doesn't seem like it would be covered by the same law.
flyinRyan 14y ago
That part of the article was nonsense. First of all, you're not buying a slave. No-poach agreements are collusion and should not even be legal. Second, agencies aren't placing people and then turning around and trying to steal them again. They just have your profile in a database, when a match comes up for a job they shoot you a mail. They don't remember that they placed you and they don't care. They make money by placing labor which has a very high fail rate so they live or die by volume. There's no time to consult a matrix to see what stupid clauses are between who, the employee will have to keep this sort of thing in mind. Remember, an employee taking a job and then leaving after a week for another $1k is going to hurt the employee more than anyone else involved so it makes sense the employee is the only one who needs to care about it.

robk 14y ago

The Kernel (UK) had a nice expose on recruiter tactics recently as well. http://www.kernelmag.com/topic/the-kernel-recruitment-report/ http://www.kernelmag.com/topic/the-kernel-recruitment-report...

jdcryans 14y ago

I was intrigued reading this to see what my inbox would say about Meebo's recruiting. In May 2010 a recruiter spammed the Hadoop mailing lists with a "Data Engineer (Analytics)" in MV. A month later I was blessed with an email from the same recruiter for the same job sent to my @apache address. Another month later he posted the job on LI's Hadoop group. Fast-forward one year, a new recruiter spammed the mahout user mailing list saying he was looking for "Engineers with Machine Learning expertise". Finally 2 months later I got an email sent to my @apache address from the second recruiter for a "Data Engineering Lead" position. So it seems that they haven't used LI a lot and mostly rely on those "other channels" and direct emails. I personally find it disrespectful to send recruiting emails to user mailing lists but I guess recruiters don't know/care about it.

starship 14y ago

"Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year." Wait a second, he was interviewing 100X more people than he was hiring??? Does that seem a little extreme to anyone, or is it just me?

modoc 14y ago
Depends on your pool. Small companies need to be absolutely brutal about only hiring the best people, with the best skills, and the best fit for the company. I went to a local university career fair looking for two different junior level folks. I took back over 40 resumes, made 3 follow-up phone screens, and 0 hires. 500 real interviews for 4 hires is a bit much, but in general I pass on people all the time.
- starship 14y ago
  I've done the same (50 resumes for two positions, phone interviews with 15-20, follow-up in-person interviews with 4). That's 10X interviews. But 100X? Assuming anyone he hires goes through multiple follow-up interviews, I don't see what information he's getting from these interviews that couldn't be handled by a subordinate or by email. Evaluating someone for "fit" is impossible in a short interview like that.
zeroonetwothree 14y ago
Each candidate probably had more than one interview. 100 interviews for each hire is not all that high, especially if you don't have a lot of intern conversion hires (that's why larger companies can hire more efficiently).
arupchak 14y ago
That's not uncommon, assuming that an initial phone screen counts as an interview. I have had stretches where it took me talking to ~80 candidates between initial phone screens, random chats, etc over two months before finding someone to hire. And to be clear, I am not claiming that I found the 'best' person out of 80 people. 'Best' is a very custom definition depending on the environment, role, and fit.

mindjiver 14y ago

"JavaScript engineer", really?

brianpan 14y ago
Elaine is one of the founders of Meebo, so yes, JavaScript engineer.
simonw 14y ago
http://www.quora.com/Startups/Why-are-front-end-developers-so-high-in-demand-at-startups-if-front-end-development-is-relatively-easier-than-other-fields-of-engineering/answer/Simon-Willison http://www.quora.com/Startups/Why-are-front-end-developers-s...
- noarchy 14y ago
  The trend of calling someone an "engineer" for all sorts of things may puzzle people who live in places where the title of "engineer" is regulated. Depending on how far you want to take it, the term can really lose its meaning. Is a supermarket stocker a "display engineer"? They do have to make considerations for aesthetics, space, and so forth...

trustfundbaby 14y ago

And here I was thinking I was special because I was getting two (sometimes 3) recruiting emails a day on Linkedin ... smh.

andrewstuart 14y ago

Is it only recruiters approaching people about work? I would have imagined many employers are directly approaching people in much the same manner as recruiters.

Rodeoclash 14y ago

We're attempting to fix the way freelancers are recruited at agencies / startups by changing the pricing model. At the moment with recruiters, the incentive is to place as many people as quickly as possible as you get a commission for each placement. By changing the model to a subscription you can then open the market place up and make it very transparent. No more hiding peoples contact details from the employee, no more hiding the employers name from the job seeker. We're only in Melbourne, Australia at the moment but if we get interest, we'll try and increase our reach. If you are in Melbourne and you're a freelancer / agency / startup, we'd love to talk: http://www.dragonflylist.com http://www.dragonflylist.com

bartonfink 14y ago
Rodeo - I'm currently planning a move down under (my wife just spooked me by wanting to push the timeframe up to next year instead of 2015). Mind if I reach out to you sometime to chat about the market there and whether what you're doing would make sense for someone in my position? I'd be much obliged.
- Rodeoclash 14y ago
  No problem, you can reach out to me on my homepage; http://www.richardson.co.nz http://www.richardson.co.nz
- RileyJames 14y ago
  You won't have any trouble getting a tech job here. Huge demand at the moment, not enough talent. Email riley@dragonflylist.com if you want to chat more.
dools 14y ago
Have you guys checked out recruitloop.com.au? They're on the same road: ie. changing the industry by changing the incentives (their's is an hourly pay model).
- RileyJames 14y ago
  Yea we've seen recruitloop. Anyone attempting to solve recruitment problems is a friend of ours. We're primarily looking at the needs of freelancers in creative and digital industries at this point. Keen to meet the recruitloop team, we'll be in Sydney at the end of next month, do you know them?

koide 14y ago

This only emphazises how different the world for programmers is in the USA (especially in the SF area) compared to the rest of the world. I only get three or four emails a year on linkedin, of them one's from Facebook, the other from Google, and the others are from local companies. This kind of make me envious and wanting to be there for a while., to experience how's it like to be valued and sought after.

rogerbinns 14y ago
You don't feel valued and sought after - more like spammed. It will quickly become very apparent that they haven't bothered reading or understanding your CV/resume and will say all sorts of stuff that obviously isn't true. The top of my CV/resume has a prominent "Note to recruiters" so it is trivial to tell if they did any work at all. The recruiters operate in the same way as spammers. They send email far and wide to see if they can get any bites. If you want to be valued and sought after I suggest you start reading all the emails about helping out folks in Nigeria.
angelbob 14y ago
If you envy our level of spam, change the address on your LinkedIn profile and/or make a new honeypot one. Like the original article, you can actually find out empirically! Then write a blog post about it.
- koide 14y ago
  Only in how it shows the level of opportunities. But it's a good idea to experience it for myself.
vonmoltke 14y ago
That's about the level I get here in Dallas. All the pings I get from Seattle and SV are from the really big players, and I occasionally get a ping from a niche employer (Eaton and Idaho National Laboratory, for example) due to my EE and signal processing background.

phillmv 14y ago

>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model. I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bullshit. You're just attempting (rationally, I might add) to depress the market for your existing talent. First and for all, especially in the climate we're in, banning two or three recruiting agencies isn't really going to hurt the chances of an employee who could be persuaded to leave. Secondly, if your employee can be persuaded to leave in the first place that's on you, not the recruiter! I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet, but when the time comes I think I'll find it hard to hold it against them. Edit: mandatory notice of: great article, would read again, A++!

hollerith 14y ago
I do not have any ideas on how to disrupt the head-hunting industry, but I have a historical anecdote that might be relevant. In the late 1970s I worked for a contractor who would sometimes hire comp-sci majors to help him. The contractor or small-business person or whatever you call him specialized in developing software for the IBM 5110, which before the IBM PC was the low end of IBM's computer offerings. He told me of another contractor like himself who had an unreasonable client. The client was so unreasonable, IBM got involved in mediating the dispute, he told me. I got the impression that IBM also helped match contractors to clients.
emmett 14y ago
No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed. It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.
- phillmv 14y ago
  > you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat. You don't even need to know that in order to recruit people. -- I feel that NDAs are kind of bullshit too, but they're typically not as expressly oppressive. Unless they stretch into noncompetes, which are incredible bullshit.

civilian 14y ago

I friended Pete London on linkedin, because having connections with fictional recruiter honeypots is awesome. http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=60565153 http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=60565153

dennisgorelik 14y ago
Here's what I got here: You and this LinkedIn user don’t know anyone in common You can only view the profiles of users within your network.
- civilian 14y ago
  Try doing an advanced search for firstname: Pete lastname: London region: San Francisco Bay Area

l3amm 14y ago

Being a good external recruiter in Silicon Valley is a tricky balancing act. Everyone in the Valley wants the superstars, so competition is ridiculous. Additionally, cultural fit in small startups is of utmost importance, so you have to learn the culture of the company your engaged with. The culture is also highly insular and revolves around being a jedi master of code, so if you're a recruiter you're expected to have a deep understanding of the technical needs of the company in addition to the cultural ones. Plus most startups want people who have an active understanding of new languages/frameworks/methodologies, so you also have to have thorough knowledge of the bleeding edge of tech. Lastly, this person needs to have good in-person skills, network, and ability to sell a position against whatever the competition is offering. Since each company is different, every time you get a new client you need to recalibrate and get up to speed on what they need. This is why it's rare to find a truly good external recruiter (and impossible to find a good contingency recruiter for a short term engagement). In my opinion the best arrangements are long-term engagements, giving the recruiting firm time to understand exactly what you're looking for and calibrate their searches against that. Of course these engagements are expensive and time-consuming, so it's also why I'm a big fan of internal recruiters since they a) absorb and presumably live your culture and b) can have a much deeper understanding of your technology and team dynamics.

glimcat 14y ago

This raises the question of A/B testing fake LinkedIn profiles to optimize for the sort of leads you want.

deleted 14y ago
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dennisgorelik 14y ago

"No poaching" requirement is a mistake. Small subset of recruiters that she was working with represents only minor danger to her company anyway (considering how many recruiters are out there). By dropping "no poaching" restriction Elaine would be able to hire better recruiters. Other than that - the article was an insightful read.

bobbles 14y ago

I wish there was a job search website where to actually advertise a position there were mandatory requirements like the company name and salary being displayed as part of the ad. Whats the reasoning behind posting completely vague job descriptions (sometimes the location isn't even provided!). I Would say 90% of the job postings I see online don't even give me enough information to want to contact them.

dennisgorelik 14y ago
How would job board enforce that?
- bobbles 14y ago
  Mandatory form fields? Is that what you mean?
  - dennisgorelik 14y ago
    What would prevent recruiter from putting fake data into these fields? For salary it could be "negotiable" or "competitive". For company name it could be name of recruiting company (not actual employer) or just plain fake. Besides, sometimes employers don't want to advertise their openings publicly (may be to avoid getting flooded by irrelevant applications or prevent panic among existing employees).
    - mgkimsal 14y ago
      Everything would need to be vetted and approved manually. There would be a sort of self-selection that would come in to play - the only companies that would advertise there would be companies that are comfortable being public with that sort of specific information. The salary one would probably need to be a range - $60k-$75k, for example. This sets expectations on both sides, although it might not stop a lot of misfit submissions, but those aren't generally stopped now anyway.
    - chris_wot 14y ago

devsatish 14y ago

the most idiotic move a recruiter does is sending emails to work email address. That's a big no no. It's easy to guess a work email address, but sending a job offer to it? that's stupid. Also same with calling the company switchboard and asking for my name and leaving job offer info in voice mail. crap!

dennisgorelik 14y ago

--- http://www.meebo.com/jobs/ http://www.meebo.com/jobs/ Meebo.com will be shutting down on July 11, 2012. Meebo has been acquired by Google! --- So Meebo was a recruiting operation for Google. It puts that article in a new light.

JamesLeonis 14y ago
It used to be a cool web based IM client. I used it on the fly when I wasn't at my computer but still wanted to talk online with friends.
- dennisgorelik 14y ago
  Building IM client is an interesting approach to attract developers and train development team.

pacomerh 14y ago

If recruiters actually gave job seekers asserted information about what companies need, this recruiting business would be a desert.

deleted 14y ago

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canttestthis 14y ago

>However, I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder. Could someone elaborate?

angelbob 14y ago
Anybody she was getting recruiting emails from was trying to poach her (a founder). Silicon Valley is small, incestuous and political. If all your competitors, other portfolio companies, etc. are getting recruiting emails from you, including their founders, you are going to seem either tone-deaf with bad recruiters or like you're trying to offend people you shouldn't offend. Also, founders basically never say "yes".

peterwwillis 14y ago

"Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn". You might be thinking, “Really? This is obvious!” Uh... No, I wasn't thinking that, since there's a ton of places for recruiters to find candidates and LinkedIn is only one of them. Is this some kind of viral marketing piece for LinkedIn or something? I have gotten maybe 6 recruiting messages on LinkedIn in my life. I finally deleted my account after the password debacle, it was so useless. Like a business contact sheet for people I already had contacts for. On the other hand, Monster.com is where most of the recruiters seem to come at me from. I get on average 8 positions sent to me a week when i'm not looking for work. My google voice gets less recruiter spam, but I had to set a separate GV line up just to catch all the recruitemarketer calls.

untog 14y ago
Then you must be in a tiny minority. I get an LinkedIn message every other day, pretty much. I closed my Monster account years ago after getting e-mails of insanely inaccurate matches in cities thousands of miles away.
- vtry 14y ago
  Yeah, LinkedIn is awesome, it's the future of finding a job second only to your "connections".
  - untog 14y ago
    I actually disagree. All I've ever gotten from LinkedIn is recruiter spam.

nothacker 14y ago

Awesome post, but I'd like to see the backing data.

azakai 14y ago

> We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring Whoa, wasn't there just a lawsuit where no-poach deals were determined highly illegal?

salemh 14y ago
Much different circumstance (more collusion) if you are thinking of the Google/Apple/Intel lawsuit: "Apple, Google, Intel fail to dismiss staff-poaching lawsuit | Reuters" http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/us-apple-poaching-lawsuit-idUSBRE83I0VF20120419 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/us-apple-poaching-... Or Google: https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=1&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=google+settlement+apple+employee+poach https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=1&source...
- rprasad 14y ago
  Different circumstances, but still illegal in California because it restricts the freedom of employment of Meebo's employees. No-poaching clauses are illegal in California, but poaching clauses can contain "referral fees" under which the poaching company must pay the original employer a substantial amount of money (usually, a year's salary of the employee poached) if they hire one of its employees during or within a year after the end of the contract period.

rdl 14y ago

How many females were on the recruiting team? (i.e., how statistically significant was all of them getting pregnant in the same month...)?

Tichy 14y ago
Pregnancy is probably infectious. Also having landed a job at a company that is doing well is a high risk factor for pregnancy.
- rdl 14y ago
  I remember Google advertising themselves as family friendly in the mid 2000s as a recruiting strategy; I guess if people are coming back after even 6 months out, it could be a worthwhile strategy.

Peroni 14y ago

There is a significant flaw in the logic here. Create a fictitious individual where, prior to linkedin, the only place Pete London existed was his own personal website. I used to be a recruiter and egotistical as it may sound, I considered myself one of the better ones. My previous history on HN should back that up. I never, ever used linkedin when searching for decent people yet even I wouldn't have found Pete London. The best developers I encountered over the years were people who came recommended by other developers or people I met face to face at meet-ups. If no-one but the creator knew Pete London existed then the only thing this experiment proves is that most recruiters aren't very good at using search engines. That's all. The one point I agreed with significantly is hiring internal recruitment specialists. I've given a talk on that exact issue in the past and I am in the process of writing a blog post on my updated perspective of that approach.

dspillett 14y ago

> In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! That is not at all unusual. When we got rid of a useless lummox a year or two ago, he gave his recruiter (the same agency we got him from) all out contact details (if you are out there, thanks for that...). Within a week of him leaving that agency called three of us claiming to be looking for a reference but immediately asking if we could be called out of work ours to reduce disruption. One of us let that happen and it turns out they were trying to get us on their books (err, no thanks, we don't want to be associated with the other "quality" peopel on your books!). Similarly the company got several calls from them most of which involved lies ("I was talking to <person x> earlier today" when <person x> had been on holiday all week). In summary: 1. Recruiters will hit you from both ends. They make money out of both ends so it suits their business model. 2. Recruiters lie. Repeatedly. Constantly.

city41 14y ago

One of the best things I did was take down my LinkedIn account. I've gone from numerous recruiters contacting me to very few. But the ones who do contact me find me through my github account, my stackoverflow account or my website. These recruiters are of much higher quality, have much more compelling job opportunities and job opportunities that match me much better. I also no longer have to politely decline recruiters constantly.

monatron 14y ago

I remember doing something similar to this after I graduated from college ('09) but a bit backwards. I was totally frustrated by the lack of responses to resumes that were flying from my outbox like cards from a blackjack shoe -- so I created a help-wanted ad on craigslist for a job that I thought I would qualify for and might have a chance of landing. The resumes I got were from people with 3-5 years experience, masters degress, laundry list of skillsets, etc. Needless to say, the whole experience was disheartening -- but it taught me to be creative in my approach to the job market and that generally the "resume" based approach to finding a "match" (employer<->employee) is deeply flawed.

hirehand 14y ago

Recruiting is difficult, especially for initial hires. Often time founders are hiring for skilled positions that they themselves are not familiar with. Thus, they turn to recruiters. However, with the good that recruiters bring, the bad comes as well. That's why I am starting HireHand. We are different than traditional recruiters and will assist by screening candidates for skilled positions using screeners will matching skills. You get a filtered set of candidates and can interview for "fit" rather than skill. We charge a small fee based on the number of candidates you have us screen, and do not charge a percentage of salary. Check us out: http://www.hirehand.com http://www.hirehand.com

vineet 14y ago

Great article. I was however confused by "I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder". Was he saying this just because founders in SV are not a good fit to Meebo? Or are they bad employees? Or that it is considered bad to poach to hire a founder?

lizzard 14y ago
She. Did you really read the article and not notice it was written by a woman? On a blog titled "Elaine Wherry"?
- vineet 14y ago
  Yes, I meant she. It really was a typo. (I realized it not because of the name - I have seen very weird names before. I realized it because of her picture on the about page.) Regardless, my question above is still open.
lsc 14y ago
dono what she was trying to say, but eh, a google recruiter emailed me tonight, and I was thinking of what a horrible employee I'd be for them. good founders generally make bad employees, unless by employee you really mean contractor; we make fine contractors. (not to say I'm a good founder... that, well, it has yet to be seen. But I'm certainly the type that would prefer to work for himself.)

leeny 14y ago

Very interesting read full of good data and some interesting takeaways (especially about LinkedIn). One thing I wonder about is given how boilerplate and sparse the honeypot's blog was, how little information there was to go on, and how uninspired the self-description was, I can't help but wonder if the good recruiters were the ones who didn't bother contacting him. As a side note, I'm also confused as to why the metric for a good recruiter was figuring out that the profile was a fake (kind of in line with Peroni's comment above). Or was it considered good that he/she chose to use the phone as a recruiting tactic?

normalized 14y ago

I am a co-founder of a startup. My takeaways from this article are: 1) Get a recruiter in-house. 2) Treasure the recruiter as much as the tech talent. 3) External Recruiters will violate non-poaching agreements. 4) It is still useful to have a non-poaching agreement, as it helps as a mild deterrent. 5) Dread thy fellow startup more than a large company.