5 ms·

Why I Love Recruiters

49 points by simonsarris 14y ago

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
chris_wot 14y ago
Ha ha! I love the responses! Friendly, but at the same time politely telling them to do better research. They really can't complain :-)
toomuchcoffee 14y ago
Talk about unrequitted empathy.
- wirt 14y ago
  I know, right? How DARE someone not be a sociopath here on HN!
stanmancan 14y ago
Simon you are now an honorary Canadian!
jfb 14y ago
I do this as well when approached by a recruiter who has obviously read my resumé. I always am grateful, and polite, and usually try to set them up with someone in my network (after checking with that person first, naturally). I haven't worked with a recruiter in maybe ten years, but I find that, you know, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and I've accumulated the contact info of a bunch of classy recruiters if I ever need help.
veemjeem 14y ago
hm, blog is hammered, anyone have a cached copy?
- simonsarris 14y ago
  Sorry! I was unprepared. How about this: https://gist.github.com/3473504 https://gist.github.com/3473504
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    http://gist.io/3473504 http://gist.io/3473504
brackin 14y ago
I met a delightful recruiter earlier at an event, they understood the startup ecosystem, don't cold call and only caters to startups and with applicants that fit in the startup atmosphere. More recruiters should look at people like her as an example.
nhari 14y ago
I'm a big fan of being nice to those who have to deal with people 24/7. +1 for Sartori Bellavitano, it's amazing
jakejake 14y ago
I always just tell recruiters that I'm not looking at the moment but please keep me on their list. Who knows when a startup fails or company downsizes and you're looking for a new gig.
clivestaples 14y ago
This is great and refreshing to hear. I treat recruiters with respect because: a.) I've been down-and-out before and consider myself blessed to be in demand, b.) their job seems pretty tough, and c.) it would be really arrogant to complain about someone offering me work.
- prodigal_erik 14y ago
  The problem is that they're all clamoring for more than their fair share of my attention, even when what they have to offer doesn't make a lot of sense. Profitable recruiters are optimizing for the first candidate who didn't resign and wasn't bad enough to dismiss in the first n months, because they aren't rewarded any more for better diligence and outstanding candidate/position fits (if anything, mediocre fits and turnover yield more business down the line).
  - lurker14 14y ago
    #1 question to ask a recruiter offering you an interview: Have they placed someone else at the same company. If the recruiter is worth working with, they have a contract with target employers, and aren't just as disconnected as you are as a prospect.
  - clivestaples 14y ago
    Time is indeed scarce and I agree that the industry is probably too focused on short-term goals. I'm referring to the recent trend of bagging on recruiters and publicly humiliating them. I try to live and let live while being grateful that I'm not unemployed like many other people I know...
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  You may want to look closer. Many are complete scumbags. Here are some things the unscrupulous ones do: * Pretend to have positions they don't, so they can claim to have thousands of candidates on their rolls * Edit resumes/CVs they submit to add fictitious information * Scrape positions from companies and pretend they are front ending those positions, even though they have no relationship to the company, and the job spec says "no recruiters" or similar. * Make no effort to match candidates and positions ie they aren't offering actual work, they are lying about what they offer, and they do not have the companies or candidates best interests at heart. It is quite hard to tell the difference between a competent recruiter and a scumbag. One simple thing to do is Google parts of email they send you.
shyn3 14y ago
I had a recruiter provide me with an interview. I was thinking about a job at that point. They were getting somewhat near $40 an hour and I was getting almost half. The people I talked to were floored by the idea. It's not what you know it's who you know. If the recruiter hadn't got me an interview at $25 an hour then I would be earning $0 for that period of time. I would have never found that job or got to know the company. Once I got in that organization I could easily work with HR to buy me out of the recruiter's contract and negotiate a better salary for myself, considering the company wanted me. The recruiter and me will probably do business again after my contract. I get a new salary after an initial test phase for the company. They get one time fee or recurring income. Everyone has to eat. Recruiters have to make contacts. They have to pay salaries. They have expenses. I don't get why people are floored when they take a large portion of your salary. Most people don't have an influential network that can land them interviews. If you can then this doesn't apply to you. If you are a I.T. recruiter in Toronto feel free to provide me with awesome interviews at $40 hour while you are making $100. I won't mind I promise.
- lurker14 14y ago
  Sounds like you are talking about contractor management, not a recruiter.
  - shyn3 14y ago
    Well no, I should have been more clear. I accepted a contract instead of full-time work. After being bought out of the 1-year recruiter deal I now get paid by the company instead of the recruiter but at a higher salary. I also posted in the wrong thread, seems I had too many tabs open.
charlieok 14y ago
I was in semi-searching mode. I had a very long commute I was unhappy with, and had every intention of putting some time and effort into finding the perfect situation. Something close to home. Something matching exactly the type of problems I wanted to solve. Using exactly the tools and technologies I wanted to work with. However, there was always another project I wanted to finish first, or another topic to bring myself current on before finding the right match and interviewing. Meanwhile, I was getting emails from recruiters. I was pretty good about replying because you never know where an opportunity might come from and because it feels better (for me) to just reply before archiving that message out of my inbox. One of those out-of-the blue recruiters ended up working out. What was an hour long drive is now a 5 minute bike ride. I hadn't valued this nearly so highly when I took that far-away job as I do now. See for example: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c... So anyway, for me this was a clear case of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. An opportunity for an immediate improvement landed in my lap that I otherwise might not have found out about, or might have put off. I can't be too upset about that.
AYBABTME 14y ago
I prefer your way, it's much more fun to write this kind of message!
hansef 14y ago
I don't understand why more tech recruiters don't ruthlessly specialize and laser-focus on building a deep understanding of a particular niche when matching candidates and employers. I'm CTO of a web and mobile development shop with about 20 employees. Finding good frontend developers is REALLY hard - to be a great frontend guy these days, working on modern web apps, you need to have strong engineering chops, with knowledge of the html5 apis, css3 and serious JS experience, including an understanding of memory and performance management in large frontend-heavy apps; ideally have worked on a couple of medium size apps with 5-7 person teams; probably have at least some exposure to the current JS framework scene; ideally (for our stack) have experience with preprocessors like sass or stylus and coffeescript; have good design sense and the ability to work in a collaborative feedback loop with a designer, etc etc. It's a really cross-functional role. There's a lot more people who "know HTML and CSS" but have never worked on serious apps, or have solid JS chops but can't produce design with reasonable fidelity to save their lives. A relationship with a recruiter who understood this "candidate profile" and could bring me people who would be a good fit, not just resumes with "HTML", "CSS", "Javascript" and "5 years of experience" on them, would be worth its weight in gold.
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  And, not to put too fine a point on it, would you pay them their weight in gold? Let's say five times what you currently pay your devs?
  - salemh 14y ago
    That would only make sense if he was significantly increasing his work force (25%, 50%, etc.) to "out save" the ~20% standard fee's on first year salaries for contingent staffing firms. Though I get your point on the "weight in gold," however, seems like he needs a strong internal recruiter to get his/her chops with the culture, team and technology. Their are a few "boutique" shops around (mostly Silicon Valley) who are fairly technical and can actually understand the requirements of the client, but, they are still on a contingent (so many firms / many candidates) which still comes down a style of "spray and pray." Most recruiting firms can't specialize (or refuse) in a niche due to the need to "branch out" to keep the money coming in, hence the all encompassing "IT staffing" agencies. Not fun, I'd love to work in a boutique / specialized model myself as a former (and probably soon to be again) technical recruiter.
gregable 14y ago
I work for big tech company. I reply to recruiters that I'm having too much of a great time where I'm at (true), but they seem like an effective tech recruiter and would they be interested in joining [big tech company]? Most say no, though one did toy with the idea but it didn't happen. The no's seem to get a kick out of the unique response though.
zwischenzug 14y ago
I couldn't disagree with this more. Recruiters are almost exclusively focussed on one thing alone: making commission. They're not necessarily bad people, but they are not interested in how polite you are, how long your response email is, or anything else than the information they require. Sending long-winded emails thanking them for their time and interest is _wasting their time_. If I want to reply, the first line gives them the info they need. "Not looking for a job", and the rest gives other information if the opp looked good. If you want to try and build up a relationship to get out of where you are, then fine. But they are interested in placing you, nothing more. Anything else they're generally faking. It's how the game works. We geeks have a hard time getting this, because we're essentially honest.
michaelochurch 14y ago
Recruiters serve a necessary purpose, and it's not the "middleman" role because that's not necessary at all. Their purpose is something else, and I'll explain. When you join a company, your manager is an advocate for the company's interests. Plenty of managers are decent people and look out for their employees as much as they can, but it's not their job. Their job is to serve the interests of the company. The employee has to be his own lawyer when it comes to negotiating raises and better projects, because no one else is assigned to that role and if the employee doesn't do it, no one will. Recruiters, when they work well, serve as talent advocates. They help employees use the only bit of leverage (the right to find another job) that they have as best they can by getting them promotions, raises, and better projects at the rate at which they become qualified rather than the much slower rate that companies consider politically convenient. There are a few problems with this system. One is that the recruiter is paid by the company, not the employee. That's actually a fairly small one, but it does mean that some recruiters will oversell bad positions in order to make quick cash. The second, related, problem is that they're paid for "churn". Most employees would rather get better work at the same company than change companies, but recruiters only get a payout in the latter case. There's no incentive for a recruiter to work toward internal re-placement, and most companies' transfer policies are so broken that the easiest way to get a better job is to change companies. The third problem is that repeated job moves, after a certain threshold, can damage the employee's resume: the "job hopper" stigma. Some recruiters warn people that there are long-term risks of high-frequency job changing (even though there shouldn't be; the "job hopper" stigma was invented to exploit people) but many don't. There's a legitimate niche yet to be filled for "talent advocates", who can help the most talented people negotiate a fair shake (without necessarily requiring they change jobs in order to do so). The problem is that talent doesn't have any fucking money to finance this sort of thing. Companies have the money, so they make the rules.
johnsonlong 14y ago
Are there people so blessed to have unsolicited recruiting emails on behalf of triple A engineer employers like MS? What I would give for that.

49 points by simonsarris 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Ha ha! I love the responses! Friendly, but at the same time politely telling them to do better research. They really can't complain :-)

toomuchcoffee 14y ago

Talk about unrequitted empathy.

wirt 14y ago
I know, right? How DARE someone not be a sociopath here on HN!

stanmancan 14y ago

Simon you are now an honorary Canadian!

jfb 14y ago

I do this as well when approached by a recruiter who has obviously read my resumé. I always am grateful, and polite, and usually try to set them up with someone in my network (after checking with that person first, naturally). I haven't worked with a recruiter in maybe ten years, but I find that, you know, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and I've accumulated the contact info of a bunch of classy recruiters if I ever need help.

veemjeem 14y ago

hm, blog is hammered, anyone have a cached copy?

simonsarris 14y ago
Sorry! I was unprepared. How about this: https://gist.github.com/3473504 https://gist.github.com/3473504
- citricsquid 14y ago
  http://gist.io/3473504 http://gist.io/3473504

brackin 14y ago

I met a delightful recruiter earlier at an event, they understood the startup ecosystem, don't cold call and only caters to startups and with applicants that fit in the startup atmosphere. More recruiters should look at people like her as an example.

nhari 14y ago

I'm a big fan of being nice to those who have to deal with people 24/7. +1 for Sartori Bellavitano, it's amazing

jakejake 14y ago

I always just tell recruiters that I'm not looking at the moment but please keep me on their list. Who knows when a startup fails or company downsizes and you're looking for a new gig.

clivestaples 14y ago

This is great and refreshing to hear. I treat recruiters with respect because: a.) I've been down-and-out before and consider myself blessed to be in demand, b.) their job seems pretty tough, and c.) it would be really arrogant to complain about someone offering me work.

prodigal_erik 14y ago
The problem is that they're all clamoring for more than their fair share of my attention, even when what they have to offer doesn't make a lot of sense. Profitable recruiters are optimizing for the first candidate who didn't resign and wasn't bad enough to dismiss in the first n months, because they aren't rewarded any more for better diligence and outstanding candidate/position fits (if anything, mediocre fits and turnover yield more business down the line).
- lurker14 14y ago
  #1 question to ask a recruiter offering you an interview: Have they placed someone else at the same company. If the recruiter is worth working with, they have a contract with target employers, and aren't just as disconnected as you are as a prospect.
- clivestaples 14y ago
  Time is indeed scarce and I agree that the industry is probably too focused on short-term goals. I'm referring to the recent trend of bagging on recruiters and publicly humiliating them. I try to live and let live while being grateful that I'm not unemployed like many other people I know...
rogerbinns 14y ago
You may want to look closer. Many are complete scumbags. Here are some things the unscrupulous ones do: * Pretend to have positions they don't, so they can claim to have thousands of candidates on their rolls * Edit resumes/CVs they submit to add fictitious information * Scrape positions from companies and pretend they are front ending those positions, even though they have no relationship to the company, and the job spec says "no recruiters" or similar. * Make no effort to match candidates and positions ie they aren't offering actual work, they are lying about what they offer, and they do not have the companies or candidates best interests at heart. It is quite hard to tell the difference between a competent recruiter and a scumbag. One simple thing to do is Google parts of email they send you.

shyn3 14y ago

I had a recruiter provide me with an interview. I was thinking about a job at that point. They were getting somewhat near $40 an hour and I was getting almost half. The people I talked to were floored by the idea. It's not what you know it's who you know. If the recruiter hadn't got me an interview at $25 an hour then I would be earning $0 for that period of time. I would have never found that job or got to know the company. Once I got in that organization I could easily work with HR to buy me out of the recruiter's contract and negotiate a better salary for myself, considering the company wanted me. The recruiter and me will probably do business again after my contract. I get a new salary after an initial test phase for the company. They get one time fee or recurring income. Everyone has to eat. Recruiters have to make contacts. They have to pay salaries. They have expenses. I don't get why people are floored when they take a large portion of your salary. Most people don't have an influential network that can land them interviews. If you can then this doesn't apply to you. If you are a I.T. recruiter in Toronto feel free to provide me with awesome interviews at $40 hour while you are making $100. I won't mind I promise.

lurker14 14y ago
Sounds like you are talking about contractor management, not a recruiter.
- shyn3 14y ago
  Well no, I should have been more clear. I accepted a contract instead of full-time work. After being bought out of the 1-year recruiter deal I now get paid by the company instead of the recruiter but at a higher salary. I also posted in the wrong thread, seems I had too many tabs open.

charlieok 14y ago

I was in semi-searching mode. I had a very long commute I was unhappy with, and had every intention of putting some time and effort into finding the perfect situation. Something close to home. Something matching exactly the type of problems I wanted to solve. Using exactly the tools and technologies I wanted to work with. However, there was always another project I wanted to finish first, or another topic to bring myself current on before finding the right match and interviewing. Meanwhile, I was getting emails from recruiters. I was pretty good about replying because you never know where an opportunity might come from and because it feels better (for me) to just reply before archiving that message out of my inbox. One of those out-of-the blue recruiters ended up working out. What was an hour long drive is now a 5 minute bike ride. I hadn't valued this nearly so highly when I took that far-away job as I do now. See for example: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/ http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-c... So anyway, for me this was a clear case of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. An opportunity for an immediate improvement landed in my lap that I otherwise might not have found out about, or might have put off. I can't be too upset about that.

AYBABTME 14y ago

I prefer your way, it's much more fun to write this kind of message!

hansef 14y ago

I don't understand why more tech recruiters don't ruthlessly specialize and laser-focus on building a deep understanding of a particular niche when matching candidates and employers. I'm CTO of a web and mobile development shop with about 20 employees. Finding good frontend developers is REALLY hard - to be a great frontend guy these days, working on modern web apps, you need to have strong engineering chops, with knowledge of the html5 apis, css3 and serious JS experience, including an understanding of memory and performance management in large frontend-heavy apps; ideally have worked on a couple of medium size apps with 5-7 person teams; probably have at least some exposure to the current JS framework scene; ideally (for our stack) have experience with preprocessors like sass or stylus and coffeescript; have good design sense and the ability to work in a collaborative feedback loop with a designer, etc etc. It's a really cross-functional role. There's a lot more people who "know HTML and CSS" but have never worked on serious apps, or have solid JS chops but can't produce design with reasonable fidelity to save their lives. A relationship with a recruiter who understood this "candidate profile" and could bring me people who would be a good fit, not just resumes with "HTML", "CSS", "Javascript" and "5 years of experience" on them, would be worth its weight in gold.

lifeisstillgood 14y ago
And, not to put too fine a point on it, would you pay them their weight in gold? Let's say five times what you currently pay your devs?
- salemh 14y ago
  That would only make sense if he was significantly increasing his work force (25%, 50%, etc.) to "out save" the ~20% standard fee's on first year salaries for contingent staffing firms. Though I get your point on the "weight in gold," however, seems like he needs a strong internal recruiter to get his/her chops with the culture, team and technology. Their are a few "boutique" shops around (mostly Silicon Valley) who are fairly technical and can actually understand the requirements of the client, but, they are still on a contingent (so many firms / many candidates) which still comes down a style of "spray and pray." Most recruiting firms can't specialize (or refuse) in a niche due to the need to "branch out" to keep the money coming in, hence the all encompassing "IT staffing" agencies. Not fun, I'd love to work in a boutique / specialized model myself as a former (and probably soon to be again) technical recruiter.

gregable 14y ago

I work for big tech company. I reply to recruiters that I'm having too much of a great time where I'm at (true), but they seem like an effective tech recruiter and would they be interested in joining [big tech company]? Most say no, though one did toy with the idea but it didn't happen. The no's seem to get a kick out of the unique response though.

zwischenzug 14y ago

I couldn't disagree with this more. Recruiters are almost exclusively focussed on one thing alone: making commission. They're not necessarily bad people, but they are not interested in how polite you are, how long your response email is, or anything else than the information they require. Sending long-winded emails thanking them for their time and interest is _wasting their time_. If I want to reply, the first line gives them the info they need. "Not looking for a job", and the rest gives other information if the opp looked good. If you want to try and build up a relationship to get out of where you are, then fine. But they are interested in placing you, nothing more. Anything else they're generally faking. It's how the game works. We geeks have a hard time getting this, because we're essentially honest.

michaelochurch 14y ago

Recruiters serve a necessary purpose, and it's not the "middleman" role because that's not necessary at all. Their purpose is something else, and I'll explain. When you join a company, your manager is an advocate for the company's interests. Plenty of managers are decent people and look out for their employees as much as they can, but it's not their job. Their job is to serve the interests of the company. The employee has to be his own lawyer when it comes to negotiating raises and better projects, because no one else is assigned to that role and if the employee doesn't do it, no one will. Recruiters, when they work well, serve as talent advocates. They help employees use the only bit of leverage (the right to find another job) that they have as best they can by getting them promotions, raises, and better projects at the rate at which they become qualified rather than the much slower rate that companies consider politically convenient. There are a few problems with this system. One is that the recruiter is paid by the company, not the employee. That's actually a fairly small one, but it does mean that some recruiters will oversell bad positions in order to make quick cash. The second, related, problem is that they're paid for "churn". Most employees would rather get better work at the same company than change companies, but recruiters only get a payout in the latter case. There's no incentive for a recruiter to work toward internal re-placement, and most companies' transfer policies are so broken that the easiest way to get a better job is to change companies. The third problem is that repeated job moves, after a certain threshold, can damage the employee's resume: the "job hopper" stigma. Some recruiters warn people that there are long-term risks of high-frequency job changing (even though there shouldn't be; the "job hopper" stigma was invented to exploit people) but many don't. There's a legitimate niche yet to be filled for "talent advocates", who can help the most talented people negotiate a fair shake (without necessarily requiring they change jobs in order to do so). The problem is that talent doesn't have any fucking money to finance this sort of thing. Companies have the money, so they make the rules.

johnsonlong 14y ago

Are there people so blessed to have unsolicited recruiting emails on behalf of triple A engineer employers like MS? What I would give for that.