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This whole thing reminds me of the H-1B debate in a way. What we have here is a heavily bimodal system that is also poorly understood. There are amazing recruit
by potatolicious 14y ago
This whole thing reminds me of the H-1B debate in a way. What we have here is a heavily bimodal system that is also poorly understood. There are amazing recruiters (I've the pleasure of knowing a few), and then there are awful recruiters. There doesn't seem to be a lot of middle ground - you're either in the "awesome, great to work with" camp, or you're in the "omfg leave me alone" camp.
What you have here are people treating recruiters as a monolithic entity instead of the highly binary one that it actually is.
Knowing some good recruiters is extremely valuable. I agree that sometimes these "hurr recruiterzzz" posts seem like attention-seeking or bragging. I ignore almost all recruiter contacts on LinkedIn, and they waste 10-20 seconds of my life daily. Hardly something worth a blog post about.
Anyways, something concrete from the post that bothered me:
> "For now on, if I like a company, I’ll contact them."
And you can do this while still talking to recruiters. I contact companies occasionally just to chat, even if I'm not looking for work, simply because I find their work interesting and want to make the introduction. I also talk to recruiters, because I am not an encyclopedic source for good companies in my area.
The secret is talking to good recruiters and wasting no time with bad ones.
- ryguytilidie 14y agoI guess the problem I have is that people seem entirely unable to do anything but "well all recruiters suck" nowadays, when that is very, very clearly not the case. Of course a lot of recruiters suck and are annoying, but when you translate that into "all recruiters suck, fuck them, I'm not talking to them", frankly you're hurting yourself. In the last 3 weeks I've had a couple different CTOs ask me to meet so I can teach them a bit more about hiring. I'm not harassing these people into taking a meeting. They are emailing me because they know that I can teach them skills that would help them and their company grow. If people want to shut out a source of value like this, than that is their own choice, but it's certainly not one I agree with.
- eliasmacpherson 14y agoIf I were in a position to land an interview for any job I was interested in, how would I be hurting myself by ignoring recruiters? Indeed, if I'm not even interested in a new position, how would what you say be true? Access to a recruiter's hidden list of jobs I don't know I want yet? Is a recruiter going to convince me, know my mind better? I find that doubtful. Anytime I went looking for a job I've tried to work out who the company were and route around the recruiter. CTO's ignoring recruiters is one thing, developers I've met do not see recruiters as a source of value, rather an occasionally necessary evil.
- gyardley 14y agoOf course a lot of recruiters suck and are annoying, but when you translate that into "all recruiters suck, fuck them, I'm not talking to them", frankly you're hurting yourself. If and only if the benefit you receive from the good recruiters outweighs the hassle of talking to and vetting all the bad recruiters in order to find the good ones. This isn't always the case. I get that you're frustrated by the demonization of your industry, but I suspect you don't really appreciate just how much of a useless time-suck a bad recruiter can be, and just how small the ratio of good to bad recruiters is.
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- coned88 14y agowhat company has the time to just chat?