Ask HN: What things that tech recruiters do, annoy you the most as an engineer?

Yeah the bitching about recruiters is really boring.

It's also silly and shortsighted seeing posts like this where the poster doesn't understand why we need to talk on the phone. Isn't it self evident? To make a job happen, it requires human contact at every step of the way. Sending out emails hoping people reply results in....... zero.

Who is it that genuinely thinks that jobs are black and white? Who is it that thinks salaries are written in stone? "We're offering $50K", do you want the job? Obviously it doesn't work like that. Recruiting is a negotiation - with everyone - the employer and the candidate.

And talking on the phone is absolutely essential. Things need to be discussed, understood, clarified.

AND, it's a SALES job.... we're trying to catch your attention, interest you in a possible new job, entice you with the positives, lead you to do what we want you to do which is meet the employer and build up relationships on both sides such that the consummation happens, which is an employment deal. None of that will happen without personal talking on the phone.

Really frankly if you're meant o be be an intelligent person, can't you understand that finding someone for a job involves lots of personal communication and discussion and working around grey areas like salary? If you're not smart enough to get that, well.....

And honestly, when people say these two things, I give up on them:

"Can you just email me the details? I'll decide then."

And

"It's all written in my resume, why are you asking me these questions?"

Because these questions make it clear that you're not interested in actually pursuing possible jobs.

The thing that annoys me most about the "how much do you hate recruiters?" posts is that companies pay us alot of money to find great people and they are very happy when we succeed and the job seeker is very happy too when we succeed - why the hate?

If you are bitching about recruiters then you are not the CTO or development manager who is paying them and working with them and wants them to succeed.

> Because these questions make it clear that you're not interested in actually pursuing possible jobs.

Correct, I'm not interested in bureaucratic processes that you pulled out of your ass. If you don't understand how I want to be communicated with, you are not a good recruiter.

> Any time I see an application form that wants facebook/linkedin/github details I just close the window.

You might be doing yourself a disservice there. It varies by company but I ask our HR team to offer the option of LinkedIn profile as an alternative to uploading a CV/resume in case you have the former but don't have the latter to hand or prepared. It's still a minority but I do see people come through who use their public LinkedIn profile as their CV.

Github is a complete waste of time as a guideline to anything useful. If there was any doubt about that in the past the recent trend I've seen of people setting up separate GitHub accounts for each job they have and keeping their personal account separate has completely removed it. (Sometimes this behaviour is company mandated, but often it's peoples' own choice.)

I've never seen the point at all of asking for other social networks because that stuff is none of my business.

Just had one reach out with "I really love your IoT skills".. of which I have none.

I will happily talk on the phone at great length with a potential employer or internal recruiter. They understand the role, they can assess my skills correctly, they can give me the important insights into what working there will be like, and they know their actual compensation range.

I have no real interest in talking with the majority of recruiters, who will generally do at least one of the following:

- Misrepresent the role to me

- Misrepresent me to the employer

- Under or oversell me (A recruiter almost refused to put me through for my current job because I was asking for the top end of the range)

A good recruiter should be able to make the decision on whether to pass a candidate on from reading a CV plus 4/5 questions (in a single email).

If you know what you're doing, just set up the phone call with the employer.

>who make the effort to actually get people on the phone and make it happen

You might make it happen faster if you skip the phone screen with people who can't assess candidates because they don't understand the role nor the candidate!