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

> 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.

This implies that you only care about the experience of the people who are paying you. Which might be honest but if it's true, it shouldn't be a surprise that so many candidates have negative experiences with recruiters.

The "job" is really a team of Google researchers, trying to understand why no one calls back recruiters.

By ignoring them, you become more and more interesting to them, and their study. Be wary. Soon they will stalk to IRL.

I once met a really good recruiter.

He was polite, urbane, efficient, well-informed and helpful. He got me an interview with a well-known company, and I got the job.

Two years later I was ready to move again; so naturally I went back to the same recruiter. But he had been promoted, and was now the managing director of the recruitment company; he no longer handled clients personally. His client-handling staff were run-of-the-mill.

Never before or since have I dealt with a recruiter that didn't seem like an ignorant, slimy salesman.

[Edit: I'm British. I worked for a year in the USA; I got the job through a local recruitment agency in Richmond, VA, who were pleasant, hard-working and well-connected. My remarks were about my UK experience.]

I've had several recruiters take my LinkedIn profile as a basis, and send the company something based off that. All the best interviews in the last year were off my LinkedIn profile, and that's how I got my current role.

I'm grateful to those recruiters - that was really helpful. One of them told me they have a team who will sort that out if there's good information in the LinkedIn profile already.

It also helped with a mental block, because it is so hard to cut down decades of diverse experience into a couple of pages that somehow encapsulate it. A good recruiter knows what the company wants to see better than I do, and if something is genuinely part of my skills and experience that I wouldn't have thought to include, that's really helpful.

I don't know why but I found things pretty difficult mentally last year. Those recruiters who were able to hook me up with a company with less ritual proved to be catalytic.

If a cold-messaging recruiter asks me for a CV now, I apologise for not having an up to date one and tell them they are welcome to use my LinkedIn profile. If they continue needing a CV, the process stalls. I feel I should have something ready, but during times where I was seriously looking for a role, I ended up with my attention taken up with calls, interviews and offers from other companies before I got around to writing up a targeted CV, so ended up not writing one. Perhaps it's just luck but that's how it turned out the last couple of years.

Similarly, companies that took "as little as a month!" to interview were eclipsed by those who took less than a week to make a good offer worth considering.

Good recruiters have been catalytic in getting those offers quickly, as well as negotiating on my behalf (taking into account my input, not blindly). So I am grateful to the good ones. They are facilitators.

I think and hope you dug further than just a name match, names aren't necessarily unique!