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Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
61–70 of 147 posts
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#62I particularly love recruiters who insist that you send them a resume in MS Word format, so that they can remove your contact details and stick their agency's ugly letterhead on top (or "improve" your resume for you if they're particularly unethical). "I'll need your resume in Word Format." "I can give you a PDF" "Give me the original in Word Format." "There is no original in Word Format, I wrote my resume in LaTeX.…
Particularly ironic as Word has been able to open and edit PDFs for a while.
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#63"They Insisted to know my current salary" "They refused to talk about compensation" Working outside of the USA, these two are kind of weird. When I am hiring someone, I want to know their current salary to know that I won't offer them a low salary + benefits package. I have ranges depending on positions, and if after evaluating someone she falls into the "mid level" category, I want to make sure that their expectatio…
That's the excuse they provide every time. Their actual intention is to low-ball as much as they can.
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#64I particularly love recruiters who insist that you send them a resume in MS Word format, so that they can remove your contact details and stick their agency's ugly letterhead on top (or "improve" your resume for you if they're particularly unethical). "I'll need your resume in Word Format." "I can give you a PDF" "Give me the original in Word Format." "There is no original in Word Format, I wrote my resume in LaTeX.…
> "Give me the original in Word Format."
Since they're all but certainly going to ghost you anyway, why not just
"Sure, here's the original. This is using features that aren't in the ancient Debian distribution of TeXlive; you'll want to follow the excellent instructions at https://github.com/posquit0/Awesome-CV to get XeLaTeX configured correctly (or it'll bomb out with the most inscrutable of errors).
I'm having a couple of locale issues with attaching files through pine at the moment, so I've pasted the source below. I trust it will not be difficult to copy-paste to a new file.
%!TEX TS-program = xelatex
%!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode
\documentclass[11pt, a4paper]{awesome-cv}
\geometry{left=1.4cm, top=.8cm, right=1.4cm, bottom=1.8cm, footskip=.5cm}
\fontdir[fonts/]
\colorlet{awesome}{awesome-blue}
\setbool{acvSectionColorHighlight}{true}
.
.
.
{\thepage}
\end{document}
Thanks!"
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's as bad if not worse if you have decision-making power at a place which is hiring and therefore are a client or potential client. For example, I (reluctantly) agreed to have coffee with a recruiter next week. I'm not looking for a job - he wants to be put on our preferred supplier list. So now he sends me an email - he wants to have a quick catch up call before we meet for coffee. Since I think having coffee with…
Do the call, cover the topics, say "I guess we don't need to meet now." Saying no is hard but we all need to learn to do it. If you're not interested, just say so.
I've actually just said no to both things. I'm pretty good at it.
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#66Dear people who are in charge of hiring processes (there will be some of you in this audience, I'm sure):
External recruiters are generally expensive and bad. By using them, you reduce the quality of your reputation. They charge 25% or more of the first year salary per placement.
If you are big enough to afford it -- that is, you're making more than four hires a year -- use an actual employee as your recruiter. Make sure that they are familiar with your company's actual culture and business practices, and can speak authoritatively about HR policies. Pay them a regular salary and benefits, so that they have no incentive to lie. Pay bonuses based on the performance of the employees they hire after those employees have been working for you for a year, so that they have an incentive to get high-quality people in.
The recruiter is the first face of your company. That experience should be considerate, consistent, responsive, and above all positive. An unsuccessful candidate should leave the experience thinking that your company would still be a pretty good place to work in the future, and maybe they should recommend a friend who would be a better fit.
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#67I appreciate the idea - I've had some bad experiences with recruiters myself, and the temptation to shame them to the world certainly has some raw emotional appeal. But I've also had wonderful experiences with recruiters, that resulted in great jobs that lasted for years. So I have some concerns: 1) Specifically seeking out bad reviews is likely to attract angry rants. Yelp has their share of bitter people lashing ou…
We actually asked ourselves the same questions. The natural evolution of this tool would be to allow for reviews of recruiters/agencies. Regarding point 1) there are ways to fight unjustified negative reviews (e.g. "I didn't get a job, this agency sucks!"), similarly to how they do on websites like Yelp. This is more of a community guided effort (unless we start actively moderating reviews, which is an option). For n…
I was working on a similar system for more general reviews and found that compared to fraudulent positive reviews negative reviews have a lot less incentives except against public figures and tend to be more honest as a result. With that said, protecting both the submitter and the accused of defamation can be accomplished partially with community moderation and aggressive redaction of as many identifying names as possible - companies are, however, not exempt (in fact, the primary key that I used for complaints). And to avoid unfair hive mind viral hits on characters, any review beyond a certain community reputation needs to be reviewed for validity and made clear to the community that the story is an allegation. Furthermore, I wanted to encourage more of a dialogue and similar to Yelp reviews, so if you are given a negative reputation you must be provided a means to defend yourself - and the status of defense must be made clear as well. For example, a statement can be made public, private (only to the person that originally wrote the review), “no comment,” or no response. If someone didn’t originally provide their contact info out of fears, the community should be made clear that it’s anonymous and will always remain so. However, protecting the information at your discretion until a certain reputation has been reached should provide more credibility as well. The hard part was trying to figure out how to contact the accused at a corporation for low-touch interactions because we tend to not have the same person repeatedly (hence why normally I just used the company, not individuals).
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#68Don't ever do that. Don't ever professionally ruin some Person life. It has a greater impact than you thought.
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#69"They Insisted to know my current salary" "They refused to talk about compensation" Working outside of the USA, these two are kind of weird. When I am hiring someone, I want to know their current salary to know that I won't offer them a low salary + benefits package. I have ranges depending on positions, and if after evaluating someone she falls into the "mid level" category, I want to make sure that their expectatio…
Because that gives the employer a lot of leverage if the candidates last salary was lower than your expectation.
Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters
#70Why do recruiters insist on phone calls for everything? Why can't they just send an email? I can't get on the phone while I'm at my job to talk to you about some other job.
Especially since I can't understand half of them. If your job depends on calling people, why wouldn't you practice speaking clearly?