Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 210 posts

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

#61

Post by f6v »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #6

- Ghosting - Sending totally unsuitable vacancies - Refusing to disclose company name - Refusing to disclose salary - Not respecting your time - Fishing for your information without disclosing anything to you Generally having a kind of condescending, slimy, sales like approach in communication, although this is far less common then it used to be.

> Generally having a kind of condescending, slimy, sales like approach in communication

Gives you an impression they could by selling anything. In the morning - you to the company. After lunch - a house or a used car.

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

#63

Post by fsloth »

f6v wrote: post #57

There’s a whole cohort of English recruiters who hire for the EU roles. They wouldn’t name a company or provide any relevant details unless you agree to have a call with them. And when you do, they’ll ask incredibly annoying questions that show how incredibly non-technical these people are. Moreover, they can’t provide you any relevant company details even if you call them, since their only goal is to push you to the…

Yes, this. "I have a SECRET client" is the most annoying thing ever. Especially since the client (in my domain) is either immediately recognizable or just irrelevant.

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

#64

Post by victor9000 »

Our hiring process includes a call with an internal recruiter as the first step and it's entirely by design. The goal is to make sure that there's a good high-level fit in terms of the role, your background, and our respective expectations. But one of the big unspoken objectives for us is to assess your communication skills. Our company is forever remote, we're globally distributed, and right now over 90% of our company speaks English as a second language, so having good communication skills is absolutely critical. We also need to make sure that you can explain technical concepts to non-technical team members, people like PMs, designers, the CEO, etc. I say all this because it may seem like a waste of time, but in our case, we're collecting information on soft skills to determine if you can succeed in your role.

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

#65

Post by avh02 »

yibg wrote: post #3

Clearly not reading my resume and sending me a job that's obvious not a good fit even given a cursory glance.

Or responding to "I'm not interested" with a canned "great! Find a slot on my calendar to talk about the role!"

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

#66

Post by andrewstuart »

God it really pisses me off when they find great people for my team.

Even worse is when a recruiter finds me a well paid job that I like.

I hate those jerks.

Wasting everyone's time with wanting to "talk on the phone", trying to clarify details about my "skills" and "experience" or "salary expectation", ugh such pointless questions - can't they just send emails, which I can slam the "delete" key on?

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

#68

Post by na85 »

andrewstuart wrote: post #66

God it really pisses me off when they find great people for my team. Even worse is when a recruiter finds me a well paid job that I like. I hate those jerks. Wasting everyone's time with wanting to "talk on the phone", trying to clarify details about my "skills" and "experience" or "salary expectation", ugh such pointless questions - can't they just send emails, which I can slam the "delete" key on?

Your sarcasm gets your point across but what I think you're maybe not seeing is that for a lot of people, dealing with recruiters is a complete negative.

There are a lot—a lot—of shitty, slimy, unprofessional and rude recruiters out there. The number of actually-good recruiters is dwarfed by the teeming masses of bad recruiters. The vast majority of recruiters reading this probably think they're in the good minority but they're just Dunning-Krugerrands and they're actually shitty too.

For real, most recruiters are awful and dealing with them has zero upside.

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

#69

Post by nindalf »

There’s a lot of people in here complaining about various things recruiters do. Let me give a different perspective. For the first couple of years of my career, recruiters just ignored me. It was like I simply didn’t exist. I hadn’t studied computer science and didn’t work at a well known company. Meanwhile, my coworkers with CS degrees constantly complained about having to bat away recruiters offering them crazy money.

It’s different now. I worked at a well known company for a few years and get plenty of recruiter emails. Many of them are for positions I’m not interested in. Many of them use tactics I’d prefer they didn’t. But I don’t complain because the only thing worse than receiving these emails is not receiving them.

Post reply on HN