131–140 of 149 posts
Same as always, networking :). Go to meet ups, go to conferences, talk at conferences. Do this for a while and your network will grow fast, and you'll be skipping technical interviews even. It's not quite practical for a lot of people but that's the breaks.
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What's the negative effect it's had?
Whenever I have done that they have offered very little (or even the same) salary as I am on. One time I was contacted about a role in London offering between 65k and 90k (can't remember exactly, but a range along those lines). I said I would only consider moving for the 90K end. He asked what I was on. I refused to tell him then eventually got wore down and told him my relatively small Spanish salary. He refused to…
Stay away from those recruiters and never negotiate your salary with recruiters.
In the UK there's something seriously wrong with the IT jobs market. On the job sites (TotalJobs is my go-to example) literally 99% of DevOps positions on any given day are being advertised through recruitment agencies. I was forced to deal with them for years and the majority are either incompetent or shady. I wrote an essay on this ( https://mocko.org.uk/b/2015/10/14/dont-feed-the-beast-the-gr... ) a few months ago…
Be very wary of those practice. Recruiters are not your friend.
In the UK there's something seriously wrong with the IT jobs market. On the job sites (TotalJobs is my go-to example) literally 99% of DevOps positions on any given day are being advertised through recruitment agencies. I was forced to deal with them for years and the majority are either incompetent or shady. I wrote an essay on this ( https://mocko.org.uk/b/2015/10/14/dont-feed-the-beast-the-gr... ) a few months ago…
I have to agree here. I flat out refuse to use recruiters in London because my experience with them was really bad. I once was put through an interview process through a recruiter. I did all interviews with this company and they were happy with me. After each interview the recruiter called me and asked me what kind of questions I was getting. It turns out he was betting on another horse to succeed as I found out late…
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The recruitee is deceiving someone to gain financial advantage, which is pretty much the definition of fraud. If the potential recruitee said "I'm looking for $X" they're not deceiving anyone.
I've been in situations where, despite telling them what I'm looking for, they've pressed me to disclose my salary. I've always been honest about it, but I can recall one specific instance where I disclosed my salary to a recruiter and told them that I was seeking a particular salary, only to be told, "No one is going to give you that big of an increase." Who said anything about an increase? It's about paying what I'…
I'm just saying that lying about your previous salary in order to get a higher starting salary is pretty clearly fraud. While it's unlikely to ever be prosecuted it is probably grounds, as has already been said, to withdraw the offer or to fire someone.
I actually just posted this http://weworkcontract.com/ for London contract jobs aggregated from job boards (and recruiters).
I'm constantly being contacted through LinkedIn by recruiters who clearly haven't actually read my profile - they'll say they've read it and then say that they think I'd be perfect for the Senior Developer position they're hiring for, when my profile clearly has me as a student looking for entry -level positions. When I respond, or when they call me, I tell them my actual qualifications and they say that they'll defi…
It's baffling. Don't tell me you've read my resume if you clearly haven't. These people are not helping themselves by blasting a canned message to those who match whatever keyword they're filtering for.
These people will get to know you, will find out about jobs you might like way before the recruiters do, or before they are posted on job sites, sometimes even before they're announced. They'll know, and want, to let you know about the jobs too, and you'll do the same for them.
This strategy has worked very well for me, and I've built a network of amazing friendly people in the process.
The trick to this strategy is to always be connecting (nod to Glengarry Glen Ross there), before you ever are in need of a job. If you are in need of one and haven't done that, then I'd advise like others have here and try to leverage what network you have.
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The entire recruiter economy is an enormous conflict of interest. They are like realtors. They are paid by commission and make significantly more money based on quantity of hires, rather than quality. So they have no real incentive to fight for you or help with your negotiations and a strong incentive to be mildly dishonest or exaggerate without burning bridges. This is terrible for both you and your employer (but mo…
I also feel that the recruiting industry leeches off of developers -- if companies are paying recruiting firms $30k per developer (with some companies I've seen having about a 1year turnover rate), then that's 30k that is essentially coming out of my salary.
I despise recruiters with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, so I try to avoid them as much as possible. That leaves me (and you) with a few viable options: 1) Use a matching service like interviewing.io or TripleByte to get connected directly with companies. (Effectiveness: Questionable but promising) 2) Use a job listing site like Indeed.com to find positions that you're interested in applying to. (Effectiveness…
I went through this same experience over the past year and a half. At some point I intend to write a more detailed blog post about my process, but the short version is that I did a boatload of research ahead of time, and leveraged the heck out of my network. In places where I found my network to be lacking, I invested additional time/effort to build connections. I had more success through networking and personal conn…
Currently interviewing.io is setting up and testing system, where engineers who did well at the practice interviews can choose companies to have anonymous interview with.