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What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

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Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#111

Post by learc83 »

alxlaz wrote: post #32

I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me sum up the recruiting industry in a single quote from this material: > Watch for spelling and grammar. [..] After conducting my own A/B tests on this matter, the data showed that candidates who had untidy resumes faired less (sic!) than those with well written ones. Edit…

>sume, then write four damn pages of resume. A one-page resume that drops three pages of relevant stuff will put you in the same basket as someone who can barely fill that page. It's not ballast, it's stuff I can ask you about in an interview.

To me 4 pages is a CV not a resume. You might prefer 4 pages, but in my experience most people won't bother reading past the first page.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#112

Post by mrlyc »

robohoe wrote: post #23
nlstitch wrote: post #3

I think recruiters should actually start giving a shit about the lives of engineers before making demands. - Actually try to get to know and understand a person - Dont use fill-in templates - Have some actual knowledge of tech (java != .net) - Dont make offerings for positions I worked on 10 years ago during college. - Dont be greedy. To just name a few...

And don't go around me and change my resume without telling me.

That happened to me when I went for a job at Wang to work on Australia's EFTPOS network. The position required using protocol analysers but the recruiter had removed all references to them from my résumé. I gave the interviewer my original résumé and got the job.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#113

Post by carapace »

falcolas wrote: post #22

In my opinion: - designing your resume - EQ - having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company - Think of your resume like a poem - visual representation of their experience/resume These are great criteria for hiring a designer or marketing personnel, but these are TERRIBLE criteria for hiring a technical person. In my fantasy world, a technical resume is in a monospaced font and is emi…

There's this one recruiter company that calls me up every six months or so.

We always do the same dance: First they ask me for my most recent updated resume. I send it to them. It's a text file. No fancy formatting, no fonts, not even any Unicode, just ASCII. They always ask me to reformat it, and they always send me the same example resume, and they always explain to me very nicely that they want my resume to make a good impression.

I never do it.

Mostly because I'm lazy, but also because I don't care. That resume gets me jobs. I've never posted it to Craigslist and not gotten responses and a job.

Sometimes they nag me once or twice and sometimes I just don't hear back from them.

Now the thing that puzzles me about this the most is, why, for goodness' sake, don't they have somebody on staff to do the reformatting for me? My hourly rate is not low, y'know? I know they have an office full of people 'cause I've been there. If it's such a crucial step, why not provide it as a value-add service?

Oh well. Not really my problem. Just a weird recruiter thought I wanted to share. :-)

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#114

Post by expertentipp »

cuddlypsycho wrote: post #49

"EQ and self awareness" What a crock of sh*t!! This is what happens when you pack HR departments with humanities and gender studies majors. Personally I do not read any resumes, all the hiring I've done was either by referral or through online websites like angelList. This is my process: - Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a bran…

Meaningfull github profile AND stack overflow profile AND able to do full time job?! I understand you pay people to work on their GH and SO reputation during office hours?

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#115

Post by dabockster »

svnsets wrote: post #77
danesparza wrote: post #6

I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful 'what engineers want from technical recruiters' post.

1) JavaScript !== Java 2) Don't even try to talk about project management frameworks because you don't understand them 3) Don't ask me if I have experience in something that isn't on my resume 4) I don't want your 3 month .NET contract in Cleveland even if it "may have the opportunity to go full-time" 5) Get both my and the employer's salary requirements up front so I don't call out of work to spend the day interview…

> I don't want your 3 month .NET contract in Cleveland even if it "may have the opportunity to go full-time"

Because those totally convert to full time! /s

Insourcing is sort of worse than outsourcing to be honest.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#116

Post by cuddlypsycho »

expertentipp wrote: post #114
cuddlypsycho wrote: post #49

"EQ and self awareness" What a crock of sh*t!! This is what happens when you pack HR departments with humanities and gender studies majors. Personally I do not read any resumes, all the hiring I've done was either by referral or through online websites like angelList. This is my process: - Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a bran…

Meaningfull github profile AND stack overflow profile AND able to do full time job?! I understand you pay people to work on their GH and SO reputation during office hours?

Yes and No. A great GH and SO reputation is something you build over a period of time. It shows passion and consistency. That's what separates people who love to code from the ones who just want the paycheck.

Also, what is "office hours"? We are plugged in 24/7.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#117

Post by ken »

amorphid wrote: post #103
ken wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree wholeheartedly with your first paragraph! As an industry, we still don't have the first clue how to hire. It's not just you. Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity. I think "Hiring for passion" is the new "Nobody ever got fired fo…

> Where I differ is with your (admittedly contrived) example. I've interviewed dozens (hundreds?) of people over the years, and I can't say I've seen any correlation between passion and professionalism/competence/longevity. Makes sense. I think I was trying to say we come up with seemingly arbitrary reasons to hire & reject people. Before getting into software, I had expected the opposite. As far as I can tell, hirin…

Great point. The word "science" appears in the name of the field that I studied, yet I haven't seen any evidence that our current hiring processes in this field are better than random (i.e., the null hypothesis).

If I made a software company who openly declared that their hiring process was purely random, would it work as a company? Would it be legal? For that matter, is a standard tech interview legally valid[1]? What if there is no known valid method?

[1]: https://www.hiresuccess.com/blog/facts-about-validation

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#118

Post by sanderjd »

rb808 wrote: post #44
falcolas wrote: post #22

In my opinion: - designing your resume - EQ - having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company - Think of your resume like a poem - visual representation of their experience/resume These are great criteria for hiring a designer or marketing personnel, but these are TERRIBLE criteria for hiring a technical person. In my fantasy world, a technical resume is in a monospaced font and is emi…

> they would gripe about that technology all day long; if they can't complain about its shortcomings and pitfalls, they didn't use it. Lol that is gold. I have to add that section to my interviewing questions.

I disagree. I used to be this gripe-y person, but the more experience I gained, the more I realized that everything is just the result of its trade-offs and started finding the griping both boring - who wants to complain constantly for years and years? - and less productive than maintaining more of an anthropologist's mindset.

So to me, constant griping is more of a not-that-much-experience signal.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#119

Post by oceanghost »

john_moscow wrote: post #64
chatmasta wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been consulting the past year and a half. Recently I decided to contact some companies just to see what the landscape was like, and if I could maybe find an interesting opportunity that also paid well. On one of the first calls I had, the recruiter heavily implied that I was “not a culture fit” after I explained that I’m only interested in a job if it pays more than I currently make consulting (this particular j…

I think it's actually kinda straight-forward: * If you have sales/negotiation skills, but no technical skills, you do sales/HR/whatnot. * If you have both sales/negotiation AND technical skills, you do consulting or start your own business. * If you have good technical skills, but poor negotiation skills, you go work as a software developer. So yeah, an unwritten requirement for many technical positions is having poo…

There's a lot of wisdom here.

Regarding negotiation for engineers-- a few years back, I had been happily employed at a company for ten years. The CEO of some company calls me up and says I'd be PERFECT for a job opening he has. He says its C2H for 6 months to make sure I'm a good "culture fit". I politely decline, and he was incensed.

I said, "Why in gods name would I leave a position I've been in for 10 years for a contract position?"

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#120

Post by sanderjd »

alxlaz wrote: post #69
danesparza wrote: post #6

I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful 'what engineers want from technical recruiters' post.

Here is what I love to see: 1. An understanding of the fields of work and of their evolution. Don't look for candidates based on languages and libraries -- those might be OK to get an initial shortlist, but: a) Any programmer past junior level should be able to pick up a library (from a field he understands) in ~1 week and become minimally productive with a language in 2-3 weeks. b) It's the idioms of each field that…

I'm surprised I didn't find this higher up the thread: I'm soooooo sick of people hiring based on languages. It's right there in the first response in this article: "make sure you’ve included the same language as the job description if at all possible". This is so ridiculous. Either you're hiring a junior person and you're going to have to invest in ramping them up anyway, or you're hiring a senior person who will quickly figure out whatever language you use.

The exception to this is if you're hiring the lead for a project, who will be setting the idioms and mentoring the rest of the team. But even then, why are you dictating technology to that person rather than letting them choose?

It is worth asking people whether they are interested / willing to learn the tools you're building on, but it doesn't make sense as a filter.

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