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What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

keyvalues.com

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Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#121

Post by dragonwriter »

sanderjd wrote: post #120
alxlaz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

> 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?

Just because you are hiring a lead doesn't mean it's a greenfield project with nothing established; even if the lead has freedom to migrate over time, that doesn't mean that it isn't important for them to be able to guide and mentor on the existing stack very quickly.

I generally agree the I industry overemphasized experience in using particular tools rather than skill in engineering systems, but it is not the case that specific tool (including language) skill is completely irrelevant.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#122

Post by lynnetye »

learc83 wrote: post #109
lynnetye wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be completely honest, I also felt a lot of frustration towards recruiters when I first started working on Key Values. (It might be one of the reasons why I built it...) In the last year though, I've met a wide variety of people with a wide variety of responsibilities, approaches, and backgrounds, yet they all share the same job title. There are certainly awful recruiters out there, but there are also some really f…

>Don't be greedy That is hilarious. If the representative of a multi-billion dollar company (or a startup trying to become a multi-billion dollar company) every said something like that to me I'd probably laugh and walk out.

I don't think many candidates tell the recruiter they're working with to be less greedy, nor do many employers tell candidates this. My point is that there's an extremely wide range of scenarios that both parties see, and most people on one side of it have a hard time considering the perspective of the other.

There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year salaries at Google and expect similar comp packages from startups. (Are they being too greedy? Meh, they're just misinformed or need to take some time to recalibrate their expectations.)

There are also plenty of companies guilty of the same thing. Their expectations are too high as they turn away great candidates because they don't have a CS degree from a top school or have an impressive track record of open source contributions.

The OP listed "don't be greedy," which sounds familiar to me. It's easy to have a few bad experiences and then draw a blanket conclusion that every tech company is trying to squeeze me. My point is only that it's frustrating on both sides, and whether you're an applicant or a hiring manager, understanding what the process feels like to the other party will make the process that much easier for you.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#123

Post by jnwatson »

falcolas wrote: post #94
commandlinefan wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 6 different fonts Dear God, is that really what they're looking for? Tech hiring gets more ridiculous every day.

It's what was needed. And my use of the word fonts is a bit incorrect, it was a total of 6 different font faces (bold, italics, different sizes, different fonts). Sorry about that. - Name - largest on the page, picked a font that looked good at that size - Email address - monospaced font, colored to appear as a link (which seems silly, but helps pull attention to it since it's the primary contact method for me) - Phy…

You were right the first time. In typesetting, A typeface is a family of fonts, and a font is a weight and set of variations (and size, too, before digital).

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#124

Post by Eridrus »

CryoLogic wrote: post #63

TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with SPA experience AND was able to build REST API's. I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and…

> I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and back-end services. He was convinced JavaScript only runs on browsers and I was full of shit.

I mean, when NodeJS first came out, I thought it was a joke too :p

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#125

Post by ummonk »

lynnetye wrote: post #122
learc83 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Don't be greedy That is hilarious. If the representative of a multi-billion dollar company (or a startup trying to become a multi-billion dollar company) every said something like that to me I'd probably laugh and walk out.

I don't think many candidates tell the recruiter they're working with to be less greedy, nor do many employers tell candidates this. My point is that there's an extremely wide range of scenarios that both parties see, and most people on one side of it have a hard time considering the perspective of the other. There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year salaries at Google and expect similar…

>There are plenty of young software engineers who hear about first-year salaries at Google and expect similar comp packages from startups. (Are they being too greedy? Meh, they're just misinformed or need to take some time to recalibrate their expectations.)

If they're choosing between working at a company like Google or that startup, it's not greedy to expect competitive compensation.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#126

Post by sanderjd »

dragonwriter wrote: post #121
sanderjd wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

> 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? Just because you are hiring a lead doesn't mean it's a greenfield project with nothing established; even if the lead has freedom to migrate over time, that doesn't mean that it isn't import…

I see that what I said wasn't clear at all: I meant the specific kind of lead who will be setting everything up, ie. on a greenfield project. I think a lead on an established project falls into the camp of experienced people who can figure things out.

Another exception: contractors. In this case, you do want someone who is immediately productive in the language you're using because you do not reap any of the benefits of them ramping up like you do with permanent employees. For contractors, familiarity with the language and ecosystem is the more important part of their job; for employees, familiarity with the business is more important and the language stuff can be picked up.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#127

Post by dmlim »

sanderjd wrote: post #120
alxlaz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 qu…

Completely agree with the point about not hiring based on specific language experience, but I took the phrase "make sure you’ve included the same language as the job description if at all possible" to mean "use similar terms and phrasing as those used in the job description." I think in that context, the advice can be helpful.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#128

Post by rb808 »

sanderjd wrote: post #118
rb808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Agreed, I wouldn't want continual moaning, I'd like to hear about the problems they experienced, and have the knowledge that on a different platform/framework that would be better, but you'd give up something.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#129

Post by whack »

carapace wrote: post #113
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…

Probably because recruiting is a crapshoot numbers game. Emailing massive numbers of people is easy. They have pre-written templates, so the marginal time spent is minimal. Forwarding resumes along is easy as heck too. But customizing someone's entire resume? That doesn't scale. They would have to... you know... actually value you.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#130

Post by andrewstuart »

I fired one of my biggest clients because they appointed an HR manager who cared most about things like whether or not the career history timeline perfectly lined up and left nothing unaccounted for - like really cared - would knock someone back after 3 tech interviews if there was a glitch in the resume.

I felt it was because she really had nothing tangible to contribute to the technical assessment process so felt she must do something.

I can tell you this - I'm not wasting my time recruiting for a company that does that sort of thing.

Why I point this out is that many of the things that these people say they want are things that are not really very important when trying to find very scarce technical talent, but such recruiting people are happy to throw away a great developer because some unimportant thing was not present.

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