I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful 'what engineers want from technical recruiters' post.
Do not try to use technical words in any conversation you have with anyone, ever.
What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
131–140 of 212 posts
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If only all hiring managers were this honest during the process, everyone would be better off.
The candidate, for example, could just walk out of the interview and go for a beer, while the hiring manager could get on with the business of finding a gullible new grad to hire.
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I'm being frank, then you need to be up front about that in the job posting. "Cultural fit" and other PC BS won't cut it - be honest about what you need. "We need someone who can design and implement frontends alongside our product marketing group." Not, "Looking for a JavaScript, Typescript, Angular, React, Node.js, Mongo, and BerkleyDB rockstar." Because I've personally watched several people who were cultural f…
I've written and deleted this message a dozen times trying to get it right without it coming off as an attack. I hope you won't take it that way because I'm genuinely trying to be helpful. The way you parse "Looking for a JavaScript, Typescript, Angular, React, Node.js, Mongo, and BerkleyDB rockstar." sounds like the way I would expect an autistic person to parse it, too literally. Every job everywhere has an implied…
Your point would be made just as well if not better with the first paragraph elided entirely. In general when you rewrite something so many times, it means you should say less
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#134If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound like sales pitches with vague language? “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy” “You’ll work close to the systems” “You’ll have a central role” What systems? What is the company even doing ? What about fundamental things like - where is this? - exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here? - What’s the team? 4 beginners?…
Sales funnel + psychology. Imagine you are using PHP4 and, 100 candidates out of your pool will totally hate it. As You know that in a face-to-face talk you have about a 10% chance to convince a PHP4 hater to still go ahead and take the offer. Now consider 2 strategies:
A) Write "we use PHP4" in the job description. In this case, 98 candidates will nope out when they read this (say 2% won't notice PHP4 or will be desperate) and 10% out of the remaining 2 gives you 0.2 people on average.
B) Be as vague as possible. Write that you use modern tooling and technologies, don't give any details. Now 80 candidates proceed to the next stage. If you only convince 10% of them, you still end up with 8 instead of 0.2.
It's similar to spam - even though >99% people will delete it without even reading, as long as there is a tiniest chance of someone actually buying the advertised product, the spammers will be in the black.
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#135Earlier 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…
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.
Interesting. Now I truly have no idea what the actual meaning of that sentence is. I still read it as talking about programming language, but your interpretation seems at least plausible.
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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]? Wh…
I'm imagining an overly academic interview question that goes something like this...
"It's been determined that our CS interviews are both random and unscientific, and we'd like to reverse that trend. To give us more control of the outcome, and to help us be more science-y, how would you design a random number generator which can be made deterministic by giving it a seed value? We need one for our hiring process."
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#137> It may seem like common sense, but having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company (whether it’s the company’s mission, product, technical challenges, or its work environment) is important. This frustrates me so much. What if I can't find a company that offers any such thing? This seems like anti-common sense to me. If you have skills at carpentry, and do a professional job, you can…
>> you're searching for people with passion so you can get them to work unpaid overtime for you
I think companies are also expecting that 'people with passion' will be less impacted by the unavoidable organizational BS and garbage that pops up on occasion.
In my experience, the people with the greatest passion also turn out to be the biggest assholes and unnecessarily alienate their coworkers. Going with the carpentry example, imagine building a house with someone that insisted _everything_ be _perfectly_level_ and went around checking everyone's work every hour and reviewing their work.
Culture fit could more effectively be restated as emotional/social intelligence which a small subset of software engineers severely lack. Hiring an excellent engineer that doesn't enable other team members is a net loss for the organization.
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#138I'm surprised none of them mentioned the abominable "culture match". I've heard repeated complaints that it's much more important to be a brogrammer who likes craft beers, than it is to be any good at the actual programming.
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…
> if it pays more than I currently make consultin
FYI, you can always make more as a consultant if you don't count cost of medical care, taxes, etc.
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've written and deleted this message a dozen times trying to get it right without it coming off as an attack. I hope you won't take it that way because I'm genuinely trying to be helpful. The way you parse "Looking for a JavaScript, Typescript, Angular, React, Node.js, Mongo, and BerkleyDB rockstar." sounds like the way I would expect an autistic person to parse it, too literally. Every job everywhere has an implied…
Your point would be made just as well if not better with the first paragraph elided entirely. In general when you rewrite something so many times, it means you should say less
I was trying to solve two problems.
The first problem is for people not on the spectrum to recognize that I wasn't trying to speak to the OP as if they were a simpleton. Because for a person not on the spectrum the implied requirement is obvious.
The second problem is a message to people like myself on the spectrum, "This is a new social rule to add to your matrix for interpreting behavior."
Eliminating the first paragraph entirely would have decreased the likelihood of creating the new rule in spectrum people while simultaneously seeming like I was being snarky to non-spectrum people. It's entirely probable that I failed in both my goals in spite of this.
Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates
#140I 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…
yes, this would be nice to see... I look forward to it!