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What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

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Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#161

Post by isoskeles »

BigJono wrote: post #141
sanderjd wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is the most important question I ask in every interview. The goal isn't to get someone to piss and moan about every little thing, it's to see if they can identify any downsides to the tech they use. IME >80% of candidates have never even thought about it, treat every tool/dependency as free, and whatever tech they happen to use was written by the second coming of tech Jesus and contains no faults.

It's a great direct question. However, what I read was that this person asks candidates broadly about X technology and expects them to divine the knowledge that they need to start complaining about X if they want a job.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#162

Post by repolfx »

ken wrote: post #78

> 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…

It is frustrating. I emphasise passion relatively little in my own interviewing process, but others in the firm can't quite get over the desire to do a "one last check" sort of interview. I don't stop them because, well, the harsh reality is that passion does help.

Why?

Because programming isn't carpentry. The difference between an average programmer and a great one is that the average one will build what you ask according to blueprints provided. The great one will come up with new ideas for how to make the product better, drive improvements throughout the team and so on. Building sites are hierarchical - by the time the carpenter turns up the plans are finalised and can't be changed so easily, but software is always in motion.

Also, when I look back at the hires we had that didn't work out, "didn't appear to care about the job" is a common theme. Carpentry is a physical job out in the open where everyone can see if you're working or not. Programming isn't. If you're in front of your desk it can be hard to tell if you're working, or goofing off, and the much greater flexibility given to developers vs carpenters feeds into that (e.g. if you're goofing off temporarily we'll cut you some slack because you're a valuable employee).

So in an environment where supervision is less rigid, the gap between most effective and least is high, and it's hard to tell when people are working, having an interest in the work (it doesn't have to be "passion") means you're much more likely to work out.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#163

Post by alkonaut »

dsk139 wrote: post #144
alkonaut wrote: post #55

If 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?…

Source: I'm an engineer & recruiter that works with over 100 tech companies in NYC. I also work on a SaaS platform for recruiters. After A/B testing tons of messages (and analyzing messages from a SaaS platform I built for recruiters to send messages) the messages that work are ones that are short. So I try to keep messages brief, reach out about a specific company that might be a match, and hope to get on the phone…

> the messages that work are ones that are short.

I completely buy that. But in a short message there is still the choice between concrete information (tasks, location, level, tech/tools, salary, business sector, team size...).

> hope to get on the phone with you to actually be able to do my actual job

But that's the point: a phone call is a pretty big effort I think. I might do it if there is any clue that the job might be something for me but I won't do it if there is a risk that the job is in the wrong part of the country!

> Would be happy to give you a recommendation for a solid recruiter in SF or NYC if you're in those areas.

Not in the US, but thanks!

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#164

Post by rejschaap »

rohan_ wrote: post #102
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…

Had to nitpick on the monospaced font line. Proportional type preserves the shape of words which is a huge part of readability. I don't think I'd take a resume that looks like it was written in a code editor as a positive signal. https://www.quora.com/Typography-Monospaced-fonts-what-are-t...

It's his fantasy world, so who are we to judge. As a gimmick I could appreciate and would definitely notice a resume printed with a dot matrix printer on pinfeed paper using Courier. But I would recommend everyone to just stick with a nice serif typeface.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#166

Post by pjmlp »

carlmr wrote: post #153
john_moscow wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 des…

I'd say this is true, but only if you're working with terrible technology. If you're working with Elm or some other cool language/technology I'm sure strategy A would fare much better.

Not really, because most companies will ignore those without Elm repositories on github.

I cannot be bothered to create Elm, Haskell, OCaml, F#, Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, Rust, Go, Swift, Angular, React, VueJS, Flutter, Dart .... github repositories, after work on evenings and weekends, just for the tiny chance of getting around the next round.

As if almost 30 year of experience across multiple business domains are worthless.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#167

Post by pjmlp »

gervase wrote: post #90
alkonaut wrote: post #55

If 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?…

Partially, this is based on a disconnect between engineering and hiring. For example, the people who are writing the job descriptions got a 1-line email, "We need to expand the engineering team; could you take care of it? Thanks!", and so they're basically having to come up with all this on their own. Their first stop is probably a Google search: "example job description software engineering" Then, they replace the b…

> “Highly motivated”

> “Passion”

Working overtime and week-ends while not getting a dime for it.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#168

Post by repolfx »

ummonk wrote: post #125
lynnetye wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it was implied by context that they weren't. Obviously if you need advice of "don't be greedy" then such a person isn't simultaneously weighing up an offer from the top of Google's pay tier, otherwise that wouldn't be greed, it'd just be realism.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#169

Post by pjmlp »

ownagefool wrote: post #99
falcolas wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current resume has approximately 6 different fonts, left and right justified fields, bullet points, and tables just so it looks just good enough to get past the HR drones (many of whom are wonderful people despite being a resume gatekeeper). It was an agonizing process, but the end result is something that recruiters recognize as being well designed. I hate having to maintain it. That's what I mean by pretending.

Mines is just literally a list of techs categorised by bulletpoints under a job without any context. It doesn't look terrible, but it was hardly really well designed. The basis that the HR drone/recruiter (wonderful people or not) is only actually interested or capable of matching buzzwords (when hiring engineers, specifically, but possibly in any field) and thus will pass the resume based on meeting a Ctrl F hit per…

Yep, good advices.

Additionally, have a master CV template and customize it based on the requirements.

Cutting it down to 1-2 pages, removing everything not worthwhile listing for the advert.

Rephrase the technical terms for the buzzwords bingo as per job advert, e.g. .NET vs C#, ADO.NET vs C# database access,...

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#170

Post by pjmlp »

icebraining wrote: post #156
Eridrus wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

JS on the server-side is actually pretty old; Netscape implemented it on their web server way back in '95, right after the language was released on their browser.

And Java had it on its SDK before node as well.

The original ASP pages could also be written in JScript.

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