Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#111

Post by Something1234 » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 2:53 AM UTC

caffeineclown wrote: post #103

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #78

As the owner of a small business I like to point out that recruiters' fees come straight out of your salary - if I have a budget of £30k for a junior developer position and interview someone myself, I'll offer £30k. If I interview someone through a recruiter and know they'll charge me 15% I'll not only offer less to try to bring the fees down but also so I don't go over my budget including fees . If you're job huntin…

I'd like to apply to an company's own listing directly (whether it be LinkedIn, StackOverflow, the company's own web site, etc.) but this seems to be a straight ticket into a black hole. At this point in my career, I've probably interviewed at 200-300 companies. I think I can count the number of times I've received a positive response for a position I applied to directly with one hand. All my interviews have been fro…

This times a hundred. I've been ghosted so many times applying for internships and looking for work after I graduate. I would at least like a letter saying this position is closed now, so fuck off, but they never do that. I hate it so much.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#112

Post by quickthrower2 » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 4:13 AM UTC

codesternews wrote: post #68

Don't ever do that. Don't ever professionally ruin some Person life. It has a greater impact than you thought.

That cat is well and truly out of the bag. Amazon reviews, Uber reviews, Airtaker. Fiverr. Etc.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#113

Post by kernx16 » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 5:19 AM UTC

randyzwitch wrote: post #55

kernx16 wrote: post #25

This is more nitpicky if anything, but developers are not the only ones that get blasted and ghosted with recruiters. I'm a DBA, but I also get recruiters always telling me how I am perfect for a Sr. full stack engineer.

As a DBA, you don't consider yourself a developer?

It really depends on your definition. I can script and make programs, and do some OOP in several languages, but I wouldn't call myself a "developer". I'm more of a devops engineer with a database emphasis if anything. I know some other DBA's who have developed really cool things like Orchestrator who others might call them a developer but I don't think that is most DBA's primary focus. Albeit, this varies pretty greatly between companies.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#114

Post by zhte415 » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 10:48 AM UTC

Question 5 alerted me

> Don't worry, we'll keep this bit of information private

So the rest isn't?

And then... there's lots of mention of 'we' in this thread and on the form, but no mention of who 'we' are.

This is harder to trust than a recruiter that at least states who they are.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#115

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 1:22 PM UTC

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #78

As the owner of a small business I like to point out that recruiters' fees come straight out of your salary - if I have a budget of £30k for a junior developer position and interview someone myself, I'll offer £30k. If I interview someone through a recruiter and know they'll charge me 15% I'll not only offer less to try to bring the fees down but also so I don't go over my budget including fees . If you're job huntin…

You can try taking the recruiters fees out of my salary offer but if your offer is 15% less than the three or four other offers I usually have - good luck with that.

I’ve worked with local recruiters almost exclusively over the past 20 years. If I send you a resume directly, I have no way of knowing whether you looked at, how much of your job req is fluff, what the necessary and nice to have skills are etc.

When I work through a recruiter, they’ve already been debriefed by other candidates who interviewed for the same position and they can tell me what the interviewer prioritizes.

I’ve also worked with recruiters from the other end as a hiring manager (actually Dev lead), I would call the recruiter back and give feedback.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#116

Post by scarface74 » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 1:39 PM UTC

caffeineclown wrote: post #103

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #78

As the owner of a small business I like to point out that recruiters' fees come straight out of your salary - if I have a budget of £30k for a junior developer position and interview someone myself, I'll offer £30k. If I interview someone through a recruiter and know they'll charge me 15% I'll not only offer less to try to bring the fees down but also so I don't go over my budget including fees . If you're job huntin…

I'd like to apply to an company's own listing directly (whether it be LinkedIn, StackOverflow, the company's own web site, etc.) but this seems to be a straight ticket into a black hole. At this point in my career, I've probably interviewed at 200-300 companies. I think I can count the number of times I've received a positive response for a position I applied to directly with one hand. All my interviews have been fro…

I can honestly say out of around 60 job submittals (I’m very focused) over 20 years and 7 companies, going through recruiters, I’ve never been ghosted, I always knew where I stood in the process and have only had maybe 4 rejections. The rest I took myself out of the running for when I got the offer I wanted. Even out of the four rejections, I at least went through the whole process of phone screen and in person.

I’m no special snowflake I’m just your bog standard enterprise developer/architect and honestly I just started taking my career seriously in the last ten years. Five of the mentioned 7 jobs were in the last 10 years.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#117

Post by anoncoward111 » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

Jeremy1026 wrote: post #93

carlmr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2) People grow and improve. I don't want to be judged for my work or my behavior from my early days in the field. How are you going to be sure this isn't unfairly capturing the worst moments of someone's career just because they are new at it and haven't learned any better yet? Or are currently in a bad company which forces/encourages this kind of behavior. I wouldn't mind recruiting company reviews though. Because…

Only one on my blacklist is Cyber Coders. They just sent me a listing for a Davenport Machine Operator four states away, based on my skills. My skills are all in software development. No idea why this recruiter thinks I'd be a good fit for operating a giant piece of machinery.

They're just spamming heavily and hoping you maybe know someone who knows someone :)

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#118

Post by chpmrc » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 4:27 PM UTC

daveFNbuck wrote: post #77

chpmrc wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, it won't turn into a public shaming list, we already thought about that. We will update the form to make this clear.

How can you release the all the data about bad recruiters publicly without making it a public shaming list?

We will only release data about companies, not individual recruiters. We will then use their name to (try to) get their contact details and send them a link to the data so that they can be more aware of how their actions affected (and how many) people. What we're doing should ideally benefit both sides, not just us.

Hence why I said we should make this more clear, as in: we're not going to publish the names of the individual recruiters.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#119

Post by chpmrc » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 4:30 PM UTC

codesternews wrote: post #68

Don't ever do that. Don't ever professionally ruin some Person life. It has a greater impact than you thought.

Please see my answer above. This will NOT be a public shaming list. We will only release the data regarding the companies and reach out to the individual recruiters to show them the data, hoping this will make them reflect on how they approach their leads in the future.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#120

Post by chpmrc » Sat, Nov 17, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

dsk139 wrote: post #58

I'm a software engineer & a recruiter. I also work on a SaaS software for recruiters. There are a ton of bad recruiters. But a lot of bad acting happens because of 1) incentive misalignment 2) information asymmetry. Looking at the list of reasons why a recruiter might be "bad" some of the blame is on recruiting company structure, but another major source of blame is on employers. They sign contracts with recruiting f…

Thank you for the insight. Websites like Glassdoor already do a good job of giving you an overview of potential employers but the same doesn't exist for recruiters.

Normally you might be in contact with 10-20 recruiters for a few months and end up working only for one company for the next few years so the impact recruiters have is a superset of the employer's.

Maybe recruiters could stop selling the company to death and openly admit what is wrong with the current state of things (e.g. poor Joel score). People appreciate honesty and I would definitely work for a company that admits their problems but is willing to fix them.

Also getting rid of recruiters altogether is not a viable option.