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Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

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Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#11

Post by digitalsushi »

It's very easy to get attention by recruiters on LinkedIn, but my experience has been that, even if I am angling for a product development position, the vast majority of the interview requests will be for support work. I sampled the 48 recruiters who reached out to me from October 1 through the 31 and 45 of them either explicitly listed the role as an SRE, or a more vague 'DevOps' that resolved into support work after some inquiry.

I didn't understand what these job classes meant three years ago when I was getting frustrated, and was surprised that I could find a job within a week. Panic really hit me when it dawned on me that I had given up a pure developer job for a pure on-call pager rotation job. I learned a lot very quickly from that screw up.

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#13

Post by iwasnothere »

Unfortunately, LinkedIn is the only game in town. It's pretty worthless though. In 2019 I received 6,000+ contacts from headhunters, maybe 25 were relevant and 3 were actually worth responding to.

LinkedIn's bread and butter seems to be spammers in India with addresses from New Jersey.

You will probably not find a good job on LinkedIn. Find niche-specific slack job boards and network with people. LinkedIn is mostly a waste of time. It was shit before Microsoft, now it's diarhea.

I'm glad I will be retiring soon and will never remove a connection for re-posting an Oleg Vishnepolsky post.

Fuck LinkedIn.

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#14

Post by crisper78 »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #7
chadash wrote: post #5

LinkedIn yes, Indeed no. Almost all recruiters (internal and external) are active on LinkedIn. It definitely doesn't hurt to have a good profile... people will reach out to you . Recruiters get a lot of scorn, but I've had good experiences with them as long as you understand their incentives. They usually get some percentage of your starting salary, so let's say they make 15k if your offer is 100k (making up these nu…

I would say they mostly suck. Very slimy, unwilling to divulge basic information and will ghost you in a heartbeat.

I would say they don't mostly suck, everyone of them who I have worked with has opened up doors that wouldn't be open otherwise. Made my salary go way up too!

Thanks recruiters you are mostly awesome!

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#15

Post by digitalsushi »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #7
chadash wrote: post #5

LinkedIn yes, Indeed no. Almost all recruiters (internal and external) are active on LinkedIn. It definitely doesn't hurt to have a good profile... people will reach out to you . Recruiters get a lot of scorn, but I've had good experiences with them as long as you understand their incentives. They usually get some percentage of your starting salary, so let's say they make 15k if your offer is 100k (making up these nu…

I would say they mostly suck. Very slimy, unwilling to divulge basic information and will ghost you in a heartbeat.

And if your cell phone ends up in their list, woo-ee they will call you at 11pm on a Sunday if it means you're more likely to pick up. It would have panicked me to get a call at 11pm at one point in my life, but thanks to recruiters I just never answer the phone at all. Voicemail is my butler.

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#16

Post by alexitosrv »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #3

Try Google for Jobs: https://www.google.com/search?q=wfh&uact=5&oq=wfh&sclient=gw... It's creation pushed me out of niche job boards. I imagine it will do the same to Indeed, and LinkedIn. All the major job boards syndicate jobs there.

That is new for me! Do you know for how long it has been on the air? Yeah I think it will push Indeed harder than LinkedIn, tbh. On LinkedIn the most valuable interactions it has been directly with the recruiters, besides the usual crap, and it has been mostly a positive net for me.

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#17

Post by gbuk2013 »

I got my current job via Hired - basically just type up my profile and wait for someone to reach out.

It was a pretty smooth and quick process but that was about a year ago - I heard rumours they ran out of money and turned into a Linkedin clone since so YMMV (would be interested in peoples’ recent experiences in case I need to look again).

I do get quite a few messages from recruiters on Linkedin but I get a feeling they don’t read my profile closely before messaging. Some are clearly automated (catch these by including an emoji in my profile name).

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#18

Post by orangepanda »

chadash wrote: post #5

LinkedIn yes, Indeed no. Almost all recruiters (internal and external) are active on LinkedIn. It definitely doesn't hurt to have a good profile... people will reach out to you . Recruiters get a lot of scorn, but I've had good experiences with them as long as you understand their incentives. They usually get some percentage of your starting salary, so let's say they make 15k if your offer is 100k (making up these nu…

> They usually get some percentage of your starting salary

Why they get a percentage instead of a flat per-head fee? Its not in companies' best interest to agree to a percentage, and recruiters have no leverage to push it.

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#19

Post by mkozak »

Depending on the industry - for some niche areas, like focused on green tech, sustainability, etc I would look for some green jobs oriented job boards, quite hard to filter and find them on LinkedIn. But for strictly IT oriented, LinkedIn and glassdoor are the best places

Re: Ask HN: Are Indeed, LinkedIn the go-to places for exploring new jobs?

#20

Post by Nextgrid »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #7
chadash wrote: post #5

LinkedIn yes, Indeed no. Almost all recruiters (internal and external) are active on LinkedIn. It definitely doesn't hurt to have a good profile... people will reach out to you . Recruiters get a lot of scorn, but I've had good experiences with them as long as you understand their incentives. They usually get some percentage of your starting salary, so let's say they make 15k if your offer is 100k (making up these nu…

I would say they mostly suck. Very slimy, unwilling to divulge basic information and will ghost you in a heartbeat.

From my experience there are 2 kinds of recruiters.

Those most likely operating out of the same boiler rooms as tech support scammers who have pitch terrible roles and employ a spray & pray approach where it's just a spam campaign with very little effort on their side. Those are a waste of time, the roles are terrible and are pretty much never matched to your profile, and when you go through anyway the recruiter will not provide any value (I had one insist on me writing a short resume of my profile... I mean you have my resume in front of you, why don't you do it?).

The rest which are typically alright. Again, quality varies, but I haven't had any outright "bad" experiences with any of this category. On the top-end of this category are those that understand the industry very well and what you're looking for and will only pitch you the right roles at the right time. The right recruiters can essentially be your sales team and are absolutely worth having on your side.

I suspect most people's interactions here would be exclusively those from the first category as they're the ones that typically send unsolicited spam. The second category will typically show much more restraint in reaching out out of the blue, so unless you explicitly seek them out you may not even be aware they exist.

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