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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

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Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#101

Post by castlecrasher2 »

anonygler wrote: post #26

Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest. I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy. But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral,…

Agreed, though I still pay attention in case something interesting shows up. For example, I got my current role through a third-party recruiter (an individual, not a farm like Cyber Recruiters) and it was a great experience through and through.

Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#102

Post by wnolens »

1270018080 wrote: post #50
frockington1 wrote: post #35

Add NYC to that list as well. There's no reason to move to either of those cities in 2022.

I can understand the Bay Area, but it's a little bit crazy to think there's no reason to live in NYC.

West coast of USA is easy-mode life. I don't fault anyone for living there and loving it. It just wasn't for me socially.

NYC makes me feel more human and connected, even if that means higher taxes, smaller apartment, and generally more discomfort on a daily basis.

Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#103

Post by llampx »

AlexC04 wrote: post #22
dsr_ wrote: post #7

The typical recruiting-house recruiter has a script that was given to them by someone else, has no particular job in mind for you, and does not know the difference between Java and JavaScript. They are, in short, one small step above spammers. Unless you are currently thinking about changing jobs, you should definitely ignore them. None of that applies to an in-house recruiter. Someone who works in HR for the hiring…

Hmmm... maybe I should have been clearer and more explicit about the fact that there are times when you ignore the script entirely. Companies that are known to pay top of market... Like you're not going to hammer Facebook or Netflix by saying "how much sucker?" if you're in a bottom of the market bracket. I also ignore the script when it is a company that I'm really interested in and excited by. I should clean that u…

I liked your article, you don't need to cover every edge case imho. Its on people who want to take inspiration from your script whether they apply it like a sledge hammer or a goldsmith's tool.

Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#105

Post by [deleted] »

boringg wrote: post #48
frockington1 wrote: post #35

Add NYC to that list as well. There's no reason to move to either of those cities in 2022.

Outside of the fact that if you like the city, the surrounding land and the people that live there. As well as many other great reasons to live in the cities. Just because you guys don't like them doesn't mean many other people love those areas, please stop unnecessarily dumping on cities you don't like.

[deleted]

Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#106

Post by MattGaiser »

rharb wrote: post #95

Just today I responded to a recruiter who directly emailed me "because my LinkedIn bio looked promising", asking: 1) How he got my email address, since it is not affiliated with my LinkedIn profile (uses my work email and only contains information about my current position) 2) That I wasn't interested, thanking him for his time He responded, seemingly offended, that I "have a Gmail account, a very public account" tha…

I've gotten a bunch of recruiters at work too and in a few cases they sent the email to the wrong Matt because they just spammed every common email name combo for corporate emails.

Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#107

Post by busterarm »

anonygler wrote: post #26

Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest. I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy. But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral,…

I was hired to my current company through an external recruiter that had a great track record but was expensive. We dropped all of those external recruiters in favor of internal ones who are absolutely useless at finding us worthy candidates because unlike the external recruiter I worked with our internal ones don't have an engineering background.

My recruiter started his career as a software engineer.

Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#108

Post by reincarnate0x14 »

anonygler wrote: post #26

Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest. I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy. But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral,…

I'm sure there are great recruiters out there (somewhere), but totally agree on this. Had real days of my life wasted on interviews and such, sometimes only to have everyone at the table realize it was a completely bad fit with no hurt feelings about a minute into us talking directly and not through "the process". Meanwhile got an out of the blue referral from a guy I had worked with ten years prior that started my consulting years.

Not everyone is a superstar networker but be kind, supportive, and professional to your coworkers. People talk.

Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

#109

Post by mikece »

I like the template but I bristle at the notion that being a software engineer is a "privilege." I have spent countless hours training and re-training myself on technologies that change every few years: don't confuse my work ethic and interest in software engineering with some sort of passive privilege that fell into my lap. There are people far smarter than me who either cannot or don't have the perseverance to stay in this industry because it means having a never-ending commitment to learning and starting over (as opposed to having the privilege of getting hired as a manager at a company because of your blood line).
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