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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

#171

Post by andrewf »

TameAntelope wrote: post #88
CoastalCoder wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the popular definition of "nepotism" is hiring one's family or close relations. I doubt anyone is advocating that.

Closeness isn't a requisite for nepotistic behavior, only undue bias due to personal familiarity. I don't think it's any less bad to hire someone you don't know all that well because you share friends than it is to hire people because they're you're close friend or a family member. The point is that it's exclusionary to outsiders, and outsiders tend to be the exact people tech needs more of.

Family is nepotism, friends are cronyism.

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

#172

Post by moron4hire »

res0nat0r wrote: post #124
dvtrn wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise and that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.) Are readers supposed to read this as a suggestion that missing out is synonymous with losing out ? I kind of take exception to these phrases because it strips a lot of agency out of otherwise exceptional…

Sounds like just a general statement of opportunity cost. If you're disregarding all recruiters, and someone comes along with a possible job that fits with a $200k raise that you would normally disregard out of hand, and most of your average raises you find on your own are $50-75k when you switch jobs, spending time talking to the recruiter would likely be worth it.

That doesn't sound like a thing that ever happens.

If I took every recruiter call I receive, I'd be spending half my week talking to recruiters. All for a tiny, small, infinitesimal chance that they might find me a job that A) is in a field I want, B) at a company I want, and C) at a decent salary.

I've been unemployed with next to no professional network before. And I took those recruiter calls. And they were a waste of time. I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.

In the end, the only way I've ever gotten good jobs is through the professional network. It was faster to build a professional network from 0 by working on open source projects and going out to meetups than to go through a 3rd party recruiter.

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

#173

Post by lbriner »

beeskneecaps wrote: post #112

Ignore recruiter if they: * are a part of a large firm * use multiple fonts, sizes, or any color in their emails * send an email _and_ an InMail * text or call you * jokingly or seriously refer to themselves as a stalker * automatically substitute in your skills or past company name * ask for your resume when they can obviously download the LinkedIn pdf * don’t disclose comp * don’t disclose the company name * use tr…

It's no unreasonable to check if the Resume on Linked In is up to date by asking for an up to date one is it?

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

#174

Post by joezydeco »

lbriner wrote: post #169
Kalium wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards" I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters. I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.

One of the most common reasons is simply that they don't want you to go direct to the company in question and bypass their commission. If they give you too much, it is very easy to do and many companies will recruit directly and the recruiter would have no legal basis to do anything about that. On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you migh…

9 times out of 10 the job description you get from the recruiter is a lazy cut-and-paste from the actual company's input.

It's never anonymized and simply pasting it into Google will almost always get you a lead on the hiring company.

Another lead is if they give you the company location. There is only one company on the planet, for example, that has R&D offices in both Mossvile and Aurora, Illinois.

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

#175

Post by klaudioz »

I have a dirty trick to ignore "bots" recruiters in Linkedin:

I just put a greek character on my name or add an emoticon, so I got a lot of messages starting with:

"Dear name ..

So, it's safe to ignore the message. Even when probably I'm not interested I used to reply with a template message, but I won't waste 30 seconds with a bot.

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

#176

Post by azinman2 »

ehnto wrote: post #147
FredPret wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a professional network.

I was just trying to articulate what I see as a difference between a purpose built career network and a network of actual friends from work. There is a difference between those two types of networks not captured when you call them both a "Professional network".

To me all you’ve described is a professional network with strong and weak ties.

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

#177

Post by sergiotapia »

Kalium wrote: post #115
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #11

I also recommend a response to every recruiter, but you don't need to explain your privilege, you don't need to suck up to them, and you don't need to justify your actions. "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"

> "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards" I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters. I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.

That hasn't been my experience. I always get the salary range, equity package, and what stage/growth the company is at currently and where they want to take things. All in the first 30 minute call.

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

#179

Post by eatonphil »

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 like NYC. I moved here in 2017 though. But after the pandemic I moved to Central Queens where my rent is much cheaper (2400/mo) and the apartment is bigger (1,000sqft ish) in a doorman building. 30m subway to Central Park and the best Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Korean restaurants in NY are the next neighborhoods over.

The coffee and pastries nearby aren't as fun as Brooklyn though.

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

#180

Post by cletus »

milkytron wrote: post #167
cletus wrote: post #132

I went into this thinking I was going to disagree because honestly I hate recruiters and the time-wasting involved but I actually agree. Here's why: by having a template that he just copy-pastes. This is extremely low effort and will filter out a lot of recruiters. I also agree with working with company recruiters over third-party recruiters. The first thing many recruiters will want to do is "hop on a call". Resist…

> There are lots of techniques recruiters will use to waste your time. Why is this? Why do they insist on wasting a candidate's time when answering some simple questions via email is much more efficient? I've talked to HR people about this, and the answers I've received are not satisfying. A common response is that they want to get to know you, hear how you speak, determine if you might be a good fit. BUT, shouldn't…

> Why is this? Why do they insist on wasting a candidate's time when answering some simple questions via email is much more efficient?

That's easy: they want you invested. The sunk cost fallacy works.

Think about it another way: being a recruiter is being in sales. Sales people love pipelines (funnels) so if you think about the recruitment stages a simplified view might be:

1. Email candidate

2. Candidate responds to email

3. Discuss on phone

4. Candidate submits resume

5. Organize phone screen

6. Conduct interviews

7. Negotiate offer

8. Accept offer

Each of these steps has a conversion rate. Imagine you get paid $20,000 for placing a candidate. Work backwards through this pipeline and you might figure out you have to send 5,000 emails to place one candidate. That means each email you send, you've "earned" $4. Imagine if the response rate is 20%. Well, getting a candidate to respond by changing up the content or presentation of the email means you've now "earned" $20. If only 1 in 3 talk on the phone then each phone introduction you make "earns" you $60. And so on.

it's a numbers game. They're just trying to get you to the next stage in the pipeline.

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