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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

251–260 of 633 posts

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

#251
post #49

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,…

Former recruiter here. You are spot-on about referrals, and having an insider advocating for you or just their willingness to make the recommendation starts things off at a great spot. Here's where I disagree. You haven't doubled your salary BECAUSE of your policy of not working with recruiters, but rather DESPITE this policy. Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things tha…

I think only true part in that description is "Exec roles are often handled and retained by recruiting firms".

But that is level where normal developers are not finding themselves. I am senior developer but I don't imagine being approached for exec level role.

There are different worlds of recruiting - world where I am is low level spamming that I get every day and most of it is just predation on unhappy people that would be open to switch job.

World where there is super specialized recruiting like exec level or really niche skills might work as described but that is super specialized and most people are nowhere near that world.

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

#252

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,…

Very much agree with this comment. Just had an awful experience with a Jobot recruiter and will 100% never work with anyone affiliated with that company again.

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

#253
post #29

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,…

Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time Or share your data. I made a throwaway, but not obnoxious email on my domain just for recruiters a few years ago, so I could try tracking who I was talking to. Via three consecutive third-party recruiters I started getting cold calls and e-mails from recruiters I’d never contacted, never met, or never before engaged wit…

I always ask where do they have this number from.

One time the guy told me that the person who referred me "preferred to remain anonymous".

I asked him if he realised that this is a violation of GDPR and that a typical candidate would recognize it as such?

No coherent answer.

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

#254

That's a pretty big wall of text when most recruiters reach out with a single sentence or few sentences.

It reads like the author really wanted to get that "privilege" line in there, and then came up with a lot of other words to put around it to hide that fact.

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

#255
There is no one better than yourself to get what you're looking for, so instead of relying in a third party to give you the edge, make sure you're already on the top of the wave.

I never work with external recruiters (staffing agencies)I have made the exception three times, and all of them ended with a poor experience, basically repeating the same information over and over again between them and the people from the actual company.

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

#256
post #221

Bad career advice I received early in my career: Don't talk compensation until late in the interviewing process after you've already convinced them to hire you. Compensation is the first thing I bring up now. "I currently make X salary, Y annual bonus, and Z equity. This position will need to exceed all 3 by at least 20% before I even consider it. Does that sound doable? If not, let's not waste any more of each other…

Unless you're already extremely out of band and are pretty sure your range will be higher than 95% of your incoming offers, I do not recommend doing this. Never give first numbers, and if you're in software and haven't gotten past the middling, typical startup salary numbers and onto the mind-blowingly high numbers, you will not feel confident enough to handle a negotiation where you've already given away too much in…

I have >20 years of experience and my comp is absolutely >95% of inbound offers. So yes, I definitely want to not waste time with those and instead focus on the 5%.

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

#258

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.

I was just trying to state the popular (AFAIK) definition of nepotism.
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