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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

#311

Post by softwarebeware »

ehnto wrote: post #78
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,…

That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people. Everyone is moving around enough that you'll be able to cross into new companies and skip whole song and dance prior. You also get the benefit of having a heads up on the company you're joining too. I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying s…

> I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying somewhere, I probably will too, since we value similar things in the work.

I wish this were true for me. I do have people I click with but I have a personal value not to work for anywhere whose main revenue source boils down to "more eyeballs / clicks" and this rules out pretty much everywhere my past coworkers/friends have gone to work.

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

#312

Post by bengy5959 »

joezydeco wrote: post #174
lbriner wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also 9 times out of 10 its a bait and switch for a different company. Whenever I've worked with these recruiters they always "see whats a good fit" with my resume and its never the company that was in the job description.

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

#313

Post by jiveturkey »

codegeek wrote: post #262
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,…

There are 3 types of recruiters: 1. Internal company recruiters. They couldn't care less about contacting you directly unless things have changed in today's market (My last interaction with in house recruiter was circa 2010). 2. Scummy recruiting farms where they hire a bunch of people on commissions and they spam anyone and everyone 3. Recruiters who actually have relationships with a customer, prospect good candida…

#3 = headhunters

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

#314

Post by ipaddr »

moron4hire wrote: post #172
res0nat0r wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wast…

I agree with everything you say until you are out of work. At that point I start taking calls.

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

#316

Post by scarface74 »

fecak wrote: post #49
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,…

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 stayed at one job too long until 2008. I was looking to restart my career and I spammed every ATS I could find. I didn’t have a network and I had no choice. I found a job that paid around $80K as a mid level .Net dev - still more then I was making. But about $10K below the local market.

Over the next three years, I did build out my network of local external recruiters who had relationships with the hiring managers.

I hopped around between various corp dev job - one generic corp dev CRUD job looks about like any other - by leveraging recruiters. By the beginning of 2020, I was making $150K and hearing opportunities of $165K locally. Then Covid hit and external recruiters had absolutely nothing to offer me paying more than I what I was making.

I hopped on the FAANG bandwagon because of an internal recruiter in mid 2020. Almost two years later, I still haven’t had an external recruiter ping me about anything mildly interesting.

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

#317

Post by AlexC04 »

lhorie wrote: post #218
AlexC04 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think of it as spamming the spammers! The marginal cost of extra words in a "select all -> copy -> paste" is pretty low so I think it makes a lot of sense to be very clear and address any objections they might have in advance. I also have found through experimentation that posting one liners like "how much?" just results in the recruiter reverting to their own script of "objection handlers" The size and cla…

Hey Alex, fancy seeing you here :) I'm going to agree that the "if you want me, do some work first" thing seems a bit overkill. For me, usually just a single sentence asking for salary range and job description gives me more than enough to figure out whereabouts in the spectrum they are. This is the way I think about it: 1) there are different types of recruiters. At least in the city where you are, I can tell you th…

Those are incredibly good points. If you look at the levels.fyi data I think this pattern applies really well to the people within the bottom half of the graph.

There's ALWAYS the option of trying to go from "No Name" -> "Big Name" but I also feel like that can be a harder path to take. When the person reaching out is a "Meta" or a "Netflix" I know that I don't need to ask how much.

I'm pretty sure the number I got there would be a 4x or 5x... in Meta's case though, it's the leetcode stopping me (2 mediums in 45 minutes? Maybe if I wasn't dad to a toddlerI could study enough to get there, though my other problem is I keep getting bored of the grind and wind up building cool shit for fun instead), in the Netflix case it's because they keep saying "NO" (hahahahaha)

The optimal path here for the bulk of the developers in the middle of the pack is to make a move when the person reaching out has a role at a different no-name shop that is 50% higher than their current.

Remember there are a few vectors for that big salary bump. One where you were grossly underpaid from the moment you were hired, but another one that pops up might be that you've been in the role for a couple years and you have been so busy and engaged that you didn't even NOTICE that the market popped in the meantime, your no-name-company doesn't really pay attention to keeping up with the market and the persona reaching out is ALSO picking you for a spot that has a significant increase in responsibility.

I do think that the "reply to everyone" model starts to fall down once you're at an Uber, or some other big logo.

The best part about advice is once you've heard it you can choose to ignore it on a case by case basis.

:D

I've PERSONALLY only ever heard the "I ignore recruiters" jokes so the idea that they're this tremendous fountain of untapped knowledge was pretty wild to me.

OOOH!! One more thing about the leetcode grind. I'd ALSO argue that if you're in the middle of your grind and a 50% raise comes along, it's probably a clever move to pause the grind for long enough to take the raise and then get back to work on the grind while you're making way more.

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

#318

Post by cortesoft »

mikece wrote: post #109

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…

It probably depends on how you got into the line of work.

I always say I am lucky and privileged because through random chance, I developed an interest in programming as a kid and it became my favorite hobby, long before I chose it as a career. I spent hour and hours at it because it was how I played, and I became good at it because it matched my way of thinking about the world and I spent all my free time doing it.

This was luck. I could easily have had gardening as my favorite hobby, or art, or playing music. I would have had a lot harder time turning those into a lucrative career, so in that sense I am lucky.

Now, many people came into the field in different ways, so not everyone in the industry is lucky in the same way, but that doesn’t chance the fact that I am personally lucky.

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

#319

Post by fecak »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #303
vintermann wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I can see, the only thing outsourced recruiters provide is blame-shifting. They're not better at judging candidates. They're not better at finding candidates. They're almost certainly worse at understanding what the company needs than the company, and worse at understanding what the candidate has to offer than the candidate. But, if the company hires a few people they're unhappy with through a recruiter (wh…

Does this blame shifting really happen though? I've never seen recruiters get blamed for a bad hire. I've seen them get blamed for sending people that fail at the first interview though.

A bad hire isn't on a recruiter unless they are basically lying to the employer about the hire's credentials or background, and even then it's the employer's job to vet what is being said.

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

#320

Post by XorNot »

actually_a_dog wrote: post #209
belval wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. You might not want to label it as such, but that is exactly what a professional network is. People can genuinely be your friends and still be part of your network.

Eh, I find work "friends" to be even more ephemeral than school friends. Nobody I've ever worked with in the past has ever contacted me after I left the company we worked for. At least school friends are around for a more or less guaranteed period of several years. Edit to add: I have initiated contact before and been well received. Nobody contacts me. It's tiring to have to do 100% of the work to maintain these rela…

I've had the same experience. I have no idea how this advice is working for people in most job markets - it certainly doesn't seem to be a thing in Australia.
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