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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

341–350 of 633 posts

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

#341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real tech people don't blather. Yeah, I know, that's not "hard data". It's a pretty consistent pattern, though. Tech people have to be able to communicate with precision; they usually don't do "blowing smoke".

> Real tech people Ah this fun gatekeeping meme rears it's head again. So how do you define "tech" people? Do you have a scorecard? How do they meet your assessment for "real"? Cohesive organization of atomic matter generally constitutes "real" in a lot of physics definitions. I'd argue trying to label someone a "real tech person" is a laughably subjective exercise that's so corrupted by personal bias and toxicity as…

The point folks are making here is that folks who go on these long rants, demand "hard data" for every experience, write in over formal language, say things like "corrupted by personal bias and toxicity as to be utterly useless" may not be that able / focused on just moving forward on stuff - it's all tied up in ego ego ego type things.

You like the posters approach? Fine. I don't find their style (or yours) to be either healthy or productive and it just can stress teams out to have to work with someone super high need.

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

#344
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you it's those keywords in your profile that draw them to send you a message

Up until I added that line it was "rust" which was doing it. Perhaps the line makes it worse, but at least I'm happy to ignore those requests now. :)

I added rust to my list of skills and then got swamped with blockchain nonsense. It’s very odd, I took it back off again.

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

#345
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…

> it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them

Up to a point. They get a fraction of the marginal increase in salary, and they’d much sooner “close the sale” than risking having someone else fill the job to try and get an extra 500$ commission.

It’s the same story with real estate agents: selling your house for an extra 20k might be a lot to you but to the agent it’s an extra 400$ in commission (exact percentage varies). In other words, it’s hardly worth risking the seller losing interest or working an extra 2–3 weeks for so little.

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

#346
post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real tech people don't blather. Yeah, I know, that's not "hard data". It's a pretty consistent pattern, though. Tech people have to be able to communicate with precision; they usually don't do "blowing smoke".

100% spot on. You can usually tell on which side of the sales vs tech spectrum someone is on organizationally by this.

I would add managers who have super inflated views of themselves but not technical so maybe with some insecurities mixed in?

Maybe mixed in with all the microaggression / toxic work environment type stuff?

The folks who code are usually like, hey, let me show you this, or do you have time to look at this.

THe managers, sales etc folks never say this. They will schedule you for long long boring meetings on any topic they can think of.

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

#347
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…

I think the one time I responded to a recruiter and went through the process was because they told me the company up front. Unless its an internal recruiter, I never get that info. I was interested in the company and I figured they could help speed me through the process (which I believe was true). I didn't take the job but I appreciated this person not BSing me.

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

#348
post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We may be violently agreeing here; what is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes? Our industry is uniquely , as in above-replacement-industry, plagued by a diversity problem, and I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends o…

We may be violently agreeing here; Violence is completely counter to my way of being - so No. What is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes? We keep going in circles - with this idea that person that someone in the company already "knows" (or who came in via a referral anyway) gets the…

Violent agreement is just a term for when people seem to be disagreeing but actually aren't. [0] If that is completely counter to your way of being, then it's possible your way of being isn't compatible with the concept of constructive argument.

And I'm confused about where I said anything about certainty. I'm not talking about how all companies operate all of the time, I'm talking about how some companies operate an unfortunate number of times.

> Holding everything else constant, from job title to industry to location, female and minority applicants were much less likely to report receiving an employee referral than their white male counterparts. More specifically, white women were 12% less likely to receive a referral, men of color were 26% less likely and women of color were 35% less likely. [1]

This is not good. Can we agree on that?

[0] https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-to-use-employee-referrals-withou...

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

#349
I also strongly disagree. All the jobs I've taken at the advice of a recruiter were the worst jobs I've ever had. Even if the job matched everything on my checklist and I was able to visit the company and talk to the employees before signing on, it was still a terrible place to work. Why? Because it was in everyone's best interest to hide how miserable the job actually was. And yes, the salary was higer, but the jobs didn't last. The longest I was able to tolerate these jobs was about 2 years each. Which didn't look very good on my resume. Switching jobs every 2 years is probably ok for some, but I wouldn't hire anyone that has a consistent record of that. My advice is to find places that you would want to work and apply there on your own.

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

#350
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bet you it's those keywords in your profile that draw them to send you a message

Up until I added that line it was "rust" which was doing it. Perhaps the line makes it worse, but at least I'm happy to ignore those requests now. :)

It is ironic that so many companies are using such an efficient programming language to implement the most horribly, deliberately wasteful computations on the planet. I got into rust because I want to do meaningful work efficiently not proof-of-meaningless-work.
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