Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 633 posts

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

#411

Post by throwaway6532 »

larkost wrote: post #368
picture_view wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was recently talking to a 3rd party recruiter who started asking me for detailed salary info of all my past jobs. I told him that I didn’t feel comfortable answering that, then when he pushed back I told him I’m legally not required to give him that info in my state (and the potential employer’s state.) He abruptly cut the call off and ghosted me. I decided to apply to the company directly. They were happy to talk…

It is ok that you did not feel comfortable with that, but pay negotiations are exactly why you would want to have a recruiter: they handle that for you, and are generally incentivized to get you as much money as they can since they generally get a percentage of your yearly salary as their pay. So by telling the recruiter you were not going to share that with them you were hamstringing them... of course they thought y…

>and are generally incentivized to get you as much money as they can since they generally get a percentage of your yearly salary as their pay

This is not quite true. They're optimizing for throughput, not max dollar value. If they optimized for the maximum amount of money they could get you that would come at the cost of their time which would lower their throughput of placing candidates and hence the maximum amount of money that they can personally earn in aggregate.

They'll still try to spin you that line though.

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

#412

Post by Mandatum »

LinearEntropy wrote: post #325
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 completely agree with you. Every single job offer I have received has come through direct listings from the company itself. Safe to say the quality of tech recruiters in New Zealand is even lower than those elsewhere.

Because the market is tiny. Recruiters can't specialize, and those that do get eaten up by the likes of Datacom or Australian-based providers.

Most recruiters in NZ start from labourer/contracting/HR firms and then move into tech because it's better paid. Whereas in Australia you get people who trained specifically to be a tech recruiter, or migrated to recruitment from tech (usually BA and QA type roles).

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

#414

Post by labcomputer »

TameAntelope wrote: post #328
datavirtue wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make it seem like straight white men conspired to take over the industry and box everyone else out. Last few teams I have been on were very skin diverse. They all had privileged cushy backgrounds though...except for one of the white men who was self-made. The power base in the US is white middle class. It's not just software that is dominated by white men. Law, medicine, construction, management at corporations.…

Thanks, I appreciate it. It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that. It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a pos…

> Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions

This is a wrong assumption, in my experience. As a rule of thumb, for not-principal/staff SWE roles, I would estimate that it takes:

1. 10+ resumes to find someone worth phone-screening

2. 10ish phone screens screens to find someone worth an in-person interview

3. 3ish in-persons to find someone worth an offer.

In other words, a hiring manager has to look at 300+ resumes to find one qualified candidate. So... imagine you get a reference from someone you trust. You go from 1 in 300 odds of finding someone who is basically qualified to 1 in 3.

This is after recruiters have pre-screened the resumes, btw. The candidate pool for Step #1 excludes all the people who apply to a senior SWE role with no Github portfolio, no relevant claimed skills, no degree and no work experience other than Burger King.

I'm curious to hear other people's experience, but I've literally never been in the position of "Do we hire candidate A or candidate B for this tech role?" It's always "Do we think A is good enough, or should we keep looking?"

> but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.

Sure, defining who is "optimal" is challenging but that's a cop-out. The situation is usually: Person A can't finish FizzBuzz (literally FizzBuzz) in 45 minutes in any language in coderpad, while Person B can do FizzBuzz, some easy recursion problem and maybe some kind of stats brain teaser. There is no world in which both of those candidates are "approximately the same".

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

#415

Post by throwaway6532 »

LinearEntropy wrote: post #325
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 completely agree with you. Every single job offer I have received has come through direct listings from the company itself. Safe to say the quality of tech recruiters in New Zealand is even lower than those elsewhere.

>Safe to say the quality of tech recruiters in New Zealand is even lower than those elsewhere.

Can vouch for this. Made that mistake. Never again.

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

#416

Post by avanderveen »

alkonaut wrote: post #295
jedberg wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to start with salary, at least don't tell them what you currently make, because that will instantly be their baseline. Just tell them what you desire and don't tell them that it is 20% or whatever more than what you currently make. But really you shouldn't start with giving a number. They already have a huge advantage because they negotiate salary all day and you do it once every few years. Just ask t…

Does the baseline matter though? If I’m not switching for less than 1.2x does it matter if they know what $current pay is? Either they can offer it or they can’t?

They might be willing to offer 1.4x. If you tell them you want at least 1.2x, they're probably not doing 1.4x. If you ask them what the range is and they tell you a range, you can at least ask them for the top of the range or more. Worst case they just say they can't do X but can do Y, and then you have more info to negotiate with. Way better than not knowing and leaving money on the table.

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

#417

Post by bitcharmer »

nsv wrote: post #405
bitcharmer wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing privileged about being passionate in things that may earn you good money. Luck? Sure Privilege? Definitely not

What is the difference between luck and privilege?

I'm hoping your question isn't serious but just in case you don't know the difference between the two:

Luck - success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions.

Privilege - a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.

Hope this is helpful

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

#418

Post by throwaway6532 »

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…

>On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.

It's in the recruiters best interest to maximize their throughput in placing candidates, and they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.

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

#419

Post by TameAntelope »

labcomputer wrote: post #414
TameAntelope wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I appreciate it. It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that. It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a pos…

> Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions This is a wrong assumption, in my experience. As a rule of thumb, for not-principal/staff SWE roles, I would estimate that it takes: 1. 10+ resumes to find someone worth phone-screening 2. 10ish phone screens screens to find someone worth an in-person interview 3. 3ish in-persons to find someon…

You really have to talk to the people in charge of your hiring pipelines if it takes 300 resumes to find one qualified candidate...

Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.

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

#420

Post by TameAntelope »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #409
TameAntelope wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I appreciate it. It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that. It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a pos…

The reality at all the companies I've worked for is that you are handed resumes, one or two at a time, from HR or a recruiting partner. You interview those 1 or 2 until you find a good/great candidate. Then you stop interviewing, make an offer, and wait for reply. You don't interview 50 people then choose the best and most diverse candidate. Your "action" doesn't fit with the reality I've experienced.

Did you know you can actually talk to the people who are handing you those resumes? You can a) ask for more resumes at a time and/or b) suggest they look at certain pools of candidates.
Post reply on HN