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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

451–460 of 633 posts

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

#451

Add NYC to that list as well. There's no reason to move to either of those cities in 2022.

I can understand the Bay Area, but it's a little bit crazy to think there's no reason to live in NYC.

I only spent couple days in NYC, but the experience was pretty awful: the city is crowded, it stinks, and is full of weirdos (for example some random girl I asked for directions turned out to be a prostitute, some guy started to yell at me for no reason, etc.). I also almost got killed by an SUV when trying to cross the street, and my hotel room turned out to be the size of an average walk-in closet.

But I guess NYC can grow on you in time?

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

#452
post #185

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…

I understand their fear of being cut out. I want them to understand that I need to know up-front if the position is interesting enough to be worth investing my time in at all. I could sacrifice my time and energy to assuage their fears, but every time I've done that in the past ten years there has been zero return on investment. A reader might, at this point, optimistically point out that the next recruiter could be…

But isn't that the advantage of the approach in the OP? It shows some more effort and good faith to the recruiter, without actually requiring any additional effort or time on your end.

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

#453

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…

How can you detect tracking pixels?

I don't load images by default. I use Thunderbird, but I know other clients also have this feature. Definitely worth whitelisting domains that you want to allow images from to avoid triggering the recruiter bots!

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

#454

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?

Agreed, it just is highly unlikely that the LinkedIn resume is out of date for most folks. Asking for a resume without asking if the LinkedIn resume is okay also creates a source of confusion. For example, if they don't ask if the LinkedIn resume will do, are they implying that a LinkedIn resume _won't do_? Do they need me to open up Word and retype my LinkedIn?

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

#455
post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend using a Google Voice number for recruiters for just such a reason. I keep all my interviewing data isolated from my private data.

I have a nice collection of "throwaway" phone numbers for all kinds of reasons, while one of them is dedicated to job hunting, I don't think merely having it would have stopped this agency from sharing my CV across to whomever they shared it with, or stopped whatever leak occurred for said email address to end up in so many collections of leaked data. That was the reason: to understand where my data was leaking from,…

No post body was provided.

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

#456
post #116

Does anyone know what the salary range is now though? It seems pretty random. Levels.fyi has a lot of very high numbers. Blind has crazy high numbers. I'm not sure if people are lying or including RSUs that have gone up 10x. Most experienced people in HCOL areas still earning 150k-200k max. When I talk to a recruited and ask for 300k often they'll say its possible but dont say if you have to be a superstar to get tha…

Compensation is multi-modal and depends mostly on these three factors:

1) Company

2) Level

3) Country (location-based pay is a thing, but the adjustment is typically much smaller than the differences resulting from changing #1 and/or #2)

Top-of-band senior offers (annualized over 4 years) are in the range of 500-600k right now (Amazon, Uber, Netflix, Stripe), with a much longer list of companies hitting in the 400-500k range (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Lyft, Snap, Coinbase, Brex, Dropbox, Doordash, Square, Robinhood, Instacart, Snowflake, etc).

Most of these places are hiring remotely.

There's "way too many to list" companies paying in the 200-350k range for seniors; pretty much any publicly-traded tech company that grants RSUs should be hitting those numbers, as well as tech-adjacent companies. Some examples: Microsoft, Salesforce, VMWare, Grubhub (which is in the same space as Doordash but pays much less), Disney, Walmart, Workday, etc.

Under that you have startups (with equity grants of varying levels of risk & EV) and non-tech companies.

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

#457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I explicitly state in my LinkedIn profile “do not contact me I’m not seeking new opportunities at this time” and I still get a half dozen a week. Recruiters are the laziest humans on earth.

Do you have it as "Open to positions" or whatever is called? Reading this thread I feel like I'm flying under the radar somehow given my experience. Could it be US specific? I'm a FAANG engineer in Europe with a small LinkedIn network (less than 100) and I rarely get bothered

No, I do not. I’m an older Network & UNIX Admin type who is qualified for a lot of different positions. I suspect I many have in-demand skills and as such I end up in a lot of search results.

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

#458
post #116

Does anyone know what the salary range is now though? It seems pretty random. Levels.fyi has a lot of very high numbers. Blind has crazy high numbers. I'm not sure if people are lying or including RSUs that have gone up 10x. Most experienced people in HCOL areas still earning 150k-200k max. When I talk to a recruited and ask for 300k often they'll say its possible but dont say if you have to be a superstar to get tha…

Compensation is multi-modal and depends mostly on these three factors: 1) Company 2) Level 3) Country (location-based pay is a thing, but the adjustment is typically much smaller than the differences resulting from changing #1 and/or #2) Top-of-band senior offers (annualized over 4 years) are in the range of 500-600k right now (Amazon, Uber, Netflix, Stripe), with a much longer list of companies hitting in the 400-50…

That's a great answer, thanks

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

#459

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,…

Agreed. When I looked for my first job I entertained calls from 3rd party recruiters. They were completely worthless and a huge waste of time. On top of that, they sold my info to other recruiter/spammers. I started getting tons of calls from robo-callers and other recruiters whom I never contacted. Had to change my phone number.

Now I only leave my email on my resume. And the only recruiters I'll ever talk to are ones who directly work for the company I'm applying to.

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

#460
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…

Some of the replies to this comment make me crazy (should I disclose here I know this commenter?).

There’s some useful information in there, that the distribution of roles behind recruiters change as the jobs become higher level. I didn’t know that. And he hedged his statements all over. And then people still reply like he’s saying if you don’t pick up a cold FaceTime call from a recruiter while you’re in the middle of coding you’re going straight to hell.

I see this pattern so often. I only hope there’s this silent readership thinking “oh, interesting. Thanks.”

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