471–480 of 633 posts
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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.
These days I just never answer the actual phone for anyone. I don’t even bother to look who is calling.
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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
Privilege: being lucky enough to be born/raised in the right circumstances
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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.
I used to respond to recruiters, "here's how much I make - if you can match that then I'd be happy to listen". Most of the time they didn't respond.
The one guy who did has found me a lot of business since. (I now own a consultancy.)
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The companies paying in the BigTech compensation range don’t care about what languages or tools you are using. The same recruiters see I work for BigTech and they are still sending me “exciting opportunities for .Net leads paying up to $150K”.
Your entry point was sales engineer, was it not?
Solution Architects are pre sales.
Consultants are post sale doing billable implementations. There is some overlap though. I do some SA type work and depending on the day of the week, I’m lumped in with the SA organization.
Out of curiosity, why did you (correctly) suspect I didn’t “grind leetCode”?
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…
And software salaries get shared publicly on things like levels.fyi these days, so you need third party recruiters even less.
With that said, I don't have a hard line policy of never responding to them, but I pretty much never get contacted by a third party recruiter with something that looks even remotely good or interesting.
I think if the company is using a third party recruiter, the gig probably isn't very good. Obviously there are exceptions, but no great role is getting sourced through Cyber Coders.
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,…
> Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks I wish this were always true. When I worked as a recruiter, I saw referrals routinely get tossed onto the stack of resumes with no special preference. How candidates are treated completely depends on the preferences of the hiring manager & corporate red tape, even at smaller companies.
I also recommend a response to every recruiter, but you don't need to explain your privilege, you don't need to suck up to them, and you don't need to justify your actions. "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
> "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.
Well, that's not a problem - the whole point of this reply template is to filter out the useless cold-calling spam without wasting time in interviews, so that 80-90% of recruiters going silent is exactly what you want. The only reason why you respond at all is to give a chance to the 10-20% of serious offers.
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> Never give first numbers I disagree: the first one who gives a number is able to anchor the negotiation around their preferred outcome; it's much harder to negotiate up from a lowball number than the other way around.
The preferred outcome of the company is making a successful hire, so they will go high enough to make sure they get a great candidate, or if they can't afford that, will go to their max budget. And if they don't then you don't want to work there anyway. There is no situation where you will say a high number and they will move up to meet you if that number was greater than their max budget to begin with.
Yes, and since it's quite common to have companies where their max budget is not acceptable (probably because they are the ones who can't fill their vacancies and thus have recruiters spam everyone all the time), it's important to filter them out by saying the high number before you've wasted many hours on worthless interviews.