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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

#541

Post by teakettle42 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #502
travisjungroth wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As logical, meritocratic and evidence-based as they claim to be, software developers get dug in to their emotion-based positions and wear blinders just like everyone else does. Once someone thinks "I hate recruiters; they are useless" it becomes very difficult to change that mindset. FWIW, I've been in industry for 30 years and all but my first job out of college came through recruiters. I tell the bad ones to quit b…

I’ve also been in the industry for 30 years, and not one of my jobs has come via a recruiter.

I have always either had — or gone out of my way to establish — the contacts necessary to line up a job at the next company I wanted to work for.

I hardly need a recruiter to find interesting companies where I can do interesting work, and the kinds of companies I want to work for avoid (or outright prohibit) using external recruiters.

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

#542

Post by berkes »

cercatrova wrote: post #531
vhgyu75e6u wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is most likely because you're in Europe that you're not getting many requests. The job market for devs in the US is insane, much higher than in other areas of the world.

It is insane in Europe too.

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

#543

Post by teakettle42 »

fecak wrote: post #270
ozim wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think only true part in that description is "Exec roles are often handled and retained by recruiting firms". But that is level where normal developers are not finding themselves. I am senior developer but I don't imagine being approached for exec level role. There are different worlds of recruiting - world where I am is low level spamming that I get every day and most of it is just predation on unhappy people that…

All of my recruiting work was retained for the last 5-10 years I was in business, and I wasn't recruiting executives. I'm not saying that is the norm (it definitely isn't), and you are correct that senior developers will not be approached for executive roles. Higher level candidates will probably attract higher level recruiters, because the amount of time to place someone making $100K is the same amount of time to pl…

> … and a $100K fee for the second.

Or I can place myself and have room to negotiate an additional $100k in my signing bonus.

I don’t network with recruiters. I network with people in my industry that can directly drive hiring decisions.

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

#544

Post by baash05 »

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've landed almost every gig in the last 10 years through the same recruitment firm. They've been so awesome, and they have a finger on the pulse of the industry. I've had excellent dealings with recruiters over the years from various companies.

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

#545

Post by hunglee2 »

I like this a lot - it is first example I have seen of a job candidate thinking about the 'recruiter experience', with the idea that if you can create a positive experience for a recruiter at low effort, you may gain high reward at some stage later in your career.

it may surprise some of the folks on HN - which as a tech / engineering audience, are usually those candidates - that a lot of recruiters actually care a great deal about 'candidate experience', as they have a similar calculus - low effort to create a positive experience, bank it as possible gain later down the line.

Unfortunately those recruiters are let down by significant minority of noisy bad actors who are outside their control. Anyone can 'become' a recruiter - you can do it right away, right now - and therefore there is no QA on who gets to do that job or how that job gets done.

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

#546

Post by dawnerd »

judge2020 wrote: post #529
dawnerd wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’ll also tell you pricing lower will incite a bidding war. Yet the first offer that comes in they’ll say wow it’s a good offer!

This works if you have an open house/2-5 days dedicated to showings and a set time where offers are allowed (which is at the end of that showing period). However, even now, houses need to be appraised by the bank for the buyer to get the loan for the house, and many people aren’t ready to get in a bidding war only to then need to come out-of-pocket an extra $10k because they bid too much and the bank appraised it tha…

Exactly. When I sold my house a few months ago I found a good agent that helped me price correctly and we sold the same weekend. Made sure it went to someone that actually needed a house and not some investor looking to flip. Still came in over asking.

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

#547

Post by ComradePhil »

jedberg wrote: post #428
vincentmarle wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

1:

Interviewee: I want X.

Company: Sorry but that's above our max budget.

Interviewee: What can you offer me?

Company: Y, YInterviewee: OK, I can consider it if you promise me a reasonable revision in a year.

2:

Interviewee: Whats your offer?

Company: Z, ZInterviewee: That's too low. I want X.

Company: You're asking for X when we offered Z. That's too much of a difference and it doesn't sound reasonable to us. We find it insulting. Let's end it here.

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

#548

Post by laxk »

derwiki wrote: post #114
dewey wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's just that you might as well just ignore it and not cause any additional noise.

Not GP but I can’t shake that it feels rude, even if expected. But more practically: if I decline after the first, I don’t get the other 4 emails they have queued up for me

In most cases they use automatic follow-up systems and if you answered then the system will stop automatically route to you next e-mails.

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

#549

Post by mihaaly »

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,…

Right! Additionally the "recruiters are also one of the best career resources you can find" was never true to me. The exact number out of close to hundred recruiter contacts is 0.

As you said, using my network, be it tight or loose threads (colleagues to acquaintances or even the knowledge of an organization) helped me exclusively.

Even the affiliated ones are problematic many times. My latest experience is a recruiter hired by the organization advising me to improve the cosmetics of my CV (i.e. lie about my past, exclude an incomplete but important education), organised the interview and gave an interview preparation with stale and generic 'advise' you can find on internet word by word, which was useless as the topic of the interview was something else and with someone else than predicted. They seemed to operated based on a script that was prepared to give the impression of caring and making actual work, however the content of the work was mere scheduling.

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

#550

Post by ehnto »

djrogers wrote: post #306
ehnto wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just trying to articulate what I see as a difference between a purpose built career network and a network of actual friends from work. There is a difference between those two types of networks not captured when you call them both a "Professional network".

All you're describing here is a professional network with 2 group of people in it - those you have beers with, and those you don't.

If it were that shallow I don't think I would have worried about making the distinction.
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