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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
581–590 of 633 posts
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#582Earlier 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 their interest, yes - but it's not worth more than closing a deal quickly.
They generally make more money by seating 3 hires at new companies for 100k than they do seating 1 hire for 300k.
Because of the downside risk of possibly losing a deal, and further - because they're paid over time as an employee remains with a company, it's much more beneficial to place many people quickly than it is to place a few people for more money.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#583The few times I have engaged with recruiters in the past I was immediately ghosted afterwards.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#584Strong 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 so I don't have to bug my network.
I've never found this to be true.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> Made sure it went to someone that actually needed a house and not some investor looking to flip.
As someone who has been trying to buy a house on and off for a few years now, thank you for caring about this.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to imagine that it is good advice for early in your career. When you’re applicant number x out of 1500 who all got good grades at a good school, have some good github projects, and do well at the leetcode, grating the interviewer by prematurely mentioning comp may not be your best move.
Fresh out of school, you're worth just about as much as someone you graduated with. 20 years into your careers, you may be worth 10x or 1/10 of that same person. Why waste people's time? It's a waste of time interviewing for a place if you know they aren't offering anything close to what you'll be asking. And if you're making 2-3x the median salary for that job title, you should probably get a comp range up front. I'…
Right; I’m saying it’s value as advice tapers off as your career progresses
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I thought you wanted companies to cast a broader net. Now you're saying that it's too broad?
> Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
Do you hire for tech roles? Software engineers, data scientists, analysts and the like?
Also, having 3-5 people make it through your process isn't meaningful. You can always find n people make it all the way through if you wait long enough. The problem just that the (n-1)-th person will generally take another offer by the time you find the n-th person.
Like I said, I have never been in the position of having two qualified candidates at the same time for one role and having to pick which one I like better. My experience, by the way, seems to match that of everyone I'd discussed this with in real life.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they're just enumerating the entire address space, rather than buying your phone number from somewhere. But I guess I have no evidence to prove this; I have given my phone number to companies, and I get a ton of spam calls.
My partner and I have adjacent phone numbers (x and x+1). /Occasionally/ we get sequential spam calls, where my phone goes off immediately after she hangs up. But not super often. Though one can shuffle before calling everything, just as easily.
It’s like a war games dialer 40 years later.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#589Strong 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,…
That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people. Everyone is moving around enough that you'll be able to cross into new companies and skip whole song and dance prior. You also get the benefit of having a heads up on the company you're joining too. I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying s…
"That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people."
I agree. Personally I'd include recruiters in that group of people as well.
I don't work with keyword monkeys...the ones that send you job opportunities for jr. sysadmin roles 20 years into your career, because a 10-year-old resume they dug up from somewhere mentioned bash shell scripting in there somewhere.
I work with a handful of recruiters I've developed a good relationship with and who know what I'm looking for.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
They may not care about what languages and tools you are using when they hire you, but that's how they find you. They aren't on LinkedIn search for "Software Engineer" in most cases - at least I wasn't.
You would be surprised at how wide even internal recruiters at BigTech companies throw their net. My very light LinkedIn profile had a bunch of no name companies where I was doing CRUD C# work yet and still I had internal recruiters from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook reach out to me. No I wouldn’t have passed the initial tech screen without practice. That would be obvious to anyone who knew their own interview process.
Since 2020, I’ve been working as a “cloud consultant” at BigTech. That’s all it says on my LinkedIn profile. Yet the recruiters from Facebook and Google are emailing me about senior software engineering and even engineering manager positions. I have never been (nor desire to be) a manager. Even internal recruiters aren’t really that good.
Another anecdote, I’ve had internal recruiters reach out to me at my current company on LinkedIn even though it shows I already work here.
On the other hand, my development background from 2008-2018 is doing C# CRUD “full stack development” the salary ceiling for that isn’t high. No matter what tools I say I’ve used - C#, Node, Python - they aren’t going to say “let’s pay him $200K+ to write a CRUD app!”. My one saving grace that let me overcome that without “grinding leetCode” is that all of the major cloud providers have internal cloud consulting divisions.