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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

621–630 of 633 posts

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

#621

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get a lucky hand in poker, then yes, I would say you were privileged... for that specific hand. Of course it doesn't matter much if you have privilege for one hand, and that privilege will change relatively fairly between everyone during a session of poker. This is different though. This is more like playing a game of poker where a single hand lasts your whole life, and you keep reaping the benefits of your lu…

Inheriting million dollars is luck not privilege. This discussion doesn't make any sense whatsoever as you decided to cling to a made-up instead of vocabulary definition of privilege [0]. The same is happening to other words these days. For example some people modified the term racism so that according to their definition you can't possibly be racist towards white people. Which is obviously idiotic, but at least it a…

> Inheriting million dollars is luck not privilege.

I'll take the bait. I can't tell if you're confusing things on purpose but here goes.

If you are Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions, sure, it's just luck. Most people do not mysteriously inherit money, but get it from older relatives they are close with. If your parents die with a million bucks to leave to you, your life was already very different than someone whose parents die nothing, or worse a mountain of debt. People who can't afford to send their kids to college, for example, probably don't have a mil to leave them. I am not sure I've ever heard of someone just randomly lucking into that kind of inheritance. It probably happens sometimes.

But getting that million dollars suddenly enables you to live a very different life, and you get to take advantage of things that people who live paycheck to paycheck cannot. You cannot say that does not fit the definition you linked.

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

#622

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"

I don't like to ignore recruiters, but it's hard to answer them correctly. I'm always looking for a nice way to articulate "I'm comfortable with my current job, but interested in exploring whether I'm being compensated fairly. I don't want to slam any doors. But, I am also not up for the hazing session of grinding leetcode, filling out online forms, doing take-home tests, phone screens, and 5 rounds of interviews, ju…

Late to comment, but basically this is why I just ignore it all unfortunately.

I'm on a subreddit that talks about my profession and basically all interview processes are now broken in my industry. A lot of just nonsense, waste of time stuff. You hire the professional prep companies so you know the right buzzwords to say and how to show you follow the "framework", but almost nothing from the interview actually really determines how well you'll do day to day.

Instead of going to an interview, they should just call my dev team and scrum master and ask how things run with me and use their feedback as the evaluation.

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

#623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still arguably not the most meaningful use of storage space

Is it meaningful for you if I store petabytes of hentai on my disks?

I'm not sure this is the venue for a debate on the merits of art.

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

#624
post #518

Alternate approach: build a relationship with the 99th percentile super-recruiter that basically all the startups that know what they are doing in your area use to hire, and go to him for a job. In NYC, this is that dude: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnkeenan/ I send all my friends to him when looking for jobs. He also doesn't lie to you and since he has a technical background, will rarely place anyone in a bad fit.…

Hard disagree. After years of random recruitment messages from him, he once sent me a series of obviously-templated robo-emails. In his database of NYC engineers, in the field that normally tracks your employer, he had me listed as "ex-[company]" -- with the name of a company I previously worked for and was no longer particularly fond of. Seems he robo-emailed using this data directly, so his templated emails (3 in a row within one month!) contained lots of cringey "How are things going at ex-[company]?"

After the 3rd email, I informed him I was taking a sabbatical from the industry (as mentioned at the top of my LinkedIn profile at the time) and asked him to remove me from his list permanently. Instead of admitting to the obvious mistake and apologizing, he doubled down with a reply that I found pretty obnoxious.

There were some other red flags years before that, so I blocked him, one of the only times a recruiter has ever led me to do so.

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

#625
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hasn't been my experience. I always get the salary range, equity package, and what stage/growth the company is at currently and where they want to take things. All in the first 30 minute call.

I've tried a fair number of those calls. You might be surprised by how many recruiters don't really have salary range or meaningful equity details (preferences, shares outstanding, etc.) but really want me to be excited for the great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing business. To my eyes, thirty minutes is a pretty expensive way to find out if a position is in line with my comp and the co…

Completely agree. Not giving them 30 mins to learn the position is half the money im making.

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

#626
when I consider all the dedication, including the summer jobs, all the hours of I have spent for self study to keep the skills up, I was thinking, “why the hell do I let a headhunter, get rewarded a year salary [1] of mine by just discovering my profile on Linkedin and maybe breaking data privacy laws through off shore?”

Still didn’t contacted or replied any of them. Sometimes, I am asking myself if I am missing any good opportunities because of not replying.

[1] rumor: Munich region

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

#627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utter nonsense. If you put enough mental grease into that sort of interpretation everything can be classed as a privilege, in which case the concept is irrelevant.

Yes, any bit of luck you have that makes your life better is a privilege, because it is something that makes your life better than someone who didn't have that luck. They didn't do anything wrong to deserve not having the luck, it was just chance. This doesn't make the concept irrelevant. It is important to accept and understand that a lot of your success in life is due to things outside of your control. You don't ha…

[deleted]

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

#628
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise and that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.) Are readers supposed to read this as a suggestion that missing out is synonymous with losing out ? I kind of take exception to these phrases because it strips a lot of agency out of otherwise exceptional…

As far as I can see, the only thing outsourced recruiters provide is blame-shifting. They're not better at judging candidates. They're not better at finding candidates. They're almost certainly worse at understanding what the company needs than the company, and worse at understanding what the candidate has to offer than the candidate. But, if the company hires a few people they're unhappy with through a recruiter (wh…

> "networking"-logrolling

What is that?

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

#629
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy. Let say you started at 50k (which is very low) and you doubled your salary 4 times (what is plenty ?). Then you make now 800k. Which is unlikely, so your main argument is probably wrong

I've doubled my income some times but I started out at around $200

Les'see, when I worked halftime for my Dad at 14, I got 60 SEK (~$12 at the exchange rate back then?) a month... Uh, no, would need to know cumulative inflation since then to figure out how many doublings it's been. Quite a few, I guess. Not as many as I'd wish.

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

#630
post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends over other, more qualified candidates is a contributing factor to that diversity problem.

Not sure where in that statement I referenced hiring funnels.

"Referenced", in the sense of even bringing it up in a discussion all about hiring funnels, perhaps?
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