Tips For Tech Recruiters, From an Engineer

Here's the thing that weeds out recruiters for me: If you get far enough to get me to respond, I'm going to ask a couple specific questions in my response. Answer them.

Just yesterday I responded to a recruiter, explained my situation and asked a couple specific questions. The response was a totally generic email that made it clear he didn't bother to read what I wrote, and just was eager to get me on the phone.

One thing I've learned is they want to get you on the phone ASAP so that they can waste your time, because somehow in their minds, the more time they waste on the phone with you, the more likely your'e going to be interested in them sending you jobs. (If I'd ever had a productive, business like conversation with a recruiter that wasn't full of weasely words and them evading questions, I might feel differently.)

I think this must be a Sales 101 tactic.

Well, I'm in a position to be picky. That makes me the kind of person you probably are really desperate to hire.... so why not take the time to read my reply and respond to it?

I mean, I expressed interest. Now I know I'm going to get follow up mails along the lines of "you expressed interest in blah... lets set up a call" for weeks... he'll never go back and actually read my response, I'm almost certain.

One of my main gripes with external recruiters are the in-person meeting.

One external recruiter contacted me on Linkedin and said they knew of open positions I might be a fit for, but insisted, like most of them do, that I come in and meet them. So I wasted an afternoon meeting them. Then I hear nothing for months. Then I get an e-mail from the same firm. The last guy I met moved on from the company, a new person is now handling me there. They know of some positions I might be a fit for. But since this was a new person handling my account, they wanted me to come in for another meeting before they referred me to any of these clients they theoretically had. Of course I didn't go.

Once when I was on the other side of things, when we were dealing with recruiting firms for a hire, my boss said he wanted to phone screen interviews before bringing them in. One of the recruiting firms was unhappy with this, and was insisting its interviews come in without a phone screen. Luckily I had a good boss, he insisted on the phone screen and they gave in.

Who benefits from no phone screen? As an interviewee, I don't want to a waste an afternoon, maybe a whole day going in to interview for a position which I am unqualified for, or which has some requirements (50% travel, whatever) that I do not want to go along with. As an interviewer, why waste my time, and my co-workers time, and their time bringing in someone who can't answer the most basic technical questions I can ask? I wonder how many people who gave those recruiters their resumes knew the recruiter was pushing against phone screens and for in-person interviews only.

Note that they told you a heck of a lot in that email by mentioning Facebook. You already know about them, engineering culture, programming language, open source contributions, lots of online videos etc.

Many of the non-personalized emails tell you virtually nothing useful about the company, certainly almost never the name.

I have to say, I struggle to see the benefit technical recruiters bring. They rarely know enough about the tech to do any sort of reasonable matching. They don't give me as much information that I could find about the job as if I went to the website. Obviously exclude the company, but if you aren't going to give me a vague impression of salary or reqs, why would I roll the dice?

There is an upside to getting occasional calls from recruiters at work - your boss knows you're in demand. ;-)