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I mean this is nice and all, but it's a little like writing an open letter to a real estate agent. It's a transactional business. Your problem isn't with recruiters, it's with the recruiting model.
But if, in my entire career, I can help one recruiter suck less, it was all worth it.
I guess I'm just an optimist like that.
I mean this is nice and all, but it's a little like writing an open letter to a real estate agent. It's a transactional business. Your problem isn't with recruiters, it's with the recruiting model.
Oh, I know. I expect to have to send it to each of them, manually, in response to bad pitches. And I expect 99.99999% will ignore it. But if, in my entire career, I can help one recruiter suck less, it was all worth it. I guess I'm just an optimist like that.
Seems like it's every week or so now that a developer writes a letter like this to recruiters. Trust me, I completely agree - recruiters suck. But I'm wondering if the recruiters you're actually trying to reach are simply never going to listen and never stop their ways. That's just not who they are. Somebody needs to fix the recruiting industry, for realz.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, I know. I expect to have to send it to each of them, manually, in response to bad pitches. And I expect 99.99999% will ignore it. But if, in my entire career, I can help one recruiter suck less, it was all worth it. I guess I'm just an optimist like that.
I guess it's worth sending a thousand unwanted emails if you get just one conversion.
The recruiters I hear from on linked-in use a shotgun method where they send out 100 e-mails and hope to get a few people to write back. Paddy, do you get personalized e-mails from recruiters?
Obviously, no hope for the shotgun. I hold out hope for the bad pitches.
The important realization is that it is not the recruiters necessarily but the recruiting ecosystem which is broken. Hiring is broken but not for recruiters. They love the current model of placing someone for a fee. Basically, the bad recruiters exist only because their clients don't give a shit about hiring (well most of them and hence the need for these recruiters). I will say this carefully but again "majority of clients do not give a shit". This translates to "Hey we are too busy with real work and so go find me a fish". Out comes these recruiters and search agents. Thanks to places like linkedin lately, all they have to do is to create an account and start fishing.
What if employers/clients actually invest their own time in recruiting ? What if they ask their team members to recruit actively and even compensate them in some way (may be a boost in performance review ?). But no, we won't do that. We have lot more important shit to worry about.
Recruiting unfortunately is a numbers game (kinda like sales)and recruiters (read: sales people) have no incentive to stop doing what they are doing. The barrier to entry is way too low as well which doesn't help.
There are very good recruiters out there and I do know a few good ones too. Kinda like a needle in a haystack but even they have to compete with the sleazy ones.
The recruiters I hear from on linked-in use a shotgun method where they send out 100 e-mails and hope to get a few people to write back. Paddy, do you get personalized e-mails from recruiters?
That certainly doesn't match the Open Letter.
Recruiters are there doing a job, and it's not an easy one. I have a lot of sympathy for them. Treat them nice, because at some point in your future, you'll be looking for a job too. The ones that you treated well ("This job isn't for me, but try calling X who is looking") will remember it.
Look, if my LinkedIn profile shows I just started a job three months ago, I am almost certainly not looking to move jobs right now. I noticed that last time I changed jobs I got a flood of e-mails just after I changed my LinkedIn profiles. It was deliberate, too - they'd start "I noticed you just started at X - if it isn't what you had hoped...", which is actually relatively smart in recruiter terms. My pet peeve: ca…
Once they called the frontdesk and left a message for me to get back to them(cuz I have no work number).
They also called the frontdesk for a coworker and lied that they were someone that played tennis with him months ago. When the coworker called back, the recruiter admitted he lied because he thought the frontdesk wouldn't relay the message if he said the truth... o_O;
Another thing, is I really wish they'd stop emailing me at work.... or maybe my company should give us the option to stop routing firstname.lastname@companyname.com from external sources. It's terrible to get that "Exciting Job opportunity" email pop-up when other coworkers are looking at my screen. I've disabled that notification-alert in my email client(Thunderbird) because of that. My LinkedIn contact-info says not to contact me with any other medium besides LinkedIn's InMail. It also says the office must be walkable from a BART station and organic food locations must be nearby for lunch(I know, I'm a spoiled bayarea techie).
Nobody reads my LinkedIn conact-info since I always get stuff that misses these requirements. If anyone from LinkedIn is reading this, you should give the option to make the contact-info section very conspicuous. I want mine to be freaking glowing bright red. In fact, just let us have custom CSS like the hatenablog platform.