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The Recruiter Honeypot

ewherry.com

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Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#101

Post by RileyJames »

bartonfink wrote: post #31
Rodeoclash wrote: post #25

We're attempting to fix the way freelancers are recruited at agencies / startups by changing the pricing model. At the moment with recruiters, the incentive is to place as many people as quickly as possible as you get a commission for each placement. By changing the model to a subscription you can then open the market place up and make it very transparent. No more hiding peoples contact details from the employee, no…

Rodeo - I'm currently planning a move down under (my wife just spooked me by wanting to push the timeframe up to next year instead of 2015). Mind if I reach out to you sometime to chat about the market there and whether what you're doing would make sense for someone in my position? I'd be much obliged.

You won't have any trouble getting a tech job here. Huge demand at the moment, not enough talent. Email riley@dragonflylist.com if you want to chat more.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#102

Post by smackay »

mark_integerdsv wrote: post #79
bartonfink wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mentioned the exact same thing to someone a couple of weeks ago - I think her name was Stella, and she's been posting for a startup recently. I'm not a professional contractor like many, but I do like doing freelance gigs to supplement my day-job income. However, finding suitable gigs, dealing with negotiations and chasing down deadbeat clients make it really unpleasant given what I really want to do is make some e…

15 hours a week? Jesus... I spend half of that in meetings. I really need to reconfigure my schedule! I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam. First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non tech…

Any wave of disruption cast towards recruiters is going to have to destroy consulting houses as proof of it's efficacy. The time and effort required to find work/workers that bartonfink mentions has to be expended by either the employer or the employee. In both cases this a poor use of time so the heavy-lifting of placing people is either done by recruiters or temp agencies. Anything that disrupts this has to make the process effortless, or nearly so, and generate better results so the employer/employee can by-pass the middle-men completely. An unlikely outcome but one which would be welcome almost universally, excluding the obvious casualties of this change.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#103

Post by dagw »

simonw wrote: post #95
phillmv wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat. You don't even need to know that in order to recruit people. -- I feel that NDAs are kind of bullshit too, but they're typically not as expressly oppressive. Unless they stretch into noncompetes, which are incred…

"Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat" I don't think that's true at all. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have had very small online footprints (they're too busy building awesome things at their company to spend much time on Twitter etc). Now that I'm responsible for hiring, I consider knowledge of that kind o…

I have to agree here. Most of the best people I've worked with don't have much in the way of twitter and github accounts. Github and twitter only seems popular within a fairly narrow professional and cultural niche.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#104

Post by Tichy »

rdl wrote: post #86

How many females were on the recruiting team? (i.e., how statistically significant was all of them getting pregnant in the same month...)?

Pregnancy is probably infectious.

Also having landed a job at a company that is doing well is a high risk factor for pregnancy.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#105

Post by Peroni »

There is a significant flaw in the logic here.

Create a fictitious individual where, prior to linkedin, the only place Pete London existed was his own personal website.

I used to be a recruiter and egotistical as it may sound, I considered myself one of the better ones. My previous history on HN should back that up. I never, ever used linkedin when searching for decent people yet even I wouldn't have found Pete London. The best developers I encountered over the years were people who came recommended by other developers or people I met face to face at meet-ups.

If no-one but the creator knew Pete London existed then the only thing this experiment proves is that most recruiters aren't very good at using search engines. That's all.

The one point I agreed with significantly is hiring internal recruitment specialists. I've given a talk on that exact issue in the past and I am in the process of writing a blog post on my updated perspective of that approach.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#106

Post by michaelt »

phillmv wrote: post #35

>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model. I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bulls…

Well, a lot of recruiters present themselves to employers as helping with their recruitment problems, rather than exacerbating them.

The "rational" thing for a recruiter to do is to post fake jobs with huge salaries to jobs boards to get in resumes; and to offload filtering for quality onto clients so as to get more volume through; to shop resumes around clients in descending salary order so lower paying places only get candidates rejected by other employers; and as soon as the contingency fee comes through, to call the employee at work and try to get them to hop somewhere else so you can collect another contingency fee.

If all recruiters did this no-one would work with recruiters - businesses only work with recruiters because those recruiters claim they aren't going to act in this ("rational") manner - they claim they're going to look out for the client's interests.

For a recruiter to make this claim while simultaneously proving it false shows a bit of cheek, and obviously makes one doubt the sincerity of the claim.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#107

Post by lifeisstillgood »

greghinch wrote: post #23
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Hollywood stars sit on set 12 hours a day, for a 16 week shoot, as does the rest of the crew. If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made. I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work. My apologies if this seems overly aggressive…

I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly a…

My question and same to @bartonfink is still what is the work? If I am say design and build a rest backend for a company, and its say two months work at 45 hrs a week, doing 15 hrs a week telling them it will take six months cos I have other clients is a sure way not to get the gig

So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams,

I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself

thank you

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#108

Post by rdl »

Tichy wrote: post #104
rdl wrote: post #86

How many females were on the recruiting team? (i.e., how statistically significant was all of them getting pregnant in the same month...)?

Pregnancy is probably infectious. Also having landed a job at a company that is doing well is a high risk factor for pregnancy.

I remember Google advertising themselves as family friendly in the mid 2000s as a recruiting strategy; I guess if people are coming back after even 6 months out, it could be a worthwhile strategy.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#109

Post by _b8r0 »

cdr wrote: post #32
_b8r0 wrote: post #3

This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters. Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus. [1] - uk.linkedin.c…

Please say it replied via markov chain.

Early on (this has been going on for years), I used to use the algorithm to generate replies. The problem is that most of what Markov creates is no good (he started as a bot on an IRC channel as someone quit IRC, so while not a replacement he was there as a substitute) but occasionally comes out with brilliant content. Sifting through that for content that almost makes sense to a recruiter is hard. The phone number used to be a real number too. If you called it you were played Rick Astley's never gonna give you up interspersed with a voice saying things like, "Connecting you to your extension","Please hold while we connect you","The person you are trying to reach is not here, redirecting to mobile" etc. and on loop every few minutes. Someone once connected for a good 15 minutes and about 3-4 full iterations of Never Gonna Give You Up.

The UK Infosec recruitment industry is a ghetto (to paraphrase Zed Shaw) and I never targeted recruiters, only occasionally responding to those that targeted Markov.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#110

Post by _b8r0 »

Kronopath wrote: post #4
_b8r0 wrote: post #3

This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters. Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus. [1] - uk.linkedin.c…

I want to read his dissertation. "Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."

For some reason Markov would score 'Seals' extremely high next to 'Baby'. The more it would pop up, the more people would put 'Baby Seals' into the IRC channel and it became a common signing off phrase.

Baby Seals, Steve

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