111–120 of 162 posts
--- http://www.meebo.com/jobs/ Meebo.com will be shutting down on July 11, 2012. Meebo has been acquired by Google! --- So Meebo was a recruiting operation for Google. It puts that article in a new light.
It used to be a cool web based IM client. I used it on the fly when I wasn't at my computer but still wanted to talk online with friends.
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…
Brilliance: "Activities and Societies: NKVD"
>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…
No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed. It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.
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…
Yet still, linkedin (even though useful) scares me away a little bit. Each single time I get back, I see more and more people inventing longer and more exotic job names and descriptions, pitching around with some void statements and uploading their pictures in suits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed. It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.
> 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…
This only emphazises how different the world for programmers is in the USA (especially in the SF area) compared to the rest of the world. I only get three or four emails a year on linkedin, of them one's from Facebook, the other from Google, and the others are from local companies. This kind of make me envious and wanting to be there for a while., to experience how's it like to be valued and sought after.
That is not at all unusual.
When we got rid of a useless lummox a year or two ago, he gave his recruiter (the same agency we got him from) all out contact details (if you are out there, thanks for that...). Within a week of him leaving that agency called three of us claiming to be looking for a reference but immediately asking if we could be called out of work ours to reduce disruption. One of us let that happen and it turns out they were trying to get us on their books (err, no thanks, we don't want to be associated with the other "quality" peopel on your books!). Similarly the company got several calls from them most of which involved lies ("I was talking to earlier today" when had been on holiday all week).
In summary:
1. Recruiters will hit you from both ends. They make money out of both ends so it suits their business model.
2. Recruiters lie. Repeatedly. Constantly.
I wish there was a job search website where to actually advertise a position there were mandatory requirements like the company name and salary being displayed as part of the ad. Whats the reasoning behind posting completely vague job descriptions (sometimes the location isn't even provided!). I Would say 90% of the job postings I see online don't even give me enough information to want to contact them.
Usually that is because there is no job. The recruitment agency is trying to farm candidate details for two purposes: firstly so they can make claims to employers about how many people they have on their books with given skillsets and secondly so they have people to present to companies when they register a position as available.
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…
This is really, really not true. Some of (perhaps even most of) the best engineers I've worked with had almost zero public profile, almost to the point of being publicity phobic.
Anyhow, my point was, who your best employees are is not privileged information.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
4) waiting on the right bids when you just need to hire someone. 5) Outsourcing the DNA of the company to the lowest bidder. If your idea or your management team suck a recruiter can only do so much. Once you are worth your salt you can hire one full time recruiter and be done with it. Recruiting is more important, not less important. Commoditizing it means you don't know how to build a company.
Good points all. On (4) this is a fatal flaw unless the market can provide enough liquidity that there is fast turnaround on bids. Overall I think it is a killer of the idea. On your (5) I would say that many organisations have no DNA worth speaking of. This is the market I would be speaking to. I have done contracting work for many different companies over my years. Rightly or wrongly, it's seen as a cost centre rat…
What you get then is a bunch of randomly selected people (essentially). They really could be random given the fact you could have many different "recruiters", without any true consistency on how they were chosen outside of process.
A hiring manager could use this service for a handful of hires. Individually all the employees look great on paper. But something weird will happen when you put them all on the same project, and you are going to wonder where you went wrong.
Personally, I wouldn't see a web application commoditizing the hiring process as disruptive (in any good sense, anyway). LinkedIn was already disruptive because it changed the recruiting industry and well-qualified highly-skilled people don't stay unemployed long because of it.
Recruiters jumped on LinkedIn because it was built correctly and it made their job easier. Trying to commoditize the process further is going to be difficult because any recruiter worth their salt isn't going to take a pay cut and fight for bids. Most recruiters I've worked with take a commission on the hiring salary anyway.
I understand that the concept is disruptive from a hiring managers point of view ("Great, I don't have to hire HR, recruiters, or pay out the ass!"), but my guess is its going to be difficult for them to take the jump into an untested service to literally have anonymous bidders ala ebay doing their hiring.
As a manager myself I wouldn't use such a service.