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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

131–140 of 633 posts

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

#131
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's just that you might as well just ignore it and not cause any additional noise.

Not GP but I can’t shake that it feels rude, even if expected. But more practically: if I decline after the first, I don’t get the other 4 emails they have queued up for me

If they cold-contact you, it is not rude to simply ignore them.

If you have an existing relationship with them, then it could be considered rude, but it would depend on your relationship.

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

#132
I went into this thinking I was going to disagree because honestly I hate recruiters and the time-wasting involved but I actually agree.

Here's why: by having a template that he just copy-pastes. This is extremely low effort and will filter out a lot of recruiters. I also agree with working with company recruiters over third-party recruiters.

The first thing many recruiters will want to do is "hop on a call". Resist this urge. In fact, don't even give them your phone number. Force them to use email to contact you. A phone call is a good way of wasting your time. If you actually need to call them on the phone, call them.

There are lots of techniques recruiters will use to waste your time. One common one is if pressed on compensation range you'll get the answer that it's "competitive".

Use a template like this to simply filter out time-wasters. If they want to get on a call, resist giving concrete details or otherwise just give you bad vibes, just stop responding. They can't call you. They don't have your number. Move on.

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

#133
Bad career advice I received early in my career: Don't talk compensation until late in the interviewing process after you've already convinced them to hire you.

Compensation is the first thing I bring up now. "I currently make X salary, Y annual bonus, and Z equity. This position will need to exceed all 3 by at least 20% before I even consider it. Does that sound doable? If not, let's not waste any more of each other's time."

Way too many lowballers out there.

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

#134
post #97

Most of the recruiter traffic comes from LinkedIn, which is not particularly surprising. The very first line of my profile there reads: Please do not contact me about cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, or associated technologies. Almost all recruiters who contact me on LinkedIn are talking about... cryptocurrency, blockchains, or NFTs etc. If a recruiter isn't prepared to read even the first line of my profile then I…

I bet you it's those keywords in your profile that draw them to send you a message

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

#136
post #115

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"

> "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards" I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters. I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.

They go silent, or they also give a canned response about being competitive in the market when it comes to comp (without naming a number).

If they do name a number and you reply it's too low, they again go into a canned response of "we're willing to reach (++x) for the right candidate", which is just as much bullshit as before. You'll complete an interview cycle and get the lowball offer of (original x).

TLDR they'll lie about comp and never completely answer you.

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

#138
post #57
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former recruiter here. You are spot-on about referrals, and having an insider advocating for you or just their willingness to make the recommendation starts things off at a great spot. Here's where I disagree. You haven't doubled your salary BECAUSE of your policy of not working with recruiters, but rather DESPITE this policy. Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things tha…

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…

I read it as a fairly mathematical statement of fact. There is a tree of opportunities, and one can choose to prune some of them at the root. By definition, any direct/anticipated; and any unanticipated, indirect opportunities; are gone. Which is a 100% valid personal choice, I interpreted the minor quibble being whether this is a net positive creditor to their overall success. On one hand, pruning opportunities is in principle a negative; on the other hand, time saved not dealing with undesired channels is a positive.

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

#139

"It is a wonderful position of privilege to be in and I’m thankful for it." Insta-delete if I'm doing hiring... ? I've found folks who actually deliver seem to have less of this type of long winded stuff.

Do you have hard data to back that up or is it just anecdotal personal bristling whenever someone says "privilege"?

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

#140
post #97

Most of the recruiter traffic comes from LinkedIn, which is not particularly surprising. The very first line of my profile there reads: Please do not contact me about cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, or associated technologies. Almost all recruiters who contact me on LinkedIn are talking about... cryptocurrency, blockchains, or NFTs etc. If a recruiter isn't prepared to read even the first line of my profile then I…

I bet you it's those keywords in your profile that draw them to send you a message

Up until I added that line it was "rust" which was doing it. Perhaps the line makes it worse, but at least I'm happy to ignore those requests now. :)
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