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What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

keyvalues.com

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Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#141

Post by BigJono »

sanderjd wrote: post #118
rb808 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they would gripe about that technology all day long; if they can't complain about its shortcomings and pitfalls, they didn't use it. Lol that is gold. I have to add that section to my interviewing questions.

I disagree. I used to be this gripe-y person, but the more experience I gained, the more I realized that everything is just the result of its trade-offs and started finding the griping both boring - who wants to complain constantly for years and years? - and less productive than maintaining more of an anthropologist's mindset. So to me, constant griping is more of a not-that-much-experience signal.

This is the most important question I ask in every interview. The goal isn't to get someone to piss and moan about every little thing, it's to see if they can identify any downsides to the tech they use. IME >80% of candidates have never even thought about it, treat every tool/dependency as free, and whatever tech they happen to use was written by the second coming of tech Jesus and contains no faults.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#142

Post by itronitron »

lynnetye wrote: post #12
nlstitch wrote: post #3

I think recruiters should actually start giving a shit about the lives of engineers before making demands. - Actually try to get to know and understand a person - Dont use fill-in templates - Have some actual knowledge of tech (java != .net) - Dont make offerings for positions I worked on 10 years ago during college. - Dont be greedy. To just name a few...

To be completely honest, I also felt a lot of frustration towards recruiters when I first started working on Key Values. (It might be one of the reasons why I built it...) In the last year though, I've met a wide variety of people with a wide variety of responsibilities, approaches, and backgrounds, yet they all share the same job title. There are certainly awful recruiters out there, but there are also some really f…

It is basically impossible to get enough information on a company in order to know and understand it prior to working there. Most company web sites provide zero information on org charts, work processes, communication flows, etc. It is very unusual for a company to provide any information during on-site interviews of how the company actually works. And any information that is given usually conflicts with other information provided later by another employee :)

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#143

Post by itronitron »

john_moscow wrote: post #64
chatmasta wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been consulting the past year and a half. Recently I decided to contact some companies just to see what the landscape was like, and if I could maybe find an interesting opportunity that also paid well. On one of the first calls I had, the recruiter heavily implied that I was “not a culture fit” after I explained that I’m only interested in a job if it pays more than I currently make consulting (this particular j…

I think it's actually kinda straight-forward: * If you have sales/negotiation skills, but no technical skills, you do sales/HR/whatnot. * If you have both sales/negotiation AND technical skills, you do consulting or start your own business. * If you have good technical skills, but poor negotiation skills, you go work as a software developer. So yeah, an unwritten requirement for many technical positions is having poo…

Yeah, if you're actually going to deposit your paychecks then clearly you aren't passionate enough about the work.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#144

Post by dsk139 »

alkonaut wrote: post #55

If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound like sales pitches with vague language? “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy” “You’ll work close to the systems” “You’ll have a central role” What systems? What is the company even doing ? What about fundamental things like - where is this? - exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here? - What’s the team? 4 beginners?…

Source: I'm an engineer & recruiter that works with over 100 tech companies in NYC. I also work on a SaaS platform for recruiters.

After A/B testing tons of messages (and analyzing messages from a SaaS platform I built for recruiters to send messages) the messages that work are ones that are short. So I try to keep messages brief, reach out about a specific company that might be a match, and hope to get on the phone with you to actually be able to do my actual job. It's very hard to convert someone over an e-mail message. Getting you to respond to my e-mail is the first part of the funnel.

From there if I can get a conversation with you I can move on to the "fun" part of my job. Giving candidates a broad overview of the market based on their interests, expectation setting, and career counseling.

Edit: To answer your question directly the reason you get bad recruiting messages stems from a mix of bad recruiting practices, bad companies/ low investment in HR departments, and bad engineers. Would be happy to give you a recommendation for a solid recruiter in SF or NYC if you're in those areas.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#145

Post by hackits »

john_moscow wrote: post #134
alkonaut wrote: post #55

If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound like sales pitches with vague language? “You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy” “You’ll work close to the systems” “You’ll have a central role” What systems? What is the company even doing ? What about fundamental things like - where is this? - exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here? - What’s the team? 4 beginners?…

Sales funnel + psychology. Imagine you are using PHP4 and, 100 candidates out of your pool will totally hate it. As You know that in a face-to-face talk you have about a 10% chance to convince a PHP4 hater to still go ahead and take the offer. Now consider 2 strategies: A) Write "we use PHP4" in the job description. In this case, 98 candidates will nope out when they read this (say 2% won't notice PHP4 or will be des…

You're making a straw-man argument.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#146

Post by FundThrowaway »

itronitron wrote: post #137
ken wrote: post #78

> It may seem like common sense, but having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company (whether it’s the company’s mission, product, technical challenges, or its work environment) is important. This frustrates me so much. What if I can't find a company that offers any such thing? This seems like anti-common sense to me. If you have skills at carpentry, and do a professional job, you can…

>> you're searching for people with passion so you can get them to work unpaid overtime for you I think companies are also expecting that 'people with passion' will be less impacted by the unavoidable organizational BS and garbage that pops up on occasion. In my experience, the people with the greatest passion also turn out to be the biggest assholes and unnecessarily alienate their coworkers. Going with the carpentr…

"'people with passion' will be less impacted by the unavoidable organizational BS"

Funnily enough I always find it that the people with passion are the ones that get themselves all worked up and distracted with the BS, the rest just keep on chugging (assuming it's not so bad that they quit).

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#147

Post by Terr_ »

hackits wrote: post #145
john_moscow wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales funnel + psychology. Imagine you are using PHP4 and, 100 candidates out of your pool will totally hate it. As You know that in a face-to-face talk you have about a 10% chance to convince a PHP4 hater to still go ahead and take the offer. Now consider 2 strategies: A) Write "we use PHP4" in the job description. In this case, 98 candidates will nope out when they read this (say 2% won't notice PHP4 or will be des…

You're making a straw-man argument.

I don't think they are -- who is the person whose argument is being characterized?

It's just being cynical about companies and recruiters.

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#148

Post by [deleted] »

falcolas wrote: post #59
Consultant32452 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of us aren't on the cutting edge of technology. I've personally never worked on a team whose biggest problem was a lack of technical prowess, the problems are always social/cultural.

If I'm being frank, then you need to be up front about that in the job posting. "Cultural fit" and other PC BS won't cut it - be honest about what you need. "We need someone who can design and implement frontends alongside our product marketing group." Not, "Looking for a JavaScript, Typescript, Angular, React, Node.js, Mongo, and BerkleyDB rockstar." Because I've personally watched several people who were cultural f…

[deleted]

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#149

Post by yosito »

qohen wrote: post #105
CryoLogic wrote: post #63

TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with SPA experience AND was able to build REST API's. I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and…

TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. You know what is impressive about (at least some) technical recruiters I've met? Despite not knowing much about tech, they can pull down $300K/yr (and this is not in SF or NYC).

Is that so?

Re: What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

#150

Post by goldenManatee »

qohen wrote: post #105
CryoLogic wrote: post #63

TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with SPA experience AND was able to build REST API's. I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I've been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and…

TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I've met. You know what is impressive about (at least some) technical recruiters I've met? Despite not knowing much about tech, they can pull down $300K/yr (and this is not in SF or NYC).

It's perception. They network, get lucky sometimes, and don't stop preaching about it until everyone around starts believing they're valuable authorities in their profession. Snow ball rolls from there and they start attracting candidates based on perceived connection to the top company/people/teams.
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