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Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

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Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#171

Post by ylee »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #74
frognumber wrote: post #20

One of my top lessons I've learned doing successful startups: 1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success. 2. Up market, down market, side market, it doesn't matter: You will get better employees if you treat candidates with respect and you will be more competitive. 3. It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated…

Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly. I had an incredible conversion rate - the senior person actually hiring saying “hey you look like you could fit in here…

>Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly.

I've never worked for a tech company. But I have worked for two bulge-bracket investment banks.

In the first case I'm pretty sure the person looking to fill the role personally contacted my college's recruiting service (because she had received her MBA from there). In the second case I saw a Craigslist listing either by the person himself or his assistant, talked to someone I knew at the firm who worked near him, then reached out to the person directly. In both cases the person hiring did my first (and, in the second case, the only) interview, and I never talked to a true HR person, let alone recruiter, before receiving the offer. Does this sort of hiring never happen in tech?

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#172

Post by firebat45 »

kleiba wrote: post #33

This is a pet peeve of mine. In the olden days, pre-digital, companies would send you a proper letter back together with your application documents so you could possibly reuse them. That was actually a little work for them to do! These days, sending an effing canned email to all applicants that didn't get hired costs a company next to nothing, and still ghosting happens. It's indecent.

In the olden days, people took time to apply for each job. Nowadays, they spam out applications to hundreds of places in a day.

The problem is on both ends and stems from rewarding quantity over quality.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#173

Post by firebat45 »

ponderings wrote: post #162

Here is a truly stupid idea: What if you could buy a job interview. You pay say 100 bucks, you get the deluxe tour, all the attention and dedication you deserve, a nice letter highlighting your qualities. Make the process into a real product that is worth buying. I've never experienced it and I don't know if they still do it but I hear in Belgium they do a lot of things over dinner. If nothing useful comes out of it…

Well, at least you got the first part right. That is a truly stupid idea.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#174

Post by firebat45 »

zero-sharp wrote: post #66

Here's a relevant experience. I applied for a job a few days ago. The recruiter reached out to me through email to schedule a phone call and I scheduled a time through her online calendar. To give you some more context in terms of timing: she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon. Less than 24 hours after she reached out to me, the job ad on the company page is taken down and now says the positio…

>she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon

Real question: How long should she sit at her desk and twiddle her thumbs, waiting for your reply, before she moves on to emailing/phoning/interviewing a different candidate?

Or perhaps she should pursue multiple candidates at the same time, to immensely speed up the process and reduce her time wasted just waiting to hear back from potential candidates who may never respond back?

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#175

Post by zero-sharp »

tayo42 wrote: post #83
skeeter2020 wrote: post #54

This is NOT the new normal, and we should NOT accept it. Everyone here should do their part; for example, I'm more often a hiring manager and will not tolerate ghosting anyone who gets to any interaction with engineering. IME it's lazy recruiters who are responsible for this, and they're about as big of a part of tech as an accountant, i.e. very little. I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and sham…

> I don't understand why many people are hesitant to name and shame the individuals and companies. The risk for repercussion isn't worth it. Your going to go online and stir up shit? Corporate culture is way to risk averse. If you are the kind of person getting ghosted and rejected from interviews you evidently aren't a person with any leverage in the hiring market.

>If you are the kind of person getting ghosted and rejected from interviews you evidently aren't a person with any leverage in the hiring market.

Haha wow.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#176

Post by JohnFen »

ylee wrote: post #171
fnordpiglet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly. I had an incredible conversion rate - the senior person actually hiring saying “hey you look like you could fit in here…

>Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly. I've never worked for a tech company. But I have worked for two bulge-bracket investment banks. In the first case I'm…

Yes, it happens in tech. It's not even all that rare, really (at least outside of the FAANG crowd). I've reached a place in my career where I'm well-established and known enough that I don't really need to hustle to find good dev jobs anymore, but for most of my career, I got most of my jobs by being my own recruiter in that way.

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#177

Post by zero-sharp »

firebat45 wrote: post #174
zero-sharp wrote: post #66

Here's a relevant experience. I applied for a job a few days ago. The recruiter reached out to me through email to schedule a phone call and I scheduled a time through her online calendar. To give you some more context in terms of timing: she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon. Less than 24 hours after she reached out to me, the job ad on the company page is taken down and now says the positio…

>she emailed me in the morning and I responded in the afternoon Real question: How long should she sit at her desk and twiddle her thumbs, waiting for your reply, before she moves on to emailing/phoning/interviewing a different candidate? Or perhaps she should pursue multiple candidates at the same time, to immensely speed up the process and reduce her time wasted just waiting to hear back from potential candidates w…

>Real question: How long should she sit at her desk and twiddle her thumbs, waiting for your reply, before she moves on to emailing/phoning/interviewing a different candidate? Or perhaps she should pursue multiple candidates at the same time, to immensely speed up the process and reduce her time wasted just waiting to hear back from potential candidates who may never respond back?

Huh? Of course she should pursue multiple candidates at the same time. I can hold that belief and simultaneously express frustration with the above story. Do you think this is some sort of dichotomy?

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#178

Post by _cenw »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #90

The whole point thing about having half a breakdown after being ghosted is not going to be remedied by receiving a generic rejection email.. even the actual response he did get after pestering them was just "you were good but another guy was better" and yeah this is 90% of all anyone will ever say anyways. Like you can simply assume that 1. a better candidate was found or 2. the job opening was already closed because…

It's also a liability thing. Keeping the legal attack surface minimal. It can result in you getting junk responses if you ask for feedback too. I've referred several friends to jobs who then got rejected, and they're almost always given the wrong reason when asking for feedback.

Especially if there's a perceived culture misfit or some manager thought we both would leave at the same time for a startup after a few months (this happened me more than once!) they all got insulted on their skillset instead by the recruiter. And sometimes even skills that weren't even in the job description!

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#179

Post by gumby »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #74
frognumber wrote: post #20

One of my top lessons I've learned doing successful startups: 1. Recruiting is the #1 job of any startup CEO, and the #1 determiner of corporate success. 2. Up market, down market, side market, it doesn't matter: You will get better employees if you treat candidates with respect and you will be more competitive. 3. It's a lot of work for the 95% of clowns out there you interview, and there's a push towards automated…

Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly. I had an incredible conversion rate - the senior person actually hiring saying “hey you look like you could fit in here…

> and I’ve never been able to convince a single other manager to do it.

I agree with everything you wrote, but if your company is big enough to have in house recruiters they probably don't want you doing it!

Not because they don't want to be able to hire great candidates efficiently. But because you presumably don't maintain the statistics they need to keep. For example, say (I don't know you and am just making this example up), you might without realizing it only be contacting candidates who have names that you recognize as male, while they want to make sure they are pulling from a wider pool to improve their chances of getting the best candidate They may have other reasons for collecting such statistics (SEC filings? Who knows?).

Re: Everyone's getting ghosted, the new normal in tech recruiting

#180

Post by foobiekr »

cco wrote: post #43

What I've never really understood is that though recruiters (external but also in-house) are typically paid on hiring candidates, much like sales people. And in that paradigm, why is ghosting so common? As a recruiter, a lot of your value is your professional network that you can pull from to place candidates. Why would you ever ghost people that, while not a good fit for this role, could be a good fit for a differen…

Much like sales the professionals establish a pretty rigorous funnel and pay no attention to anyone who looks like they will fall out of the funnel. They optimize for offer and if they sense the candidate won’t get there they are better off trying to find one who will.

Also, honestly, a lot of recruiters suck. They are often hired with no qualifications and really not even any serious education. It is routine to hire people who formerly worked in retail or whatever for these jobs so on average they are themselves fodder for the process and often don’t last long.

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