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Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter

alexchesser.medium.com

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

#211

Post by woodruffw »

l33t2328 wrote: post #181
beeskneecaps wrote: post #112

Ignore recruiter if they: * are a part of a large firm * use multiple fonts, sizes, or any color in their emails * send an email _and_ an InMail * text or call you * jokingly or seriously refer to themselves as a stalker * automatically substitute in your skills or past company name * ask for your resume when they can obviously download the LinkedIn pdf * don’t disclose comp * don’t disclose the company name * use tr…

How can you detect tracking pixels?

Tracking pixels are just embedded 1x1 images in HTML emails. They're not hidden; they're just stuffed in the rendered HTML. For example, here's one from B&H photo:
Detecting them automatically is probably tricky, but you can avoid the entire problem by not loading external resources in HTML emails (or, better yet, always load the plaintext version of the email.)

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

#212

Post by pydry »

ehnto wrote: post #78
anonygler wrote: post #26

Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest. I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy. But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral,…

That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people. Everyone is moving around enough that you'll be able to cross into new companies and skip whole song and dance prior. You also get the benefit of having a heads up on the company you're joining too. I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying s…

I did this for a while and certainly got some leads but the really well paid roles still seemed to come mostly via recruiters.

The "networking" was also very time consuming. It was also fun but if i had a wife and kids I wouldnt have had the time for it.

The good recruiters seemed to have a knack for finding the companies that were the right combination of rich and desperate whereas companies I found through my network were generally from companies that were always keen on talking to a decent technologist but werent exactly craving somebody with my precise skillset to start next week.

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

#214

Post by 0des »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #159
Tehchops wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Real tech people don't blather. Yeah, I know, that's not "hard data". It's a pretty consistent pattern, though. Tech people have to be able to communicate with precision; they usually don't do "blowing smoke".

100% spot on. You can usually tell on which side of the sales vs tech spectrum someone is on organizationally by this.

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

#215

Post by datavirtue »

TameAntelope wrote: post #200
stronglikedan wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Quoted post unavailable.

You make it seem like straight white men conspired to take over the industry and box everyone else out. Last few teams I have been on were very skin diverse. They all had privileged cushy backgrounds though...except for one of the white men who was self-made.

The power base in the US is white middle class. It's not just software that is dominated by white men. Law, medicine, construction, management at corporations. Not just white men. Privileged white men and the few "diverse" people mostly come from a level of privilege that would make my white lucky ass sick to my stomach.

Nice comment.

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

#216

Post by mywittyname »

l33t2328 wrote: post #186
DebtDeflation wrote: post #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…

I have to imagine that it is good advice for early in your career. When you’re applicant number x out of 1500 who all got good grades at a good school, have some good github projects, and do well at the leetcode, grating the interviewer by prematurely mentioning comp may not be your best move.

Fresh out of school, you're worth just about as much as someone you graduated with.

20 years into your careers, you may be worth 10x or 1/10 of that same person.

Why waste people's time? It's a waste of time interviewing for a place if you know they aren't offering anything close to what you'll be asking. And if you're making 2-3x the median salary for that job title, you should probably get a comp range up front.

I've been burned by this a lot. Don't talk comp, go through hours of interviews, taking afternoons off for in person interviews (in the before times), all to find out that their maximum for for the position is a 25% pay cut.

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

#217

Post by mabbo »

A simpler approach: just be nice to recruiters.

Even the cold-calling, working-for-an-agency, just-wants-10%-of-your-salary recruiters. Most of them are simply nice people who are trying to make a living in a difficult and incredibly competitive business. Some are assholes, no doubt, but just being polite until they prove that they are cost you very little.

I had a recruiter reach out this morning to tell me about great opportunities in with . I don't want to work for that company, ever, for serious ethical reasons. I don't want to move to that city (though it's not a terrible place).

I simply said "Hi , thanks so much for reaching out. I'm not really interested in any new opportunities right now. I'm also planning a fully remote career from now on, so moving to doesn't really work for me. Thanks for reaching out though".

It took 30 seconds. It burned no bridges. It made no presumptions about them and didn't try to harm them back for wasting my time.

If they persist, I'll ask them to please take me off their list and not contact me again- as politely as I can manage.

So far this strategy has proven 100% effective at handling recruiters, but it also makes me feel better because there's no negative emotions involved.

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

#218

Post by lhorie »

AlexC04 wrote: post #31
eatonphil wrote: post #27

That's a pretty big wall of text when most recruiters reach out with a single sentence or few sentences.

I like to think of it as spamming the spammers! The marginal cost of extra words in a "select all -> copy -> paste" is pretty low so I think it makes a lot of sense to be very clear and address any objections they might have in advance. I also have found through experimentation that posting one liners like "how much?" just results in the recruiter reverting to their own script of "objection handlers" The size and cla…

Hey Alex, fancy seeing you here :)

I'm going to agree that the "if you want me, do some work first" thing seems a bit overkill. For me, usually just a single sentence asking for salary range and job description gives me more than enough to figure out whereabouts in the spectrum they are.

This is the way I think about it:

1) there are different types of recruiters. At least in the city where you are, I can tell you that there are actually some good recruiting firms that consistently send appealing opportunities while avoid wasting your time with emails about lowballers, if you just spend the 30 mins upfront to chat with them about your expected salary range and specialization. These recruiters understand that there's an entire subsection of the workforce that is very capable but has zero online presence, and they build their own moat by connecting w/ professionals directly, to build a long term, high quality, proprietary network. Being part of such networks and having the recruiter sift and prescreen jobs for you can be valuable. For one-off linkedin cold mailers, the signal to noise ratio is generally pretty low IME because they optimize for volume. While they can give me data points about what lowballers offer, I personally haven't gained anything from this info, so I'd optimize elsewhere. YMMV.

2) you can often infer salary range from the company name and job title alone. As a rule of thumb, if it's an no-name company, they're almost always going to lowball if you're at senior level. If your goal is to raise your salary quickly, then rather than looking at sideways increments, you'll want to target "obvious" upgrades (e.g. if one is junior, look for "senior" roles; if you're senior at a local non-US company, look for US-based multinationals; or just go for broke and try for unicorns exclusively)

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

#219

Post by 0des »

Tehchops wrote: post #192
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real tech people don't blather. Yeah, I know, that's not "hard data". It's a pretty consistent pattern, though. Tech people have to be able to communicate with precision; they usually don't do "blowing smoke".

> Real tech people Ah this fun gatekeeping meme rears it's head again. So how do you define "tech" people? Do you have a scorecard? How do they meet your assessment for "real"? Cohesive organization of atomic matter generally constitutes "real" in a lot of physics definitions. I'd argue trying to label someone a "real tech person" is a laughably subjective exercise that's so corrupted by personal bias and toxicity as…

I take it by your confrontational response that their comment hooked you somewhat. I can assure you it's the truth, and though it may or may not have been relevant to you in a way that affected you emotionally, the words ring true in my experience. Those who can do the thing don't mince words about it, the ones who can't need to massage what they're saying a bit to not lay the bad news on you like a ton of bricks; it is natural for people to want to be accepted socially.

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

#220

Post by kritiko »

TameAntelope wrote: post #93
vanusa wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not nepotism. That isn't even what "nepotism" means. People have always gone through their in-network to seek advice and find others to work with, since the beginning of time. It's how nearly anything really great or interesting gets done, actually.

I don't think, "It's always been done this way." is as good of an argument as you think it is, especially considering the discrimination that takes place when you hire referrals over searching for the most qualified candidates. Maybe we should shoot for doing better than how it's been done in the past? I think we can as an industry do a lot better than where we are currently.

Hiring for "culture fit" is problematic. Hiring known commodities is not.

I'm interested in hearing how you think the search for the most qualified candidates can be improved. Interviewing is, necessarily, a messy process and full of uncertainty.

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