This is like a woman complaining about online dating app in that she gets too many messages from men just saying “Hi.”
It won’t change :)
A Note About Recruiters
31–35 of 35 posts
Re: A Note About Recruiters
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
That means you would hit someone you know is relevant once every workweek (at least) and because you took some time to figure out whether or not they were a match, you can be reasonably certain you can get 1-3 relevant candidates for a position every month. Having known recruiters, these figures are almost unthinkably high. Clearly this is a viable strategy.
Ok. Let's assume it is a viable strategy. Recruiters, the people who actually make their living at this - who must make sure their children's teeth are fixed, their houses' leaks are fixed - have an incentive to use the best strategy available. Why then are recruiters not using this strategy, do you think?
There are plenty of recruiters that do use this strategy.
Re: A Note About Recruiters
#33This is like a woman complaining about online dating app in that she gets too many messages from men just saying “Hi.” It won’t change :)
One can argue that things stay the same until someone (and by this I don't mean a single person) tries hard enough to change them - e.g. now there are dating apps where men simply can't start the conversation. Accepting the status quo as the law of nature certainly won't change anything.
Re: A Note About Recruiters
#34All of this is perfectly reasonable advice, but I think it'll fall on deaf ears. The jobs these bad emails/messages are advertising are often terrible, and while making a better pitch will let you attract the interest of better candidates, those same candidates will surely not accept the terrible job you're offering, so why bother?
I guess for the terrible jobs they'll still have the benefit of a better pitch working better with the not-so-great candidates that'd be willing to do that job. :-) Obviously there's a limit to how much a recruiter can do in such cases.
Re: A Note About Recruiters
#35I think we have this post/rant every few months on this site, so let me explain how recruiting works. There's 3 types/market for recruiters and they almost never overlap. The first are "body shop style" recruiters. It's basically a numbers game where they try to cold-call as much people with githubs/linkedin or blogs that reference programming. They don't know programming (not even what's the difference between langu…
Yeah, I mostly had in mind the first group you've described, but in my experience they are by far the biggest group. Truly "professional" recruiters are very rare.
I agree that referrals often yield the best results, but that's quite orthogonal to the problem I wanted to tackle with my article.