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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

#461

Post by ip26 »

Kalium wrote: post #115
Spinnaker_ wrote: post #11

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.

If they are attempting unsolicited headhunting - that is, not affiliated with the company - they almost certainly don't know the expected compensation.

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

#462

Post by omgwtfbyobbq »

jjwiseman wrote: post #402
devoutsalsa wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days I just never answer the actual phone for anyone. I don’t even bother to look who is calling.

A scenario I hadn't thought about, that you might want to be aware of: I had to call 911 recently. I talked to the dispatcher, and hung up. A few minutes later they called me back to give me instructions. The call showed up as a regular Los Angeles 323 area code number. In fact, it was flagged by my phone as spam. It made me wonder whether reverse 911[1] calls, which are used to warn about hazmat situations, fire eva…

They likely do. I've seen similar with numbers that are used by medical organizations.

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

#463

Post by sdenton4 »

jrockway wrote: post #435
vollmond wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the phone calls I get from unknown numbers are some combination of scam/robo/or just immediate hang up. The only exceptions tend to be businesses responding to my initial contact (eg, trying to get a plumber out to my house), in which case I will answer unknown numbers for a day or two until we connect. Otherwise nope. This is a US mobile number that I've ported from carrier to carrier since the mid-00s. Haven…

I think they're just enumerating the entire address space, rather than buying your phone number from somewhere. But I guess I have no evidence to prove this; I have given my phone number to companies, and I get a ton of spam calls.

My partner and I have adjacent phone numbers (x and x+1). /Occasionally/ we get sequential spam calls, where my phone goes off immediately after she hangs up. But not super often. Though one can shuffle before calling everything, just as easily.

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

#464

Post by anothernewdude »

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…

Talking compensation late is a good way to leverage the time they've spent on the hiring process.

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

#465

Post by anothernewdude »

qubyte wrote: 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…

Easiest way to do that is to not have a linked in profile

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

#466

Post by muzani »

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,…

"But the real secret sauce is referrals."

This is a given. Recruiters are there to help you get access to companies you don't have referrals in. They're good for those from other states or countries, or from a different social class.

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

#467

Post by folkrav »

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,…

YMMV. I've doubled my salary in the last couple of years by following recruiter cold-calls, including once for a recruiter not affiliated to the company, and it obviously wasn't a pure waste of time for me.

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

#468

Post by jdright »

I've been doing this and fully agree. On my side my reply is not as nice as this, I'll steal this and improve it. I also agree with the 50% rule. Currently I'm interviewing with 3 nice opportunities in parallel, but now getting to the 6h-8h interview step is hard, I have to basically take 3 days off and this costs a lot of money and energy. I wasn't much smart at first, so this is why I got into this situation, but each time I do it I improve on the next. I may be getting close to 20 first step interviews, 10 second step interviews and finally now 3 last step. And this in about 2 months, excluding all others that failed my requeriments since first contact.

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

#469

Post by selimthegrim »

scarface74 wrote: post #327
fecak wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd bet your LinkedIn isn't optimized at all for discovery. Populate a skills section with languages and tools you use, and you'll often see an immediate uptick.

The companies paying in the BigTech compensation range don’t care about what languages or tools you are using. The same recruiters see I work for BigTech and they are still sending me “exciting opportunities for .Net leads paying up to $150K”.

Your entry point was sales engineer, was it not?

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

#470

Post by LAC-Tech »

jen20 wrote: post #355

Every time I read something about recruiters, I am reminded of this fantastic post [1] (sadly the original has been taken down, and this is the only copy I know of). Anyone who has ever experienced third party recruiters in the UK will be nodding their head along after just the first few paragraphs... [1]: https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a056586967293...

LOL that's pretty funny. I find it kind of messed up how British people like to shit on big segments of their population for having certain accents (ie "Shithead"). But still really well written.

I saw this posted by a recruiter about devs once:

https://media-exp1.licdn.com/dms/image/C5622AQEZ5ZZUs6mSlw/f...

Not quite as blistering as that article, but not super professional to plaster all over your linkedin.

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