Nice try recruiter.
Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
481–490 of 633 posts
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've more than once asked a cold-call recruiter how they got my number where the answer has been a rather candid, "there are markets for such information". Kinda makes me regret the few years my LinkedIn profile had my phone number public, but I do wonder how successful these questionable personal data marketplaces are. I certainly haven't had a conversation get beyond "this is spam".
Check out http://intelx.io , depending on your risk tolerances, putting your email and phone number in yet another search bar may not be in the cards. If you can swallow it though, depending if (1) anything you care about has been leaked at all and (2) anything you care about being leaked has been indexed by this site...the results may be illuminating. Or nothing at all. Interesting resource nonetheless that suppleme…
How do you put a phone number in? It rejects mine.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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.
Then why would I want to talk to them at all?
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#484As a software engineer, st least in the US, there are two types of jobs.
1. Your bog standard run of the mill corp dev jobs. They all look alike and they all pay around the same. In most major cities that’s around $80K - $150K. This is where most developers work. A local recruiter can usually help you find a job as long as you have some experience and are looking for average wages. Yes I know “average” for software engineers even in this category puts you in the upper middle income.
2. The Big Tech, unicorn, let’s waste VC money tech companies - with compensation levels you see on levels.fyi. External recruiters are useless once you are looking in that range. But again, there are only a few dozen companies that pay in this range, they are always hiring and we all know how to find them if they don’t find us first.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "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.
One of the most common reasons is simply that they don't want you to go direct to the company in question and bypass their commission. If they give you too much, it is very easy to do and many companies will recruit directly and the recruiter would have no legal basis to do anything about that. On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you migh…
This isn’t true for commission sales. There was a famous study cited in Freakonomics.
https://freakonomics.com/2008/02/real-estate-agents-revisite...
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not GP but I can’t shake that it feels rude, even if expected. But more practically: if I decline after the first, I don’t get the other 4 emails they have queued up for me
I can tell Amazon isn't banging down your door. Seriously, it's insane how no one at Amazon Recruiting talks to anyone else in Amazon Recruiting.
I’ve gotten two messages from internal Amazon Retail recruiters via LinkedIn about “exciting opportunities” over the past year.
My LinkedIn profile clearly shows I work at AWS…
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#487Strong 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,…
Maybe it works for other (non-SWE) professions, and maybe it still works for the more conservative enterprise companies, but my experience is that for most Silicon Valley style tech companies, a referral might at best just let you skip the phone screen. Then it's the same leetcode circus show as anyone else.
But yes, I agree with you that most third party recruiters suck. I'd say there are some very small boutique firms out there that don't suck though. Generally, the larger the recruiting agency, the shittier they are.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#488Bad 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…
Unless you're already extremely out of band and are pretty sure your range will be higher than 95% of your incoming offers, I do not recommend doing this. Never give first numbers, and if you're in software and haven't gotten past the middling, typical startup salary numbers and onto the mind-blowingly high numbers, you will not feel confident enough to handle a negotiation where you've already given away too much in…
In corp dev where I worked until 2020. The compensation range is small enough that you know when you’re asking for top of range and you are at most leaving a couple of thousand on the table.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#489"...let them know you're not currently open to offers less than $current*1.5."
Whoa!! Is this for early career folks (less than 6 years)? In the 15-20 years experience range none of my friends and ex-colleagues who moved jobs got a 50% raise on moving.
Re: Career advice nobody gave me: Never ignore a recruiter
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
Thanks, I appreciate it. It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that. It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a pos…
Why would you assume that two straight white men agree more (in their perspective on things) then e.g. with a gay black woman?
The world of ideas is so high-dimensional that sex & race impact very few of these dimensions. Most straight white men are not the same.