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Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

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51–60 of 147 posts

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#51

@chprmc good idea to have an anon way of collecting the data. In the UK we have a list of "spammy recruiters" who consistently disrespect "unsubscribe" requests and send useless/unrelated emails see: https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters

Looked for vividresourcing aaand yep no surprise it's there !

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#52

@chprmc good idea to have an anon way of collecting the data. In the UK we have a list of "spammy recruiters" who consistently disrespect "unsubscribe" requests and send useless/unrelated emails see: https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters

Wow this is a great resource! Thank you for sharing it. Let's keep in touch for future collaboration on this.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#53

@chprmc good idea to have an anon way of collecting the data. In the UK we have a list of "spammy recruiters" who consistently disrespect "unsubscribe" requests and send useless/unrelated emails see: https://github.com/drcongo/spammy-recruiters

Looked for vividresourcing aaand yep no surprise it's there !

We are very curious to hear what happened!

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#54
post #32

"They Insisted to know my current salary" "They refused to talk about compensation" Working outside of the USA, these two are kind of weird. When I am hiring someone, I want to know their current salary to know that I won't offer them a low salary + benefits package. I have ranges depending on positions, and if after evaluating someone she falls into the "mid level" category, I want to make sure that their expectatio…

Here is how this always goes for me:

1. Initial convo, things seem interesting, no salary details from recruiter, lots of questions about how much I make

2. They ask me to sign an NDA, a bunch of other paperwork, and spend a bunch of time in meetings doing dumb whiteboard questions

3. "You're amazing! Can we hire you for 50k below market? It's totally worth it, we have a $200 xbox that you can stare at while you work 60 hour weeks trying to fix our abortion of a product!"

So, unfortunately, my rules have become:

+ Salary range upfront. If you can't give me a number, I can't give you the time of day.

+ No NDAs or other BS unless you give me the $600 for my lawyer to go over it. Protip, my lawyer is going to reject it.

+ You get one day of whiteboarding/whatever. I don't do follow up visits. I don't do "projects" or "homework". I'm not implementing the twitter api for you. Sorry, spent too many days doing projects for free.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#55
post #25

This is more nitpicky if anything, but developers are not the only ones that get blasted and ghosted with recruiters. I'm a DBA, but I also get recruiters always telling me how I am perfect for a Sr. full stack engineer.

As a DBA, you don't consider yourself a developer?

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#56
My major issue right now is getting a ton of irrelevant emails and voicemails for roles that I am not at all qualified for.

They're borderline spam and follow the came basic format:

Hey atfateshands!

I've got a great FTE opportunity in your area. The company is really great and offers a ton of great perks.

insert another paragraph about how awesome the company is and how many "best places to work" awards it has won in the last few years

Then it lays out the req's and experience:

insert laundry list of technologies they want you to have. Usually stuff that's not all relevant to what you do. I'm a front-end dev and get all kinds of these for Java, .Net, Azure or other tech stacks I'm not at all involved in

Then the kicker:

"If you're not a good fit for this, please forward this on to anybody in your network who you think would be interested."

When I was looking for a gig about a year ago, I got sucked into many of these thinking they were legit. Now I just scan and delete them.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#57

Why do recruiters insist on phone calls for everything? Why can't they just send an email? I can't get on the phone while I'm at my job to talk to you about some other job.

Never been in recruiting, but just from sales experience it's very hard to sell without direct contact. You have to adjust to what your prospect wants, you can eficiently find out from the sound of their voice whether they're intereste or just polite.

I agree about the business hours, almost none of us have our own offices anymore, so the business hour phone call should only be about making an appointment outside business hours when you can actually talk.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#58
I'm a software engineer & a recruiter. I also work on a SaaS software for recruiters. There are a ton of bad recruiters. But a lot of bad acting happens because of 1) incentive misalignment 2) information asymmetry.

Looking at the list of reasons why a recruiter might be "bad" some of the blame is on recruiting company structure, but another major source of blame is on employers.

They sign contracts with recruiting firms, give little to no oversight, and provide a limited set of information about the role/responsibilities/comp/etc. At the same time, a lot of employers are really bad when it comes to retention. This combination leads to recruiters/recruiting companies that get away with bad behavior and still make a lot of money since it's purely a numbers game and they find that subset of engineers willing to tolerate their behavior. And companies pay them large fees for each transaction.

Protip: If you want to get rid of a lot of recruiter contacts, deactivate your LinkedIn. And make sure your public commits on Github don't include your real e-mail.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#59
post #20

I particularly love recruiters who insist that you send them a resume in MS Word format, so that they can remove your contact details and stick their agency's ugly letterhead on top (or "improve" your resume for you if they're particularly unethical). "I'll need your resume in Word Format." "I can give you a PDF" "Give me the original in Word Format." "There is no original in Word Format, I wrote my resume in LaTeX.…

This almost screwed me in my last interview. (I still got the job thankfully). They took off my blog, mvp award, GitHub profile, and Stack Overflow account. I went into the interview with them thinking I had done nothing except my work history. When I found out, I snapped at the recruiter explaining those are important for them to see.

Re: Ask HN: Dontrecruit.me – A website to collect stories about bad recruiters

#60
post #20

I particularly love recruiters who insist that you send them a resume in MS Word format, so that they can remove your contact details and stick their agency's ugly letterhead on top (or "improve" your resume for you if they're particularly unethical). "I'll need your resume in Word Format." "I can give you a PDF" "Give me the original in Word Format." "There is no original in Word Format, I wrote my resume in LaTeX.…

This sounds a lot like the kind of stories we are looking for! We would really appreciate if you could share the story with us.
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