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The Recruiter Honeypot

ewherry.com

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Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#71

Post by [deleted] »

greghinch wrote: post #23
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Hollywood stars sit on set 12 hours a day, for a 16 week shoot, as does the rest of the crew. If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made. I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work. My apologies if this seems overly aggressive…

I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly a…

[deleted]

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#72

Post by chris_wot »

Kronopath wrote: post #4
_b8r0 wrote: post #3

This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters. Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus. [1] - uk.linkedin.c…

I want to read his dissertation. "Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."

Could happen.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#73

Post by chris_wot »

dennisgorelik wrote: post #61
bobbles wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory form fields? Is that what you mean?

What would prevent recruiter from putting fake data into these fields? For salary it could be "negotiable" or "competitive". For company name it could be name of recruiting company (not actual employer) or just plain fake. Besides, sometimes employers don't want to advertise their openings publicly (may be to avoid getting flooded by irrelevant applications or prevent panic among existing employees).

Not really a problem. I've wasted my time on at least one interview for a non-existent job. If you are a candidate worth it's salt, then you do some research into the company. If it's a recruitment company, then I'd not go for job :-)

I'd have a "flag for false data" link.

Also, if you did this in Australia, then you could have an ABN number field that is mandatory to be filled in.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#74

Post by nl »

Kronopath wrote: post #4
_b8r0 wrote: post #3

This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters. Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus. [1] - uk.linkedin.c…

I want to read his dissertation. "Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."

His other well known paper (Decoupling IPv7 from Replication in Link-Level Acknowledgements) is available from MIT[1]

[1] http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686...

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#75

Post by cliftonmckinney »

TamDenholm wrote: post #2

This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags. Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll wri…

So I think you have to look at why external recruiters are successful:

(The following refers to most, but certainly not all)

They're generally loathed by developers for a multitude of reasons, they charge ridiculous rates, they come back and poach their placements, and commit a plenty of other sins. Yet they're still out there, plugging away and jamming my LinkedIn feed...

The only reason they still manage success is because the alternatives have to be even worse. Despite the ridiculous environment we're in right now, there are still folks out there who are interested in leaving their current jobs for greener pastures. But Dice.com isn't getting it done for these folks, and even if it is their resumes are getting buried beneath piles of unqualified candidates and/or getting filtered out by terribly built filtering software or, even worse, HR folks who mistake Java for Javascript.

I think the way you disrupt the recruiting industry is by significantly improving the alternatives. That or providing a completely new alternative that's wildly better.

Word of mouth has always been the better alternative. It works like a charm until networks are exhausted. Maybe that's the place to start.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#76

Post by zalew »

bobbles wrote: post #48

I wish there was a job search website where to actually advertise a position there were mandatory requirements like the company name and salary being displayed as part of the ad. Whats the reasoning behind posting completely vague job descriptions (sometimes the location isn't even provided!). I Would say 90% of the job postings I see online don't even give me enough information to want to contact them.

> posting completely vague job descriptions

My favorite is sth like "Your responsibility will include writing software according to the provided technical spec."

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#77

Post by emmett »

phillmv wrote: post #35

>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends! What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model. I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bulls…

No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed.

It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#78

Post by peterwwillis »

"Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn". You might be thinking, “Really? This is obvious!”

Uh... No, I wasn't thinking that, since there's a ton of places for recruiters to find candidates and LinkedIn is only one of them. Is this some kind of viral marketing piece for LinkedIn or something?

I have gotten maybe 6 recruiting messages on LinkedIn in my life. I finally deleted my account after the password debacle, it was so useless. Like a business contact sheet for people I already had contacts for. On the other hand, Monster.com is where most of the recruiters seem to come at me from. I get on average 8 positions sent to me a week when i'm not looking for work. My google voice gets less recruiter spam, but I had to set a separate GV line up just to catch all the recruitemarketer calls.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#79

Post by mark_integerdsv »

bartonfink wrote: post #5
TamDenholm wrote: post #2

This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags. Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll wri…

I mentioned the exact same thing to someone a couple of weeks ago - I think her name was Stella, and she's been posting for a startup recently. I'm not a professional contractor like many, but I do like doing freelance gigs to supplement my day-job income. However, finding suitable gigs, dealing with negotiations and chasing down deadbeat clients make it really unpleasant given what I really want to do is make some e…

15 hours a week? Jesus... I spend half of that in meetings. I really need to reconfigure my schedule!

I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam.

First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non technical I might add) management. You'll get a salary and a fancier title than 'contractor' something like... Say... 'consultant' yes! Consultant! That's gonna bump up the hourly rate... But not YOUR hourly rate of course, that of the Firm my friend.

I guess my bitterness in this regard is quite obvious but here in South Africa, this type of thing is utterly rife. You have a few managers who have swept in over time on the winds of apathy and who for some I fathomable reason have good, big contracts and a slew of underpaid 'consultants' who run around doing their bidding.

You seem to believe that this relationship will play out the other way round where you are earning that 'market rate' and for a small percentage of that you'll have in your employ not only someone who'll ensure you're always employed but who is also a personal assistant that runs your admin?

That's called: 'a boss.'

Please correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems you have the world (as I know it) bass ackwards and programmers are not Hollywood stars, not where I come from.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#80

Post by angelbob »

koide wrote: post #28

This only emphazises how different the world for programmers is in the USA (especially in the SF area) compared to the rest of the world. I only get three or four emails a year on linkedin, of them one's from Facebook, the other from Google, and the others are from local companies. This kind of make me envious and wanting to be there for a while., to experience how's it like to be valued and sought after.

If you envy our level of spam, change the address on your LinkedIn profile and/or make a new honeypot one. Like the original article, you can actually find out empirically!

Then write a blog post about it.

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