Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 291 posts

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#71

Post by satvikpendem »

noitpmeder wrote: post #52
dheera wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of all the recruiters who reach out to me saying they're working on filling some engineer position but never say the company name, and when asked, they want to have a call. Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line

They can't, otherwise a significant fraction of the people they reach out to would just skip the head hunter and contact the company directly. Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly. IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-sal…

Not exactly. Recruiters often can guarantee an interview with the hiring manager while if you submitted your resume to the company directly, you'll just get lost in the sea of resumes so not much point going around them. I also always give them a PDF resume and I'm pretty sure they don't edit them as sometimes during a video interview the employer pulls up my resume as a screen share to go through it and it's always been the exact one I've had with all my personal contact details.

It's simply not worth it for either the employer and interviewee to go around the recruiter because they act as a filter for both sides initially.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#72

Post by maratc »

bflesch wrote: post #54
chrismorgan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether it helps or not—the typical contact like this hasn’t been a human for decades now. What I’m seeing these days is materially almost identical to what went out ten years ago. Basic form letter with a cover sentence or paragraph of either no relevance, or a tenuous but normally ill-researched claim at relevance.

[flagged]

They also have no spaces around the em dash. Must be followers of Chicago Manual of Style (and not AP Stylebook.)

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#74

Post by LightBug1 »

noitpmeder wrote: post #52
dheera wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of all the recruiters who reach out to me saying they're working on filling some engineer position but never say the company name, and when asked, they want to have a call. Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line

They can't, otherwise a significant fraction of the people they reach out to would just skip the head hunter and contact the company directly. Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly. IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-sal…

Or they don't have a job opening at all and are just looking to bolster the database.

I remember the annual cycle back in the day. During quieter times of the year, I'd suddenly get a tonne of calls from various recruiters with a job (no company name) ... almost as if they'd been told, "ok, no one's hiring or placing right now, no point you sitting there on your arse while I pay you. So pick up the phone and get some qualified leads"

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#75

Post by gloosx »

By the way it's also the same way around with "Who is hiring" threads, tried posting a job there and my email just instantly filled with all sorts of letter-slop, hundreds of emails which are infeasible for a single human looking for a job candidate to sort out, some of them are just generated to match the job description, but it's completely unrelated experience listed in the CV, some of them are just straight spam promoting some yet another AI shit. They still keep coming to this day, few months after posting in that thread. It's very hard to look for a job, or look for a candidate nowadays by using the public channels where you just leave your email in the open thanks to the wicked automations some highly disrespected individuals are eager to keep setting up. I maybe received one or two letters written by the real people. Who is hiring and Who wants to be hired seems to be perpetually doomed by AI, good luck to you Ilia.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#76

Post by hansvm »

The other side of this isn't sunshine and roses either.

Imagine you're a reasonably talented developer and just can't seem to break into a good job. You've been working delivery or something to make ends meet, and somebody finally offers a tech job. It isn't much, but your kids are hungry. You'll take it.

You show up, and it's everything the cynics here could have told you. Spamming people for money is the least of your worries. Whatever, at least you're actually programming, and maybe this is your chance to break into one of those mythical "good" jobs people keep talking about -- a stepping stone.

In an effort to impress, you figure out how to leveraging the HN who's hiring thread. It takes a bit of convincing for management to give you the time, but you're eager to prove yourself, and that enthusiasm is a bit infectious. Somebody signs off on the project.

It's a total flop though. You get zero conversions, nothing, nada. You've been spending the last week frantically debugging, getting more and more desperate as you realize what this means for your career prospects in a cutthroat environment like the one you're trying to appease.

As luck would have it, you stumble across this post today. Then the weight of your fuckup dawns on you. You spammed the "who wants to be hired" thread instead. Not fully yet recovered from the shock, you hear your boss call you over. "Do you have a minute to talk about something important?" There's a glint of orange on their desktop, and a pit sinks through the bottom of your stomach.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#77

Post by LollipopYakuza »

ElevenLathe wrote: post #49

Ordinary, non-elite jobseekers (at least in the US) NEED a job or they will be homeless. If you want somebody to stop asking for a job, give them a job.

Being in (important) need for a job doesn't make it any more legit to blindly spam others - especially those in the same boat.

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#79

Post by iqihs »

ed153 wrote: post #16

As a general rule, if someone ever posts any kind of career troubles on any platform, the only correct responses should contain sympathy or a relevant career opportunity. Anything else is so callous. Hang in there Ilia, you're not the only one hurting, and don't apologize for venting. Most of us in the HN community are far more supportive.

[flagged]

Re: Please don't spam people looking for employment. It's just cruel

#80

Post by ibejoeb »

codeforafrica wrote: post #69
ibejoeb wrote: post #10

I just started getting a barrage of these last month. They're just scraping those threads. I don't think there's much to do about it. These aren't "real" hn folks that actually participate here.

That's because you all share your email addresses directly in your posts. I put my email address in my profile, and anyone genuinely interested is just one click away from getting my address from there or from my website which i also link to. Aside from a handful of exceptions I get no spam whatsoever, despite posting for years and not obscuring my address at all. And what I do get is most likely hand-written.

We have the technology to scrape your profile page too.
Post reply on HN