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A Note About Recruiters

batsov.com

1–10 of 35 posts

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#2
All of this is perfectly reasonable advice, but I think it'll fall on deaf ears. The jobs these bad emails/messages are advertising are often terrible, and while making a better pitch will let you attract the interest of better candidates, those same candidates will surely not accept the terrible job you're offering, so why bother?

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#3
Recruiting is tough. Thinking about my last job transition, there was probably a golden period of two weeks where I was truly open to all recruitment possibilities. By the end of those two weeks I was starting to move into the offer stages. So realistically I can't blame the frequency and volume of recruitment communication; it's possible a followup message would have struck at exactly the right moment.

That being said, for senior engineers surely it's more likely that recruitment will be more driven by referrals by trusted colleagues? I don't think I've seen referral bonuses rising at a commensurate rate.

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#4
Why would a recruiter spend time and effort on reading everyone's cv and writing personal letters to every candidate? They won't be able to reach more than 10 people in a day doing that, and probably will get 0% responses anyway.

I also get these spammy job ads every day but I understand why and I can't offer a better method that actually works better. If you were in their shoes, would you do differently? Only if it worked to be different. So far it doesn't seem to work.

Just today I got an email from a recruiter with her playlist so I would know her mood. So yeah. Recruiters try all sorts of things but it's very hard.

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#5
Some recruiting, like some sales jobs and like many things in life, is a numbers game. And there is zero cost for the bulk messaging campaign on the way to the 1/50 affirmative response they will get. If there is a way to solve this inefficiency, it's well worth building a better solution.

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#6
Cold calls/letters from recruiters are a waste of time. I've never had a cold call or letter from a recruiter that resulted in a job.

If you have any talent at all, reaching out through your professional network is the way to go.

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#7
This feels like a fundamental mismatch between his expectations as an internal recruiter vs external recruiters

> built the technical recruitment operations in the last 3 start-ups I worked for, so I feel I’m somewhat qualified in the subject matter

Sure, your startup might have some very tight requirements for a position and the ability to research candidates before conversations. That's precisely what you should do since time is limited and (presumably) you're not hiring for a TON of positions

But an external recruiter needs to match X jobs to Y candidates. It almost doesn't matter what the tech stack is at that point, you probably have an open position to fill that'll match that person. It's a numbers game and it's a "Please respond to me at any cost" game.

And often, even if you did research, there are so many false negatives that it didn't even matter to begin with. I've had targeted recruiters reach out to me that are amazed when my current position doing $CURRENT_TECH isn't completely representative of my skills and I'm actually a viable candidate for $NEW_JOB_WITH_OTHER_TECH

The only real response here is to cut em some slack or ignore them. Guides like these don't help

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#9

Cold calls/letters from recruiters are a waste of time. I've never had a cold call or letter from a recruiter that resulted in a job. If you have any talent at all, reaching out through your professional network is the way to go.

Anecdata...

My current job was from a cold e-mail.

Though FWIW, I was actively looking for new work at the time, so the recruiter just had good timing.

But the recruiter also had a good e-mail, including the salary range, which was slightly above the band I was expecting.

Re: A Note About Recruiters

#10
This guy must be so fun at parties. Seriously do appreciate the opinion of some guy who has never hired anyone. Yes, you mr Bozhidar, despite your name aren't the god's greatest gift for humanity. Nobody cares or should care that you "state in your resume.." - seriously how hard is it to ignore the message?

"built technical recruiting" - give me a break hun. you should know the reason why most companies do not offer post-interview feedback

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