
What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages - mrfusion
http://blog.alinelerner.com/what-i-learned-from-reading-8000-recruiting-messages/
======
codegeek
No brainer about a few things. No matter what anyone says, unless a recruiter
gives you the following information, I am not interested:

\- Salary Range. yes, a range. don't give me crap like "market rate" and
"depends on experience". That's the same as saying "we won't tell you". It is
understood that not everyone can negotiate the same amount of money but the
range is crucial to know. For example, if I want to get paid 150K base salary
and the range says 100-120K, I am not going to be bothered any further.

\- Name of the client/company: Please don't play games with this one. Either
you tell me the name or I am out. I don't wanna hear "Fortune 500 client with
great benefits". really ?

\- What are they looking for? Ok this one is subjective and sometimes
difficult for a recruiter to explain. Totally understood. But please work with
the hiring manager on understanding their requirement more. I blame hiring
managers more on this one. I have got calls saying "we need an excellent C++
developer but donno any further details". Umm no.

\- Location: Where will I need to be ? If you don't know, then I am not going
to guess. I cannot move to Austin from New York (well I can't) Only when I
know these things at a minimum from a recruiter, they will get my attention.

~~~
githulhu
If they told you the company, what would stop you from just bypassing the
recruiter and going straight to the company?

~~~
kstenerud
What purpose would that serve? Why go to the trouble of cold-calling a company
when I already have an inside track via this recruiter?

~~~
potatolicious
Compensation - ultimately the company has a budget for hiring for a role,
which would include any fees required to bring you on board. In many (not all)
cases the recruiter's fee subtracts from your own salary negotiations.

Also, a lot of recruiters are not retained but work on contingency, so they're
at best arms-length from the companies they "work" for - it's questionable how
"inside" they are. Going with them may not confer as much of an advantage to
getting the job as one might think.

In any case, I feel like tech recruiting is a poor solution that encompasses
two problems: job discovery, and candidate discovery. Recruiting is effective
at the latter, but oftentimes is used to fulfill the former.

~~~
balls187
> In many (not all) cases the recruiter's fee subtracts from your own salary
> negotiations.

Do you have evidence of that?

Anecdotally that has not been my experience. While recruitment fees are taken
into consideration, between choosing a locally sourced vs 3rd party source
candidate, it has had no bearing on salaries.

~~~
kstenerud
And in fact, it would work against the company to do this. Either you're going
to pay me a salary I consider acceptable, or I'm going to move on. I don't
care about your expenses from sourcing talent.

As an employer, the trifling cost of a referral that leads to a hire doesn't
even enter into the conversation. Any candidate who would go around a
recruiter (regardless of the fact that their reasoning is misguided) is
demonstrating bad faith already, and I would not hire them.

~~~
balls187
> Any candidate who would go around a recruiter (regardless of the fact that
> their reasoning is misguided) is demonstrating bad faith already, and I
> would not hire them.

Perhaps, but not always. I've been in a situation previously where I felt that
the recruiter was not working in my best interest and decided to contact the
hiring manager directly.

------
linker3000
I learned that the author hasn't checked out their web site from a phone. A
big subscription window pops up, overhangs the right half of the screen and
can't be closed because you can't reach the button. Couldn't read article.

~~~
cordite
I wish that subscription window happened near the end, not at the beginning
when I'm reading the first paragraph--that's just distracting.

~~~
leeny
fixed!

------
minimaxir
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8103540)

As I mentioned in those comments, the statistical analysis is a bit arbitrary
and not very scientific.

~~~
tjradcliffe
Even if the statistical analysis was sound the conclusions don't follow. The
"effect" of personalized responses may be due to multi-colinearity: personal
letters may be written only in cases when there is a genuine personal
connection, so adding personalization may have no effect in other
circumstances.

There are other issues as well, but that's the most obvious. The whole thing
is a cautionary tale of not doing data analysis when you don't have
appropriate training and experience.

------
VLM
A fun secondary analysis would be cost estimate. So a truly personal message
might cost an hour of labor, but a form letter costs only a few seconds to
make sure you're sending the correct letter. On the scale of $ expended per
decent candidate, form letters would appear to be much better than personal
messages, even if they are less effective.

WRT "Instead I wrote a little script that hashed messages with an edit
distance" an alternative, possibly faster strategy, might be vocabulary. Look
at the form letters full of meaningless idioms and cliches, total corporate-
speak, all "believe" and "passionate" (that word is only used in cheap pr0n
and corporate speak) and "casual" (See commentary on "passionate") and
"challenge" "fit" "strong" (what is this ESPN Sportscenter or a recruitment
email?) and "Agile" (which has been poisoned in the market to mean absolutely
nothing now) How the corporate-speak form letters avoided classics like the
phrase "work life balance" is a mystery. Words like "opportunity" and
"experience" are kind of on the bubble and generally indicate corporate-speak.
Relative lack of corporate-speak vocabulary in the personalized written by and
for humans messages is also apparent.

(edited to add, an interesting difficult startup idea would be addons for word
processors or web browsers which highlight corporate-speak words and phrases
to dramatically improve writing styles. Any time "key takeaways" or "metric"
appears in the text box its underlined in yellow or something.)

------
ColinWright

        Note that all the graphs in this post
        are interactive, so you can hover and
        do other fun things.
    
            502 Bad Gateway
            nginx/1.4.6 (Ubuntu)

~~~
minimaxir
The graphs are using plot.ly, which are externally hosted.

I don't understand the appeal of interactive charts for simple, static data.

------
furyofantares
I suppose you'd need a much bigger sample size but I'd be very interested in a
continued analysis on how many of those that responded went on to get offers
and how many accepted. The comment about salary ranges got me thinking about
this, giving me a range probably increases my response rate but then if I am
later offered the low end of the range am I less likely to accept than it I
hadn't been given the range? Maybe, so it isn't at all clear to me that
maximizing response rate maximizes hiring rate.

------
pyrrhotech
Salary range is the most crucial point. I would not take a sub $120k job under
any circumstances, so please don't waste my time. Sub $140k would have to be a
very good opportunity at a rocket ship with boatloads of equity. If you want
responses, be honest and up front on what you are willing to pay, then we can
start to filter through the other information.

------
elmuchoprez
I found the use of slightly different shades of the same color to
differentiate data bars to be incredibly frustrating, which made me assume
this was written by a marketer and not someone with a technical background.
Fair or not, that instantly made the message less interesting to me.

Anyways, just an interesting take on another type of factor that can impact
recruiting messaging.

------
mavelikara
From a quick scan I could not find the author discussing it, but I found it
amusing that the response rates did not increase as the bid-to-ask ratio
increased past 1.1. I think this is because a job which advertises pay
significantly more than what the engineer's preferred salary is signals that
the job could be out of their league.

~~~
zippergz
Or that there's some other reason it's undesirable and they have to pay people
a lot to do it...

~~~
mavelikara
Good point.

------
dang
[https://hn.algolia.com/?q=What+I+learned+from+reading+8%2C00...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=What+I+learned+from+reading+8%2C000+recruiting+messages#!/story/forever/0/What%20I%20learned%20from%20reading%208%2C000%20recruiting%20messages)

------
cpfohl
Gateway errors all over for me...

------
leeny
Author of the original post here. Happy to answer any questions!

~~~
sriram_sun
Nice articles in general! The MS vs BS was spot on. So are the observations on
GitHub projects in "Lessons from a year's worth of hiring data"

------
sriram_sun
I'd like to pick on the point that Founders and Engineers are as guilty as
Recruiters in terms of sending boiler plate messages.Recruiter: 53%, Founder:
49%, Engineer: 47%.

A recruiter's _only_ job is to recruit talented people. A founder/engineer has
other things to do. Yes they should be spending a significant portion of their
time recruiting. How realistic is that expectation though?

Also, how do the %s above add to 100 unless there is a significant overlap
between Engineers and Founders?

------
thomasfromcdnjs
Highly recommend reading all of her post, very genuine and insightful view of
recruiting.

------
Lambent_Cactus
"Despite the title of this post, reading almost 8,000 messages and scoring
them for how personal they were was clearly intractable."

Big data!

------
notastartup
Being sent on a goose chase. Been to interviews where the recruiter sent me
for a role that didn't exist. Had recruiters call from blocked numbers.

When a recruiter from a recruitment company contacts me on linkedin, I
immediately flag and block them.

