

How to Not Be a Shitty Recruiter - snkahn
http://team.adzerk.com/post/17768823073/shitty-recruiters

======
user24
If developers were artists, we'd all be getting emails like this:

Hi user24,

I saw your profile on ArtIn and wanted to see if you might be interested in a
commission.

The role requires significant experience using paint and canvas, as well as
familiarity with brushes. Experience with chalk or pastels is not required,
but would be a bonus. Our artwork hangs on walls around the house, where it is
seen by lots of people. Our house is very exciting.

We are offering a competitive rate of pay in a very dynamic house.

If you're interested, please contact me. Alternatively if any of your artist-
friends might be interested, I'll happily use them instead. I don't really
care if it's you or someone else that fills this role so long as you tick the
boxes. As far as I'm concerned one artist is much the same as the other yeah?
Obviously the most important thing is how long they've been painting for, and
whether they've used the exact techniques our other artists have.

Look forward to hearing from you!

A. Recruiter.

NB: I'm not trying to say that as a developer I am an artist, or that you
can't quantify what makes a good developer. My point is that if you were an
artist, would you take that role? You can't even answer the question because
it doesn't tell you anything. Every art commission needs experience with
paint! Is it a portrait? An abstract piece? What size?

Recruiters: your job is to _attract me_ , not simply to find me. Tell me that
your company is growing, which industry you're in, that you'd rather do it
right than fast, that as a developer I'll have input to the product direction,
etc etc.

Attract me.

~~~
jrockway
I don't think that "I don't really care if it's you or someone else that fills
this role" is such a bad thing. Good companies want developers that are smart
-- they don't care about you because you're you, they care about you because
you possess the characteristics of someone who will do good work for them.
Similarly, if you want some graphic design, there are a number of people who
will do a good job. You want any of those people, not one specific person.
Unless, that is, that person has done something specific that makes them a
particularly good fit. But you can offer jobs without being that specific.

In my own experience, I've gotten jobs both ways. I got a job at a small Perl
web app company because of my work on a Perl web framework. The lead developer
approached me directly. I've also gotten jobs where someone has recommended me
because of general ability rather than any specific work.

------
jdludlow
I generally loathe recruiters, but I do feel a bit sorry for them. They are up
against the real recruiters in this field: other software developers.

The pattern that I've seen over and over is:

* Good developer #1 starts a project.

* Hey, this project is great and there's more work here than one person can handle.

* Asks other good developers to see who is in between projects.

* Gig is filled without a "recruiter" ever knowing about it, because the real recruiter was Dev #1.

~~~
AznHisoka
I don't feel sorry for them - they chose that profession, and most are
starting to feel the futility of their job. What I'd like to see is a
recruiter that works backwards: they asks what companies you want to work
with, then actively goes out and see if they can form connections to get you
an interview in those companies...

~~~
sopooneo
That does happen. Recruiters that cultivate relationships in both directions
are known as "full desk" recruiters.

------
dugmartin
The increase in bad recruiters is simply because the demand for developers is
so high and there is room for them in the market. To me it's starting to feel
like 1999 again - developers talking about what they are entitled to like they
are sports stars. I just hope 2014 isn't like 2002 - I remember going to a job
fair in Waltham where thousands of folks showed up for a couple of hundred
jobs. For all you 20 somethings - enjoy this time while you can.

~~~
taude
Glad someone else remembers this well. Every time I read some self-righteous,
mid-20-something blogger ranting like they are Michael Jordan, I remind myself
of when the first bubble blew-up and there WEREN'T jobs or opportunities for a
lot of really talented/smart people.

~~~
cydonian_monk
I remember the last two career fairs at my engineering school in late 2002 /
early 2003. There were crickets chirping. Five airlines had booked booths, but
only one sent a representative to say "we're not hiring.' The other four were
left empty. Tech companies were about as sparse, but most at least sent a rep.
The only ones doing any real hiring were FedEx (but not for technical
positions - package handling only!) and a GeoEngineering firm that was looking
for GIS grads.

Talk about depressing.

------
dsr_
Number one rule (for all sales people, not just recruiters): be polite.

A remarkable percentage of recruiters can't graciously accept a politely
negative response. Threatening to report me to my boss for endangering the
(nonexistent) relationship with their firm was not an acceptable counter; I
hung up. Ringing every nearby phone number in the hopes of finding someone to
connect him to my boss was aggressively stupid.

True story.

~~~
vbtemp
Upon very politely declining an offer from a recruiter on Linkedin, I was very
surprised to find a response saying "send me your resume, the offer expires
tonight. one day you will be on the job market again, and I will not help
you". Unbelievable, I wonder why he had to go out of his way to sound like a
jerk, and why he thought that would be a good idea...

~~~
rdouble
Why do recruiters on Linkedin always ask for a resume, anyway? Don't they
already have it?

~~~
devs1010
I think they are too lazy to actually look at your profile, they just do a
keyword search and then contact you directly form the search page (you can
still do this on LinkedIn if memory serves me correctly), apparently, being
bothered to click on your profile and read through it would take too much of
their precious time

~~~
anamax
I suspect they ask for a resume so they can send it to someone else.
Extracting a resume from linkedin is work (AKA an opportunity for an
application or linkedin feature).

I wonder whether folks are more likely to keep their linkedin profile up to
date or their resume.

~~~
lazerwalker
Every LinkedIn profile has a "PDF" button that generates a pretty nice-looking
resume representation of the profile.

------
malandrew
It would be interesting is the demand side of this industry (those startups
and tech companies with with a sense of ethics and responsibility) starting
demanding certain standards of their tech recruiters.

If you are a desirable company working with interesting technology, and a
recruiter does an offensive job trying to recruit, that reflects badly on the
company who hired the recruiter.

The companies should stipulate rules for the recruiters to earn the recruiting
fee. Rules like: in the first email and and solicitation such as on a list,
you must disclose who you hiring for, the nature of the project, the
technologies involved, etc.

Companies could even resolve this issue by issue a company email like
joe.mcruit+recruiters@companydoingthehiring.com that forwards leads to the
appropriate recruiter. It's not a perfect solution, but any solution that
allows candidates to deal with the recruiter in a way that holds the recruiter
accountable to the company for which they are working can only serve to raise
the very very low bar we have at the moment.

~~~
comm_it
If they disclose who they are hiring for then what's to stop a candidate
applying to the company directly? Cuts out the recruiter and they lose their
fee. I've known this has happened to a few friends when they've dealt with
recruiters who were stupid enough to disclose this in the first e-mail.

~~~
Peroni
Bingo. It's not the only problem though. There is a surprisingly large number
of recruiters posing as developers in order to find out who the competition is
recruiting for, your reason, coupled with this is the sole reason why
recruiters never disclose their client.

~~~
comm_it
Wow, I didn't know this! Cheeky buggers :)

------
mdwrigh2
While the DHH quote was amusing, sadly it turns out be just a fictional
scenario created by one of the commenters of the gist:
<https://gist.github.com/1285068#gistcomment-56327>

~~~
Roboprog
Damn. I laughed pretty hard when I read that though. Mostly because we all
know full well that if you or I did invent something, we _would_ be asked by a
recruiter how many years experience we had, and if it was invented 2 years
ago, you would be asked for "3 to 5 years experience".

------
hongquan
There is a solution here, but not everyone will like it.

Shitty recruiters do this shit because at the end of the day, it still works.
Or works well enough for them to make a decent salary. Really shitty
recruiters quit after a year or two because their base salary is very low (or
even zero) and they don't get their commissions if they don't get placements.
Ignore them and they will literally die off.

All the Engineers, Designers, Developers who complain about this practice
should just put these recruiters on blast. I freaking LOVE what DHH is doing
with those stupid recruiter emails. Why don't all of you do that? Those shitty
recruiters will be on notice, their Agencies will be embarrassed by the bad PR
or Google Search results and no startup will use their services.

At the end of the day, a good recruiter (full disclosure: that's my day job)
will still be in demand because they do more than push resumes.

Cheers, Hong

------
snkahn
A few weeks ago one recruiter made the rounds of all the developers who worked
in our building- with violent disregard to the skill sets of said developers.
They were looking for a senior backend dev, but this recruiter was emailing
frontenders, UXers, designers, devops, they really didn't care who you were.
The pitch itself was ridiculous bordering on nonsensical due to the
recruiter's extreme non-understanding of what he was describing, and he didn't
bother to change it from person to person. Over a period of a few days we
watched as this same pitch cropped up from person to person. It was painfully
obvious this guy either had no clue, or wasn't even trying. Really, what kind
of response did he expect? Who doesn't want to work for a 'HOT Music 2.0
startup'!

------
orbitingpluto
I tend to go whenever I can when a recruiter asks to meet. Most of them are
the same. Interviewing is a skill I know I should work on. But usually
recruiters have a job they want to fill and they myopically try to pigeonhole
you into it.

Yesterday's experience...

Recruiter: So I see you have .NET experience. I'm going to put that at the top
of the list on your profile.

Me: Yes I do, but as you can see my primary experience and interest is now
mobile development and Linux.

Recruiter: I'll just put .NET on the top of your profile.

When a recruiter asks to meet you, they should be trying to form an impression
and finding that perfect match when it comes along.

I love the how-many-years-of-experience response, "All of them."

------
takrupp
tl;dr: Use smaller agencies or solo recruiters, ignore the big firms.

Just another prospective (from a high-end recruiter): You get what you pay
for.

10% on a developer making $60-100k means that you need to push a ton of paper
to make out a decent living at an agency. Its like the difference between
Apartment Brokers vs Real Estate Brokers: The Apartment Brokers are jokers,
because they need to deal with 1000's of people to make the 30-40 fees a year
that make up a decent living. A Real Estate Broker can do a tenth of the deals
and make twice as much. The quality of service is a lot higher.

Likewise, in high paying industry with top tier compensation the recruiters
are much higher quality. I only need to make 5 placements a year to make six-
figures, where as the jokers at Selby Jennings or those other massive paper
houses need to make 15-20 placements to even get close to that.

I can afford to treat candidates with respect, protect their information, and
tailor their search. Most technical recruiters can't.

My advice, if you don't make over $100k and want to use a recruiter, go with
someone working at a really small firm or by themselves. They take service
much more seriously than the well known spam-a-lot agencies.

PS: We're hiring, and work in a very cool, niche high tech space.

------
ferrofluid
I made <https://jobpoacher.com/> so you can send all of the shitty recruiters
(and good ones) to an anonymous email address.

------
aggarwalachal
tl;dr and Some thoughts :

Actually talk about the project - The people sending out these emails and
pitching for a position for you to fill, don't really know what the project is
all about. Many a times they don't even know the difference between iOS and
Android.

Money isn’t everything! - I don't know how many startups actually go out and
pay a recruiter firm to do this job. From what I feel, i think in a startup
its always best that the founding team takes this job up on their own.

Please never call us - so true!

Be active in the community! - Most of the times because of their lack of
awareness and motivation to keep themselves updated, they don't really bother
doing something like this. They just go out to a forum and post a job without
thinking what would happen next.

Be transparent - As I said before, most of the times they don't know.

------
anarchitect
It seems to get worse every time I recruit (we're hiring, cheeky link -
<http://www.easyart.com/content/help/jobs.ghtml>).

Every job ad I've written clearly says "no recruiters". Luckily, I don't have
a phone number in this office. But in the first week I had:

* About a dozen recruiters calling our generic office line (despite the "no recruiters")

* A recruiter tracking down my personal contact details to offer his services

* A recruiter blatantly lied to a colleague who asked him "are you a recruiter". I Googled his name and number and found out that he was.

Absolutely relentless. Why they think I would do business with them is beyond
me.

To be fair, I've had some emails from nice ones too, but the vast majority
have been very unpleasant to deal with.

------
hispanic
I suspect that 80% of the calls I get are from recruiters - typically offering
positions out of state. Being the polite guy I am, I used to make it a point
to respond to all voicemails with a "no thank you". These days, I use an
"unable to answer" message that states up front that, if you are a recruiter,
DO NOT leave a voicemail - email me instead. And yet, I still get voicemails
sometimes. :P

For all of the recruiter emails I get, I have a GMail canned reply that states
up front the geographic areas I'm interested in and the minimum rate that I'm
looking for. For the vast majority of these emails, I never receive a
response.

I have this same basic "disclaimer" at the top of my LinkedIn profile. Every
once in a while, I get a cold email from a recruiter who has actually read it.
10 cool points to them.

------
devs1010
Has anyone else noticed a trend of getting a lot of calls from offshore
recruiters? I don't mean to sound xenophobic but I seem to get this stream of
calls now (often 1-2 per day) from "recruiters" who I can barely understand as
they have very thick accents, that are using poor phone connections (obviously
over VOIP). My solution is that I don't answer the phone unless I'm expecting
a call, everything goes to voicemail for me to weed through later. I am fairly
open about putting my phone number up on resumes publicly, as it has benefited
me before, so I guess its a price to pay but I just find it odd and can't help
but wonder if they are actually recruiting for a real position or just trying
to scam me in some way.

~~~
sselby
I've had a lot of this as well. I don't think it's a scam (though I wouldn't
know since, like you, I just ignore those calls). The positions these people
are recruiting for seem awful to me, which would explain why they're hard to
fill (and why the company is using a seemingly cheap service to fill them).

~~~
devs1010
Yeah, I agree.. well I have also gotten some emails (from seemingly similar
types of "recruiters") who do some sketchy things such as asking me to fill
out a form with SS#, etc, obviously these go right to my spam box.

------
Peroni
I can never resist these discussions. Relevant:
[http://voltsteve.blogspot.com/2011/07/all-that-is-wrong-
with...](http://voltsteve.blogspot.com/2011/07/all-that-is-wrong-with-
recruitment.html)

------
recruiter858
Recruiter perspective: I admit there are some really bad recruiters. And they
don't improve, because either A)Lazy or B)What they do works for them.

There are two reasons why a recruiter won't release a client name initially.
1) Some recruiters use a fake position to engage a candidate in a conversation
2) Most commonly, a recruiter does not want a candidate to go around the them
and apply directly or tell another recruiter about the opening. It happens and
it sucks.

~~~
shareme
Two types of recruiters those that have exclusive contracts and those that do
not..

Your description does not hold for those with exclusive contracts.. in fact
those are types of recruiters you should interact with as they are very
pleasant.

------
aggarwalachal
but the best was

Recruiter: How many years of Rails experience do you have? DHH: ALL OF THEM!

------
molecularbutter
LOL at the title

------
publicus
Recruiters are great at getting you bunch of practice interviews (at companies
you don't care about).

Then you can go to the real interviews prepared ;)

