

What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages - leeny
https://blog.hired.com/what-i-learned-from-reading-8000-recruiting-messages/

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Jemaclus
Great analysis, Aline. The positive examples are exactly the kind of emails
I'd like to receive. On the other hand, if all recruiters followed this
advice, I'd have a harder time rejecting spammy recruiters... So maybe keep
this on the down-low? ;)

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leeny
Heh, I think giving advice is much easier than actually following it :)

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wowzer
As a developer with a fairly interesting background, I've been getting
messages from recruiters for years. As Aline's post elucidates, most of the
messages are completely impersonal. I had been ignoring these e-mails for
years. I then got a message from a recruiter that was really well written and
completely geared towards me. I was shocked that someone took the time to
actually read my resume. That recruiter got a response from me. He then lined
me up with a gig. His approach also got four other people hired at the job he
lined me up with.

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djb_hackernews
This was an awesome post and I really enjoyed it. I hope to see more data
driven analysis like this in the future. I actually try to respond to every
recruiter email I get, even if they are obviously generic (though I have my
limits). My one goal is for them to give me a number. I typically thank them,
ask them how they found me (specifically what keywords they searched for, etc)
and what the salary ranges are for the position. I usually frame it to "ensure
I am staying market competitive". I'd say 50% of the time I get the dodge one
way or the other, 40% of the time they are paying below what I'd expect to be
paid for the position, and 10% is what I'd expect. Only one time was I
surprised by the salaries thrown out and those were positions in NYC. That
said, I'm going to get a little cynical, so be warned.

Keeping salaries secret has been a huge tool wielded by hiring managers and HR
in order to suppress salaries for a very long time, especially with the way
engineers are typically pigeon holed in to broad titles. I don't see that
changing any time soon, as much as I'd like too. It'd solve a number of
problems for our profession if that were so. I'd be interested to see what the
differences are from the initial offer when reaching out and what the official
offer is if a candidate accepts.

I'm guessing most businesses that use this platform have figured out the
optimal number to get responses from recruiting emails and then used any
leverage they can get in order to discount the engineers skills and
experiences in order to get them in to a lower salary. Unfortunately engineers
are notoriously bad negotiators and we start to buy in to their arguments and
end up accepting bad deals and we don't realize it.

But, this is definitely a step in the right direction.

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Matt_Mickiewicz
We've gotten 1100+ companies to disclose salaries upfront on our marketplace,
which is what all the numbers in the blog post are based on...

I definitely agree that keeping salaries secret until the very last second -
when you've spent days or weeks in an interview process, and become
emotionally vested in the outcome - is a tool that's been wielded against the
benefit of Engineers.

Our goal is to break that cycle, and shed some transparency on this otherwise
opaque part of the hiring process and get better alignment upfront about comp.
expectations before time gets wasted by either party.

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jisaacstone
My experience (back when Hired was known as DeveloperAuction) is that most of
the 'offers' I received were completely impersonal and disingenuous.

What I mean is that it seems the companies 'bid' on anyone who met some
minimum requirement and relied on the initial phone screen to actually vet the
candidate. The three phone screens I had the person on the other end displayed
no knowledge of the experience and skills I listed on my profile and one did
not even have any preference what division of the company I should work for
(was just looking for another somewhat competent software engineer, not caring
much beyond that)

My point is: personalized messages are more likely to result in a hire BECAUSE
the person writing the message knows what they are looking for. Conversely the
recruiters I deal with on a regular basis are only looking for a 'python
engineer' or something similar. They could not possibly write a personalized
recruiting message.

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minimaxir
> _These values come from running a logistic regression on the factors that
> were most statistically significant. The y-axis represents the standardized
> value of the coefficients in our regression._

"Most statistically significant" does not imply that the variables themselves
are statistically significant, and it does not imply that the logistic
regression itself is accurate (especially since the regression uses only 5
variables). What is the accuracy of the model?

The value of the logistic regression coefficient is the log-likelihood of the
estimate, _not_ the "Significance of Regression Coefficient", which is a
completely different value altogether (the p-value).

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leeny
Sorry, you're right, that's unclear. We chose to run a logistic regression on
a subset of factors that were statistically significant (i.e. every factor in
the graph is significant). In other words, we chose the factors that had the
largest effect size and then plugged them into the regression.

~~~
x0x0
so wait -- you ran the regression with lots of factors, and then dropped those
you found not to be statistically significant?

I would suggest it's not good practice to drop variables, even if they aren't
statistically significant (and what an argument that can become if you test
things simultaneously). Particularly if there's any chance they are correlated
with other variables. Read Pearl; causality (which is what you're really
discussing) is a rat's nest.

Also, when you plot the value of the coefficients, I would suggest ordering
them by abs(coef) * stddev(var). This may not matter much for you since it
looks like most of your variables are indicator variables, but it's still good
practice.

edit: oh, hi, you're the Aline that wrote this? Thanks for the interesting
analysis.

~~~
leeny
I ran a number of different regressions in parallel with significance testing.
Ultimately, I chose to publish the figures from the one that included the
factors with the largest effect sizes (determined in parallel) for simplicity,
but the takeaways didn't really differ much when more factors (even ones that
weren't significant) were included.

Regardless, thanks for pointing me to Pearl. Linking here for others in case
they're interested, too:
[http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/](http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-2K/)

And, yes, I'm that Aline. Ohai, and thanks!

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dezoxir
Excellent analysis. Great follow up to the
[http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-
hi...](http://blog.alinelerner.com/lessons-from-a-years-worth-of-hiring-data/)

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gameguy43
Love this. I wish more recruiters were this data-driven.

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Matt_Mickiewicz
Since Hired is a marketplace, it's a lot easier for us to analyze data
because:

1.) Data is stored in a central database, and not across dozens of email
accounts, LinkedIn Recruiter accounts, etc.

2.) Working with over 1100 companies, and hundreds of candidates every week,
we have a huge sample size to draw on

3.) We actually have a full time Business Intelligence Analyst on our team,
and we subscribe to data analysis tools such as "Looker" to build internal
dashboards, and metrics which help us drive marketplace efficiency... we also
have a Data Scientist on staff, whom we found on Hired (naturally!)

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malsheikh
This is awesome, especially as someone who is new to recruiting in the tech
space. Sent to a couple other HR/recruiters and they love your posts!

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lazyant
Not sure I understand; the main variable for initial response is salary yet in
none of the examples of initial emails salary is mentioned (that's my
experience as well)

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leeny
On Hired's platform, each recruiting message is accompanied by a salary offer,
separate from the message body.

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neom
I hope every developer reads this.

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dropit_sphere
If I ran a company, I would want to hire this woman.

~~~
mattygreenburg
She's an engineer actually fixing recruiting... What more could you want for a
talent acquisition thought leader.hopefully she can bring about more
evangelism to recruiting.

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acconrad
TLDR: recruitment letters need to have attached in them with a competitive (at
or above average) salary number, personalized to the prospective employee. In
other words, actually email the person and be transparent with what you're
offering.

