
Imagine Getting 30 Job Offers a Month - patmcguire
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/02/imagine-getting-30-job-offers-a-month-it-isnt-as-awesome-as-you-might-think/284114/
======
jballanc
I used to get recruiter spam, then I tried this one weird trick and all the
recruiters stopped emailing me...

Actually, it wasn't that weird. I just moved out of the US. Changed my
location on GitHub, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and the recruitment spam stopped
overnight.

As for the few recruiters who are still working off of old lists and still
have me as living in NYC, I just politely reply that I'd be interested in
talking with them if the position they're hiring for would consider a remote
working arrangement.

So far, not a single recruiter has replied that they are ok with remote...

~~~
yahelc
I just moved from NYC to Oakland. When I moved, I switched my LinkedIn
location to "Oakland, California". Immediately, I went from 2-3 recruiters per
week to none at all.

Mostly out of curiosity (since I'm not looking for a new job), I switched my
location to San Francisco Bay Area. And like magic, the recruiters immediately
returned in full force.

~~~
vonmoltke
Yeah, I get a trickle here in Dallas (1 - 2 per month, counting Amazon in-
house recruiters). Never tried changing my location to see what happens,
though.

------
drakaal
I have a monster resume that gets 30+ emails a day.

[http://www.xyhd.tv/2008/05/how-to/seo-when-updating-your-
res...](http://www.xyhd.tv/2008/05/how-to/seo-when-updating-your-resume-on-
monstercom-is-good-for-the-ego/)

Emails aren't offers. They are typically auto-generated. As an executive I use
the honey pot that gets bombarded with recruiters as a way to filter out which
recruiters I won't ever work with.

I want to work with recruiters who will give my company a good name. When they
spam people and include my company name they are hurting my reputation. That's
not something I can risk.

That said, as a candidate SEO for your you CV is important. A good recruiter
will look for certain phrases that you need to have to drive up your odds of
getting noticed. This is especially true for specialized jobs that can be
great paying because of the limited number of candidates. Did you use some
weird software that is proprietary to an industry or company? Put that on "A"
CV.

You can have more than once CV and tuning them to every kind of job you could
do is a great way to get to the phone call stage. Then send a CV tuned for
what that employer actually wants after you get a job description.

But most importantly, "It isn't the number of jobs it is the quality of the
job" (at least until you are desperate then it is take what you can get)

------
warrenmar
Getting an email from a recruiter is a whole lot different than getting a job
offer.

~~~
wtracy
This.

Getting 30 job offers a month probably _would_ be as great as the author
thinks. But how many of those 30 recruiter emails will lead to job offers?
Probably zero.

My beef with recruiters is that they repeatedly pitch me jobs that I _know_
their client won't ever hire me for. They're not only wasting my time, they're
wasting their client's time, too.

~~~
johnward
the best is when you say "yeah I know the folks over at X company. they're
great but I'm not the right fit." then they continue to try to pitch you.

------
rdl
I get 10-15 recruiter mails every month. Much worse, IMO, than being
recruited, is the fucking useless recruiters who spam me about _recruiting for
me_ (which happens once you list CEO on LinkedIn, or get any press).

And the shitty contract-dev houses, mainly in India.

I'd categorically never use a recruiter who contacted me like this, nor a
contract-dev house.

~~~
mcphilip
I've had a highly successful career so far (though I'm only in my mid 30's)
without maintaining any significant online presence. My HN profile is probably
the only place where you'd find my email address listed. No LinkedIn, no
Twitter, and a Github account that is only mentioned if someone wants to vet
my work remotely.

Granted, it could lead to trouble down the road if I ever seriously wanted to
leave Austin, but just keeping good meatspace contacts in the Austin VC
community along with a good track record of delivering quality output has
allowed me to comfortably enjoy my career and take interesting jobs on my time
schedule.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I'd love to think that the bullshit associated with
meticulously grooming some social media facade is by no means a prerequisite
for a career in software engineering.

Obviously being a CEO requires a completely different degree of public
visibility, so it's not a comparison to your situation.

~~~
rdl
I've found being online to be really helpful -- it caused me to meet most of
the people I've ever worked on projects with, and I've picked up some really
high dollar and/or interesting consulting work (which allowed me to work
without a salary on various other projects) for most of the past 15y.

It especially helped while I was spending a large amount of time outside of
major tech centers (Caribbean 1998-1999, Sealand 2000-2002,
Iraq/Afghanistan/Kuwait/etc. 2003-2007 2008-2010.)

------
smoyer
Trying to recruit DHH for a junior RoR position is quite a faux-pas. In that
position (no ... I'm not famous), I'd be very tempted to show up for the
interview after submitting an appropriately junior resume!

~~~
fredgrott
even worse is the fact that his partner is on the Groupon board of directors
:)

------
cakeface
My favorite quote from the article "I tried, and failed, to speak with Valley-
based recruiters, who seem to be considerably less eager to return emails than
to send them."

~~~
ChuckFrank
I'm constantly amazed at how hierarchical email return etiquette is. I
constantly see people only returning emails to people that they see as more
powerful than them. If fact, I've found that it's the engineers that are best
at returning emails, and everyone else that is terrible at it. Even when
they've requested your participation in the conversation. I have an email
triage system. Priority emails I respond to immediately, important emails
within the day, and queries within the week. In that way I respond to all my
emails. With others, it's just like there's a giant email black hole that my
emails fall into - never to be heard from again.

~~~
sjg007
One has to enforce classism.

------
sssantosha
Finding people actually interested in changing jobs is challenging. I'd say
it's probably one of the hardest parts of recruiting.

All the engineers at
[https://www.MightySpring.com](https://www.MightySpring.com) (we're building
an app that matches companies with job seekers) spent this week doing
traditional agency recruiting to get a better sense of the problem. Recruiting
really is a numbers game. Finding the right balance between personalization
and efficiency - knowing that most emails get deleted immediately, unread, is
hard. We don't envy the recruiters who do this all the time.

~~~
bliti
The one thing that made me take my current job is the personal touch I was
given. The person who contacted me was simply just being human, and not seeing
me as just another number. That makes a difference.

~~~
sssantosha
Totally agree. And that's why we're taking the time to make it personal. But
doing this has made me understand why so many recruiters just let everything
slip into automatic.

------
lyndonh
Dear (insert your name),

I am working with a company in (roughly your area but not specific and
probably more than 100 miles from your nearest city) seeking candidates who
have good skills in (very broad term 1), (very broad term 2), C++ and
(redundant broad term 3).

There are a variety of positions available with different types of contract,
which is my excuse for not knowing anything about the job, if it actually
exists.

Salary would be around (3 times your normal rate) although if you actually did
get an offer it would be (1.1 times your normal rate, max).

If you are interested, please let me know so I can set up a 30 minute
telephone interview with a more senior recruiter who also knows very little
about this position. He only wants to make sure you don't sound like a moron
so he can forward your resume rewritten with C++/.NET/Python/Matlab/LAMP
screaming in Arial Black 32pt Bold centered at the top.

If you are interested, we will arrange a gauntlet interview with a minimum of
3 interviews before you get a clear idea of what job is actually on offer. You
will probably be rejected and the client will never call you to let you know.

------
crystaln
Why do recruiter emails bother people so much? Just ignore them.

Sometimes they give me a small piece of visibility into the job market. Mostly
they are a non-event.

Why let it bother you?

~~~
bostonaholic
It's the complete lack of care and attention some recruiters put into their
job that is annoying.

As programmers, we all take great pride in our work and would hope that others
do, too.

~~~
crystaln
If that's the case, why not be upset at something that matters. There is lots
of much more impactful incompetence to complain about. Bad recruiters are
largely harmless.

And seriously, I can't imagine a more elitist, entitled attitude than being
seriously upset at people trying to pay you lots of money to work. Do you know
what a privilege that is?

~~~
atgm
> I can't imagine a more elitist, entitled attitude than being seriously upset
> at people trying to pay you lots of money to work.

I think the recruiters that most people complain about aren't "trying to pay
you lots of money to work." The recruiters people complain about are just
looking for people and don't really care whether or not those people actually
fit the job description.

They may not even have a job they're recruiting for and may just be looking
for people to keep "on hand."

So rather than "paying lots of money," they cost money in terms of time spent
filtering them out and communicating with the duds.

In addition to that, the recruiters themselves aren't actually the ones paying
money... the companies are. I don't think anyone is getting upset about
companies offering jobs -- just shoddy recruiters who waste our time.

So saying that complaining about bad recruiters is an "elitist, entitled
attitude" seems to me like saying that people are elitist and entitled for not
liking Nigerian scammers... hey, they're offering you free money!

But they're not.

~~~
crystaln
Complaining about Nigerian scammers is also pretty stupid - both useless and
tiresome. Delete and move on.

------
yeukhon
Obviously I have very limited experience with jobs though wanted to share some
here. I am getting a few recruiter emails lately from various companies. Some
of them really do over-estimate me (I always tell them the truth though) and
some just don't mind and will continue the recruitment and interview process
with me. For example, this week someone tried to recruit me for a senior level
(from a famous company). I told him the truth; I am only an undergraduate
senior, I can't really call myself a senior level engineer. At most, above
junior level. The email, I am not sure if it was generic or not, but started
with "I'm impressed with your experience and work...". It could be just a
generic body - to make people like me excited about the email! From what I
understand, they usually just crawl through mailing list and Github-like
places. So to students out there, participate in OSS and OSS mailing list will
get you some attention. I promise.

I obviously don't mind someone getting me 30 recruitment emails every month.
But I guess when I reach that level of famous, of competence and successful, I
will look at them as spams. If I want to recruit someone that successful, I'd
meet that person in real life. Go to the conference, walk up to him and tell
him the offer.

~~~
johnward
I generally don't get past the recruiter for jobs I would be perfect for. then
for some reason recruiters always want me for something out of my league like
CTO.

------
bostonaholic
It's understandable that recruiters are playing a numbers game.

Imagine if recruiters were paid using the formula:

% of filled position salary / # of contacted recipients

This would encourage recruiters to contact only the best-fit(s) for the
position. While at the same time reducing the "spam" some of us receive on a
daily basis.

A win-win.

P.S. I understand it's nearly impossible to track the # of contacts.

------
georgemcbay
I get a lot of random recruiter pings, probably mostly because I don't bother
to do anything to proactively limit them (and I tend to use my real name on
forums, social networks, etc and will often post my real gmail address and
such).

But for me it doesn't seem like they are that big of a deal and the vast
majority of them I just completely ignore. If somebody emails me out of the
blue unprompted, I don't feel guilty about archiving their message away
without a response. And practically speaking, given the shotgun nature that
most of these emails come in on, the recruiter isn't even going to notice that
I didn't respond, let alone feel slighted by it.

Getting about an average of one easily-ignorable email per day trying to let
you know about an open job opportunity in your field is truly a high level
first world problem... one that a lot of people living in the first world in
other professions would likely be very happy to have.

------
fredophile
That article is missing a really key point. Being contacted by a recruiter is
not a job offer. It's an offer to begin the application process. People aren't
getting 30 job offers a month. They're getting offered the chance to submit 30
resumes, conduct 30 phone screens and finally 30 onsite interviews.

------
Bahamut
The recruiter emails are mostly awful. One of the worst was where a recruiter
emailed me three times about a position, each time getting more desperate and
ending with a title about how he will change my life.

On the flip side of things, a good recruiter did help me get my first job in
the tech industry, and I'm currently enjoying a great experience with another
recruiter who I met at several tech meetups in the area.

I keep a pretty low profile (excepting on github), and yet I get a few
attempts a day, whether via phone or email...personal or work, and my work
email isn't even publicly published as far as I'm aware. The spam has got to
end - it seems like these are low quality recruiters.

~~~
sssantosha
Were they towards the end of the month? :P

Most agency recruiters are fresh out of college, up against some hard quotas,
and super stressed. Turnover is very high.

------
trackerbri
I've been 'recruited' for positions where I was the hiring manager. They
must've seen a posting online since we never hired recruiters that I was aware
of. I'd expect they'd be embarrassed when that was pointed out to them along
with 'we're not contracted with you' but frankly two out of the three times
it's happened they then went on to tell me about how many great candidates
they had for me.

------
chancancode
My favourite part is in the comments, where the #1 recruiter on recruiter
spam[1] responds to the article:

> I think the bottom line is that recruiters tend to be very intelligent and
> multi-talented, and frankly, sometimes candidates get jealous.

No shit.

[1]: [http://www.recruiterspam.com/stats](http://www.recruiterspam.com/stats)

------
diziet
But no serious manager / founder will want to hire David Heinemeier Hansson.
DHH is way too ambitious to work for someone else -- he is not a good role for
a position even if he is extremely talented on paper.

------
plaguuuuuu
Oh... I think I could _probably_ psychologically handle 30 job offers in a
month if just one of them was from a company like Google :|

------
speeder
I wish that stuff happened to me... I only have been invited to a job once, or
something like that, I don't remember other attempts...

~~~
beat
What do you do? What technical skills do you have? Where do you have your
resume posted online?

SEO your resume (honestly, no making up stuff you can't really do), and you
can get lots of hits too.

------
sbntn
As soon as I changed my location from San Francisco back to Australia these
emails almost stopped.

------
MyNameIsMK
I lol'd hard.

