

Show HN: Form I send all recruiters to - hippich
https://e.l1t3.com/pavelkaroukin

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davidu
I've signed offer letters and hired about 300 people in the last 5 years, and
I still consider myself chief recruiter...

Two comments:

1) This is obnoxious in the sense that it's placing a bar that other
candidates don't, and it's lacking context I'd prefer to provide over a phone
call. For instance, equity at our company is typically quite different than
equity at other companies. Not all equity is created equal, and our cap table
is very clean.

2) For the right candidate, I'd still make a best effort to fill it out
despite the aforementioned comment.

To me the most broken part of recruiting is the third-party recruiting
process, and yet, we still use them, because they do occasionally bring in
great candidates we would otherwise miss.

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jimmydddd
@davidu: I have friends who apply to companies through the company recruiting
Web sites. Even when they are great fits for a position, and it would be
better to discuss the matter, they are still forced to fill out numerous
fields without any "context." So, if nothing else, maybe forms like this will
make companies rethink their own recruiting Web pages.

~~~
davidu
I do not disagree w/ you.

I do 99% of my recruiting with a hand-written email from an email I find on
linkedin, github, or a personal webpage.

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dasboth
Love the idea and I'm interested to see if anyone bothers. As you say, if the
recruiter cares and isn't playing the numbers game, it's not a huge task for
them to go through for a good enough candidate. You'll likely get few
responses but from the recruiters who you want to be in touch with.

~~~
hippich
Exactly, and I always hate to simply not respond to email, because it is
always a possibility, that this particular email will lead to a better job.

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joshstrange
While I doubt any recruiter will ever take the time to fill this out I love
the idea. That said it would take a miracle before I would work with a third
party recruiter again and I would never send something like this to recruiters
that work for the company in question. In my experience they have been very
good at their jobs, third party..... Not so much. I've had third party
recruiters make me jump through hoops (tests that prove nothing), try (and
fail) to hide the name of the company, harass my references, and be completely
useless.

~~~
fivedogit
I landed 2 solutions (sales) engineering jobs in NYC with the help of 2
different 3rd party recruiters and they were excellent. No hoops, no extra BS.
They really helped me zero in on the positions that fit with my goals and
experience, so I wasn't wasting time.

Coding positions might be a whole different ballgame, though. I probably
wouldn't have much patience for coding tests with a recruiter which
undoubtedly makes the process harder for all 3 parties.

~~~
joshstrange
I'm sure recruiter usefulness does vary on a per-profession basis. As for
coding tests, I am fine with problems that prove that you can work with a
language and/or prove basic programming/problem solving skills. In fact I love
them, I spend a good bit of time on Project Euler and the like (Code kata and
stuff like that). My issue is with tests that really are seeing if you can
execute code in your head:

Given the following code snippet what is it's output:

//IMAGE OF CODE

A) 1

B) 2

C) false

D) null

These are stupid questions IMHO, in fact the last test I had to take like this
I could have typed up each code example and run the code in the time I was
given on each question. Test me on my problem solving but don't ask me to boot
up an interpreter in my head that skill is NEVER needed in your day to day
life as a coder. (I also take issue with tests that ask about boilerplate or
stuff handled by the IDE/environment). We live in a world where a massive
amount of information (I'd argue even more so when you look at just
programming) is just a google away. Don't ask me to memorize docs that I can
lookup in seconds, it's just not a skill that's really needed. I prefer "learn
as you go" over "memorize this book". Now when it comes to programming
concepts I might budge a little but not much.

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michaelochurch
Is the "Foosball table" item a negative or positive?

~~~
hippich
for me - positive :) i like to foose (although I am not good at it)

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mpeg
A good recruiter is worth its weight in gold, I think this is useless against
recruiters who are just spamming; because it's a numbers game for them, and
they don't have the time to be filling forms when there's money to be made
elsewhere.

And a good recruiter might find it a bit pretentious. I'd rather take the spam
than risk my career.

~~~
hippich
If I see email from recruiter worth a following up - I never risk it. But this
is rarity, more often you get boilerplate emails. But who knows, may be one
particular recruiter with boilerplate email is actually care.

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vishalzone2002
this should rather be used by recruiters to generate an email template that
will definitely get more attention and higher response rate...

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buro9
Does the form represent the priority of concerns you have about a position?

i.e. does the compensation and perks come before technologies and management?

~~~
hippich
May be slightly, but more importantly, all these fields required - i.e. this
information what I consider most important about opportunity and usually takes
quite awhile to find out from my experience. So I offload it to recruiter to
do it.

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whiskykilo
I like this idea a lot, do you have an auto response set up in your email or
manually send it to them?

~~~
hippich
In my form right now - no. But it is possible to configure emails sent to
recruiter too. Thanks for idea!

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opless
How many recruiters jump through this particular hoop?

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hippich
So far - 0, but i just started responding with link to this form. But if
someone really care about position/company they are working for, it shouldn't
be hard to get answers to questions.

I think it is better than just not responding to recruiter email or mark it as
spam. There is always a chance.

~~~
pkaye
A vast number of recruiters are not in-house recruiters so they will never
have most of this information anyway.

~~~
hippich
And this is perfectly fine. Better noise-to-signal ratio.

~~~
laxatives
Probably great specificity, but close to zero sensitivity. I guess thats fine
if you have no intention of changing jobs though.

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captn3m0
What is the green lock at the bottom for?

~~~
hippich
instead of captcha - [https://hashcash.io/](https://hashcash.io/)

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Emilmikhailov
Well Done!

