

What It's Like to be Recruited - ghempton
http://codebrief.com/2011/06/what-its-like-to-be-recruited/

======
maxdemarzi
"As I write this, all in all I have received: 266 emails and 96 voicemails.
This roughly equates to 12.7 emails and 4.3 voicemails per workday."

I just went through this myself and it was nuts. The phone rang from 8 am - 6
pm almost every 30 minutes for a week when I updated my resume on monster. My
skills are back-end Ruby and SQL, both seemed to be high in demand in Chicago
last month. I didn't capture detailed notes like you, but I wish I had.

"For the first week, I actually answered all incoming calls, but this
eventually became unmanageable. I used the opportunity to hear them out and
also sometimes give them a reverse pitch on GroupTalent for feedback."

Ha! I did the same pitching my start-up Vouched ( <http://getvouched.com> )
and doing impromptu Lean Startup style customer interviews. There is quite a
range of talent and process in the recruitment industry. Some are real
professionals, others are just playing on volume. I spoke to one recruiter who
makes around 70 calls a day to get 3 possible candidates. The reasonable ones
called 20 people at most and actually tried to develop relationships instead
of dialing for dollars.

It's an interesting space, or as Charlie O'Donnell put it... a bad
neighborhood. [http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2011/3/21/five-
reason...](http://www.thisisgoingtobebig.com/blog/2011/3/21/five-reasons-why-
the-job-space-is-a-bad-neighborhood.html)

Best of luck to you.

~~~
Harkins
Ruby has been in ridiculous demand in Chicago for at least a year. I blame
Groupon. :) They've hired big chunks of three or four consulting shops and are
building their own internal teams.

One of the Obtiva owners (consulting shop) wrote:
[http://nuts.redsquirrel.com/post/2680658687/chicagos-ruby-
de...](http://nuts.redsquirrel.com/post/2680658687/chicagos-ruby-developer-
crisis)

~~~
ericb
In Boston, it is absurd for Rails developers also.

It doesn't help call volume-wise that "Quantronix" seems to be outsourcing
calls to india and calling about positions in Texas regardless of my stated
Boston-only preference.

------
potatolicious
I'm in the recruitment process right now, the signal-to-noise ratio with
recruiters is so low that I've basically stopped paying attention unless they
are an internal recruiter.

Is it just me, or is it far more productive to simply make it known to your
network that you're looking, and let companies come to you? That's what I'm
doing this time and it seems to be working quite well.

For one thing, my friends won't refer me to bullshit positions, and more often
than not I'd already know someone working there, or formerly worked there, who
can give me some inside scoop about the work environment and any gotchas.

I honestly can't imagine trying to find my way through the meat market that is
Dice and Monster.

~~~
beamso
I'm currently unemployed.

I would say that some recruiters are great, just like some internal recruiters
are poor. The worst experience I've had this round of interviewing has been
with an internal recruiter, where there was both no personality fit between me
and the managers/recruiters and the job was not what they had advertised.

I alerted my network that I was looking for work before I resigned. I didn't
get an attractive offer through my network so I have to look through ads on
various job boards.

By replying to those ads with applications I eventually got interviews or
recruiters calling me back about positions that they had not advertised yet.

You are correct in that your friends won't recommend you to a place where they
aren't enjoying working or where they don't think you'll enjoy working.

------
supercanuck
I'm curious as to how much overlap there is in those Emails and Voicemails. My
experience is that 10-15 Recruiters will all be recruiting for the same
position and they monitor for new resumes and blast them with automated emails
the minute you post your profile.

------
dminor
> Additionally, and importantly, I had indicated that I would be willing to
> relocate.

IME recruiters pay absolutely no attention to this field.

~~~
dkarl
That agrees with my experience as well. The don't know or seem to care where I
live. I had a company arrange a call with me and at the end of the call
finally ask me if I was willing to relocate. I had to (silently) shake my head
at that, because my address was right there on my resume. I lived half a mile
from their office.

------
sosuke
"Seeking freelance or short term contract iPhone and Android development
positions."

That's a dream guy for so many emails I get daily and I'm not even looking for
work. From my perspective it looks like everyone wants to hire someone for a 6
month contract in a city nearby (which in Texas seems to mean 3 hours is
nearby) for a company whose name they won't disclose. If he said he wanted
full time employment and relocation reimbursement I think the number would
have been much smaller.

Edit: looks like I didn't read closely enough and I ended up venting rather
than seeing that this was a research and discovery project and not an after
thought while looking for a job

~~~
ghempton
The objective meant little: majority of the positions were for contract to
hire and full-time.

------
synnik
My biggest problem with recruiters comes to my SharePoint skills. I get a ton
of calls, but they don't seem to understand, "No, I don't want a SharePoint
job. I dislike it intensely."

~~~
100k
Ugh. I worked at Stellent (now part of Oracle) after they acquired a company I
worked for. I don't have their product Universal Content Manager on my resume,
but I constantly get emails about UCM administrator positions in BFE.

I've de-emphasized Stellent on my resume but sometimes I think about deleting
it entirely.

------
100k
I posted some numbers last week from the viewpoint of a passive candidate (my
resume is on the internet and in innumerable recruiting company databases, but
I do not have a Monster, Dice, etc profile):

[http://www.recursion.org/2011/5/21/recruiting-inquiries-
per-...](http://www.recursion.org/2011/5/21/recruiting-inquiries-per-quarter)

For me, I got more enquiries in 2010 than 2011 so far, but I didn't keep track
of LinkedIn requests, which could skew the numbers.

Most enquiries are very keyword spray-and-pray spam but I occasionally get a
"smart" recruiter who will look me up on GitHub or Stack Overflow. The best
one was a startup co-founder who evidentially spent considerable time reading
up on me, and referenced something from a talk I gave.

------
jamii
I've had much better luck with the 'Hiring Freelancers?' threads here than
with any job board or recruiter service. For one thing it seems like people
actually read posts rather than just looking for keywords.

------
rdoherty
"My profile on StackOverflow careers was viewed by employers a whopping 1 time
and had 3 search hits."

I've had similar experience with StackOverflow Careers. Even though my skills
listed and location are in the top 5 for each, I have 31 views of my profile
and 6 inquiries. And I've been on the site for over 6 months.

I get the feeling that while SO Careers has the right idea it's really a
matter of where the recruiters are.

~~~
blatherard
My company advertises on Stack Overflow and have had very interesting results.
We get very low volume, something on the order of 1 to 3 responses per
posting. However, the quality of these applicants is very high, which is great
because we are not looking for commodity programmers.

I think SO Careers is currently a sort of high-end site for programming jobs,
and Monster is a meat market.

~~~
mattm
As someone who also has his CV up on SO Careers, this is interesting to see
that it is designed like that. I was also concerned about the very low number
of views and times appearing in search results.

------
dennisgorelik
Can anyone here share some ideas about how all that recruiting activity can be
automated?

It is already partially automated (keywords search), but that's obviously not
enough.

Better matching algorithms are needed, so neither job seekers nor recruiters
would be overloaded with poor matches.

Anyone?

~~~
danarkind
Hi,

Dan Arkind from JobScore here. We have spent some time on this. Check out our
stuff at www.jobscore.com or holler if you have more specific questions -
dan@jobscore.com

The crux of what we do is a parse and clean pattern with a relatively
straightforward resume fit scoring (or matching if you prefer, tomato,
tomatoe).

You can enter weighted keyword terms (useful), but we also FILTER based on
location, experience level (employers, job titles) and education level
(schools, degrees). We've found this does a decent job of "wheat from the
chaff" separation when you receive a lot of job applications.

The reality when you are hiring is that you definitely want to _actually read_
and review ~ top 25% of inbound applications.

Finding matches in larger data sets (100M+ LinkedIn profiles) is obviously
harder... but filtering one level down in structured data (degrees in
education, job titles in employment) makes matches relatively precise.

There's a non-trivial challenge in normalizing job title information
(javascript ninja vs. front end software engineer vs. awesome developer!) and
degrees that could make matching more precise, but we aren't aware of anyone
who has really taken this on (bueler?)

Variables that aren't typically captured (like salary) are really strong
indicators of a match as well...

LinkedIn's (interesting) secret sauce here is relationship metadata (who you
know) as a filter. LinkedIn also captures reputation metadata and the folks
over at www.honestly.com are doubling down on this. We have an (undisclosed)
secret sauce angle to matching at scale... but we'll need a heck of a lot more
data for that to really matter...

In general though, you don't want or need an exact match (who you are going to
hire), you just want what's close (who should I call).

Give jobscore a whirl & see if you have any additional input!

------
sriramk
I'm going through a similar experience. I haven't posted my resume anywhere
and I'm not even really 'looking' right now. But I've got a ton of emails from
people who've seen my tweet on leaving MSFT or better, from a post on HN about
it.

------
MatthewB
Off topic but I love the link design used on his site.

------
georgieporgie
I would love to know how many job postings and recruiter calls there are per
actual job. I seem to see a number of suspiciously similar job descriptions
anytime I look.

I've had to completely obliterate sections of my resume because keyword-
searching recruiters would glom onto them like flies on a turd.

Oh, and one tip: never, _ever_ go to a recruiters office because they "might
have some positions for you". I relented and did this _once_. It's a
phenomenal waste of time where they try to pump you for information and
contacts.

