Good luck on the search! Particularly curious to hear your experience with recruiters; even though that industry should be really competitive at the moment with the great resignation and all, I've found they still feel kind of general and don't necessarily make great matches. But that certainly could just be my own limited experience with them, maybe the key is to find niche recruiters?
Not sure if you're interested in startups at all, but shameless plug: I recently made a startup jobs board[0], it tracks number of job posts each company has over time and ranks them so you can see how much each is growing.
For my own part, I've found that a lot of recruiters operate like used-car salespeople. They don't really know what they're selling or care who they're selling it to. They operate by relying on phone-sales skills and trying to control your information to get you where they can talk about this great chance to get in on the ground floor of this faced-paced mission-driven work environment with great benefits and unlimited PTO. While doing their best to avoid telling you the comp.
I've started refusing to take phonecalls from recruiters who cannot give me JD, comp, and remote-friendliness. This basic stuff seems to scare off about 80% of them.
It's crazy that we're living in the world of (almost) infinitely available information, big data etc. in 2022, but recruiters are still often secretive and shady.
For the general audience, let me drop some advice here that helped me during my job search:
- I knew what I was looking for (remote-friendly tech startups with their own product). I suggest you think this through as well.
- No Linkedin profile! Really, not needed unless want a corporate job. (Though I have a tiny and mostly neglected personal website which is appreciated by most companies.)
- Browse and actively follow dozens of job boards like the one in parent comment. DuckDuckGo is your friend. In a few days or weeks, you'll find out your 'taste' in terms of jobs that interest you and easily filter out mediocre offers.
- Draw boundaries and put your bar high. Know your desired compensation range and ask right away if not indicated. Reject take-home homework, leetcode interviews etc. if you don't like them. The interview process tells a lot about the company culture and you're also getting to know that company, not just the other way.
- Work on your resume! An investment that pays back like wonders. It also makes you much better prepared for interviews. There are some very useful books out there like "The Tech Resume Inside Out". Best $20 I've ever spent.
This way, you have total control in your job search and will have zero awkward HR phone calls. Though I admit that if you're looking for corporate jobs, a Linkedin profile might help. Also, if you're looking for MANGA etc. jobs, you'll need a totally different approach.
Shameless plug: I'm currently working for a no-code process automation tool startup called Process Street (https://www.process.st/), and we're hiring. :)
While I mostly do ignore recruiters that don't put all the information upfront, I think there might be a couple reasons why they do that:
- Incomplete information is provided purposefully to get you to the next step of the funnel which is a phone call
- They don't want competition to narrow down who their client might be
- Possibly they are trying to lowball potential candidates (has happened to me)
Or maybe... some of them are just simply incompetent. Looking both at my inbox and a several LinkedIn groups with jobs that I run, I do wonder how some of those opportunities are getting any replies.
On the bright side though I have interacted with some recruiters that really know what they're doing. It's not a big group but it's worth remembering who they are.
It's frustrating, the number of recruiters who don't provide the job description and compensation - even when directly asked for them.
I keep "Can you please send me the job description and pay rate, so I can let you know if I'm interested?" in a text file, so I can easily copy-paste it.
I also created a web page, to send a link to the most annoying recruiters (https://hellotechrecruiters.com/), but haven't used it - yet.
I'm using typesense (https://www.typesense.org), a really great open source alternative to algolia. I'm using their cloud offering, but you can self-host as well, it's awesome!
Not sure if you're interested in startups at all, but shameless plug: I recently made a startup jobs board[0], it tracks number of job posts each company has over time and ranks them so you can see how much each is growing.
[0] https://www.coolstartupjobs.com