I also recommend a response to every recruiter, but you don't need to explain your privilege, you don't need to suck up to them, and you don't need to justify your actions.
"Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
> "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.
One of the most common reasons is simply that they don't want you to go direct to the company in question and bypass their commission. If they give you too much, it is very easy to do and many companies will recruit directly and the recruiter would have no legal basis to do anything about that.
On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
> it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them
Up to a point. They get a fraction of the marginal increase in salary, and they’d much sooner “close the sale” than risking having someone else fill the job to try and get an extra 500$ commission.
It’s the same story with real estate agents: selling your house for an extra 20k might be a lot to you but to the agent it’s an extra 400$ in commission (exact percentage varies). In other words, it’s hardly worth risking the seller losing interest or working an extra 2–3 weeks for so little.
My point exactly. The seller’s (or job seeker’s) upside is much higher than the agent’s, and so the agent won’t try and get you a higher price/salary if it means delaying the sale.
This works if you have an open house/2-5 days dedicated to showings and a set time where offers are allowed (which is at the end of that showing period). However, even now, houses need to be appraised by the bank for the buyer to get the loan for the house, and many people aren’t ready to get in a bidding war only to then need to come out-of-pocket an extra $10k because they bid too much and the bank appraised it that much below the offer amount.
Exactly. When I sold my house a few months ago I found a good agent that helped me price correctly and we sold the same weekend. Made sure it went to someone that actually needed a house and not some investor looking to flip. Still came in over asking.
Assuming it is an active real estate with lots of transactions, yes, the agent is absolutely more motivated to close the deal and move on to another deal than to get the highest commission possible on a particular deal. The situation is similar with recruiters. It is important to understand these motivations to correctly interpret what you are hearing from the agents/realtors.
I used to work as a waiter when I was in my first summer out of high school. The calculus was similar there. When it was busy the tables turned as soon as the person got up, so I would often not emphasize dessert. The added $15 on the check from dessert increased my tip a couple dollars, but regular desserts could cause me to lose 1-2 full turns of my section over the course of the evening, so with a four table section of everyone for dessert, I might lose 8 tables total, and if the average tip was $20, I’d lose $160 minus the extra $16 in tip gained from everyone having dessert. Point is, I much preferred quick turns over small per capita increases in per table tips.
In non rush times though where tables didn’t get filled when people left, it made a lot more sense to play up dessert.
I’ve never encountered a recruiter who would even entertain that idea. They loved “cookie cutter” deals and hated this kind of unusual arrangements for the same reason that they can’t understand anything else than keywords.
> On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
This isn't my experience at all, having worked with recruiters both as a hirer and hiree. Recruiters typically are looking to close as many positions as possible, making money on volume. Their incentives are to spend as little time as they can getting candidates just enough so they say yes.
They typically are paid a percentage of a candidates first year salary. At first glance this might seem to mean they're motivated to get you as much as possible. In reality it means that the effort to get an extra $20k, which might make a big difference for the candidate, only results in an extra e.g. $2000 for them. They're not going to spend time on that that could be spent on closing another candidate, and getting another full commission, if they think the candidate will accept either way.
The money a recruiter is paid also often comes from the same budget a potential signing bonus would. The fact that they take 10% of the first year salary makes companies less forthcoming with extra money for the candidate.
A lot of the recruiters have different businesses. Some may be recruiting for direct hire but alot of them retain them as employees as they contract for six months or however long...sometimes years..for an hourly rate. They pocket the difference over what is paid to the engineer.
I want them to understand that I need to know up-front if the position is interesting enough to be worth investing my time in at all. I could sacrifice my time and energy to assuage their fears, but every time I've done that in the past ten years there has been zero return on investment.
A reader might, at this point, optimistically point out that the next recruiter could be different. This reader would be correct. That could indeed be the case! Yet every time I wind up deciding to try the optimistic approach I wind up on a phonecall in which I learn that the company isn't someone I want to work for, the JD isn't one I actually want to work on, the comp isn't nearly enough, or some combination thereof. Generally the comp is so far off it has no change to even be negotiated to something I would consider. Often they try to sell me on a 40%-60% pay cut, because a slice of that is worth a lot to them (it's happened twice this month).
At this point I'm quite tired of paying optimism's price to assuage the fears of recruiters. The kindness is not returned. I understand others might choose differently.
But isn't that the advantage of the approach in the OP? It shows some more effort and good faith to the recruiter, without actually requiring any additional effort or time on your end.
9 times out of 10 the job description you get from the recruiter is a lazy cut-and-paste from the actual company's input.
It's never anonymized and simply pasting it into Google will almost always get you a lead on the hiring company.
Another lead is if they give you the company location. There is only one company on the planet, for example, that has R&D offices in both Mossvile and Aurora, Illinois.
Also 9 times out of 10 its a bait and switch for a different company. Whenever I've worked with these recruiters they always "see whats a good fit" with my resume and its never the company that was in the job description.
> it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
Unlikely. Its way better for the recruiter to focus on the quantity of hires rather than trying to increase the salaries of a smaller number of them. It takes way more work and makes them less money to help increase your salary by 20% than just finding another role and hire.
>On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's in the recruiters best interest to maximize their throughput in placing candidates, and they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
> they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
No, the company would pay you your salary and keep the commission itself, it would not have given you that commission simply because you went directly with them.
I think the one time I responded to a recruiter and went through the process was because they told me the company up front. Unless its an internal recruiter, I never get that info. I was interested in the company and I figured they could help speed me through the process (which I believe was true). I didn't take the job but I appreciated this person not BSing me.
> On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's in their interest, yes - but it's not worth more than closing a deal quickly.
They generally make more money by seating 3 hires at new companies for 100k than they do seating 1 hire for 300k.
Because of the downside risk of possibly losing a deal, and further - because they're paid over time as an employee remains with a company, it's much more beneficial to place many people quickly than it is to place a few people for more money.
that all depends on the contract setup with the company and recruiter. i've worked at places that had exclusivity contracts with recruiters where we wouldn't even post the positions in hr until the contract expired.
>I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
Well, that's not a problem - the whole point of this reply template is to filter out the useless cold-calling spam without wasting time in interviews, so that 80-90% of recruiters going silent is exactly what you want. The only reason why you respond at all is to give a chance to the 10-20% of serious offers.
That hasn't been my experience. I always get the salary range, equity package, and what stage/growth the company is at currently and where they want to take things. All in the first 30 minute call.
I've tried a fair number of those calls. You might be surprised by how many recruiters don't really have salary range or meaningful equity details (preferences, shares outstanding, etc.) but really want me to be excited for the great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing business.
To my eyes, thirty minutes is a pretty expensive way to find out if a position is in line with my comp and the company one I want to work for. It could just as easily be handled in thirty seconds.
Last month I had a quick 20-minute call with a recruiter who couldn't tell me anything about the company or the position that I hadn't found in thirty seconds of searching. This is not an unusual experience, unfortunately. The only explanation for that call I can find is that the recruiter sincerely expected to impress me with a phone sales approach.
If they are attempting unsolicited headhunting - that is, not affiliated with the company - they almost certainly don't know the expected compensation.
They go silent, or they also give a canned response about being competitive in the market when it comes to comp (without naming a number).
If they do name a number and you reply it's too low, they again go into a canned response of "we're willing to reach (++x) for the right candidate", which is just as much bullshit as before. You'll complete an interview cycle and get the lowball offer of (original x).
TLDR they'll lie about comp and never completely answer you.
Sometimes I say something like "I'm glad to hear you're competitive! I'm currently being offered $REAL_BIG_COMPANY_NUMBER, so I look forward to our conversation." Generally this ends the conversation.
I don't like to ignore recruiters, but it's hard to answer them correctly. I'm always looking for a nice way to articulate "I'm comfortable with my current job, but interested in exploring whether I'm being compensated fairly. I don't want to slam any doors. But, I am also not up for the hazing session of grinding leetcode, filling out online forms, doing take-home tests, phone screens, and 5 rounds of interviews, just to find out at the end of it all what my current market value is."
Late to comment, but basically this is why I just ignore it all unfortunately.
I'm on a subreddit that talks about my profession and basically all interview processes are now broken in my industry. A lot of just nonsense, waste of time stuff. You hire the professional prep companies so you know the right buzzwords to say and how to show you follow the "framework", but almost nothing from the interview actually really determines how well you'll do day to day.
Instead of going to an interview, they should just call my dev team and scrum master and ask how things run with me and use their feedback as the evaluation.
It's amazing how these basic questions are often like kryptonite to these people.
Protip: If you want senior people to respond, you should probably include that information up front.
I've done several interviews at places only to get to the stage we're talking money and suddenly it becomes clear they were expecting to pay about a third to half of what I currently make for someone in a senior position. Each time I think it could genuinely save a lot of time and effort (and thus money) by just being up front about that stuff.
I've started getting very firm with them. I respond to each email with "no thank you, also stop contacting me, also here's the last person I asked to stop contacting me, but who didn't." We'll see how long it works, if at all, but after 3 separate Amazon recruiters contacted me last month I was fed up.
I replied to a first follow up (~'I don't think I'm a good fit', nevermind anything else) this morning as it happens. Almost always ignore; took one as far as interview a few years ago, which I never heard back from (no result/feedback) until a week or so ago! But I might make that a policy, if they 'just check in' after the first email then may as well try to head it off there I suppose.
"Hi, thanks for the message. I would appreciate as much detail as you can via message. Interested in location, compensation, and what specific problems they need help solving. Thanks!"
I don't take a call unless the work description is specific enough. I don't want to work on your "backend". If asked, I tell them my comp expectation is min +50k over what I currently make. And I sure as hell am not moving to the bay area.
Yep, at least tell me who your recruiting for. I have a list of companies I don’t care to work for, so let’s not waist time on those.
A number of recruiters are also just bad at their job. I worked as a .Net developer 12 years ago, but most recruiters apparently aren’t smart enough to figure out that not only is my knowledge horrible out of date, it might also not interest me anymore.
This is what I'm doing so far. I typically answer stating how I would like to work and hint my conditions and let them know that I'm happy to follow up if they see a fit.
Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest.
I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy.
But the real secret sauce is referrals. Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks so I don't have to bug my network.
Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time
Or share your data.
I made a throwaway, but not obnoxious email on my domain just for recruiters a few years ago, so I could try tracking who I was talking to.
Via three consecutive third-party recruiters I started getting cold calls and e-mails from recruiters I’d never contacted, never met, or never before engaged with from agencies that weren’t the ones I spoke to or sent a CV to. Soon I started getting other completely irrelevant email. Then the robocalls came. I later found that email address among five different data leak sources.
Just so happened to be a different popular recruiting company that has “Cyber” in the name.
A scenario I hadn't thought about, that you might want to be aware of: I had to call 911 recently. I talked to the dispatcher, and hung up. A few minutes later they called me back to give me instructions. The call showed up as a regular Los Angeles 323 area code number. In fact, it was flagged by my phone as spam.
It made me wonder whether reverse 911[1] calls, which are used to warn about hazmat situations, fire evacuations, and other public safety issues, show up similarly.
I quite honestly think that general direct-dial telephony is only a few years from catastrophic collapse, not for technical reasons, but because people will simply defect from the system.
There are too many nuisance calls, there are too many people (and businesses) falling for scams, and there seems to be nothing telcos or governments are willing to do about it.
It's pretty much the same thing that's happened to Usenet and Email (and is now happening to the Web as well). John Gilmore's lament about crackdowns on open email relays is heartfelt, but ultimately naive. If I'm remembering correctly (and I'm probably not), it ran something like: We created a way for anyone anywhere in the world to talk to anyone else, and it wasn't an accident. The problem is of course, bad actors, and lowering costs means enabling vastly more bad actors.
Figuring out how to impose highly asymmetric costs --- and not necessarily financial ones --- on unwanted communication attempts, will win this.
The technical problem is reasonably straightforward. Generating widespread adoption is the real challenge, IMO.
I haven't received any robocall, cold sales attempt or spam SMS in years. I'm also EU based, maybe it's another side effect of non-existant privacy laws in US?
- The US remains relatively high income / high wealth. Especially among the more vulnerable senior population.
- The regulatory environment in the US hasn't been successful, or much interested from appearances, in taking on spam.
- Uniform language. Virtually the entire country speaks a single language, English. That's roughly 300 million targets (minor children generally wouldn't count). The largest single European nationality would be Germany, with a total population of 84 million. It's not even possible to necessarily presume an entire country speaks one language, as with Switzerland. And though computer-generated calls are increasing in prevalence, most still use human speakers.
Effectively, it's opportunity, mechanism, and logistics.
But as costs fall and voice-processing (both comprehension and realtime generation) improve, I'd suggest increasing your vigilence around telephone hygiene.
My understanding, from the last time I looked into this, is that the US does have decently aggressive laws against spamming people without offering them ways to opt out and some prior relationship, but a bunch of the spam originates in places outside the US and its immediate allies, so shutting it down becomes nontrivial.
I have, in fact, gotten periodic spam calls, though only once or twice an SMS - usually trying to solicit me about my car's insurance policy having issues (I do not own a car).
I sort of wish I could convince my Android phone to treat all calls to my direct number from anyone but GV as spam, because I have never given that number to anyone.
I’m also in the EU and received a spam SMS not even five minutes ago. I get maybe one a year, so your point stands. Cold sales attempts used to be more frequent, but after blocking a handful of numbers they stopped.
I hadn't really thought about this before, but your comment made me realize the costs that used to be associated with spam calls in the past.
Monetary or social costs were both asymmetrically in favor of the receiver because a long-distance call was expensive and a local spam call would eventually incur a high social cost (either in the innocent case of teenage prank calls being figured out by parents or the less innocent cases where the police or phone company might need to trace the source).
I don’t know anyone that isn’t my parents age that has a landline anymore so this scenario already wouldn’t work with my friends, family or neighbours. My phone isn’t directly tied to my address in any way that might be useful for emergency services.
A true landline, very few people. But setting up a cheap VOIP line is not very expensive on a month-to-month basis, and it's useful to have a phone number that you can give to any person or business that can't bother you at work. We have poor cell service at my house, so the VOIP line is my preference for most calls at home.
Sure, that's why I said that mine isn't. I know that's not the case for everyone, but it is for me and many people I know, at least. Its obviously not the case for everyone, many people will have a phone tied to an address, but many people also don't. My phone is tied to me, but whether or not the provider has an address depends on if I have a bill phone or not (many people here do not).
I also wonder EU countries, including Sweden, would actually allow telecom providers to share that information with other parties such as emergency services or whether that would be against data protection laws.
Besides, prior to the pandemic, there was also a high likelihood that I wouldn't be at home, if you called me on a random day at a random time, so even if my phone were tied to my address, it wouldn't be a good idea for emergency services to rely on that.
The one time my neighbors called for help (their car wouldn't start and they needed to go to urgent care), they txt'ed first, then called. Though I would have picked up when they called (and it would have gotten through my do not disturb settings) because their number is in my contacts.
Not saying that your neighbor would call you, but that the emergency services would call you on your neighbours behalf (and it will not be from a number you recognize).
I've never heard of that happening, but yeah, if the neighbor calls 911, and then EMS calls me for some reason, I'm not going to answer since 99% of the time it's a spammer.
I have lost track of how many times I have told people: just because you hear a phone ringing on your end, doesn't mean it's ringing on my end. (Verizon US, and yes, you as a caller will hear ringing while my phone sits silent.) Leave a voicemail. It can be short, it can be almost devoid of meaning, but if you send it, I will at least know that you called. If you don't? No record at all. I was out of range, you left nothing to be tracked by...
When I set up a contact, I change the ringtone for them. Then, I ignore calls from non-contacts, which are currently dominated by offers of help with my non-existent student loans (it used to be the warranty on my 20 year old car).
99% of the phone calls I get from unknown numbers are some combination of scam/robo/or just immediate hang up. The only exceptions tend to be businesses responding to my initial contact (eg, trying to get a plumber out to my house), in which case I will answer unknown numbers for a day or two until we connect. Otherwise nope.
This is a US mobile number that I've ported from carrier to carrier since the mid-00s. Haven't been particularly careful about where I use the number, which is probably how it got this bad.
I think they're just enumerating the entire address space, rather than buying your phone number from somewhere. But I guess I have no evidence to prove this; I have given my phone number to companies, and I get a ton of spam calls.
I think they're just enumerating the entire address space
Even when you consider most calls now for SIP/VoIP platforms (which is where a lot of these scammers get their DID/phone numbers from) are charging fractions of a cent for outbound calls, enumerating and then dialing entire NPA spaces gets prohibitively expensive after even five minutes of dialing waiting for someone to pick up, even for the most dedicated of scam call centers.
Doesn't mean they aren't dialing randomly to see who picks up, just I doubt they're dialing entire phone number spaces wholesale.
What can be observed going on is these scammers quite literally trade lists of leaked phone numbers and email addresses and they actively keep track of who responds, and who falls for their scam before sharing the list with others.
Jim Browning (a popular youtube scambaiter and infosec pro) has videos where you can watch it happening with your own eyes.
My partner and I have adjacent phone numbers (x and x+1). /Occasionally/ we get sequential spam calls, where my phone goes off immediately after she hangs up. But not super often. Though one can shuffle before calling everything, just as easily.
I have a nice collection of "throwaway" phone numbers for all kinds of reasons, while one of them is dedicated to job hunting, I don't think merely having it would have stopped this agency from sharing my CV across to whomever they shared it with, or stopped whatever leak occurred for said email address to end up in so many collections of leaked data.
That was the reason: to understand where my data was leaking from, not to duck recruiter calls.
I've more than once asked a cold-call recruiter how they got my number where the answer has been a rather candid, "there are markets for such information".
Kinda makes me regret the few years my LinkedIn profile had my phone number public, but I do wonder how successful these questionable personal data marketplaces are. I certainly haven't had a conversation get beyond "this is spam".
Check out http://intelx.io, depending on your risk tolerances, putting your email and phone number in yet another search bar may not be in the cards. If you can swallow it though, depending if (1) anything you care about has been leaked at all and (2) anything you care about being leaked has been indexed by this site...the results may be illuminating. Or nothing at all.
Interesting resource nonetheless that supplements my day-to-day line of Devsecops.
This site and a few other OSINT tools was how I discovered who 'sold out' my CV to some of the questionable 'recruiting agencies'.
I legally changed my name two years ago and I still get recruiting emails addressed to my old name. It hasn't been on LinkedIn for equally as long, so I can only anticipate that my data was sold and my old name is cached in some database.
Former recruiter here. You are spot-on about referrals, and having an insider advocating for you or just their willingness to make the recommendation starts things off at a great spot.
Here's where I disagree. You haven't doubled your salary BECAUSE of your policy of not working with recruiters, but rather DESPITE this policy.
Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise, especially at the higher levels. Exec roles are often handled by retained recruiting firms and aren't as well publicized as entry level and junior roles. So just saying "I will never work with a third party recruiter" can certainly be your policy, and you may save yourself a fair amount of time by sticking with it, but that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)
The reasons that there are so many incompetent recruiters are many, but a few are:
- low cost: companies hire entry level recruiters and pay them next to nothing in guaranteed compensation (mostly commission-based). The good ones will make the company a lot of money, and the bad ones can't afford to stay in the industry because they aren't making enough in commission - so they 'go away'.
- low skill: the skills required to be a good recruiter aren't typically taught in school, so they aren't coming out of college with a strong foundation. They need to learn and be successful quickly (because it's commission-based)
Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise
and
that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)
Are readers supposed to read this as a suggestion that missing out is synonymous with losing out? I kind of take exception to these phrases because it strips a lot of agency out of otherwise exceptional people who are more than capable of navigating their careers to where they want them to be, maybe not necessarily where you as a recruiter think they should be.
Seems to me the market is very strong for employees and those with in demand skills and experience to back them up are probably missing out on job x but probably aren’t losing out by any equal measure-all other considerations being equal. One of the most common refrains I've been hearing right here on HackerNews in response to the 'Great Resignation' isn't that people are leaving the workforce, they're just finally leaving jobs they've been wanting to anyway and taking their labor elsewhere.
So
That said, what does it really matter if someone decides they want more autonomy in who they decide to interview with? Shouldn’t we be encouraging more of this?
Especially given some of the fees that come with hiring through a recruiter?
I don't think missing out and losing out are synonymous. I'm simply stating that if you decide to ignore any subset of potential opportunities solely due to the source, you are limiting your exposure to possibilities.
For example, if you don't have a LinkedIn profile, you will probably get far less incoming inquiries from hiring entities (external/internal recruiters, hiring managers, etc.). That's a decision many people make.
Everyone has autonomy in who they interview with - I'm not sure where that comment is coming from.
This isn't about autonomy or interviews. It's about the ability to say "yes" or "no" to additional information about opportunities. Nothing more.
EDIT: To address the Great Resignation thing, agreed there as well. I'm a resume writer/career advisor now and my business has been brisk. Lots of clients are changing industries to find more impactful work, better working conditions, etc. Obviously if someone IS leaving the workforce they aren't calling me to write their resume, but I'm seeing a lot of activity from people looking to find work they "feel better" about in one way or another.
As far as I can see, the only thing outsourced recruiters provide is blame-shifting. They're not better at judging candidates. They're not better at finding candidates. They're almost certainly worse at understanding what the company needs than the company, and worse at understanding what the candidate has to offer than the candidate.
But, if the company hires a few people they're unhappy with through a recruiter (which is bound to happen from random chance no matter how they hire), they have someone to blame. They can switch to another recruiter, and assure their further-ups that the problem has been addressed.
There are many corporate roles that are mostly about providing blame-shifting opportunities, but outsourced recruiting is an unusually pure one. Along with "networking"-logrolling, it's one of the things which I really can't stand about working in software development, and on darker days they makes me wonder if I shouldn't go be a hermit in a cabin in the woods or something instead.
Does this blame shifting really happen though? I've never seen recruiters get blamed for a bad hire. I've seen them get blamed for sending people that fail at the first interview though.
A bad hire isn't on a recruiter unless they are basically lying to the employer about the hire's credentials or background, and even then it's the employer's job to vet what is being said.
Companies are stupid. Recruiters talk them into bad hires all the time, then there candidate gets a job, experience, and they get to replace them the following year, placing another person with the original company and moving the other candidate to the next.
That's assuming the employer has infinite time and resources to interview and vet candidates. They don't, they are overwhelmed, and it's supposedly the recruiters job to make it easier, yet most seem completely clueless and useless.
I said bad "hire", not bad "interview" - this was by design. If a company makes a bad hire, it's not (generally) because the candidate was presented, but rather a flaw in their interview and vetting process. The "how" of the candidate appearing is mostly irrelevant at that point.
I’ve only seen the blame shifting work at another layer: HR dept telling us that they made their best by engaging a recruiting firm, they can do us a favor by finding other recruiters, but it’s not on them if all the candidates we get sent are mismatched.
I read it as a fairly mathematical statement of fact. There is a tree of opportunities, and one can choose to prune some of them at the root. By definition, any direct/anticipated; and any unanticipated, indirect opportunities; are gone. Which is a 100% valid personal choice, I interpreted the minor quibble being whether this is a net positive creditor to their overall success. On one hand, pruning opportunities is in principle a negative; on the other hand, time saved not dealing with undesired channels is a positive.
The reluctance to work with recruiters is mostly the "time suck" element. If you were to chase every opportunity sent by recruiters you'd waste a ton of time, but you'd also maximize your potential for getting offers that meet your criteria (whatever those criteria are).
It was meant as a statement of fact. To oversimplify, if you limit the information you are willing to receive, you won't have all the information you could have.
My main issue with the original post was that OP was crediting a policy of reduced information with doubling their salary. That just isn't the case.
Sounds like just a general statement of opportunity cost. If you're disregarding all recruiters, and someone comes along with a possible job that fits with a $200k raise that you would normally disregard out of hand, and most of your average raises you find on your own are $50-75k when you switch jobs, spending time talking to the recruiter would likely be worth it.
That doesn't sound like a thing that ever happens.
If I took every recruiter call I receive, I'd be spending half my week talking to recruiters. All for a tiny, small, infinitesimal chance that they might find me a job that A) is in a field I want, B) at a company I want, and C) at a decent salary.
I've been unemployed with next to no professional network before. And I took those recruiter calls. And they were a waste of time. I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.
In the end, the only way I've ever gotten good jobs is through the professional network. It was faster to build a professional network from 0 by working on open source projects and going out to meetups than to go through a 3rd party recruiter.
> I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.
It's somehow correlate, since one of the most potential client for recruiters are companies that hard to find employees. Though there are also companies that lack channel / networks to specific fields, it cannot be dismissed that the previous point still stand.
Some of the replies to this comment make me crazy (should I disclose here I know this commenter?).
There’s some useful information in there, that the distribution of roles behind recruiters change as the jobs become higher level. I didn’t know that. And he hedged his statements all over. And then people still reply like he’s saying if you don’t pick up a cold FaceTime call from a recruiter while you’re in the middle of coding you’re going straight to hell.
I see this pattern so often. I only hope there’s this silent readership thinking “oh, interesting. Thanks.”
As logical, meritocratic and evidence-based as they claim to be, software developers get dug in to their emotion-based positions and wear blinders just like everyone else does.
Once someone thinks "I hate recruiters; they are useless" it becomes very difficult to change that mindset.
FWIW, I've been in industry for 30 years and all but my first job out of college came through recruiters. I tell the bad ones to quit bugging me and I work cooperatively with the good ones to find positions that I might actually like.
I’ve also been in the industry for 30 years, and not one of my jobs has come via a recruiter.
I have always either had — or gone out of my way to establish — the contacts necessary to line up a job at the next company I wanted to work for.
I hardly need a recruiter to find interesting companies where I can do interesting work, and the kinds of companies I want to work for avoid (or outright prohibit) using external recruiters.
"but that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)"
Why does everybody assume that the goal is to advance to an exec role?
I'm sure that you were a competent recruiter, but the reality is that I don't have the time or the energy to waste on you to figure out if you are or not.
I don't assume everyone is looking to advance to an exec role - in my experience, most actually are not looking for that at all. I tend to assume people aren't looking for exec roles.
"Advance your position" could refer to improved work/life balance, more time off, remote, whatever you value. I was referring to overall position (life quality), not on an org chart. I can see how that wasn't made explicitly clear.
What's your suggestion on fostering relationships with recruiters?
I do ignore the vast majority of contacts due to the sheer overload of them, I don't have the energy or time to parse through each message and see if it's worth pursuing the recruiter in the future or not.
My CV is no unicorn, I have a lot of experience in different roles and company sizes but I'm not a deep specialist or a very sought after technologist, just a decent engineer. Even then I get dozens of contacts per month, it's impossible for me to actively engage with that...
If I decided to keep some recruiters in the loop when I look for new jobs, how should I do it? I can't just answer all these contacts and filter out, are there good places to match decent professional recruiters and job-seekers? I'd love to have an ongoing relationship with a good recruiter who could match me to openings offering things like a 4-day work week, etc., but usually I'd have to go searching for these openings and then contacting the recruiters for them, how can I invert this relationship?
I feel like tech recruiting became a new gold rush, noticed it got progressively worse the past 15 years with recruiters just blasting me with spam. The increasingly higher bonuses for hiring attracted a crowd that I'm not very fond of.
The article's methods are actually quite good. You should ignore most of the recruiter contacts - if the recruiter approaches you for a job that is clearly not a fit for your background, I'd dismiss that person as either not respectful of your time or incompetent, and both are good reasons to ignore that person down the road.
If you're getting a fair amount of incoming traffic, you're already optimized for discovery, so that is working. Telling recruiters "I'm only looking for jobs that fit these parameters" and then paying attention to the ones that are respectful of that will work to start a relationship. I had some relationships for the entire 20 years I was in the business, and some of those people I didn't make a dime off for maybe 15 of those years.
One thing that's contradictory to what you've said that's caused me to ignore recruiters is that they misrepresent the opportunity even when the criteria doesn't match up. I've dealt with a few that I've told "this doesn't fit my criteria" and they're very insistent that the company is looking for people, not skills, and I should interview anyway. Ultimately this is a lie and I'll end up wasting everyone's time. I've done probably 30 interviews via recruiter and never landed a single position. All my positions have been the result of me just applying directly or through referrals.
Agree, but recruiters who can actually respect and match you with good criteria are valuable. I don't know why companies isn't do better job marketing / posting / community communication, but there are many jobs that feels like exclusively reserved to recruiters.
I don't think that is contradictory at all to what I wrote. I agree, many recruiters will try to send you out to every client and every job they have just to maximize their chances of a fee. Those recruiters should be avoided.
If you've gone on 30 interviews and never landed one job, that might be something you need to also consider and look inward. Going 0-for-30 is pretty unusual, unless you were accepting interviews for jobs you were clearly unqualified for.
I stayed at one job too long until 2008. I was looking to restart my career and I spammed every ATS I could find. I didn’t have a network and I had no choice. I found a job that paid around $80K as a mid level .Net dev - still more then I was making. But about $10K below the local market.
Over the next three years, I did build out my network of local external recruiters who had relationships with the hiring managers.
I hopped around between various corp dev job - one generic corp dev CRUD job looks about like any other - by leveraging recruiters. By the beginning of 2020, I was making $150K and hearing opportunities of $165K locally. Then Covid hit and external recruiters had absolutely nothing to offer me paying more than I what I was making.
I hopped on the FAANG bandwagon because of an internal recruiter in mid 2020. Almost two years later, I still haven’t had an external recruiter ping me about anything mildly interesting.
I'd bet your LinkedIn isn't optimized at all for discovery. Populate a skills section with languages and tools you use, and you'll often see an immediate uptick.
They may not care about what languages and tools you are using when they hire you, but that's how they find you. They aren't on LinkedIn search for "Software Engineer" in most cases - at least I wasn't.
You would be surprised at how wide even internal recruiters at BigTech companies throw their net. My very light LinkedIn profile had a bunch of no name companies where I was doing CRUD C# work yet and still I had internal recruiters from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook reach out to me. No I wouldn’t have passed the initial tech screen without practice. That would be obvious to anyone who knew their own interview process.
Since 2020, I’ve been working as a “cloud consultant” at BigTech. That’s all it says on my LinkedIn profile. Yet the recruiters from Facebook and Google are emailing me about senior software engineering and even engineering manager positions. I have never been (nor desire to be) a manager. Even internal recruiters aren’t really that good.
Another anecdote, I’ve had internal recruiters reach out to me at my current company on LinkedIn even though it shows I already work here.
On the other hand, my development background from 2008-2018 is doing C# CRUD “full stack development” the salary ceiling for that isn’t high. No matter what tools I say I’ve used - C#, Node, Python - they aren’t going to say “let’s pay him $200K+ to write a CRUD app!”. My one saving grace that let me overcome that without “grinding leetCode” is that all of the major cloud providers have internal cloud consulting divisions.
Technical consultant in AWS ProServe. I specialize in enterprise app dev/architecture + cloud.
Solution Architects are pre sales.
Consultants are post sale doing billable implementations. There is some overlap though. I do some SA type work and depending on the day of the week, I’m lumped in with the SA organization.
Out of curiosity, why did you (correctly) suspect I didn’t “grind leetCode”?
That's actually the problem with third party recruiters: the bad ones so greatly outnumber the good ones that it's extremely hard to filter out the bad from the good. I could easily spend half an afternoon or more every week on random calls with third party recruiters and never get anywhere.
What I've started doing is only dealing with the ones who both show a little evidence of having seen my profile on LinkedIn (since this is generally the ultimate source of these contacts), and mention a specific opportunity (not just "full time Python role with my direct client").
That brings me to the second problem, which is that most of these third party recruiters are working for companies that are still series C and earlier. I've done the startup game twice now, and figured out that working for a company that's going to pay me partially in lottery tickets that won't pay out for 7-10 years isn't that great of an opportunity. There are the odd exceptions out there, but they are few and far between.
I think only true part in that description is "Exec roles are often handled and retained by recruiting firms".
But that is level where normal developers are not finding themselves. I am senior developer but I don't imagine being approached for exec level role.
There are different worlds of recruiting - world where I am is low level spamming that I get every day and most of it is just predation on unhappy people that would be open to switch job.
World where there is super specialized recruiting like exec level or really niche skills might work as described but that is super specialized and most people are nowhere near that world.
All of my recruiting work was retained for the last 5-10 years I was in business, and I wasn't recruiting executives. I'm not saying that is the norm (it definitely isn't), and you are correct that senior developers will not be approached for executive roles.
Higher level candidates will probably attract higher level recruiters, because the amount of time to place someone making $100K is the same amount of time to place someone at $500K, with the only difference being a $25K fee for the first person and a $100K fee for the second.
> The reasons that there are so many incompetent recruiters are many, but a few are… companies hire entry level recruiters and pay them next to nothing in guaranteed compensation (mostly commission-based). The good ones will make the company a lot of money, and the bad ones can't afford to stay in the industry because they aren't making enough in commission - so they 'go away'
Wouldn't that be an explanation for why there shouldn't be so many incompetent recruiters? Why don't the incompetent ones all "go away"?
Good question. The bad ones don't go away immediately. They go away eventually, and are quickly replaced with another round of new hires. So you have maybe 10% of the industry that stays for the long haul, and 90% is a revolving door of college grads.
There are probably other industries that have similar models where most of the workforce is newbies at all times, but I don't have an example that won't be dissected.
How am I supposed to get any sense of a recruiter's skill when they reach out? Do I need to be looking at their LinkedIn profiles to see their tenure? I've dealt with maybe one or two competent recruiters out of dozens.
Tenure is a good one, but can be misleading. There are a few ways to make money in recruiting. Being really good at it and ethical is one way, but there are also people who are unethical and it hasn't caught up with them.
I would always suggest looking at their tenure. A new recruiter doesn't have the depth of client relationships to be all that helpful, but most new recruiters are 'sourcers' and not handling the client side (they are responsible for researching and bringing in candidates).
Most people never get to the point where they're candidates for executive positions.
And software salaries get shared publicly on things like levels.fyi these days, so you need third party recruiters even less.
With that said, I don't have a hard line policy of never responding to them, but I pretty much never get contacted by a third party recruiter with something that looks even remotely good or interesting.
I think if the company is using a third party recruiter, the gig probably isn't very good. Obviously there are exceptions, but no great role is getting sourced through Cyber Coders.
I was recently talking to a 3rd party recruiter who started asking me for detailed salary info of all my past jobs. I told him that I didn’t feel comfortable answering that, then when he pushed back I told him I’m legally not required to give him that info in my state (and the potential employer’s state.) He abruptly cut the call off and ghosted me.
I decided to apply to the company directly. They were happy to talk to me because my experience was a really good fit for them. I come to find out that the recruiter emailed them saying that I was a poor candidate and that he suggest they don’t talk to me. Luckily they didn’t listen to him.
I talked with a mortaging company that's pretty big after hearing a friend's experience. Got through with the first interview. A recruiter at a third party firm heard about this and called me up: "I thought I told you about this, do you want me to say some nice things about you?" I didn't understand what she was conning me into so I said yes. (This was mid morning. By late afternoon I get a call from the gmorgage people saying "hey you did great in the first interview but we're going to pass.")
Recruiters comment on that: "They keep passing on everyone I refer"
Ended up getting a job elsewhere, and the recruiter still hit me up on "do you have any referrals?"
It is ok that you did not feel comfortable with that, but pay negotiations are exactly why you would want to have a recruiter: they handle that for you, and are generally incentivized to get you as much money as they can since they generally get a percentage of your yearly salary as their pay. So by telling the recruiter you were not going to share that with them you were hamstringing them... of course they thought you were a bad candidate (for them).
It is a bit petty that they told the company that you were a poor candidate, but you seem to not understand what was happening. And it could have been they had already mentioned your name to them, and then had to explain why they suddenly were not representing you. I don't know, but that is a reasonable explanation.
I personally have had a mixed bag with recruiters: many I have dealt with are worthless in that they don't understand the jobs they are recruiting for (so give very bad matches to both sides), but I have been lucky twice and had recruiters give me great jobs and handle the pay negotiations so well that I probably got $20-40K/year more than I would have by myself (if I had somehow found those positions).
>and are generally incentivized to get you as much money as they can since they generally get a percentage of your yearly salary as their pay
This is not quite true. They're optimizing for throughput, not max dollar value. If they optimized for the maximum amount of money they could get you that would come at the cost of their time which would lower their throughput of placing candidates and hence the maximum amount of money that they can personally earn in aggregate.
The only reason a recruiter would ever negotiate your comp up is that you are asking way below market. Then they will indeed "negotiate" up to the lowest bound of the comp band for the position. Otherwise, it makes no sense to try to get a few grand more in commission at the cost of risking the whole placement. In fact, all recruiters I've ever worked with tried to negotiate me down instead of negotiating with the HM on my behalf.
So the only good candidates for a recruiter are the ones willing to let their recruiter break the law and make a salary history a requirement for consideration?
WA state law makes it very clear as a candidate I don’t need to share salary information, and by some readings of the statute it’s illegal for them to even ask.
My most recent job is at a very large public company where the salaries are well published (levels.fyi) - there was no need for me to give a detailed salary history of all my recent jobs.
If the value-add of a recruiter is getting a better negotiated salary, what is the value-minus of putting another point of failure between me and a job I want. Surely it’s possible that over time the minuses are greater than the pluses.
That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people. Everyone is moving around enough that you'll be able to cross into new companies and skip whole song and dance prior. You also get the benefit of having a heads up on the company you're joining too.
I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying somewhere, I probably will too, since we value similar things in the work.
> I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies.
You might not want to label it as such, but that is exactly what a professional network is. People can genuinely be your friends and still be part of your network.
Hence the 'per se'. Some people go out of their way to groom a network of people specifically for their careers, I was just trying to articulate that difference.
Eh, I find work "friends" to be even more ephemeral than school friends. Nobody I've ever worked with in the past has ever contacted me after I left the company we worked for. At least school friends are around for a more or less guaranteed period of several years.
Edit to add: I have initiated contact before and been well received. Nobody contacts me. It's tiring to have to do 100% of the work to maintain these relationships.
Can confirm. I've seen at previous jobs that some cliques do form, especially among high-rising careerist or very social folks. Other people just don't intermingle that much and are sidelined.
Maintaining contact happens rarely. And no, a linkedin add doesn't count at maintaining contact if the last private message was exchanged on the last day of work.
I suspect there's a sort of introvert / extrovert miss match.
Sounds like it’s on you for either not being someone they liked working with or not putting any effort at maintaining contacts. Can’t always expect other people to pull all the weight.
I've had the same experience. I have no idea how this advice is working for people in most job markets - it certainly doesn't seem to be a thing in Australia.
I get it. I'm definitely not an asshole; even my ex will tell you that. People seem to like me. I’ve never gotten any feedback from any manager or team member of mine saying anything about bein difficult or anything. I try to help people out when I can.
The times when I have contacted people, it's been about as well received as I'd expect a contact from a former coworker to be. It's just that nobody ever initiates. I'm not getting anything out of trying to maintain these relationships except stress, so, why bother?
And, now, someone (actually 3 someones, because I was at +3, now at 0) has gone and downvoted my original comment for whatever reason. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm in my second role in Australia. Can't say whether it's a thing but people from my previous role (people still there and people who have moved on) definitely keep in touch with each other.
I did this for a while and certainly got some leads but the really well paid roles still seemed to come mostly via recruiters.
The "networking" was also very time consuming. It was also fun but if i had a wife and kids I wouldnt have had the time for it.
The good recruiters seemed to have a knack for finding the companies that were the right combination of rich and desperate whereas companies I found through my network were generally from companies that were always keen on talking to a decent technologist but werent exactly craving somebody with my precise skillset to start next week.
"That's the career advice I would give, build good bridges and make friends with people."
I agree. Personally I'd include recruiters in that group of people as well.
I don't work with keyword monkeys...the ones that send you job opportunities for jr. sysadmin roles 20 years into your career, because a 10-year-old resume they dug up from somewhere mentioned bash shell scripting in there somewhere.
I work with a handful of recruiters I've developed a good relationship with and who know what I'm looking for.
> I don't have a professional network per se, just a bunch of friends I clicked with at various companies. I know if they're enjoying somewhere, I probably will too, since we value similar things in the work.
I wish this were true for me. I do have people I click with but I have a personal value not to work for anywhere whose main revenue source boils down to "more eyeballs / clicks" and this rules out pretty much everywhere my past coworkers/friends have gone to work.
I was just trying to articulate what I see as a difference between a purpose built career network and a network of actual friends from work. There is a difference between those two types of networks not captured when you call them both a "Professional network".
Not to beat a dead horse, but the reason you keep getting these kinds of replies is because it seems like you have an idea about a second type of Professional Network that is different than what you described as your network of friends. Everybody's just trying to say that the real Professional Network is exactly the network of your friends, and if there is another kind of "purpose built career network" that people are talking about, it's the imitation of what you've got, not the other way around.
What you've described from your own experience is the substance of what a professional network is, and has always been. LinkedIn connection requests are trying to create a digital product in the form of the real-world phenomenon that you've experienced and described. If we're going to call one of them a professional network, everyone in this subthread is saying, let's give the real thing the name professional network, and the imitation a different name.
(None of this is intended to disparage LinkedIn. It is what it is, but if it's trying to be a substitute for real relationships between humans, it will always be the shadow, not the substance.)
Eh I think there is a huge middle ground between "network consisting of work friends" and "LinkedIn network". Maybe it's different in academia but I know plenty of people that have a strictly professional network built from real world interactions - conference meet ups, seminar series, collaboration projects, etc. They would be happy to call each other up for work purposes but would never do something purely social together or consider each other friends.
I don't think the type of network I've just described is imitating anything. They are mutually beneficial but purely professional relationships. The fact that the internet has enabled people to have a much larger number of superficial relationships doesn't mean that what the poster was describing is the only way to have a "real professional network". Yeah it's a professional network, but it's not the only kind.
That is the case I think, the two ideas about types of professional networks seems clear, and it would seem I probably see it differently to some. To me, "professional network" is better at describing a network curated for your career.
It's a tough one, because while I can see that it is also a professional network, said network would be pretty offended if I called them that. So I don't necessarily disagree with you, or even with the other commenters, but there is at least some room for subjectivity about what to call your own personal relationships.
This is exactly what I was trying to describe. People on HN are so much smarter than me lol. I used the word "informal", and you expressively described what I was intending to communicate.
The difference is the intention behind the relationship I suppose. I don't think it matters if we disagree, it was an off the cuff statement. I see a difference, I consider it important. No one else has to.
You make a good point. This advice is strongly weighted towards people who still have multiple salary doublings left in their career ladder. At each step up the career ladder, you can afford to be more and more selective around what you're looking for.
This basic script is designed to remove or greatly reduce that time-waste from the early process.
I'd argue that it makes early ghosting a non issue, by reducing the cost of the initial and clear response it cuts through multiple layers of that dance that the spam-cruiters go through.
You're also right about referrals and I don't think this is mutually exclusive with them, instead it is a complimentary passive search protocol.
Strongly with you on this one. I have had recruiters from the UK reach out to me(I'm based on the west coast in US) from agencies and made the mistake of replying to one. Complete waste of time and total incompetence on their side. I have a rule like this(recruiters have to be from the company they are soliciting for):
- If I am interested in the company I will reply right away.
- Somewhat/not really interested ignore first email they send out and if they followup a reply I then email them stating I am not looking for work now but could change my mind in the future.
- Not interested in company at all just ignore the unsolicited response.
I have also completely given up on startups as the comp they have been getting back to me with is 50-70% lower than my TC and its a waste of my time. Your time is the most important resource you have, don't waste it on unsolicited responses from recruiters in positions that are not right or companies you have no desire to work for.
> I've "doubled" my salary plenty of times through this policy.
Let say you started at 50k (which is very low) and you doubled your salary 4 times (what is plenty ?). Then you make now 800k. Which is unlikely, so your main argument is probably wrong
Les'see, when I worked halftime for my Dad at 14, I got 60 SEK (~$12 at the exchange rate back then?) a month... Uh, no, would need to know cumulative inflation since then to figure out how many doublings it's been. Quite a few, I guess. Not as many as I'd wish.
1. Internal company recruiters. They couldn't care less about contacting you directly unless things have changed in today's market (My last interaction with in house recruiter was circa 2010).
2. Scummy recruiting farms where they hire a bunch of people on commissions and they spam anyone and everyone
3. Recruiters who actually have relationships with a customer, prospect good candidates like a salesperson, keep their pipeline full and understand the hiring needs. They work diligently to find good candidates who fit the job description. They do exist but are rare unfortunately.
I have no problem with #3 above and I have worked with some great ones in the past and right now as a hiring manager, working with one who is trying to find a senior level candidate for a while now (lot of work there).
I got my current job through an internal company recruiter. He's the best I've ever seen in this business -- the introduction was extremely well targeted, the process was very low-pressure, and he's measured on the long-term success of the people he brings in.
He spent time explaining the role, the skills, and the goals, and offered feedback throughout the process.
My exact experience. I've had one actual great recruiter that was in the #3 category, one okay recruiter from #2 who a #1 recruiter farmed out to, and then dozens and dozens of sleazeballs from #2.
For the most part, I just say ignore recruiters entirely, unless the job is for a great company and there are no red flags, instead opting to network and send emails directly to people in charge of hiring.
> I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for.
This is a massive privilege. A lot of companies interview in a way that I couldn't pass years ago, so I depended on external recruiters to get me jobs. This was basically how I made a living in the South without a CS or CE degree.
The universal truth I see throughout every career advice thread is always take this advice with a grain of salt.
Yes, it's interesting to see how many people here are 100% against 3rd party recruiters rather than recognizing there are those good and bad at their job - just like anything else. My best friend from growing up had a 3rd party recruiter go completely out of their way to help him, and he was very appreciative of that.
I think it's possible to recognize that 3rd party recruiters can be good or bad at their job while also coming to the conclusion that the bad outweighs the good to a degree that it's not worth the time to figure it out.
It's certainly a privilege to be in a position where you'd still have an excess of inbound job opportunities even without 3rd party recruiters. But if that's the position you're in, it's one of the more effective strategies I've seen to increase signal:noise.
I'm sure there are great recruiters out there (somewhere), but totally agree on this. Had real days of my life wasted on interviews and such, sometimes only to have everyone at the table realize it was a completely bad fit with no hurt feelings about a minute into us talking directly and not through "the process". Meanwhile got an out of the blue referral from a guy I had worked with ten years prior that started my consulting years.
Not everyone is a superstar networker but be kind, supportive, and professional to your coworkers. People talk.
Same. Sorry for any good recruiters out there, but these people are generally used car salesman like scum. Multiple keep emailing my work address even after asking them numerous times to stop. One I worked with on a potentially good role - acted like my best buddy, constantly texting and calling for weeks, and when I decided not to take the offer, just ghosted me. Not even an 'OK thanks anyways'. I think even an annoyed reply like 'Sigh, OK' would have been more professional.
> Strong disagree. I've made it my policy to never work with a recruiter that isn't affiliated with the company they're hiring for. Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest.
100% agree. I'd go a step further and say: don't bother applying for any job on Indeed where they say "we're looking to fill a contract position with <insert some info about another company (a top industry producer!)>" because they're just a front for those same recruiting farms.
I’ve had great experiences with local recruiters who had relationships with the client companies. They will tell you the max salary you can get, the interview process, why past candidates failed, the actual must have requirements, etc.
My success rate from my application being submitted by a recruiter to a phone screen with the client company is 100%. My non rejection rate was close to that.
That’s when I was hopping around in corp dev. I have a specialty now that’s slightly more niche. I am working for by far the largest company in that niche so I don’t really need the middlemen anymore. If I ever decide to leave my current employer, no one is going to ignore my resume.
> Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks
I wish this were always true. When I worked as a recruiter, I saw referrals routinely get tossed onto the stack of resumes with no special preference. How candidates are treated completely depends on the preferences of the hiring manager & corporate red tape, even at smaller companies.
Right! Additionally the "recruiters are also one of the best career resources you can find" was never true to me. The exact number out of close to hundred recruiter contacts is 0.
As you said, using my network, be it tight or loose threads (colleagues to acquaintances or even the knowledge of an organization) helped me exclusively.
Even the affiliated ones are problematic many times. My latest experience is a recruiter hired by the organization advising me to improve the cosmetics of my CV (i.e. lie about my past, exclude an incomplete but important education), organised the interview and gave an interview preparation with stale and generic 'advise' you can find on internet word by word, which was useless as the topic of the interview was something else and with someone else than predicted. They seemed to operated based on a script that was prepared to give the impression of caring and making actual work, however the content of the work was mere scheduling.
Also strong disagree. I literally ignore several obviously useless recruiters a week. I occasionally humor one long enough to confirm that they know exactly nothing about me and have put zero actual thought into their inquiry. Asking “what about my resume made you think of me for this position” is usually very enlightening.
I do have an exception, however, and it’s not recruiters that are affiliated with a particular company, it’s high quality recruiters that my friends refer me to and who will work on my behalf. I had one spend a TON of time really getting to know what I was looking for, what my skills were, and what made me happy, and he looked at companies with an eye toward making both me and the company happy long term, because he knew that’s where the big payoff was.
Also I've had third-party recruiters ask for an version of my resume in Word format so they can standardize the format.
A. Fuck no. You aren't modifying my resume. I created it to be presented exactly as I have laid it out. I made it to stand out, not be standardized with a hundred other resumes
B. I don't use Microsoft stuff, like many other engineers
Usually if a third-party recruiter says Company XYZ is looking for people and I'm actually interested in that company, I'll just go shoot an e-mail to that company directly with my resume and not respond to the recruiter. I highly encourage everyone to do the same.
YMMV. I've doubled my salary in the last couple of years by following recruiter cold-calls, including once for a recruiter not affiliated to the company, and it obviously wasn't a pure waste of time for me.
Because the market is tiny. Recruiters can't specialize, and those that do get eaten up by the likes of Datacom or Australian-based providers.
Most recruiters in NZ start from labourer/contracting/HR firms and then move into tech because it's better paid. Whereas in Australia you get people who trained specifically to be a tech recruiter, or migrated to recruitment from tech (usually BA and QA type roles).
Maybe it works for other (non-SWE) professions, and maybe it still works for the more conservative enterprise companies, but my experience is that for most Silicon Valley style tech companies, a referral might at best just let you skip the phone screen. Then it's the same leetcode circus show as anyone else.
But yes, I agree with you that most third party recruiters suck. I'd say there are some very small boutique firms out there that don't suck though. Generally, the larger the recruiting agency, the shittier they are.
> Recruiting farms like Cyber Recruiters (yuck) will do everything in their power to waste your time out of sheer incompetence and disinterest.
Cyber Coders, I think that is the actual name, is pretty bad. They use a lot of automation to build funnels and send out messages automatically. There are several thousand other recruiting firms that do the same thing with more or less technology.
That being said their goal isnt to waste your time. They are just playing a numbers game. They are trying to hit the postgre DBA who just got told their contract is ending with an email about a postgre DBA contract that starts ASAP. If you are that person and you get that email you might have good results.
I think people get angry when recruiters don't personalize messages or make sure that they are actually qualified for a job or that they actually are helpful during the interview process. But they sold for 105 million in 2013. Their model works despite having one of the worst reputations in the business. They generate a shit load of revenue by spamming massive amounts of people and getting enough emails to the right person at the right time.
If you view third party recruiters as someone who is going to be your job agent and work for you, you're going to have a bad time. If you think of them as street vendors who are slinging wares of questionable quality and price and who offering no refund no return one supply items... You might have a better experience and save yourself a lot of grief.
TLDR: Recruiting companies print money by getting the right email to the right person at the right time. They don't work for you. Don't expect their service to be tailered for you.
Agreed. When I looked for my first job I entertained calls from 3rd party recruiters. They were completely worthless and a huge waste of time. On top of that, they sold my info to other recruiter/spammers. I started getting tons of calls from robo-callers and other recruiters whom I never contacted. Had to change my phone number.
Now I only leave my email on my resume. And the only recruiters I'll ever talk to are ones who directly work for the company I'm applying to.
Well, let's be honest - when you're just starting out, making $50,000/year, you can probably double your salary in one jump. If you're making $200,000/year, you're not going to double your salary, recruiter or not.
I was hired to my current company through an external recruiter that had a great track record but was expensive. We dropped all of those external recruiters in favor of internal ones who are absolutely useless at finding us worthy candidates because unlike the external recruiter I worked with our internal ones don't have an engineering background.
My recruiter started his career as a software engineer.
This is the key to success. Even if you think a company is bad, but you have a good network that sends a referral your way, it will probably save you.
If the job was good and you liked working there - and you had the right attitude - then it's your job. Recruiters and even companies make it harder for a resume to get to the hiring manager than it ever used to be.
Agreed. My primary test for a recruiter call is to ask them if the position is funded and what the title is. Recruiting warehouses will often say they want to ask me a few more questions before answering that, and the truth is they're scouring Indeed for the same jobs I could find on my own and adding a recruiter commission to the bid.
I've landed almost every gig in the last 10 years through the same recruitment firm. They've been so awesome, and they have a finger on the pulse of the industry.
I've had excellent dealings with recruiters over the years from various companies.
Agreed, though I still pay attention in case something interesting shows up. For example, I got my current role through a third-party recruiter (an individual, not a farm like Cyber Recruiters) and it was a great experience through and through.
This is a given. Recruiters are there to help you get access to companies you don't have referrals in. They're good for those from other states or countries, or from a different social class.
I have had some positive third-party recruiter experiences, but only after being referred by friends. On the other hand, there are other guys putting up fake listings to trick you into contacting them.
> Companies always prioritize a strong referral, ignoring mediocre interview performance, and will even skip the reference checks so I don't have to bug my network.
Very much agree with this comment. Just had an awful experience with a Jobot recruiter and will 100% never work with anyone affiliated with that company again.
My takeaway from the article wasn't to work with every recruiter that spams you (in the sense of actually spending time in their funnel), but rather, take the opportunity to "interview them" with a "standardized test" of sorts.
As the article said, most of the time, you're not actively job searching, but you generally do care about salary data points and what sort of roles are available. For unicorns, you can find salary info through levels.fyi, but for those not making those 300k+/yr, the pool of better paying jobs is much larger and recruiters still remain a useful source of data. Sniffing for roles is an underused technique. Recruiters have like 3 paragraphs to catch your attention, so they optimize for bang-for-the-buck. Which means they aren't going to offer EM roles if you don't already hold that title, even if the company has an opening. A lot of times, if your next career ladder rung is a title upgrade or a role pivot, you need to ask explicitly.
As for your policy, I feel like it's attributing all your chips into one thing while ignoring everything else you've done. Like many here, I've had my share of salary bumps over the course of my career, and each time it was through different methods (diagonal internal move, OSS lead, unicorn recruitment, promotions). It'd be naive to not have more than one tool in the arsenal.
It's not nepotism. That isn't even what "nepotism" means.
People have always gone through their in-network to seek advice and find others to work with, since the beginning of time. It's how nearly anything really great or interesting gets done, actually.
I don't think, "It's always been done this way." is as good of an argument as you think it is, especially considering the discrimination that takes place when you hire referrals over searching for the most qualified candidates.
Maybe we should shoot for doing better than how it's been done in the past? I think we can as an industry do a lot better than where we are currently.
A person who is referred (especially in SWE) doesn't automatically mean they'll get the job, they'll still have to pass checks from members who may have never even interacted with the referrer. The advantage lies in the fact that it means their resume/cover gets reviewed while the 200th applicant doesn't. The reality is companies get tons of applicants and on paper most of them might be qualified.
When you have multiple people on this very thread saying they've hired or been hired as referrals without any interview at all, it's hard to say with a straight face that these people still had to pass any quality check whatsoever.
Hiring for "culture fit" is problematic. Hiring known commodities is not.
I'm interested in hearing how you think the search for the most qualified candidates can be improved. Interviewing is, necessarily, a messy process and full of uncertainty.
Closeness isn't a requisite for nepotistic behavior, only undue bias due to personal familiarity.
I don't think it's any less bad to hire someone you don't know all that well because you share friends than it is to hire people because they're you're close friend or a family member.
The point is that it's exclusionary to outsiders, and outsiders tend to be the exact people tech needs more of.
I once had a former team leader tell me that "I warn you, I practice nepotism", and she did not refer to familiar relations, she just meant that she favored people she knew and liked when looking for people (it included me, I guess, since she "got me in" at a consultancy when I was looking for a job).
Actually it is not; this is how the term is defined:
> nep·o·tism - /ˈnepəˌtizəm/ - noun - the practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends, especially by giving them jobs. [0]
> Nepotism is a form of favoritism which is granted to relatives and friends in various fields, including business, politics, entertainment, sports, fitness, religion, and other activities. [1]
The practice among those with power or influence of favoring relatives or friends,
That's precisely the point - "close" relations. When we talk about business referrals, it by no means implied that the person being referred is a "friend" in the usual sense of the term (let alone relative). Usually it's just someone you vaguely know (by their work, and/or a chance encounter at a meetup or conference), but don't know too well personally.
And just because they come in via a referral does not mean, ipso facto, that "favoritism" is happening and all objectivity is thrown out the window in the evaluation process.
We may be violently agreeing here; what is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes?
Our industry is uniquely, as in above-replacement-industry, plagued by a diversity problem, and I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends over other, more qualified candidates is a contributing factor to that diversity problem.
It is not guaranteed that this always happens, but I am asserting it often is (as evinced by the "lack of interview" or "going by reputation only" as reputation is rife with bias), and that is a bad thing.
Violence is completely counter to my way of being - so No.
What is bad is the idea that someone can get a job because they know someone else, over a more qualified candidate who doesn't know that person already. We agree this is bad, yes?
We keep going in circles - with this idea that person that someone in the company already "knows" (or who came in via a referral anyway) gets the job at the expense not just of a comparably qualified (but not known to the company) candidate, a hypothetical more qualified candidate. You just keep assuming that this what happens when companies act on referrals (and implicitly, that it happens a lot).
That's now that I see happening, when referrals are made. But if it's what you want to believe, then it's what you want to believe - and there probably isn't anything I'll be able to say to dissuade you from this belief.
Violent agreement is just a term for when people seem to be disagreeing but actually aren't. [0] If that is completely counter to your way of being, then it's possible your way of being isn't compatible with the concept of constructive argument.
And I'm confused about where I said anything about certainty. I'm not talking about how all companies operate all of the time, I'm talking about how some companies operate an unfortunate number of times.
> Holding everything else constant, from job title to industry to location, female and minority applicants were much less likely to report receiving an employee referral than their white male counterparts. More specifically, white women were 12% less likely to receive a referral, men of color were 26% less likely and women of color were 35% less likely. [1]
I'm not talking about how all companies operate all of the time, I'm talking about how some companies operate an unfortunate number of times.
In between these opposite extremes -- your language clearly indicates that you think this level of what we might call "aggravated bias" (hiring not just someone in your network; but hiring them over a more qualified candidate, presumed to exist and be interested in your opportunity) is commonplace, or something close to it.
Such that in your mind, "including referrals in your hiring funnel" == aggravated bias (in the sense above), basically.
As to the bias stats you liked to: the findings interesting, to say the least -- if they can be validated. Unfortunately the link to the original Payscale "study" seems to be broken (if we can call it that -- since remember, this is the work of a private company, with products to push).
I'm asserting the practice among those in power of favoring relatives, friends, or even friends of friends over other, more qualified candidates is a contributing factor to that diversity problem.
So you're defining closeness as not including blood relation or friendship?
You are quoting definitions which disagree with your assertion. You used the word incorrectly, and now you're doubling down on that rather than leave the word behind.
Better hope good recruiters aren't seeing this! ;)
I'm with you on your core assertion, about leveraging personal social networks in hiring leading to reinforcing systemic racism and cultural biases.
But in this context, you used "nepotism" to mean "people one knows" and then leaned even further into saying it didn't mean "close relationships" but any relationships. That's just not what that word means, not how it's commonly used either. So that assertion is wrong.
I cited two separate definitions, at this point you're disagreeing with not just me, but my citations as well, which makes it hard for me to take what you're saying here and make any changes to what I understand the word to mean.
I'm not sure a) why you think you have authority here, or b) why it's such a sticking point to the point that you've continued this conversation for over an entire day.
I think at this point the only real option you have is to admit the word must have either evolved since you learned it, or you may have learned it wrong/incompletely.
My use of the word "nepotism" was correct here, but more importantly, what the fuuuuuuck does it have to do with my larger point? This is, literally, the definition of pedantry.
Um, you kept defending your use of the word, rather than abandoning it in the face of multiple people showing you used it incorrectly. I returned to the website today to a new-to-me question from you asking for a definition, so I gave it. You've been antagonistic and personal to me rather than admit that nepotism means family and close friends, not "everyone I know," and it has hurt your core thesis since--again--multiple people read your posted definitions and noted that they did not support your use of the word.
It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this, or how it's undermining your primary point, but you do you.
> Um, you kept defending your use of the word, rather than abandoning it in the face of multiple people showing you used it incorrectly.
Do you often abandon ideas because of a volume of people disagreeing with you? How do you differentiate that from falling victim to an ad populum logical fallacy?
> You've been antagonistic and personal to me
Apologies! Can you cite, specifically, where I was unambiguously this way towards you? I'd like to understand whether this is just you reading too much into something I said, or if I've genuinely made a mistake here. I suspect the former, but it could be the latter!
> rather than admit that nepotism means family and close friends, not "everyone I know,"
What's interesting here is that you think I ever said, "everyone I know". I certainly didn't mean that, and as far as I can tell, I never said that either. I look forward to seeing the specific language I used that caused your confusion!
> and it has hurt your core thesis
How would this hurt my core thesis, since it's not important to that thesis if the people being favored are close to the person in power?
> multiple people read your posted definitions and noted that they did not support your use of the word.
Noted incorrectly. There's nothing to be done if people write factually false statements on HN, but that's what they are; factually incorrect.
Further they're not "my* definitions, but definitions from prestigious institutions trusted to define English words.
> It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this
That implies there's something to see, when in fact there is not. What's actually weird is how you keep replying, yet with no new information or analysis.
> or how it's undermining your primary point
It cannot be undermining my primary point, as it's not related to my primary point.
> but you do you.
Oh I will, I do not need permission from you to do that. Again, I'm curious about why you take this position of authority, as if you have any control over my behavior at all.
> Industry sanctioned nepotism doesn't feel like a good look for the SWE industry
Is it nepotism though? Your friends are not your family. Unless I'm missing some fine details of what nepotism means as a non native English speaker.
Besides, if you are a reliable employee, I doubt any reasonable company would miss out on an opportunity to consider a strong referral. Regardless of industry.
Your friends, family and people you don't like but do a favour for are all examples of nepotism because they got the job through a non professional relationship.
Referrals are welcome. Filling the managers roles with these type of relationships makes the workers below feel they have no opportunity at those top jobs.
You make it seem like straight white men conspired to take over the industry and box everyone else out. Last few teams I have been on were very skin diverse. They all had privileged cushy backgrounds though...except for one of the white men who was self-made.
The power base in the US is white middle class. It's not just software that is dominated by white men. Law, medicine, construction, management at corporations. Not just white men. Privileged white men and the few "diverse" people mostly come from a level of privilege that would make my white lucky ass sick to my stomach.
It's not very important, when you focus on outcome, whether or not a group of people conspired to create that outcome, or if that outcome was simply a consequence of other factors. The impact here is that straight white men over-represent the software industry as a whole, and there are things we can do to fix or improve that.
It's a super bad idea to hire anyone who is not qualified for a position, but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions, and once you've found each qualified candidate, selecting the candidate that brings the largest difference in perspective (regardless of representation group) will be the best candidate. Given the saturation of straight white men in the SWE field, the odds that another straight white male will give the largest new perspective is not super high (though it is not zero).
The "action" here, if we need to walk away with one "thing" to do, is to saturate your pipeline with candidates from very diverse backgrounds, and then select the best candidate. It's a bullshit move to say, "only straight white men applied" if you did no work at all to reach out to other communities explicitly.
> Instead, it seems optimal to acknowledge that there will always be more qualified candidates than there are open positions
This is a wrong assumption, in my experience. As a rule of thumb, for not-principal/staff SWE roles, I would estimate that it takes:
1. 10+ resumes to find someone worth phone-screening
2. 10ish phone screens screens to find someone worth an in-person interview
3. 3ish in-persons to find someone worth an offer.
In other words, a hiring manager has to look at 300+ resumes to find one qualified candidate. So... imagine you get a reference from someone you trust. You go from 1 in 300 odds of finding someone who is basically qualified to 1 in 3.
This is after recruiters have pre-screened the resumes, btw. The candidate pool for Step #1 excludes all the people who apply to a senior SWE role with no Github portfolio, no relevant claimed skills, no degree and no work experience other than Burger King.
I'm curious to hear other people's experience, but I've literally never been in the position of "Do we hire candidate A or candidate B for this tech role?" It's always "Do we think A is good enough, or should we keep looking?"
> but I'm not going to pretend there's any kind of even remotely objective or precise way of determining who maximally fits into that position.
Sure, defining who is "optimal" is challenging but that's a cop-out. The situation is usually: Person A can't finish FizzBuzz (literally FizzBuzz) in 45 minutes in any language in coderpad, while Person B can do FizzBuzz, some easy recursion problem and maybe some kind of stats brain teaser. There is no world in which both of those candidates are "approximately the same".
I thought you wanted companies to cast a broader net. Now you're saying that it's too broad?
> Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.
Do you hire for tech roles? Software engineers, data scientists, analysts and the like?
Also, having 3-5 people make it through your process isn't meaningful. You can always find n people make it all the way through if you wait long enough. The problem just that the (n-1)-th person will generally take another offer by the time you find the n-th person.
Like I said, I have never been in the position of having two qualified candidates at the same time for one role and having to pick which one I like better. My experience, by the way, seems to match that of everyone I'd discussed this with in real life.
The experience you have is part of the broken system that discriminates against qualified candidates because of their race and gender. I'm not surprised you and everyone you know conducts yourself in this discriminatory way, it's all too common in the industry.
You have to proactively attempt to break this cycle in order to make any real progress, and a few ways to do that include being intentional about how you find qualified candidates (growing your recruitment pipeline to source from non-traditional groups), and changing your interview process in ways that allow for candidates who are qualified to move forward together, rather than do some kind of false stack ranking of your candidates, creating this incorrect notion that "only one" person for any given role is qualified, which is objectively untrue.
Stack ranking is bullshit when applied to employee performance, why would it be anything but bullshit when applied to the interview process?
The reality at all the companies I've worked for is that you are handed resumes, one or two at a time, from HR or a recruiting partner. You interview those 1 or 2 until you find a good/great candidate. Then you stop interviewing, make an offer, and wait for reply. You don't interview 50 people then choose the best and most diverse candidate.
Your "action" doesn't fit with the reality I've experienced.
Did you know you can actually talk to the people who are handing you those resumes? You can a) ask for more resumes at a time and/or b) suggest they look at certain pools of candidates.
Bad career advice I received early in my career: Don't talk compensation until late in the interviewing process after you've already convinced them to hire you.
Compensation is the first thing I bring up now. "I currently make X salary, Y annual bonus, and Z equity. This position will need to exceed all 3 by at least 20% before I even consider it. Does that sound doable? If not, let's not waste any more of each other's time."
Unless you're already extremely out of band and are pretty sure your range will be higher than 95% of your incoming offers, I do not recommend doing this. Never give first numbers, and if you're in software and haven't gotten past the middling, typical startup salary numbers and onto the mind-blowingly high numbers, you will not feel confident enough to handle a negotiation where you've already given away too much information.
I have >20 years of experience and my comp is absolutely >95% of inbound offers. So yes, I definitely want to not waste time with those and instead focus on the 5%.
That's great, and I'm in a similar situation myself. But your intro mentioned this being early career advice, which could mislead people into making pretty big negotiation mistakes.
Definitely negotiate, but the first rule of negotiation is to never be the first to give a number. And the 2nd rule is to always have multiple options that you'd consider.
I disagree: the first one who gives a number is able to anchor the negotiation around their preferred outcome; it's much harder to negotiate up from a lowball number than the other way around.
The preferred outcome of the company is making a successful hire, so they will go high enough to make sure they get a great candidate, or if they can't afford that, will go to their max budget. And if they don't then you don't want to work there anyway.
There is no situation where you will say a high number and they will move up to meet you if that number was greater than their max budget to begin with.
> There is no situation where you will say a high number and they will move up to meet you if that number was greater than their max budget to begin with.
Yes, and since it's quite common to have companies where their max budget is not acceptable (probably because they are the ones who can't fill their vacancies and thus have recruiters spam everyone all the time), it's important to filter them out by saying the high number before you've wasted many hours on worthless interviews.
The point is the tactic of giving the first number, though successful in ending many unappealing recruitment attempts, also has the unintended side effect of making it impossible that you'll ever get an offer SIGNIFICANTLY ABOVE your target range. Because comp boosts in the 50-100% range are possible, and you actually want to see those, you should let the recruiting org offer the first number.
You can simply quote a much higher amount instead. Boost your own salary by 100% and ask for that. When I was still working, that's what I used to do, and lo and behold, I 8x'ed my salary within 5 years.
Again, as others have repeatedly said here, this is a textbook example of why that’s a bad strategy. 100% sounds like a ton to you. How could it not? My last top offer was literally 2.5x what I was making. Never in my wildest dreams would I have been able to pick a number that high and say it with a straight face.
Interviewee: OK, I can consider it if you promise me a reasonable revision in a year.
2:
Interviewee: Whats your offer?
Company: Z, Z<Y
Interviewee: That's too low. I want X.
Company: You're asking for X when we offered Z. That's too much of a difference and it doesn't sound reasonable to us. We find it insulting. Let's end it here.
Can't tell whether it is sarcasm or not. A "Company" might get insulted, but, lucky you, you talk to a hiring manager. Who is just a person, not an entire organization, and who is not spending that X out of their own pocket.
The hiring manager is a person representing a company, which is exactly why they would find their downplaying the offer (because they were hoping to increase it somewhat to meet the candidate in the middle, so they had to start low because they want to keep some gap there) embarassing and feel insulted.
They may not be spending out of their pocket but they are spending out of their budget.
In corp dev where I worked until 2020. The compensation range is small enough that you know when you’re asking for top of range and you are at most leaving a couple of thousand on the table.
If you're going to start with salary, at least don't tell them what you currently make, because that will instantly be their baseline. Just tell them what you desire and don't tell them that it is 20% or whatever more than what you currently make.
But really you shouldn't start with giving a number. They already have a huge advantage because they negotiate salary all day and you do it once every few years. Just ask them for the range and make sure the minimum is above your X+20% number. If it's not, let them know that their range is too low, and if they won't tell you, say, "thank you, next".
I don’t think this true if you are already near top of band (very lucky place to be in). Right now I have golden handcuffs and just ignore almost all recruiters because I know only a few select big companies (plus quant) can match my pay.
Startups are a bit more hit or miss though, and if they are small enough they probably won’t even have pay bands. You need to do more due diligence there
Does the baseline matter though? If I’m not switching for less than 1.2x does it matter if they know what $current pay is?
Either they can offer it or they can’t?
It still matters because of mental anchoring. In their mind they are being very generous by giving you 20% more than you make so their offer will be the minimum.
If they don’t know what you’re making now, they will think the minimum might be too little and if they really like you they will go higher than the 1.2x.
The question wasn't about whether one should go first here, the question was whether if I make $100k should say either
a) "I make $100k today and I want at least 20% more which is $120k"
vs
b) "I want at least $120k"
The difference there is a lot less obvious. Of course, in the second you might have a minuscule chance of them offering way over $120k whereas in a you would not.
They might be willing to offer 1.4x. If you tell them you want at least 1.2x, they're probably not doing 1.4x. If you ask them what the range is and they tell you a range, you can at least ask them for the top of the range or more. Worst case they just say they can't do X but can do Y, and then you have more info to negotiate with. Way better than not knowing and leaving money on the table.
Once you've reached a high salary, it's a "damned if you do, damned if you don't".
If you talk comp early, you'll potentially (almost certainly) lowball yourself. If you don't, you'll spend a full time job's worth of time with hopeless positions.
If you are currently underpaid (and many people early in their careers are), this is a way to keep being underpaid.
What if they are willing to offer 50% more, but you ask for 20% more and end up with it?
If they go first, and they lowball you, you can always ask for more. If you go first and say "I want $X", and they say "OK!" you probably left money on the table.
You have a lot of experience, so you probably know what you are worth. But a lot of people a few years into their careers would undervalue themselves in this kind of negotiation if they went first, especially if they are transitioning from startups to big tech.
I have to imagine that it is good advice for early in your career. When you’re applicant number x out of 1500 who all got good grades at a good school, have some good github projects, and do well at the leetcode, grating the interviewer by prematurely mentioning comp may not be your best move.
Fresh out of school, you're worth just about as much as someone you graduated with.
20 years into your careers, you may be worth 10x or 1/10 of that same person.
Why waste people's time? It's a waste of time interviewing for a place if you know they aren't offering anything close to what you'll be asking. And if you're making 2-3x the median salary for that job title, you should probably get a comp range up front.
I've been burned by this a lot. Don't talk comp, go through hours of interviews, taking afternoons off for in person interviews (in the before times), all to find out that their maximum for for the position is a 25% pay cut.
Agreed, but it depends a lot on how much you value your time.
When starting out, you are usually not going to be low balled as you are cheap. Your time is not worth as much either and you are trying to climb the ladder.
Once you get to proper level of compensation, your time becomes much more valuable and the number of offers that meet that level of compensation become much lower. This means your best call is probably to move to talking money first.
Of course, you might miss out on some opportunities but you'll save a lot of time.
I do the same thing - I give them a ballpark of what I am making right now and depending on the opportunity what it would take to make me say yes (and if I em flexible/etc).
Sets expectations and avoid wasted time, which everyone prefers.
Not at all for software. You have many resources to do your do diligence and figure out what's the range. For top companies it's okay to put off the compensation talks for later.
Most of the recruiter traffic comes from LinkedIn, which is not particularly surprising. The very first line of my profile there reads:
Please do not contact me about cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, or associated technologies.
Almost all recruiters who contact me on LinkedIn are talking about... cryptocurrency, blockchains, or NFTs etc. If a recruiter isn't prepared to read even the first line of my profile then I think I'm fine to ignore them. For all other recruiters I'll send a polite and friendly "thanks, but I'm not looking at this time".
It is ironic that so many companies are using such an efficient programming language to implement the most horribly, deliberately wasteful computations on the planet. I got into rust because I want to do meaningful work efficiently not proof-of-meaningless-work.
Not sure if you're just calling blockchain development meaningless work in general, or referencing proof-of-work, which refers to meaningless computation done for blockchain security despite the unnecessary wastefulness.
If you're referencing the latter, maybe it's worth pointing out that all the blockchains using Rust (or the popular ones anyway) are proof of stake.
Haskell is probably the worst (best) blockchain company magnet. Scala too, to a lesser extent. It's not that odd when you think about what they're trying to build.
Do you have it as "Open to positions" or whatever is called? Reading this thread I feel like I'm flying under the radar somehow given my experience. Could it be US specific? I'm a FAANG engineer in Europe with a small LinkedIn network (less than 100) and I rarely get bothered
No, I do not. I’m an older Network & UNIX Admin type who is qualified for a lot of different positions. I suspect I many have in-demand skills and as such I end up in a lot of search results.
It is most likely because you're in Europe that you're not getting many requests. The job market for devs in the US is insane, much higher than in other areas of the world.
I see so many people complaining about it and I wonder if it is a US thing. I'm a FAANG engineer in Europe with a small LinkedIn network (less than a 100) and I rarely get contacted unless I open my LinkedIn profile to be seen by recruiters.
Honestly, I'd recommend taking that off your resume, or describing it in a way that avoids using keywords. Your resume doesn't have to mention every job you've ever had, especially if they aren't relevant to the work you're looking for.
Taking this post to publicly shame a recruiting technique I was victim to:
I entertained a reference check call by a recruiting firm (not standard but he was a good coworker and it was a serious position with a serious company). The interview was normal and standard fare except the last question which I found off-putting and dishonest: "Are you looking to fill any positions?"
Although I was, it's not the kind of professionalism I expect from any company representing mine so I politely declined and ended it there. My friend got the job and all's well that ends well.
Fast forward 3 months and I get cold called by the same company asking me if I would consider a position at XYZ inc (new company, unrelated to the first).
I was blown away that a company would think this is acceptable, and that information given for reference checks by employees are somehow automatically made into leads owned by the recruiting company. I escalated to legal at serious company and explained in no unclear manner how serious of a matter this was, to which they terminated the hiring agreement over.
So just a reminder please vet your recruiting companies before you mandate them to represent your company.
This is standard operating procedure to mine references for sales leads at several large national recruiting agencies. I am also pissed that this is a thing.
I like the template but I bristle at the notion that being a software engineer is a "privilege." I have spent countless hours training and re-training myself on technologies that change every few years: don't confuse my work ethic and interest in software engineering with some sort of passive privilege that fell into my lap. There are people far smarter than me who either cannot or don't have the perseverance to stay in this industry because it means having a never-ending commitment to learning and starting over (as opposed to having the privilege of getting hired as a manager at a company because of your blood line).
It probably depends on how you got into the line of work.
I always say I am lucky and privileged because through random chance, I developed an interest in programming as a kid and it became my favorite hobby, long before I chose it as a career. I spent hour and hours at it because it was how I played, and I became good at it because it matched my way of thinking about the world and I spent all my free time doing it.
This was luck. I could easily have had gardening as my favorite hobby, or art, or playing music. I would have had a lot harder time turning those into a lucrative career, so in that sense I am lucky.
Now, many people came into the field in different ways, so not everyone in the industry is lucky in the same way, but that doesn’t chance the fact that I am personally lucky.
Well, “interest in programming” sounds to be like a special advantage in the current world; why do you think it’s not a privilege? It might even be genetic!
(Not to mention that you also need the privilege of being born relatively smart.)
The problem with this conversation is that people feel attacked by the term, like it undermines the hard work they've done or their intelligence. It doesn't necessarily mean everything was handed to you on a silver platter. It's ok to acknowledge the ways in which you were dealt a good hand (if, in fact, you were).
Yes, saying that people like me achieved success due to privilege is misleading and hateful because it dismisses our hard work and tons of sacrifice to get where we are now.
But sure, call it a privilege. Thanks to discourse like this the word already lost its meaning.
The only thing that I got dealt a good hand is that by accident my passion and hobby can bring me a tonne of money.
Where is my privilege here?
Sadly as many people here you're confusing luck and privilege. No point in carrying on with the exchange if you're insisting on calling everything privilege.
I'm a self-taught programmer and I can think of several ways that my hard work was enabled by my privilege. And that's the key for me, is that you're focusing on the "here's what you were given" aspect of privilege and not the "here's what you were denied" aspect. Cheap computers abound now, but it wasn't long ago that having a personal computer at all implied a minimum income level.
I can't speak for you, but I went to a school with a computer lab and had a computer at home from a young age. Learning programming was hard, but it would have been a lot harder without those things. That's privilege. I was an advanced reader because my parents had time to teach me and filled our house with books. That's privilege. I had hobbies in my teen years instead of having to work to help support my family (privilege).
There are lots of people who could be brilliant programmers or engineers had they had the same opportunities as me. Instead of resenting the term, I acknowledge and am grateful for whatever advantages I was provided, because without them getting to the same place would have required exponentially more work, or maybe even been impossible.
Why does it bother you so much when people say you have privilege? Your privilege is that your passion and hobby is in high demand... most people don't have that. They have hobbies like fishing or golf or gardening, and those things aren't in high demand. If you had been born 200 years ago, your passion might also have been something that wasn't in high demand.
I don't see how that concept upsets you. No one is saying you did anything wrong, or that you haven't worked hard. We are just asking you need to accept that some of your success is due to luck, and your luck is a privilege.
Why is this important? Well, it is important to have an appreciation that not everyone had the same luck, and other people not doing as well in their careers is not necessarily because they haven't worked as hard as you.
Once you accept that, the next logical step is to realize that those of us who have been lucky (like me and you, who were lucky enough to have our skills be in high demand) should think about ways we can help those who haven't been so lucky.
A healthy society takes some from the lucky ones to help the unlucky ones. This doesn't mean that everyone should get the same reward, or that you don't deserve success or praise for your skills, just that there is some humbleness in not thinking you are better than someone else who is not as successful.
The fact that you get so angry when anyone points out that some of your success is based on chance and was not just because you worked harder is troubling. Why are you so defensive? Is it because you want to be able to think all of your success is based on your own hard work and therefore you don't need to share any of your success with the less fortunate?
I don't think you read my comments. If anything it looks like you just skimmed through them.
I explicitly said my success is a function of passion, hard work and LUCK. I have no problem admitting that part of my success is luck.
However equalling luck with privilege makes absolutely no sense. In your dictionary if I play poker and get a lucky hand I am now privileged.
What an utter nonsense.
And for the record I have absolutely zero problem with paying high taxes. Again, if you read my comments you'd know I come from a poor family. Government support was sometimes all we had. I fully support offering safety net for the less fortunate but can see you already made unfair assumptions about me.
If you get a lucky hand in poker, then yes, I would say you were privileged... for that specific hand.
Of course it doesn't matter much if you have privilege for one hand, and that privilege will change relatively fairly between everyone during a session of poker.
This is different though. This is more like playing a game of poker where a single hand lasts your whole life, and you keep reaping the benefits of your lucky draw for your entire life. That is meaningful privilege.
Imagine if instead of getting lucky with having an aptitude for computers, you instead inherited a million dollars when you turned 18.
Would you consider that privilege? It is just luck in the same way as your skills... you just happened to be born into a rich family who gave you money. That is luck, in the same way.
I think that is clearly privilege, and your computer skills are likely to earn you more than a million dollars extra in salary than someone working equally hard in a less lucrative profession.
If you think that inheriting a million dollars isn't privilege, I am curious as to what you think is.
Inheriting million dollars is luck not privilege.
This discussion doesn't make any sense whatsoever as you decided to cling to a made-up instead of vocabulary definition of privilege [0].
The same is happening to other words these days. For example some people modified the term racism so that according to their definition you can't possibly be racist towards white people. Which is obviously idiotic, but at least it allows these people to push their sick racist agendas.
Like I said, there is nothing to be achieved here when you're using your own definitions of words.
> Inheriting million dollars is luck not privilege.
I'll take the bait. I can't tell if you're confusing things on purpose but here goes.
If you are Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions, sure, it's just luck. Most people do not mysteriously inherit money, but get it from older relatives they are close with. If your parents die with a million bucks to leave to you, your life was already very different than someone whose parents die nothing, or worse a mountain of debt. People who can't afford to send their kids to college, for example, probably don't have a mil to leave them. I am not sure I've ever heard of someone just randomly lucking into that kind of inheritance. It probably happens sometimes.
But getting that million dollars suddenly enables you to live a very different life, and you get to take advantage of things that people who live paycheck to paycheck cannot. You cannot say that does not fit the definition you linked.
> In your dictionary if I play poker and get a lucky hand I am now privileged.
Reductio ad absurdum. A poker hand is dealt randomly, as are circumstances of birth and other factors, sure. But the next poker hand we are all on equal footing.
However the analogy is a good one if you extend it. If you win a big poker hand early in the game, gameplay changes once you're the chip lead. Your definition of what a good hand is changes. You are able to take chances and play hands that someone else couldn't. Once you have a stack of chips, you can win hands with those chips regardless of what cards are dealt. Sure, it's not a guarantee and you still have to play the rest of the game well.
Utter nonsense. If you put enough mental grease into that sort of interpretation everything can be classed as a privilege, in which case the concept is irrelevant.
Yes, any bit of luck you have that makes your life better is a privilege, because it is something that makes your life better than someone who didn't have that luck. They didn't do anything wrong to deserve not having the luck, it was just chance.
This doesn't make the concept irrelevant. It is important to accept and understand that a lot of your success in life is due to things outside of your control. You don't have to apologize for it, but you also shouldn't think you are better than people who weren't lucky.
Understanding this is important, because if you think that your success is entirely based on choices you made, you might feel like people who aren't successful are that way entirely based on their choices, too. Realizing that luck plays a big role is the first step towards understanding that those of us who have been lucky should help those of us who haven't been as lucky, because they don't deserve to be miserable just because they had bad luck.
Sure, but lots of people show up and work hard but only make minimum wage. The privilege is that your hard work earns a lot more money than someone else's hard work.
When my peers were partying and having a great time I was spending nights at the computer learning stuff.
I made this sacrifice willingly.
Years later I'm reaping the benefits of that sacrifice which I think I earned and is fair but still some people who don't like others to be successfull will call me privileged like it was all magically bestowed upon me.
We all had the same start. I choose a different path that cost me a lot.
And you have the nerve to call me privileged. Wow.
Is it easier if you reframe it as "good fortune"? For instance suppose that you or an immediate loved one suddenly developed a condition which was treatable and tolerable within your current life but took up 10+ hours per week. It sounds like thus far you've had the good fortune to always be able to find the time to continuously learn and re-train.
Or if you think back to your earliest contacts with technology, whether someone gave you a book, told you the name of some tech to learn, helped you get access to a computer, etc., I think all of us who are working in tech have had the good fortune to have access to technology and resources that helped us train ourselves but I can imagine having had substantially less access earlier in my life and the deficit that could've left. So I think I've been overall very fortunate, and that's part of what's meant by the word "privilege."
A software engineer does not have to deal with surviving on a median personal income of $36K. Or know what it's like to have to stay in a toxic job because it's difficult and risky to find a new one. Or what it's like to suffer health consequences from years of manual labor. And probably a lot of other things I don't realize because I never had to deal with it. I work very hard at my job, but I know I have these blindspots which is why I consider myself privileged.
Sounds like this was written by someone who has very atypical experience with recruiters. Perhaps they haven't had their resumes copied into the database that gets bought and sold by every recruiting firm in existence.
I could make a full time job out of replying to recruiters, because I get probably 100 "opportunities" a day. Most of them have never actually read my resume, or they are working off of a 10 year old copy that was bought from a data broker. And probably 10k other people get that same exact email, so even if I did respond, the odds are bad.
If a founder of a company reaches out with a thoughtful message, there's a 100% chance I'll respond, even to decline. If an in-house recruiter for a copy reaches out, and shows that they understand why I'd be a good fit, there's a 100% chance I'll look, and a 50% chance I'll respond.
I did get my current role by doing roughly what the article states. A recruiter for a startup reached out to me, explaining what the role was and why I might be a good fit. I interviewed with an intent to only leave for a 50%+ salary bump, and they offered 80%+ and equity, so I left. That being said, I ignored 99.9% of the other recruiters who reached out.
What is sad, is what has happened to the industry, over time.
When I was younger, recruiters would woo you, and would act as your advocate. They would sing your praises (sometimes, with a bit of “embellishment”) to the prospective employer.
They also made quite a bit of money.
I suspect that outfits like monster.com devastated the “concierge” type of recruiter.
Also, there were contractor specialists. They acted almost exactly like talent agents, getting a commission, whenever they successfully found a contract for their clients. I dealt with a number of them (as an employer) over the years.
I think the “agents” are a thing of the past. Not exactly sure what killed them.
These days, everybody, in every profession, is obsessed with scale. Lots of small numbers, as opposed to a few big ones.
I assume that “self-service” sites have accelerated that transition.
If anyone ever saw the movie Jerry Maguire, it sort of laments the same kind of metamorphosis, in the sports agent field.
I have been rather shocked at the uncouth behavior that has been directed my way, by recruiters. I’ve been told that it’s because I’m older. They haven’t done or said anything to dissuade me from that point of view.
Dealing with today’s recruiters was one of a number of reasons that I threw in the towel on looking for work, and just accepted that I’m in early retirement.
In any case, I am sad to see the change, but folks seem OK with the state of the industry, so I guess that it’s really just sour grapes, on my part.
Tracking pixels are just embedded 1x1 images in HTML emails. They're not hidden; they're just stuffed in the rendered HTML. For example, here's one from B&H photo:
Detecting them automatically is probably tricky, but you can avoid the entire problem by not loading external resources in HTML emails (or, better yet, always load the plaintext version of the email.)
Turn off "auto-load images in emails" option in gmail. If a plain-looking email has that banner at top "click here to load images", there is a pixel-tracker in there.
I don't load images by default. I use Thunderbird, but I know other clients also have this feature. Definitely worth whitelisting domains that you want to allow images from to avoid triggering the recruiter bots!
Agreed, it just is highly unlikely that the LinkedIn resume is out of date for most folks. Asking for a resume without asking if the LinkedIn resume is okay also creates a source of confusion. For example, if they don't ask if the LinkedIn resume will do, are they implying that a LinkedIn resume _won't do_? Do they need me to open up Word and retype my LinkedIn?
I get a lot of recruiters that are trying to fill positions at defense contractors. So right away I know two things:
- I'm not interested
- They aren't at liberty to talk about the technical details
So I always respond with something like:
> Oh yeah, I'm pretty decent at {language}. But I want to keep growing, so I'm really not interested in writing {very old version of language}. Can you tell me what version they're using?
I figure it's a good balance between "screw off" and bothering with a phone call that won't be fruitful for either of us. It keeps me in their rolodex (in my experience, recruiters have a very high turnover rate--so who knows who they'll be recruiting for tomorrow). Also, I like to imagine that some poor engineer is trying to convince the machine to let him upgrade, and maybe I can help them out, whoever they are, by making the old version seem like a recruiting hazard.
Even the cold-calling, working-for-an-agency, just-wants-10%-of-your-salary recruiters. Most of them are simply nice people who are trying to make a living in a difficult and incredibly competitive business. Some are assholes, no doubt, but just being polite until they prove that they are cost you very little.
I had a recruiter reach out this morning to tell me about great opportunities in <city> with <company>. I don't want to work for that company, ever, for serious ethical reasons. I don't want to move to that city (though it's not a terrible place).
I simply said "Hi <name>, thanks so much for reaching out. I'm not really interested in any new opportunities right now. I'm also planning a fully remote career from now on, so moving to <city> doesn't really work for me. Thanks for reaching out though".
It took 30 seconds. It burned no bridges. It made no presumptions about them and didn't try to harm them back for wasting my time.
If they persist, I'll ask them to please take me off their list and not contact me again- as politely as I can manage.
So far this strategy has proven 100% effective at handling recruiters, but it also makes me feel better because there's no negative emotions involved.
I don't want to deal with that multiple times a day, though. They're not "nice people" when they disregard the only thing written in my Linkedin profile: "please no unsolicited calls". If they didn't even bother to read that single sentence, they probably know nothing about me and have nothing to offer. It's arrogant of them to waste my time.
Exactly. I don't get the hate. We are so privileged in the software industry to have people on our backs all the time offering us work that it makes me kind of sick when people take it for granted.
Sure, some recruiters will waste your time, but a lot of them are quite good at their job. It's literally their job to matchmake workers and employers. You don't have to be an asshole to them for reaching out.
I had that happen with a house once. I sent a house to my agent (that I had an existing relationship with), and they never responded. So I found a new agent and bought the house. Old agent reappears two weeks later and I informed them of what happened.
They had their assistant respond and they were cordial. The last time I saw him he was pretty condescending saying things like "this is the first step in a long process of finding a house." To the point that the assistant pulled him aside during the showing and asked him to tone it down and apologize to me.
So him blowing me off seemed like more of the same attitude and I'm sure they realized they lost $25k on an easy sale. This was in Seattle so I didn't feel bad about finding someone who took me seriously in a fast market.
Alternate approach: build a relationship with the 99th percentile super-recruiter that basically all the startups that know what they are doing in your area use to hire, and go to him for a job.
I send all my friends to him when looking for jobs. He also doesn't lie to you and since he has a technical background, will rarely place anyone in a bad fit. He's literally sent 2nd tier candidates to other recruiters.
It's a rich get richer game and the super-connectors have way more candidates and companies to match, effectively creating their own market. I believe John makes mid 7 digits a year from placements, plus companies love him and candidates keep going back to him for their next job.
Once you have that reputation, it looks like art next to the other 99% of hustling recruiters that are trying to place poor fit candidates into the 3 roles they are "working on".
Reminds me of NYC’s absolutely horrific apartment broker model. No thank you.
Why would I want to give a recruiter a large cut of my potential compensation for no real value? If someone is making seven figures doing that, there’s a problem.
If I want a job at a company, I can apply for it myself.
I hate apartment brokers as much as you do, I assure you.
I don't know what to say other than there is significant value in (1) getting a direct connection to someone who is running hiring from a reputable source and (2) having your recruiter actually understand you well enough to directly recommend you to jobs that are a good fit (some of which aren't even publicly listed anywhere) and saving you a ton of time.
You are aware that pretty much no one looks at folks that are "applying on the website", right?
Hard disagree. After years of random recruitment messages from him, he once sent me a series of obviously-templated robo-emails. In his database of NYC engineers, in the field that normally tracks your employer, he had me listed as "ex-[company]" -- with the name of a company I previously worked for and was no longer particularly fond of. Seems he robo-emailed using this data directly, so his templated emails (3 in a row within one month!) contained lots of cringey "How are things going at ex-[company]?"
After the 3rd email, I informed him I was taking a sabbatical from the industry (as mentioned at the top of my LinkedIn profile at the time) and asked him to remove me from his list permanently. Instead of admitting to the obvious mistake and apologizing, he doubled down with a reply that I found pretty obnoxious.
There were some other red flags years before that, so I blocked him, one of the only times a recruiter has ever led me to do so.
A lot of recruiters won't list the company that they are recruiting for. I assume this is because you could just apply to the company directly and they wouldn't get their fee.
One time I asked the company who they were recruiting for. They told me the company name and I replied with "I already work there."
This was on LinkedIn where my current employer is on my page and anyone can see it.
I’m not replying to the guy who wants me to move to Tampa for “up to $60K” as a PHP developer. (Nothing against Tampa or PHP. I’m just not moving there for that.)
But occasionally I’ll get an email like:
“Hi! I saw from your LinkedIn that you used to do X, but now you’re doing Y. That’s an interesting progression! I’m working with a company who needs people with experience in X who’d rather be doing Y, because they’d like to be on Y. I also see that you’re interested in Z, and you’d be reporting to our CTO who wrote a book about Z. Want to hear more?”
I’m not looking, but I send them a nice reply and remember their names. If I were looking, that’s the kind of recruiter I’d want to talk to.
Just state clearly what kind of information you need in order to continue the conversation (or not). Even a simple "what's the pay like" would be more effective.
Every time I read something about recruiters, I am reminded of this fantastic post [1] (sadly the original has been taken down, and this is the only copy I know of).
Anyone who has ever experienced third party recruiters in the UK will be nodding their head along after just the first few paragraphs...
LOL that's pretty funny. I find it kind of messed up how British people like to shit on big segments of their population for having certain accents (ie "Shithead"). But still really well written.
I don't have time ... the volume of messages is too high, and the amount of 'legitimate' inquiries are too low. And the odds of getting ghosted by the recruiter too high.
If they're a recruiter from a company that I know and they WORK FOR that company, I'll respond.
Having said that I think that is a good article and I really like that email.
I find that a lot of people working for a recruiting company actually make it clear in their email with the address or signature.
To some extent a contractor who working for the company I know ... I'd still consider that a direct company reaching out to me type situation that I'd be more inclined to respond.
I don't find that it is hidden all that often, but that's just my experience.
I suppose it is possible that a temporary contractor has an email address from that company, but I think you can get reasonably high signal by looking at their LinkedIn history. Switching positions every few months is a red flag. Even if they're an independent contractor, longer-term arrangements with each client suggest better relationships and better commitment to real outcomes.
I see plenty of recruiters who just work for recruiting firms and don't hide that fact. Anyone who won't immediately tell me who they're recruiting for gets ignored. I'm sure I end up talking to the occasional contractor but you can easily filter out a lot of obvious low-hanging (and rotten) fruit).
I went into this thinking I was going to disagree because honestly I hate recruiters and the time-wasting involved but I actually agree.
Here's why: by having a template that he just copy-pastes. This is extremely low effort and will filter out a lot of recruiters. I also agree with working with company recruiters over third-party recruiters.
The first thing many recruiters will want to do is "hop on a call". Resist this urge. In fact, don't even give them your phone number. Force them to use email to contact you. A phone call is a good way of wasting your time. If you actually need to call them on the phone, call them.
There are lots of techniques recruiters will use to waste your time. One common one is if pressed on compensation range you'll get the answer that it's "competitive".
Use a template like this to simply filter out time-wasters. If they want to get on a call, resist giving concrete details or otherwise just give you bad vibes, just stop responding. They can't call you. They don't have your number. Move on.
> There are lots of techniques recruiters will use to waste your time.
Why is this? Why do they insist on wasting a candidate's time when answering some simple questions via email is much more efficient?
I've talked to HR people about this, and the answers I've received are not satisfying. A common response is that they want to get to know you, hear how you speak, determine if you might be a good fit. BUT, shouldn't they figure out if the candidate is even interested by verifying basic needs/requirements?
The responses come down to basically they don't value our time as much as we do.
> Why is this? Why do they insist on wasting a candidate's time when answering some simple questions via email is much more efficient?
That's easy: they want you invested. The sunk cost fallacy works.
Think about it another way: being a recruiter is being in sales. Sales people love pipelines (funnels) so if you think about the recruitment stages a simplified view might be:
1. Email candidate
2. Candidate responds to email
3. Discuss on phone
4. Candidate submits resume
5. Organize phone screen
6. Conduct interviews
7. Negotiate offer
8. Accept offer
Each of these steps has a conversion rate. Imagine you get paid $20,000 for placing a candidate. Work backwards through this pipeline and you might figure out you have to send 5,000 emails to place one candidate. That means each email you send, you've "earned" $4. Imagine if the response rate is 20%. Well, getting a candidate to respond by changing up the content or presentation of the email means you've now "earned" $20. If only 1 in 3 talk on the phone then each phone introduction you make "earns" you $60. And so on.
it's a numbers game. They're just trying to get you to the next stage in the pipeline.
i've had lots of recruiters that really thought their value was to harass me me by phone. even though I've emphasized repeatedly that there isn't anything more that they can do personally to help me...the insist on calling me nearly ever day to 'see where my head is at'
i'm pretty sure i've lost out on some decent positions in the past because i got so sick of spending 30 minutes here and there talking to the same idiot that said 'dont _ever_ call me back you asshole'
I also strongly disagree. All the jobs I've taken at the advice of a recruiter were the worst jobs I've ever had. Even if the job matched everything on my checklist and I was able to visit the company and talk to the employees before signing on, it was still a terrible place to work. Why? Because it was in everyone's best interest to hide how miserable the job actually was. And yes, the salary was higer, but the jobs didn't last. The longest I was able to tolerate these jobs was about 2 years each. Which didn't look very good on my resume. Switching jobs every 2 years is probably ok for some, but I wouldn't hire anyone that has a consistent record of that. My advice is to find places that you would want to work and apply there on your own.
I have one rule about life: I do not work with spammers. This includes my career.
Recently, I've been solicited for jobs where it was clear that the recruiter never looked at my resume. (I'm a software engineer, and the roles had nothing to do with software engineering.) I flagged these as SPAM.
Reading resumes is work. Reading job openings is work. When a recruiter spams a job opening without screening the recipients, they're just trying to push their work onto strangers.
I have a dirty trick to ignore "bots" recruiters in Linkedin:
I just put a greek character on my name or add an emoticon, so I got a lot of messages starting with:
"Dear name ..
So, it's safe to ignore the message. Even when probably I'm not interested I used to reply with a template message, but I won't waste 30 seconds with a bot.
One question I have- recently some states (notably Colorado, California, Connecticut) have required job postings to specify the salary range. Is this something recruiters are required to provide via contact over email/Linkedin message?
This. It works. And it saves time for both sides ( and remember that recruiters have no motive not to disclose it -- the more you get the better it is for them ).
I like to think of it as spamming the spammers! The marginal cost of extra words in a "select all -> copy -> paste" is pretty low so I think it makes a lot of sense to be very clear and address any objections they might have in advance.
I also have found through experimentation that posting one liners like "how much?" just results in the recruiter reverting to their own script of "objection handlers"
The size and clarity of the message really does say "this isn't a conversation", "no bullshit" and "let's not fuck around here"
This is my own experience though. I've been running with it and refining for about 6 months to a year. Maybe It could be better. :)
I'm going to agree that the "if you want me, do some work first" thing seems a bit overkill. For me, usually just a single sentence asking for salary range and job description gives me more than enough to figure out whereabouts in the spectrum they are.
This is the way I think about it:
1) there are different types of recruiters. At least in the city where you are, I can tell you that there are actually some good recruiting firms that consistently send appealing opportunities while avoid wasting your time with emails about lowballers, if you just spend the 30 mins upfront to chat with them about your expected salary range and specialization. These recruiters understand that there's an entire subsection of the workforce that is very capable but has zero online presence, and they build their own moat by connecting w/ professionals directly, to build a long term, high quality, proprietary network. Being part of such networks and having the recruiter sift and prescreen jobs for you can be valuable. For one-off linkedin cold mailers, the signal to noise ratio is generally pretty low IME because they optimize for volume. While they can give me data points about what lowballers offer, I personally haven't gained anything from this info, so I'd optimize elsewhere. YMMV.
2) you can often infer salary range from the company name and job title alone. As a rule of thumb, if it's an no-name company, they're almost always going to lowball if you're at senior level. If your goal is to raise your salary quickly, then rather than looking at sideways increments, you'll want to target "obvious" upgrades (e.g. if one is junior, look for "senior" roles; if you're senior at a local non-US company, look for US-based multinationals; or just go for broke and try for unicorns exclusively)
Those are incredibly good points. If you look at the levels.fyi data I think this pattern applies really well to the people within the bottom half of the graph.
There's ALWAYS the option of trying to go from "No Name" -> "Big Name" but I also feel like that can be a harder path to take. When the person reaching out is a "Meta" or a "Netflix" I know that I don't need to ask how much.
I'm pretty sure the number I got there would be a 4x or 5x... in Meta's case though, it's the leetcode stopping me (2 mediums in 45 minutes? Maybe if I wasn't dad to a toddlerI could study enough to get there, though my other problem is I keep getting bored of the grind and wind up building cool shit for fun instead), in the Netflix case it's because they keep saying "NO" (hahahahaha)
The optimal path here for the bulk of the developers in the middle of the pack is to make a move when the person reaching out has a role at a different no-name shop that is 50% higher than their current.
Remember there are a few vectors for that big salary bump. One where you were grossly underpaid from the moment you were hired, but another one that pops up might be that you've been in the role for a couple years and you have been so busy and engaged that you didn't even NOTICE that the market popped in the meantime, your no-name-company doesn't really pay attention to keeping up with the market and the persona reaching out is ALSO picking you for a spot that has a significant increase in responsibility.
I do think that the "reply to everyone" model starts to fall down once you're at an Uber, or some other big logo.
The best part about advice is once you've heard it you can choose to ignore it on a case by case basis.
:D
I've PERSONALLY only ever heard the "I ignore recruiters" jokes so the idea that they're this tremendous fountain of untapped knowledge was pretty wild to me.
OOOH!! One more thing about the leetcode grind. I'd ALSO argue that if you're in the middle of your grind and a 50% raise comes along, it's probably a clever move to pause the grind for long enough to take the raise and then get back to work on the grind while you're making way more.
> The optimal path here for the bulk of the developers in the middle of the pack is to make a move when the person reaching out has a role at a different no-name shop that is 50% higher than their current
I think it's worth noting that 50% bumps were historically nowhere as realistic as they are today with the current job market. At least from my convos w/ recruiters over the years, large bumps would normally imply some very tangible upgrade, like a corresponding job title change. A 30-50k bump back in ~2015 typically meant moving from a dev role to a role w/ significant leadership/managerial responsibilities.
Being able to command 50% bumps without a significant change in levels of responsibilities in today's market is definitely an anomaly from a historical perspective, but under these circumstances it definitely makes sense to consider lateral job changes to get in on those juicy market dynamics.
I think you could get the same effect but in like 6-8 sentences, 1-2 paragraphs.
If I saw this text in a response, personally (and I'm not a recruiter), I'd move on since the person seems hard to handle.
But yeah my approach is different in the first place. I only respond to recruiters who seem to put good thought and background research into their conversation starter.
I'd love to see your version of the same thing. The exact response isn't really as important as writing something that is authentic and in "your voice"
You're probably right that a different response would work well for you.
Though if a recruiter wasn't willing to read through that for the ~$30k payday I'd represent if they are successful, maybe that's one that I don't want to work with either.
But we all gravitate towards people who we think we'd fit with. Maybe someone skips over me for coming across as a stuffy and a lot of work and maybe someone else says "finally a type-a jackass like me! we're gonna crush this thing"
"Thanks for reaching out, could you send along the company name, a job description and total compensation details for the role?"
Get to the core of what you're asking. The rest of the response is needlessly long-winded. You don't want them to waste your time, and that is a fair ask in our industry, but you also don't need to waste theirs.
It reads like the author really wanted to get that "privilege" line in there, and then came up with a lot of other words to put around it to hide that fact.
I've been doing a variation of this myself over the years, it's gotten me good jobs. Sometimes, I'd simply say I want X salary that is ~20% more than I currently would have thought I was worth. Then sometimes the recruiter would come back and say that is actually possible.
There are two types of recruiters. Relationship based recruiters and “numbers game” recruiters.
As a recruiter that works primarily with programmers I can usually tell within moments of meeting another recruiter which type they are.
Relationship based recruiters can be a huge asset to your career.
Here are a couple tips
1. A relationship based recruiter is almost never a general recruiter, they specialize in a specific industry.
2. The best type of recruiter is one that has intimate knowledge of your field. So ask probing questions. If they know the jargon and that’s it, pass.
I dunno. I've been a SWE for almost 20 years now, and I just got a recruitment email for "Senior Manager of Partner Relations". I'm honestly not sure what that even is, but it's definitely not code monkey. Email included all kindsa reassurances, which, even if I were in the field of "Partner Relations", would make me pretty nervous:
We do not conduct fake interviews
We will not ask you for references unless you are being considered for a job
We will give you feedback the moment we get it from our customer
There is no one better than yourself to get what you're looking for, so instead of relying in a third party to give you the edge, make sure you're already on the top of the wave.
I never work with external recruiters (staffing agencies)I have made the exception three times, and all of them ended with a poor experience, basically repeating the same information over and over again between them and the people from the actual company.
In my view (your experience may differ): almost always ignore a recruiter, unless getting out of your current job situation is so urgent that you're willing to waste a ton of time, or the recruiter presents a very specific proposal that makes clear that they've done their homework meaning that you are a great fit for a unique opportunity.
In some cases going through a recruiter is a guarantee that you won't get a position, because a third-party recruiter tries to sell you to a company that has its own recruiters and is unwilling to pay the third-party recruiter's fee.
I don't know if it needs to be this elaborate. I like the idea though.
However...
> Can you send along the company name, a job description and, total compensation details for the role you’re reaching out in reference to?
Should be table stakes. I've started having to walk away from any recruiter that insists on a 15 minute call without providing these details up front. I wish there was some collective awareness around the fact that if someone took a 15 min call with every recruiter ping they got, they'd be on the phone 5-8 hours a day.
No, I definitely ignore recruiters. Internal recruiters I may respond, but if you're some consultancy firm or recruiting firm I'll never work with you.
My skills are in demand. When I want a new job I'll reach out for it. It'll be there.
I don’t know how I feel, all the recruiters that reach out to me are hilariously out of touch and it’s patently obvious that they are purely reaching out to me as a stat and nothing else. The worst of the bunch is Amazon, I keep getting messages referencing my work experience 15 yrs ago! They probably have a resume of mine from back then. My career has changed significantly since then and they don’t bother checking.
Sorry but I do not care enough about my career to put in this much effort. Recruiters are a dime a dozen these days and it's so much easier to just wait until you need one. Even if it's a bit less optimal.
Thanks for reaching out. I'm okay to travel to spend a week to work together every now and then but I'm working remote only and permanently from X1-Country and I'd only be interested in opportunities with compensations around X2 plus benefits and if I like their tech stack. Let me know when you have something that sounds like a match for that. Thanks again.
I've seen so many shady tricks pulled by recruiters. I'm sure it goes both ways, but never forget the recruiter isn't in the business of helping you, they're in the business of helping the people who pay them.
Seen recruiters low-ball staff, or tell the person that they weren't as good as other candidates... "but if you lower your day rate to be more aligned with your junior-level skills..." So when the person shows up, they feel deflated since they think we thought they were junior... but in fact, we loved them and just didn't have enough budget to hire them at the right rate -- and the recruiter helped us get their rates down because at the end of the day the recruiter only cared about putting seats in chairs for us.
Seen recruiters spam over candidates without so much as doing a basic screening interview. "Oh yeah, he's great... he knows JavaScript and English..." and they're literally just looking at the poor guy's LinkedIn and they haven't ever spoken with him past a few copy-paste emails. It's a numbers game to them. They don't want you, as the person paying them, to ever feel like their shelves are empty.
Seen recruiters promise people visas along with the offer letter... then for whatever reason, if the job shifts, the recruiters just cancel the contract and the person would get deported. Saw this in Sydney A LOT. The recruiters and staffing agencies don't care at all what happens to the person, as long as they get a commission. They lie and over-promise, and sell-sell-sell... and even if they only have a 3-month contract they'll promise someone a year, then just switch it last minute or have a cancellation clause.
As someone who worked for a Digital Agency where we hired a lot of people through recruiters... the number of times some poor bloke would come up to me and be like, "So... 3 months probation then I'm full time? That's what the recruiter said... now you can get me a visa and I'll be able to bring my wife over here too?" and I'd have to be like, "Yeah sorry, Johnny... this was just a 3-month gig." Had one guy, "But I gave up my family's visa for this... the recruiter promised me higher pay and that you'd take over my visa..." Felt awful. And the poor guy almost certainly had to leave Sydney when the job was done.
Worse... my GM wouldn't let me fire that recruiter. "They give us the best rates..." Was all so shady. Left me with the solid impression that these people were all just bottom feeders. Willing to do anything to make a buck that day.
Possibly, but they left out the possible outcomes of "simply refuse to talk salary, or to talk salary in email" and "just lie about the salary and/or the job".
I did have that in there at one point. In my case I tend to either practice refining my script, or just thank them and walk away. It's in the autoresponse "without that data I'm unable to continue further discussions"
You do have to stick to that, but it's IMO pretty clear but also concise enough that you don't well on it.
I’ve got a specific LinkedIn hack - my name on it is Firstname “Nickname” Lastname. If I get a message addressed to Firstname or to Nickname, I know someone actually read it before sending and I’ll respond. If it’s to Firstname “Nickname”, then I know it’s an automated shotgun blast and I generally ignore it.
I think we have this post every few months on this site, so let me explain how recruiting works.
There's 3 types/market for recruiters and they almost never overlap.
The first are "body shop style" recruiters. It's basically a numbers game where they try to cold-call as much people with githubs/linkedin or blogs that reference programming. They don't know programming (not even what's the difference between languages or front-end/back-end) and are looking for a list of buzzwords. They'll send copy-pasted messages (you can tell because it references tech you never used or never even claimed to have used). If you respond (and really you shouldn't) you won't be able to get any relevant information about the position because... they don't have it. These recruiters are often contracted by external firms in "best value countries" and are given canned response to message you. That's probably what the author encountered.
Second type are professional recruiters. Their salary is by commissions will often be a percentage of your salary. They are knowledgeable about programming and tech (often former engineers who wanted a break from coding!). They typically are looking to match specific profiles to specific jobs at client companies. This goes all the way to recruiters specialized in C-Suite executives (and you can picture the commission finding a CEO will bring in). Their messages will be personalized and you shouldn't hesitate to reply back even if you aren't looking for a job. They know that most great software engineers are almost never openly looking for a job so their goal is to be on good terms with a large number of talented developers so that the minute they start looking for a job they can match them with positions. You'll know when you encounter one.
Third type is basically referrals. A players attract A players, smart companies know it. Make sure your referral bonus is a percentage of total comp. It's probably the most effective way of recruiting (it has an insane signal to noise ratio). But you only get access to that type of network by... bringing value and being part of it in the first place!
I'm happy to invest in a relationship with recruiters who will be around for a while. But I get the impression that most recruiters have only short stints in that work.
P.S. I would like to give credit to one recruiter though: Markus Edmunds. He'd been recruiting for a particular technical specialty a year or two ago. He really got to know my preferences and strengths, and never ghosted me when individual companies passed on my resume. I know that's indistinguishable from him acting in enlightened self-interest, but it was still a productive relationship.
Just today I responded to a recruiter who directly emailed me "because my LinkedIn bio looked promising", asking:
1) How he got my email address, since it is not affiliated with my LinkedIn profile (uses my work email and only contains information about my current position)
2) That I wasn't interested, thanking him for his time
He responded, seemingly offended, that I "have a Gmail account, a very public account" that his "team of Search Engineers" found.
I've gotten a bunch of recruiters at work too and in a few cases they sent the email to the wrong Matt because they just spammed every common email name combo for corporate emails.
My idea for recruiters was special website with referral link where they could fill out all information I was interested in (the fields was required in order to submit the form) and big red information that stated: "If your offer will be interesting I will contact back on linkedin".
In addition I made small control question, for example: "Whats the first letter on my LinkedIn description?".
That way I know I don't talk with a bot and they really read my profile.
No thanks. Most cold callers these days don't even work for the company. They always seem to say "I'm recruiting for an esteemed/up and coming/potential unicorn (lol)/hot/aggressively funded/blah blah blah company". I've bitten a few times and asked for details about said company and they say they want a call first.
No thanks. Tell me about the position first. Then I'll tell you if I'm interested.
I like forcing recruiters to voicemail. It's the same for email. This doesn't mean I am ignoring them but it does give me a way to filter who I even reply to. If they send me a badly written, very generic email for something like Helpdesk Level 1, something I'm not even doing or isn't on my resume, or CEO of Company X for $10/hr, I don't even reply. The voicemail works the same way - if they can't seem to render a sentence, be topical, or sound conversant in the local language, I just delete it.
If it sounds remotely interesting, I might send them an email back. The exception is AWS/Azure/Google which is heavily recruiting for TAMs and they're having a heck of a time filling the seats and keeping them filled. If they're $MAJOR_CLOUD_PROVIDER I always ask them if its for a TAM or similar role up front.
I have a small blacklist of companies too - folks I know who are going to go through the entire interview process and it doesn't matter whats said because they're going to lowball the crap out of people. I don't want to work for bottom-feeders.
The "good offers" I get typically come from someone who has seen an open source contribution from me, or someone I know from consulting. If you find yourself jammed up in your career and you can't find that next lillypad, try consulting to build up your connections. It's a good way to get the inside story at companies, and also if you find a company you really like, it's very possible to arrange something so that they hire you on some split between your consulting rate and your pay rate so you and them win. Check your employment contract first, local laws, etc. Check my profile for an email to send your resume to if you want to chat.
I could of course easily search the Internet for the meaning of that acronym, but where's the fun in that? I'll stick with the first thing that popped into my head: Tits & Ass Manager.
There are so many comments from people who report being inundated on LinkedIn by recruiters. I don't have a LinkedIn account, and I _never_ hear from recruiters. My name is out there; I'm on other developer-centric social networks and generally have no compunction about giving out my email address and phone number, and I literally don't have this problem. I have over a decade of experience in many different software engineering roles, so I assume I would be a plum prize for unscrupulous recruiters. (I used to receive messages like these, but they dropped off around 2013. I assume this is roughly the point that recruiters realized that they could focus on LinkedIn to maximize their conversion.)
So, serious question: why do you have a LinkedIn account? I know there is theoretical benefit in maintaining connections to professional acquaintances, but in sticking to email and a few alumni Slack channels, I have never felt limited in that department. What is the benefit of your LinkedIn account and why do you keep it?
Because it made looking for a job almost effortless. I'm not terrible at whiteboarding but I hate doing it so I just kept letting recruiters contact me and sending back a generic response asking for info until I found one that sounded fun, paid well, and didn't whiteboard.
This may be familiar by now but developers are very lucky.
I left computers to move to investments, make 500k+/year but I envy the stability and choices that developers have. If I lost my job tomorrow it is not clear I could find another similar job. You have lots of options.
It looks like the situation will remain this way during our lifetimes (you never know), but you should at least appreciate it.
Great take. I turned down a path into finance to go computers, and did so to target the reverse of what you notice.
Few other jobs offer pay and stability similar to a Dr. or Lawyer without the working hours and with geo-flexibilty. Few other jobs offer a shot at a massive personal liquidity event without the direct exposure to a recession like in finance. Few other jobs offer this pay for what's basically a trade without a tough physical lifestyle like working in O&G.
If more "normal" people went into engineering, as in the normal white collar types who are smart but go into MBAs/MDs instead, I think we'd see interesting social impacts as more people discover that you can do flavors of digital nomad work without being the stereotypical tech bro. I think this is just starting to happen with MBAs who go into TPM roles.
Eng paths re-enanble lifestyles that I feel were lost post-1970 for much of the general working population. Now, you can live and work nearly anywhere. No requirements to suck it up in Cleveland, NYC, whatever for the kids because of good schools and a good local white collar job. If you want to pack up and go to Europe, you can grab a visa from big US tech there, or small startups. Just meet the right recruiter. Wild stuff.
A recruiter got me my first job a decade ago when I was fresh out of college and my internship place didn't hire me and I was panicking to find something as I didn't have a backup plan. He helped me interview at multiple places until he found one for me (the pay sucked but it was a job). So yeah, they're annoying, but I do understand their place.
Recruiters and estate agents seem to be the smarmiest individuals I've ever come across. I'm not sure why that is, but the pattern is obvious.
I really don't understand why we're expected to trust the largest transactions in our lives (house/job) to individuals with no real qualifications to execute those transactions. It feels kinda dumb.
A great tip I heard was to put something at the top of your LinkedIn profile like "If you're messaging me about a job opening, please tell me your favorite song at the top of your message".
That way you can throw away any message that doesn't start with the answer because you know it was a bulk mail and they didn't actually read your profile.
I like this a lot - it is first example I have seen of a job candidate thinking about the 'recruiter experience', with the idea that if you can create a positive experience for a recruiter at low effort, you may gain high reward at some stage later in your career.
it may surprise some of the folks on HN - which as a tech / engineering audience, are usually those candidates - that a lot of recruiters actually care a great deal about 'candidate experience', as they have a similar calculus - low effort to create a positive experience, bank it as possible gain later down the line.
Unfortunately those recruiters are let down by significant minority of noisy bad actors who are outside their control. Anyone can 'become' a recruiter - you can do it right away, right now - and therefore there is no QA on who gets to do that job or how that job gets done.
Love reading reviews about recruiters! I'm a recruiter and the CEO of HireScale. Many of the pain points described in this forum are ones I set-out to solve at HireScale.
Let me just start with agency vs. in-house recruiter types. In-house isn't always practical for employers so agency has traditionally been the fall back when flexibly is needed. Not anymore!
Freelance recruiters are the solution because they have authorization to represent the employers' brand and are being paid for the service they provide.
Agency recruiters are not authorized to represent brand (except retained) and only get paid if they make the placement so they don't disclose the brand until they've got their "fish on a hook".
My theory is the gig-economy can fix this while providing more value to the employer, recruiter and the candidate (transparency goes a long way). For any hiring managers reading out there, when a flexible option is needed, freelance recruiters offer a much better option.
I agree that it's a good practice to build relationships with recruiters. I also think it's important to do business with the companies where you agree with their practices, methods and principles.
Why support a bad practice so go ahead and ghost agencies.....Cyber and many others like them were built for hiring practices in the 70's or 80's (think kelly secretaries/ temporaries). Today's talent market is much more sophisticated.
Check-out the HireScale Recruiter Marketplace. Follow our community to interact with in-house and freelance recruiters only(branded to the employer 100% of the time)
The typical recruiting-house recruiter has a script that was given to them by someone else, has no particular job in mind for you, and does not know the difference between Java and JavaScript. They are, in short, one small step above spammers. Unless you are currently thinking about changing jobs, you should definitely ignore them.
None of that applies to an in-house recruiter. Someone who works in HR for the hiring company, directly, may have years of experience, good training, and have a good idea of what the hiring manager is looking for. You shouldn't ignore them, although if you're entirely happy you should have a short message prepared -- "Thanks for thinking of me. I'm happy with my current position, but you never know what the future holds. Feel free to check in with me again in six months or so."
Absolutely true. 3rd party recruiting agencies have very different motives than an in-house HR department recruitment.
An easy tell-tale sign is that they withhold the name of the company until they get you on the phone. They have a contract saying once you're in direct contact with the recruiter, you are in their pipeline and they get rights to bill a portion of your contract.
3rd party agencies are incentivized to get you the most amount of money they can, so they can skim off the top. They are highly motivated to move you through and get you signed as quickly as possible, qualified or not.
In house recruiting doesn't have this constant need to move candidates, and will be fast or slow depending on the needs within the company.
My experience has been the opposite. 3rd party recruiters cold messaging me have led to my last two job changes and significant bumps in salary. One of them put my salary in at a higher level than I had asked for.
In house recruiters on the other hand have not been more knowledgeable about the team they are trying to fill for. Also, I have a theory that companies that are willing to pay a huge commission check to 3rd party recruiters are more likely to pay more for talent.
Hmmm... maybe I should have been clearer and more explicit about the fact that there are times when you ignore the script entirely.
Companies that are known to pay top of market... Like you're not going to hammer Facebook or Netflix by saying "how much sucker?" if you're in a bottom of the market bracket.
I also ignore the script when it is a company that I'm really interested in and excited by.
I liked your article, you don't need to cover every edge case imho. Its on people who want to take inspiration from your script whether they apply it like a sledge hammer or a goldsmith's tool.
After reading the responses, all I can say is that the US recruiting industry must be a lot different from the UK one. Or maybe it's different because I'm not in a popular niche like Python dev or something.
I'm in the UK and I just looked at my latest linkedin recruiter message. They told me the company type, the role, the skills they were looking for. An accurate enough description to make me think it was a real role. They didn't include the rate, but that would have been my next question if I had been interested.
If I'm not interested in the role, I normally reply with "Thank you for thinking of me but it's not right for me because [reason]. Good luck in your search." I might even refer them on to a friend if I know one that fits the requirement and may be looking.
Maybe once you're a respected programmer with some solid companies on your resumeé recruiters maybe nice to you. Fresh out of college, like I was a few years back, recruiters really don't care about you. They spam you likedin inbox and you email with generic messages to see if anyone bites. Back in my day they went as far as sending me whatsapp messages - the funny thing is - they don't even bother to properly answer you.
I was coming back from the south of the country to my city, a long drive, and I received a whatsapp message from a recruiter telling me about an opportunity, since I was fresh out of college looking for a job, I stopped the car to talk to them, only to find out they won't respond you right away. I only got a answer from this person like 3 days later.
That's baked into the assumption of the script though. If your response is a copy and paste, who cares about the ones that ghost you after one message? Doesn't matter because the cost of interaction was quite low.
If they send the ball back after your initial response THEN you know you can open a conversation up until that point, just assume it is spam and you're spamming them back.
I'm always nice to recruiters if they make the bare minimum effort. If the job isn't a fit, I offer to stay in touch. It has led to great opportunities for me simply by taking advantage of the network effects offered by a recruiter link. Things turn up if you talk around enough.
I try to be nice to recruiters who demonstrate that they've actually spent 60+ seconds considering if my resume was a match for the position. (Including my stated location requirements.)
Occasionally I'll tell them that I'm not working on a different level of the software stack than their position requires, and try to point them in the right direction. No idea if that's helpful to them, but it's nice to feel like I've been kind to a stranger.
This post doesn't go far enough. One of the best things a programmer can do to better their career is to talk to no technical people. Talk to recruiters. Just pick up the phone. Then, learn to politely decline. Then, learn to ask questions. Then, expand your horizons. Maybe you can have a conversation with the QA department people for more than 20 seconds about a non-technical topic. Maybe you can talk to the CTO and ask them questions.
Most programmers find talking to nontechnical people like recruiters beneath them. They just want to crush the coding challenge, and be hired on the spot. The idea that there could be more to a job than writing lines of code is hard to fathom. Once you open up that world though, it's very interesting, and pays dividends.
Just on this story alone I would imagine this happened exactly once, given the comp increase expectations. Is it really worth building a system around?
Separately, if you're not reading their canned email, what makes you think they're going to read your canned response?
I give an extremely simple answer, where I state that in the present, for $real_reason, I'm not looking for other opportunities, but in the future, I may. It worked!
I actually spend a little bit of effort to filter out (block) incompetent recruiters, but that's all.
I've been doing this and fully agree. On my side my reply is not as nice as this, I'll steal this and improve it. I also agree with the 50% rule. Currently I'm interviewing with 3 nice opportunities in parallel, but now getting to the 6h-8h interview step is hard, I have to basically take 3 days off and this costs a lot of money and energy. I wasn't much smart at first, so this is why I got into this situation, but each time I do it I improve on the next. I may be getting close to 20 first step interviews, 10 second step interviews and finally now 3 last step. And this in about 2 months, excluding all others that failed my requeriments since first contact.
Obviously this is geared towards software development, and my personal experience with recruiters for software jobs is similar to most here.
However, I sometimes help out my client's HR departments and the recruitment experience for other jobs is vastly different. Like searching for expert welders or other specific skillsets, not unlike the ones that exists in software development (+10 years java, +15 years embedded C, etc.). They almost always use external recruiters for the first filtering, and they deliver quality candidates. Expensive fees, but worth it.
Why is this such a problem with recruitment for software development?
Are there recruitment shops that DO understand the differences in software development?
The uncomfortable truth is that quality doesn't matter in software. When you need something welded you need an expert. Most companies don't need or even want a candidate with 10 years of Java experience. They want someone with barely enough skills to ship the minimum portion of the feature the business will accept. It's an evolutionary process. If companies wanted high quality candidates the market would deliver a solution. In software it just doesn't matter for most cases.
I'd argue that it does matter, however it's incredibly difficult to measure "quality" of a software project, so there's no real way to distinguish crappy software engineers from good ones. Even people with 15+ years of experience have often just been delivering dogshit for 15+ years.
I run a small agency in addition to my full-time gig. Every time a recruiter sends me a message I respond with a script that includes criteria for work that I'll do, work that I won't do, and interview limitations. I also include an agency hourly rate which makes most of them run for the hills. Every great once in a while I'll get a short-term contract out of it.
The lone full-time contract I took on came about from recruiter contact, but he wasn't one of those keyword carpet bombing mooks. I've only ever landed one full-time job without a referral in 20 years in the industry. Referrals and niche market sites (e.g. AngelList) are the way to go.
The time required to work with the 99 who can’t double your salary isn’t nothing, that’s a part time or even full time job spent courting people who are just spamming everybody on linkedin with a pulse
Two years ago I quit my job, then covid kicked off and I was out of work for 6 months.
During that time I was relying on recruiters to hunt down leads for me.
Nothing was coming up! They kept trying to feed me full-stack and front-end roles, and I kept saying no thank you.
Then, I just started sending out my own resumes. And I instantly got more callbacks in the MONTHS I spent with recruiters.
I have a few suspicions:
1. The recruiters present themselves as having a "relationship" with companies, but they actually don't, they are just bullshitting you.
2. The jobs people actually want end up getting filled, so if you end up with a recruiter, you are going to be ending up with bottom-tier opportunities.
The incentives for recruiters are clear; to get you hired. They cannot however force a hire and there's a threshold for submitting duds -- their clients will stop working with them.
I look at recruiters as a helping hand in the hiring process. That said I've had a couple that have wasted my time, so there's that.
Typically, unless you're getting flooded, it takes almost nothing to engage with them temporarily. I like the approach the author recommends. Recruiters are folks that are trying to make a living too, there's no need to be nasty.
I haven't had issues with finding good paying work - history, references, and a good bit of research in the places where I apply has served me well /shrug
> you don’t want to be a jerk to the one in 100 who have taken the time to carefully craft a high quality message to you alone.
I agree with this. If I get the sense the recruiter put effort into the email, then I will usually respond. I'm sure I still fall for automated messages with this. But some recruiters really do their homework, really research you, have interesting and fitting opportunities, and can be valuable.
The 99.99% of recruiters who are just spamming? Totally ignore them.
Like most things in life, 90% of everything is crap. That goes double for recruiters. I've worked with only two competent recruiters in my very long career, who have, at most, gotten me a low double-digit raise at best. I've had one recruiter royally screw up an offer to the point the company rescinded, and I've had another recruiter use coercion on me to not work at SONY for 20% more than the other company was offering. But as only a single data point, I can quite emphatically say no recruiter has ever doubled my money for me.
I will also say that most recruiter outreach, even in this hot market, is absolutely lousy, and the compensation on offer is below what I am currently earning at a company I am exceptionally happy with doing work I love, and I don't consider myself to be overly compensated.
Most recruiters that do any outreach immediately ghost me when I ask about compensation range, and if compensation range is mentioned, it has yet to be more than what I currently make. Once or twice in the past three months I've had an "upto $X for the right candidate" where $X is only 10% more than what I am currently making, so it is highly unlikely I will get that upper bound.
If I responded to every recruiter that reached out to me via email and LinkedIn I'd spend many more hours per day wasting my time than I would care to think about. And most recruiters that reach out to me these days are of the exceptionally low quality churn'n'burn variety.
I currently have three recruiter messages open on LinkedIn, one for an animator with 2+ years of experience, another for someone wanting a mid-level front-end web developer for an AR application, and another for a "senior" Java programmer. I don't do any of those things, didn't even look at my profile or C.V. Just a scattershot approach, which you would think on LinkedIn, with its targetted InMails, it wouldn't be the case. But here we are.
Of the one recruiter out of the three who didn't immediately ghost when asked about compensation (always my first question), the upper bound is $80K below what I currently make, and again, I don't consider myself well compensated.
My recommendation is never waste your time with any recruiter, but if you must, expend it on those that actually work for the company they are hiring for.
I just want to say I feel blessed to work in a field where companies bombard you with opportunities. I may not reply to recruiter emails but don't consider them spam.
1. It's not like they give up. I've been receiving the same emails from the same firms for years and years.
2. You can't just respond. The few times I've responded years ago meant that they follow up at an even more frequent pace, even when I made it clear I wasn't interested. Sometimes calling me after I said no!
3. It's clear very few of them actually read my profile.
120% Disagree. All I can see is responding to a recruiter is helping to improve the recruiter's message, so they can span ppl more efficiently next time?
Personally, I rearly had good experience with recruiters, one they had difference goal compare you or the company you want join. Most efficient way to get into a company is by referral, e.g next time when you do some shitty work think twice, as it got long term impact.
Disagree strongly. Recruiters are like real estate agents - the barrier to entry is low and there are a lot of folks who do a crap job.
I work with a couple recruiters who: 1) actually respond to emails, 2) actually look at my CV to see if a role is a good match, 3) have some long term commitment to clients.
When I get an email about a role that matches well from a job I had a decade ago, straight to spam folder.
Interestingly, I have employed a similar sentiment so far, without knowing that it might be actually a good thing. I am trying to give at least one short and comprehensive answer that: I am not looking for new challenges, thanks though. Exceptions might apply to especially annoying recruiters who just don't care and ignore my wishes and send me useless messages regardless.
I wonder if it would work to respond with a link to an online form to fill out with the job details. This website would also contain your resume and descriptions/code for your software projects. Kind of a script flip, making potential employers apply to you, rather than the other way around. Obviously this will only work if you are really good, and know it.
I pretty much always respond to recruiters that seem to have understood what I do, even if I'm not looking. They are gold.
I usually ignore the others.
The ones that spam me with positions that are clearly absolutely nothing to do with my career, I sometimes respond to asking why they think I'm suitable. And that's just for the childish pleasure of wasting a bit of their time.
I have to say--none of this advice would be actionable in all my previous experiences with recruiters.
The truest statement is the one the author makes up front:
>Recruiters are just cold calling
More accurately, they're contacting a lot of people who's profile contains their search keywords. No recruiter is contacting only you for a req they're trying to fill.
Recruiters need to pass the bozo test to prove that they have read and understood the first sentence of my LinkedIn profile before they rate anything beyond having their email reported as spam.
It's a high bar for them to cross; I've only seen two or three in the past few years, and those I think were sold my data by Triplebyte instead.
Completely disagree. I have found recruiters to be nearly useless. However, my experience is through the lens of someone who created a consulting practice bit by bit and have gained a good reputation in my niche. Recruiters don't help people like me. Those on LinkedIn who don't even read your profile are the worst.
The problem I have is that almost every recruiter that emails me lists the positions they are trying to fill. Almost all of those positions are ones to which I am morally opposed. It's a waste of both of our time to respond positively and interview for positions that I won't accept under any realistic circumstance.
I'm not sure how you go from "Never ignore a recruiter" to "Always respond positively and interview with a recruiter". There is a middle-ground where you can reply, without being positive and not setting up an interview, while not burning bridges that you might want to cross in the future.
Even if I’m not interested in the role I’ll let them know and often I’ll send them some people in my network that could work out. I think it’s good practice and I’ve had recruiters come back to me with really good opportunities down the road. Yeah the carpet bombing ones I ignore but personal ones I keep on with.
To be honest, even with a cut and pasted initial reply, this sounds like more effort than it's worth. I don't want to have to respond to the recruiter's response. My mental energy is valuable. I don't need to spend it on job opportunities I'm not interested in.
I think one of the assertions here is wrong. "One in a hundred can double your salary". It's more like "if you are the 1 in a hundred who is tragically underpaid to the point where a double in salary is at all a possibility, then yes, talk to recruiters".
How could anyone come to this contrarian conclusion, even after reading the article it is baffling.
There is a time and place for in-house recruiters and third party recruiters. This article does not identify them and obsessively takes the contrarian view with no supporting rationale for doing so.
Hey! Thanks for your feedback. I would love to try and understand what you're saying but I'm struggling a little.
Can you explain what you mean by "There is a time and place for in-house recruiters and third party recruiters." what is that time and place?
I honestly tried to be really nuanced (but clearly failed a little, thanks for that data point).
I think it does speak to the fact that I have seen 20 years of the prevailing narrative that there is zero value to recruiters and this realization was, to me, pretty mind-blowing.
I appreciate that "never" is a word that lacks nuance, maybe that was a little too clickbait of me.
I wouldn't go so far as to say zero value, but I would say that engaging with third-party recruiters is generally an activity with a negative expected value. Generally they don't actually have or aren't willing to share the incredibly useful real and direct insights you wisely point to.
Personally, I've found that high quality messages from recruiters are usually painfully obvious. They lead with the name of the company and show evidence that the recruiter read my profile. These are so rare that I completely skip any kind of bot-ish response to handle them.
Most of the responses I can expect to the kind, compassionate, empathetic script you've so helpfully provided will not contain all three data points requested. At best, we can expect to get a JD and maybe a company name. Comp is usually withheld and the cycle goes around again.
Treating the recruiter-spammers as humans, unfortunately, does not really seem to produce the results we would all love it to. It mostly seems to be treated as proof that the spammer has hooked a fish and just has to reel them in.
I like third party recruiters because I like to use them strategically. I know how they are compensated and they learn what I want to do, so I could get raises every 15-18 months by switching companies that they placed me at and they could get paid multiple times because turns out I'm a reliable employee!
We knew to ignore each other for 15 months. It was a good symbiotic relationship. Sometimes they knew I wanted side gigs and would hook me up with the companies that "needed something yesterday!" while they knew I was employed at one of their client companies. sometimes the recruiter hired me on their payroll directly instead of letting me be a contractor with their clients. it was a fun time for some time.
This has almost nothing to do with random outreach from them on linkedin. It is barely the same topic. But thats what I used them for.
In-house recruiters are distinctly different animals with a couple of overlapping daily tasks and the same name, but the way to use them is very different. A company with one of those wouldn't be using third party recruiters and thats fine, in house recruiters can somewhat bat for you in a unique and more holistic way but they are still just gatekeepers you want to get passed so you can talk technical stuff with hiring managers.
To me it's pretty clear that I really shouldn't bother with ones that have position I'm not clearly interested in or isn't line with my own career. These are pretty clearly not desirable positions. So why even follow up with that spam.
I’d certainly say don’t be rude to recruiters. Some people seem to get unnecessarily wound up by recruiters and forget that we are all adults just trying to do our job. It doesn’t hurt to be polite and might just work in your favour in the long run.
Always worth talking to ones with opportunities that seem interesting. Those are rare. But if you do and follow up every 6mo/year..you can just ping them whenever you're ready to move on and you'll have an interview.
Honestly that autoresponder reply reads a bit condescending and borderline rude, but it could be just me.
'This means I don't have the time to hop on a call' is not how my mother taught me to talk to people.
I get access to salary statistics every year via my union. They collect everything from the member, support is almost always around 80%. Just plug in area, experience, title and if you have a management role. So yeah, my answer would be: most people have insight in salary levels.
Also remember that in some countries you income is public record that can be looked up by anyone.
Q for engineers on this thread: would you be more open to a "recruiter reach-out" if that person _is_ an engineer themselves but independently also helps startups build teams as a recruiter?
The more you differentiate yourself, the more likely I am to listen. My priority is:
1. Internal recruiters. They have real pull.
2. External recruiters that give me real information and give me quality information before I get on a call and why I might be interested.
3. External recruiters that are working with a company that I have prior interest in.
Below this, I usually don't respond.
4. Recruiters that ask if I can "get on a call" to get me details.
5. Recruiters from big name firms. (Robert Half et. al)
6. Low quality recruiters that have no connection to what I do.
I'd rather talk to another eng, but the problem with recruiters isn't that they're recruiters, it's that their email wastes people's time; cf. the article, and the canned response the article recommends writing: what if… what if the recruiter just told us those things up front? Then I'd instantly know this is worth responding to! Instead, we have to waste a mostly-automated round trip asking for what ought to have been done up front.
Of course — the offer would need to be actually palatable.
You know how everyone hates real estate agents? Imagine if a real estate agent did not need to take courses, become licensed, and face repercussions for unethical and illegal conduct.
My problem with responding to recruiters - especially FAANG - is that once you start a conversation it's hard to stop. I find it very hard to leave if I'm in the middle of a big project.
I reply gently saying that I have no interest unless it is my absolute dream job and describe exactly what that is. They are happy to receive a reply even if my demands seem bonkers.
when I consider all the dedication, including the summer jobs, all the hours of I have spent for self study to keep the skills up, I was thinking, “why the hell do I let a headhunter, get rewarded a year salary [1] of mine by just discovering my profile on Linkedin and maybe breaking data privacy laws through off shore?”
Still didn’t contacted or replied any of them. Sometimes, I am asking myself if I am missing any good opportunities because of not replying.
When you are a junior engineer, recruiters ignore you or use you to boost their career. When you are a senior engineer, you ignore recruiters or use them to boost your career.
Yeah sorry I don't think so. I'll respond to recruiters who have something to offer, but it's pretty obvious who that is and who is just wasting your time.
The only value a recruiter brings to me these days is someone to practice light interview skills with when I'm feeling like I need a reminder that I can still do it.
I only reply to recruiters from companies that I'm actually really interested in (but not currently looking to move), or places where my former colleagues work.
I don't think the recruiter gets 10% of the salary anymore. I have seen recent recruiter fees for 20% of the first year base salary. People should know that.
"Do you have hard data to back that up or is it just anecdotal personal bristling whenever someone says "privilege"?" - Tehchops
This is actually a perfect example of this! Let's take a minute here to look at your response.
"Do you have hard data to back that up"
I literally said "I've found". Folks who go on long winded discussions about privilege do exactly this - redirect, misunderstand, demand impossible things.
I didn't say I had hard data, I said this was just my personal experience. I don't need hard data to back up my own experience - it's simply my experience.
The "hard data" that you seem interested in is often horrendously weak in this social studies type area. This may be offensive or triggering, but measuring job performance is extremely hard, and measuring it relative to communication styles is harder. This raises a question in my mind, are you unable to evaluate the likelihood that hard data would exist so that it makes sense to demand it and you would believe what I presented if I found some? There may be some poor critical reasoning skills here.
"just anecdotal personal bristling whenever someone says "privilege""
Dismissing others experience rather than engaging on the comment. Is your experience positive with folks who communicate like this? Mine is not. The writer is using this over the top over formal language. Their language choice is all a bad sign of ego ego ego. Tech folks are in high demand, they are not gods.
"While I very much appreciate the fact that exceptionally talented and engaged recruiters reach out consistently"... "I will be unavailable for further discussion."
> Dismissing others experience rather than engaging on the comment. Is your experience positive with folks who communicate like this? Mine is not
I believe your original comment was:
> Insta-delete if I'm doing hiring...
Now who's being dismissive again? ;-)
> Folks who go on long winded discussions about privilege do exactly this - redirect, misunderstand, demand impossible things.
And I've found folks who respond defensively as you have tend to not reflect on their own privilege, and generally do not respond well to criticism or questioning.
Of course... feel free to "dismiss" what I'm saying.
Yeah, I know, that's not "hard data". It's a pretty consistent pattern, though. Tech people have to be able to communicate with precision; they usually don't do "blowing smoke".
Ah this fun gatekeeping meme rears it's head again.
So how do you define "tech" people? Do you have a scorecard?
How do they meet your assessment for "real"? Cohesive organization of atomic matter generally constitutes "real" in a lot of physics definitions.
I'd argue trying to label someone a "real tech person" is a laughably subjective exercise that's so corrupted by personal bias and toxicity as to be utterly useless in evaluating someone's capability to participate in organized software engineering.
Case in point: I have worked with several folks, in FAANG, who by all technical standards were "real" tech people. Polyglot programmers, could tackle any sticky logic problem.
Ask them to communicate their solution to other engineers? To communicate with others with empathy? Be able to navigate conversations with directors and VPs about broadly implementing their solutions? Absolutely, 100% fell on their face. Couldn't do it. They couldn't form a cohesive, understandable, actionable statement about their work to save their lives. They'd go off on some completely pointless technical tangent that had little to do with the problem at hand.
Code reviews they participated in ground to a complete fucking halt. Not because they actually addressed meaningful technical issues. No, they wanted to pontificate and show off how much smarter they were.
In my not totally hard-data experience, people that maybe didn't have quite the "real tech people" skills but were expressive, capable communicators often actually shipped more meaningful work, more often, and built organizational equity not just for themselves, but for their teammates and managers too.
Software development at any scale, like it or not, involves working with other people. In my experience people that go around gatekeeping and using some hilariously subjective ruler to grade "realness" aren't very effective at all.
I take it by your confrontational response that their comment hooked you somewhat. I can assure you it's the truth, and though it may or may not have been relevant to you in a way that affected you emotionally, the words ring true in my experience. Those who can do the thing don't mince words about it, the ones who can't need to massage what they're saying a bit to not lay the bad news on you like a ton of bricks; it is natural for people to want to be accepted socially.
"Truth" and "rings true in your experience" aren't necessarily overlapping values.
Sure, it's a confrontational response, because I've seen too many solid, empathetic, capable individuals run out of tech by toxic gatekeeping bullshit just like this.
Then all I'm left to manage and work with are toxic, self-aggrandizing, "um akshually" engineers who rate appearing smarter than others over working well with others and getting things done.
I agree that people trying to appear smarter is toxic, at least if done very often. (Even if not done often, maybe it's still toxic, just not a lethal dose.) That isn't what I meant.
It really comes down to this: You can't blather at the computer. You have to make very precise statements to the computer. If you can't be precise in your communications, you can't program.
That usually spills over into human communications, too. People who can talk to computers can usually talk to humans who can talk to computers, because they can use at least some of the same terms with the same meanings.
And they can talk with the same mindset. You can't show off to the computer. You can't get the code to compile or to run by using more flowery wording. Tech people tend to carry that mindset into their communication with each other.
The point folks are making here is that folks who go on these long rants, demand "hard data" for every experience, write in over formal language, say things like "corrupted by personal bias and toxicity as to be utterly useless" may not be that able / focused on just moving forward on stuff - it's all tied up in ego ego ego type things.
You like the posters approach? Fine. I don't find their style (or yours) to be either healthy or productive and it just can stress teams out to have to work with someone super high need.
> "corrupted by personal bias and toxicity as to be utterly useless" may not be that able / focused on just moving forward on stuff.
It's the same recycled logic of people who want to return to the times of being able to say whatever they want, and people who are offended just "need to move on".
This kind of thinking is why homophobia/misogyny/racism is still so prevalent in tech. Dog whistles like "real tech people" or "super high need" or "people that just can't move on".
It's a lot more convenient and dismissive to associate it with some kind of lack of performance. "Oh they should just focus on the code, thank god for all the coders who never want to attend meetings and just code..."
I know you don't like my "style", but I'm afraid most organized software development is starting to become more aware of the need to be empathetic and accepting of the human element, not less, and just "getting over it and coding" isn't an acceptable answer anymore.
We also know that most (99%) of people aren’t like that. So while I’ll communicate straight, efficiently, “with precision” with other tech people, I’ll adapt a nice “professional, formal” style for most other business communications.
I make a habit of responding to each and every recruiter.
The ones who send me jobs I am way overqualified for, or simply don't pay enough, I tell them my current compensation package with the advice to send relevant offers in the future.
Realistically though, every external recruiter I have talked to since I got into my current big tech company has been a waste of time. They can't usually touch my comp package, and only the other big tech companies are likely to be able to (or internal recruiters).
I loved the article.
I worked in sales for ~2 years before starting my career as a software engineer +15 years ago, so knowing how downputting rejections are, I try to treat all the salespeople as human beings, so I try to respond to all of them.
My strategy is to make them refusing me, by requiring "only" a +30% i increase.
"...let them know you're not currently open to offers less than $current*1.5."
Whoa!! Is this for early career folks (less than 6 years)?
In the 15-20 years experience range none of my friends and ex-colleagues who moved jobs got a 50% raise on moving.
As a software engineer, st least in the US, there are two types of jobs.
1. Your bog standard run of the mill corp dev jobs. They all look alike and they all pay around the same. In most major cities that’s around $80K - $150K. This is where most developers work. A local recruiter can usually help you find a job as long as you have some experience and are looking for average wages. Yes I know “average” for software engineers even in this category puts you in the upper middle income.
2. The Big Tech, unicorn, let’s waste VC money tech companies - with compensation levels you see on levels.fyi. External recruiters are useless once you are looking in that range. But again, there are only a few dozen companies that pay in this range, they are always hiring and we all know how to find them if they don’t find us first.
I reply to InMail so that they get their LinkedIn credit back. They are usually thankful for that. Other offers there's a 50/50 chance I have the energy to reply.
Does anyone know what the salary range is now though?
It seems pretty random. Levels.fyi has a lot of very high numbers. Blind has crazy high numbers. I'm not sure if people are lying or including RSUs that have gone up 10x.
Most experienced people in HCOL areas still earning 150k-200k max. When I talk to a recruited and ask for 300k often they'll say its possible but dont say if you have to be a superstar to get that. Meta seems paying 500k+ often and random big tech cos are all over the place.
Compensation is multi-modal and depends mostly on these three factors:
1) Company
2) Level
3) Country (location-based pay is a thing, but the adjustment is typically much smaller than the differences resulting from changing #1 and/or #2)
Top-of-band senior offers (annualized over 4 years) are in the range of 500-600k right now (Amazon, Uber, Netflix, Stripe), with a much longer list of companies hitting in the 400-500k range (Facebook, Google, Twitter, Lyft, Snap, Coinbase, Brex, Dropbox, Doordash, Square, Robinhood, Instacart, Snowflake, etc).
Most of these places are hiring remotely.
There's "way too many to list" companies paying in the 200-350k range for seniors; pretty much any publicly-traded tech company that grants RSUs should be hitting those numbers, as well as tech-adjacent companies. Some examples: Microsoft, Salesforce, VMWare, Grubhub (which is in the same space as Doordash but pays much less), Disney, Walmart, Workday, etc.
Under that you have startups (with equity grants of varying levels of risk & EV) and non-tech companies.
My experience is exactly opposite: recruiters are like cockroaches, they come up from every hole. Ignoring them is the only way to stay sane. As for well paying job offers those will always be there.
I agree. Although as someone who has been burnt before, I would not consider the position from a small company unless its a very senior and generous offer.
I feel like throwing it in their face that lots of recruiters reach out to you is unnecessary.
I also suspect asking for company name will scare off most recruiters because if you go around them, they dont get paid.
They do say keep interviewing to keep the skill sharp. So perhaps there is something to be said here.
Here's the one I got today, when I try to reply it just says 'you're replying to a mailing list' so really I'm nobody to this one.
>I am reaching out to see if you would be interested in exploring Executive Level opportunities.
>I have reviewed your LinkedIn profile and found your skills and experience to be impressive and relevant to the job position.
>If you are interested in learning more about our company and the position, we would love to set up a quick phone call. We would be pleased to answer any questions you may have and give you all the details about the job.
>Please reply to this email with an updated copy of your resume.
There's no way he 'reviewed my linkedin' while also just mailing list form. In fact if I look at it. The mailing form only really has $FIRSTNAME and that's about as much effort as they put in.
Yet they want me to produce an updated resume and join a quick call? Oh man that's asking.
Outside of the fact that if you like the city, the surrounding land and the people that live there. As well as many other great reasons to live in the cities.
Just because you guys don't like them doesn't mean many other people love those areas, please stop unnecessarily dumping on cities you don't like.
I like NYC. I moved here in 2017 though. But after the pandemic I moved to Central Queens where my rent is much cheaper (2400/mo) and the apartment is bigger (1,000sqft ish) in a doorman building. 30m subway to Central Park and the best Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, and Korean restaurants in NY are the next neighborhoods over.
The coffee and pastries nearby aren't as fun as Brooklyn though.
Can you elaborate on reasons for the move? I am facing a similar realization regarding another one of your child comments about not clicking as much with west coast culture but am concerned about a drop in tech opportunities
Many reasons. But after 10 years on the west coast, I had many dozens of friends but almost none that I wanted to spend holidays with (i.e. felt like family, neither friends nor partners). I decided that it wasn't for a lack of trying or giving it time.
The west coast felt judgmental and divisive. I couldn't always express myself for fear of alienation. I do not have strong views and I (used to?) consider myself liberal (I'm not American).
I really enjoy how conversationally adept the average New Yorker is. It's simply more fun to be with people. And the diversity is refreshing. I'm a software dev more by circumstance, not temperament. I used to only talk to ~30 y/o tech men/women. Now my day includes a sweet 75 year old lady, academics, health workers, and plenty of ~30 y/o folks who are living interesting lives without a mold.
I kept my job and moved here, taking a 10% haircut thanks to taxes. Oh well. All the big tech firms have a physical presence in NYC (FB, GOOG, AMZN..). There's less kool-aid drinking startups, but I'm ok with that. It's a big city, you can have your pick. I think as a tech worker, you have the breathing room to give up the top 10% opportunities in the field and still be a top 1% earner in the larger society (with more job satisfaction).
Not the person you are responding to - what about NYC made you get in touch with non-tech people that wasn't possible on the west coast? Is there something different about NYC's culture that helps in mingling with more people?
Hm.. It might be largely a numbers thing: higher density (more interactions), and more diversity. But can't ignore the general willingness to connect (ex: going to a bar solo in NYC yields me a lengthy convo 50% of the time, and I almost never initiate.).
What are you talking about? The Bay Area has one of the greatest weather of the world, lot of job opportunities, beaches near by as as mountain. Lot to like also.
"No" reason is probably an overstatement. But it's certainly a different lifestyle than e.g. living in a suburban / rural area and working remotely. Many of us would consider it a step backwards unless the net increase in income was life-changing.
That's about how I figure it. Even if you try to split the difference by living in the suburbs of NYC, my impression is that housing is still pretty expensive and you have a time-consuming commute.
I only spent couple days in NYC, but the experience was pretty awful: the city is crowded, it stinks, and is full of weirdos (for example some random girl I asked for directions turned out to be a prostitute, some guy started to yell at me for no reason, etc.). I also almost got killed by an SUV when trying to cross the street, and my hotel room turned out to be the size of an average walk-in closet.
You should always respond to recruiters at your OWN discretion. Use 3 digital condoms (throwaway numbers, etc.), and don't continue the Convo if they won't disclose details such as salary. Ain't nobody got time for dat.
> No one ever explained to me that recruiters are also one of the best career resources you can find.
For increasing your salary, and potentially finding a role you'd take. I'd not categorize this as "career resources" -- there's so much more important stuff like figuring out what you want out of your career and keeping on track with it.
Why do people focus on money so much when making career changes? Sure, you'll get more in your next job because the current salary is a piece of leverage to use. But if it's only about money, why did you accept your current job?
"Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"