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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 thi

• ibi5 5y ago
  "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.
  • fecak 5y ago
    The OP mentioned doubling salary multiple times. 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.
    • piva00 5y ago
      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.
      • fecak 5y ago
        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.
        • nameisname 5y ago
          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.
• ASinclair 5y ago
  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.
  • fecak 5y ago
    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).
• dvtrn 5y ago
  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?
  • res0nat0r 5y ago
    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.
    • moron4hire 5y ago
      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.
• jrochkind1 5y ago
  > 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"?
  • fecak 5y ago
    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.
    • selfhifive 5y ago
      That's a great description of software consultancy firms. Most people are fresh college grads who leave after their first contract is up or earlier.
      • fecak 5y ago
        The bigger ones, yes. Not boutique/niche firms, but large ones tend to churn.
    • nsv 5y ago
      Well, retail and food service is a classic example of a high-turnover industry.
• actually_a_dog 5y ago
  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.
• ozim 5y ago
  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.
  • fecak 5y ago
    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.
    • teakettle42 5y ago
      > … and a $100K fee for the second. Or I can place myself and have room to negotiate an additional $100k in my signing bonus. I don’t network with recruiters. I network with people in my industry that can directly drive hiring decisions.
• scarface74 5y ago
  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.
  • fecak 5y ago
    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.
    • scarface74 5y ago
      The companies paying in the BigTech compensation range don’t care about what languages or tools you are using. The same recruiters see I work for BigTech and they are still sending me “exciting opportunities for .Net leads paying up to $150K”.
      • selimthegrim 5y ago
        Your entry point was sales engineer, was it not?
        • scarface74 5y ago
          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”?
• travisjungroth 5y ago
  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.”
  • HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    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.
    • teakettle42 5y ago
      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.
• dimmke 5y ago
  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.