>Pinging a real person with sincere, earnest content and talking to them like they're a person is so much better.

I was a bigtime Rdio fan. I loved their clean design, discoverability. I pinged a real person with big list of improvements and bugfixes that was I was collecting over many months. I told them I wanted to work for them and sent them my resume.

They got back to me with "We have sent over your suggestions to our engineers, but we can't hire anyone without Python experience" .

Anyone with Python experience should know how easy it is to translate any other language experience into learning Python.

They would've been better off saying they just couldn't hire anyone at the time.

And look where they ended up :/

yea, apparently their CTO didn't like anyone without python experience. bizarre.

I wish this was true everywhere. I've tried this few times on the companies I was very excited about, but it never worked so far for me. Most of the time, they don't even care to reply. I don't like faking interest, so I just drop my applications into the black hole these days.

> As a former recruiter, I can't second this enough. Applying online is like shouting into a black hole.

If this is true, why even have an online job site? Why waste everyone's time?

For one thing, existence of a jobs page tells desirable candidates to find the real way to apply; non-existence leads some candidates to assume you're not hiring.

Every company with 10+ engineers is hiring engineers but many people don't know that yet, so, have a jobs page.

> For one thing, existence of a jobs page tells desirable candidates to find the real way to apply; non-existence leads some candidates to assume you're not hiring.

Assuming there is a "real way". Many large companies force you through their terrible portals and HR filters.

> Every company with 10+ engineers is hiring engineers but many people don't know that yet, so, have a jobs page.

Mine isn't, and has not been for several months. We aren't in financial trouble, either. We just don't have the backlog or volume of expected work.

Hey "former recruiter" what do you do not? I'm currently a recruiter now and always interested in hearing about what people do after recruiting.

now

If everyone followed this advice, it wouldn't work because that person would quickly ignore the dozens of pings he'd get daily.