Edit: heck with it, I've got nothing to hide. Enjoy: https://www.fuzzy-logic.org/file/Lee_Whalen_Resume.pdf
So folks don't abuse my poor auto-responder, here's what would happen if you hit the email in that resume: http://bit.ly/2lxsly3
2) The numbers in that autoresponder caused my jaw to hit the floor. I thought I was well compensated but apparently there is a lot of room for me to grow!
AND work on IT. As an housing architect I received zero offers from recruiters despite having relevant experience. By the other hand I have been contacted several times by IT recruiters once I listed there (irrelevant) IT side projects.
Resuming: it's not you, it's IT..
I normally get nearly zero recruiter emails, but late last year I changed my location preferences on Indeed and/or Career builder (I don't remember) from my hometown to Washington DC and suddenly I was deluged with the 20+ recruiter emails per month; more right after I update something on my profile.
Strangely, 1/2 of the emails are for locations far away from DC. I might try changing my preferences to San Jose and see how many more I get.
My "profile" is pretty much just my resume. Experience seems to be another important factor.
80% of it is for jobs within the surrounding city, 10% for within the state and 10% out of state. That said, most of these jobs you could also find without the recruiters as well, but sometimes ones from internal recruiters (and if you're lucky a developer/dev manager) are useful.
Admittedly, I'm not in the market for a developer position, and I deliberately down-play my development experience in my profile, which probably reduces my contact count substantially. I should conduct an experiment wherein I stuff my resume and LinkedIn profile with programming languages and framework keywords for a month and record whether it has an effect on recruitment volume. I suspect it would.
Just follow all the guidelines that LinkedIn gives you, so that your profile is an "all-star" and make sure you have a bunch of connections (500+).
An email a day is fairly normal at least for SF engineers.
The more important nugget is that he is contacted about two attractive opportunities a year for his passive method that have a fairly high probability of leading to offers if he is interested. This enables him to: 1. Accurately appraise his worth to companies, 2. Quickly scale to a much higher number of interesting opportunities through the 14 worthwhile recruiters per year that already value his conduct (even if only 2 per year have opportunities with appropriate fit) by actively involving their aid if he becomes dissatisfied with his current employer/role (or they become dissatisfied with him), 3. Identify hiring trends in his field.
I for one think it is a brilliant strategy, and I'll probably adopt it myself!
I'm not kidding. Dear HN reader, please steal this idea!
To me, getting this done on interesting domains seems to be the hard part. For people with their own domain, getting a separate server to deal with email for that is some hassle. You can't really do this on a generic domain either, cause that looks a lot less professional. Signing people up for gMail accounts might work, but that's probably against google eula. I'd guess the same for other webmail services that are at least somewhat professionally acceptable.
Best way I see is to give people with their own domain as easy a time as possible to set up DNS correctly. Getting through DKIM and SPF reliably seems like a minefield though.
Okay maybe I took it too far.
You didn't take it too far, someone build the first online recruiter focused video game where the prize at the end of each level is the contact details for a more-and-more suitably qualified candidate.
Related anecdote: There was a technology recruiter that was constantly calling me at work, despite the fact that my work number is not listed anywhere* and my LinkedIn profile having clear instructions not to do that.
I decided to look him up on LinkedIn. Guess what his previous job was? Debt collector.
* I figure the recruiters get around that by calling the front desk and asking to be transferred to me.
The best recruiters can not only make efficient matches, but they also connect the dots to reach out to matches in the pool of passive candidates they talked to when a new role opens up.
Even better than that is when I'm able to actual push back with companies and make an impact on the hiring process to get someone hired.
With that foundation I'm more effective as I see more career trajectory data points when I talk to candidates that specialize (data, security, devops, ml) or ladder up (vp, manager, cto). Then I can provide even more value to new candidates with the career counseling approach.
I work with about 70 companies (only in NYC) from pre-launch to almost IPO and a new role opens up to a us every week. It's helpful to find a recruiter who knows you & the market well enough to curate jobs you want and tell you about opportunities that might not even be listed or on your radar.
They have their own recruiting team that you are going to be dealing with anyway, and aren't playing the numbers game or shuffling their candidates between many different companies trying to get their (usually very large) hire bonus. They just throw as many people they can at as many companies they can till they get a bite.
Senior employees can be up to a FULL YEAR of the hired employees salary. As that employee you don't pay it, but it's not something that is benefiting you either. On top of that, the companies often have claw backs. If the employee leaves under a certain time, they have to give back their fee.
The reason they don't respond after the first email, is that they need someone who is going to be very proactive and actually motivated to get hired. Else their candidate catapult might hit the target, but less likely to stick.
Not true. Companies hire recruiters to find employees. Not all companies (especially startups) have their own internal recruiting department.
The flip side is true, though: as a company trying to hire people, every recruiter email that says "I have a perfect candidate for you" is junk. They just invent those people or send resumes of people who aren't even on the job market.
A founder should personally be handling recruiting until the company is big enough to have their own internal recruiting department.
This is false. My last two roles were both initiated by 3rd-party recruiters.
If you don't have any way for companies to target you themselves, then 3rd party recruiters might be more effective the you targeting companies directly yourself.
However, if you are in the boat where you are getting many recruiter emails a week, my advice is sound. They are all junk, and the only way to get any signal to noise is to look for ones directly from the company doing the hiring.
Tumbleweeds every time.
If the email shows any effort whatsoever, mentioning a project I worked on, mentioning my current job, pointing out the role in question would fit my skills and it actually does, basically anything at all that suggests it's not just a form email sent to hundreds of people, then I will reply.
However, there's a third type of recruiting email that shows the person on the other side really is directly targeting you. It usually comes from the person who would be your manager, or at least someone who has a direct stake in the company (say the CTO or CEO at a small company). These emails I take seriously and appreciate. One of these led me to my current job.
Oh and I don't appreciate recruiting emails that have tracking links in them. Usually I will politely respond that I don't appreciate the tracking.
Tracking links are not always == shotgun approach
(I don't redirect all recruiters, though, so there's still a filter)
The best time to interview is when you're very happy with your current job.
Zero pressure, zero commitment and potentially huge upside in terms of pay and title increase.
"Hey, you look like a great candidate for $AWESOME_JOB"
"Great, let's talk"
"Oh, you're not really what they're looking for, can I interest you in $GARBAGE_JOB or $BASEMENT_AT_YELLING_CORP"
But by then I've showed interest, so I start getting calls. Not worth it.
I see you're working as $ROLE in $COMPANY_A. How would you like the exact same $ROLE in $COMPANY_B? Or worse, How would you like $ROLE-1 in $COMPANY_B.
Sorry but it's going to take at least $ROLE+1 to get me to uproot my life and go through that interview gauntlet again.
Of course, as I said in another post, the calculus changes entirely if you're unemployed and need "something, anything".
My company has 'Linux' in it's name, apparently recruiters think that means I'm a sysadmin (I'm a dev).
To paraphrase you, there's always that remote chance that one of the Nigerian Princes could actually need your help.
I used to do a similar thing to you, but it's too much work now and the levels of job spam ("Oil pipeline engineer" roles, simply because my CV has the word engineer in it (prefixed with Software)... lazy recruiter, that's bad!). Basically, if they can't make the effort, why should I? I guess the answer is, "Because there's always that remote chance that one of them could be able to set me up with a "dream job""..
Think about it like the real estate market (in normal markets, not Silicon Valley). Some houses sell before they even hit the market. A few also sell after the realtor does a few private showings. The rest are the "dog properties" that go on the MLS and need heavy marketing to sell.
That's... a strange way to look at the housing market. The norm is to list your property and then see what bids you get. Putting your house on the market is not some weird trick to pass a crappy house on to a bunch of rubes, or am I misunderstanding you?
Like, how do you reliably find a willing buyer pre-listing, and how do you know that's a good price (other than just blindly trusting your agent), if you don't even bother listing it? Listing is as much about price discovery as it is about finding more buyers.
The hotter the market, the more realtors know buyers willing to pay a lot for the first home that meets all their needs. Hence more homes are sold before listed.
I think that's locale specific. Except in the 15million+ bracket, auctions (here in Melbourne at least) tend to get the best money for the seller.
The "dog properties" don't get listed on MLS at all; there is a cost to listing on MLS and the dog properties generally don't generate enough interest to justify the expense (and usually don't even attract a realtor willing to invest the effort).
If the quality that companies were getting from regular applications was better than the quality they get from their recruiters why would companies pay to have recruiters?
If there's an awesome job available out there, with way above average pay, benefits, great opportunities for advancement, good work/life balance, etc., you'll fill it with a top talent. You're not going to need a recruiter. Word will get around even to people who are not actively looking, trust me. Similarly, if you have an "average pay for an average worker" kind of job, you'll find that average worker.
When you have a ho-hum average job but you want top talent, then you're going to need that recruiter because the job needs to be actively sold.
I invite anyone who works at a company that pays 3X average salaries or is well known for being an unbelievably great place to work to reply and tell me they have trouble hiring.
They could definitely fill their need for new software engineers naturally, but presumably have data that the quality of candidates they get by bothering a substantial fraction of the world's software engineers on ~a yearly basis gets them better applicants and engineers.
Why do you think so? Just because you receive X resumes doesn't mean they're all qualified to work there.
Above average people are usually treated well in theirs jobs. If you want to hire them you need to actively approach and lure into applying. Even then, they will not bother to refresh algorithms questions for whiter-boarding.
Below average people are looking for jobs because they are on PIP or they have toxic relationship with management or they will never get promoted in current role and need to change jobs.
Really talented engineers already have jobs and may not be actively looking to move, but if the right opportunity for the right company presents itself then they might consider it.
Due to my current situation, I tend to only deal with recruiters who are local to where I live; unless the job opening allows for telecommuting, or it is a "too good to pass up" situation (I have yet to see one) - I will generally pass it up.
Instead, I currently only work with a couple of local recruiters. I have told both what I expect for interviewing (I prefer a practical interview with tests - not a whiteboard pressure interview), and I keep both informed what interviews the other has sent me on, so they aren't both submitting me to the same position opening.
Going beyond 2-3 recruiters in such a situation can and will lead to a tracking nightmare, to keep all of them in synch and not submitting you to the same opening - either at the same time, or worse, after you have already been interviewed once and weren't successful.
I do however, try to review the contacts I do get from recruiters, and if I feel they might be useful in the future, I tell them so, and keep a contact with them (even if it is just a LinkedIn or email contact) - and let them know I am interested in the future. That'll usually be enough for them to keep me in their DB for future potential offers to come up.
It's a little less flattering when they can't correctly pronounce my name or the state I live in.
But mostly I want to get it because I want to see what these companies are expecting from their candidates, technology these companies are using, and the salary range. DevOps / SRE / Production Engineers are high in demand.
Note many job recruitments are from agency so they are likely hiring consultants, so paycheck doesn't come from the actual client company.
See, I see that time as very expensive.
Once I applied for a job that had a really obscure job requirement which I met. The job was already filled but I spoke to the recruiter, who was really nice and ultimately found me a different job in another skill set about a month later.
The other was the traditional thing were a recruiter reached out to me. I actually didn't like the recruiter, but I liked the job and ended up pursuing it anyway.
As an engineer you should have a clear picture of the kinds of companies that you want to work for. As you get older, your selection criteria should improve and become more detailed.
The only ones I tend to ignore are the recruiters who are bringing positions that are far out of my geographic areas and are not remote.
It's amazing how often "Hey, thanks for reaching out, I'm interested. Can you tell me more about the role?" results in the conversation ending right away. Probably over 50% recruiters that contact me do not reply back after that very polite and neutral response.
Many who do keep the conversation going have not read my profile or resume carefully, so I'll give them a summary of the types of work I'm actually interested in, which is never what they contact me for, and politely decline to move forward with the (usually way too junior) role they are looking to fill. That will almost always end the engagement.
Sure, it's a lot of noise, but filtering is very cheap: the time it takes to reply back. My actual success rate with recruiters probably pretty average. Of the eight or so jobs I've had in my ~20 year career, about three were obtained through recruiters, two times through in-house staff, once through an external recruiter.