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.

It seems like an old flea market where most people don't buy anything but the vendors all buy and sell old stuff from each other to supplement.

I keep all my interviewing data isolated from my private data.

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.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_9-1-1

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.

- 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.

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.

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 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.

If they leave a voicemail, I'll get a transcript.

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.

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.

That was the reason: to understand where my data was leaking from, not to duck recruiter calls.

One time the guy told me that the person who referred me "preferred to remain anonymous".

I asked him if he realised that this is a violation of GDPR and that a typical candidate would recognize it as such?

No coherent answer.

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".

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'.

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)

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?

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.

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.

What is that?

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The same recruiters see I work for BigTech and they are still sending me “exciting opportunities for .Net leads paying up to $150K”.

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.

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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).

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 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 am also done with 3rd party recruiters.

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 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).

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.

They'll still try to spin you that line though.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Try messaging someone you used to work with to check in - you may enjoy catching up or even stumble into being able to give or receive help.

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.

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)_/¯

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.

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 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.

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.)

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.

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 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.

- 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.

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

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).

He spent time explaining the role, the skills, and the goals, and offered feedback throughout the process.

I’ve accepted a job through a very good internal recruiter once in 2015.

I can distinguish between a 2 and a 3 in a 5 minute phone call.

I don’t understand all the hate about recruiters. I cut off the bad ones and the folks left are great. The overhead is quite low.

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.

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.

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.

Not everyone is a superstar networker but be kind, supportive, and professional to your coworkers. People talk.

Anymore I just ignore them all.

Sometimes you get multiple contacts from different recruiters with the same company on the same day.

If they won't tell you what company is interested, they don't have a contract with that company.

Don't be open and honest with a recruiter if they aren't open and honest with you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Safe to say the quality of tech recruiters in New Zealand is even lower than those elsewhere.

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).

Can vouch for this. Made that mistake. Never again.

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.

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.

[1] https://www.cybercoders.com/insights/press-release-cybercode...

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.

Meanwhile, I doubled my salary by responding to a recruiter.

Though FWIW, I was actively looking for new work at the time.

In my case, I doubled from $100K to $200K. I would not expect to double it again. I'd be lucky to even see 50%.

My recruiter started his career as a software engineer.

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.

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've never found this to be true.

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.

Industry sanctioned nepotism doesn't feel like a good look for the SWE industry, especially given our diversity problems.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Actually it is; it's how the term is defined.

So at least some people use the word that way.

> 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]

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Anepotism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism

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.

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.

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]

This is not good. Can we agree on that?

[0] https://wiki.c2.com/?ViolentAgreement

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/how-to-use-employee-referrals-withou...

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).

Can you show where I said anything approaching this? I do not believe this, nor do I believe I said or even suggested this to be the case.

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! ;)

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'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.

It's so weird that you're unwilling to see this, or how it's undermining your primary point, but you do you.

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.

If a hiring manager knows someone, the kind of worker and individual they are, they are in a great position to know if they should hire them.

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.

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.

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.

Nice comment.

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.

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".

Every single position I've ever hired for has had multiple people make it all the way through, often more like 3-5.

> 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.

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?

Your "action" doesn't fit with the reality I've experienced.

The world of ideas is so high-dimensional that sex & race impact very few of these dimensions. Most straight white men are not the same.

By what metric is software dominated by white men? Are we counting Indians as white?

But assuming 100% of white software developers are men, 54% is still not within the normal range of the word "dominated".