Imagine the following...
- Recruiter outreach is filtered / summarized.
- Recruiter phone screens are scheduled for you, batched together.
- Your assistant pre-screens for basic preferences: remote, salary, company size, role scope/level.
- Interview loops are scheduled for you.
- Receive a packet of spaced repetition exercises (optional), digest of Blind/Glassdoors messages, compensation data from the company/industry/area.
- Negotiation practice, coaching
In my experience, "forwarding this to my assistant for scheduling" is a power move.
Some of above is handled by agency-style recruiting (Cybercoders) but the quality of those leads is on the low end. The high-end recruiting agencies focus on the employer side of the equation. Feels like there's an interesting gap for a service focused on a highly-skilled candidate's side of the equation.
I know of one guy who was a consultant who had a dedicated agent to handle this stuff for him. Which lots of consultants get their jobs through agencies who match consultants with companies anyway, so it just seemed like a natural jump up to this level for him.
On the other, I get sort of a bullshit-job vibe on this, in the sense that it would an entirely new type of professional invented just to paper over inefficiencies in an existing system.
Is there a way we could improve recruiting across the industry that would make this sort of specialised PA unnecessary?
(Asking not just hypothetically -- it could help me design sensible recruiting processes.)
So using assistants would be one way to make using assistants unnecessary.
The recruiter with good matches asks for meeting time, salary, you figure it out reply. In this scenario assistant does that. Do you think recruiter is supposed to talk people into meeting at inconvenient times, interviewing for jobs with salaries below what they require? I think none of these things make a difference to the recruiter whether you provide the information or the digital job filtering agent does it.
Leetcode and system design prep take up the overwhelming majority of job search time. (Hundreds of hours - months of nights and weekends) Then the interviews themselves come second. I did something close to 200 hours of interviewing for my last job search (including some dozen onsites which were all 5-6+ hours). This is hugely time consuming… spending a half time spamming some websites is hardly that difficult in comparison.
And yes, I had to finally take time off of work to accomplish this. I usually take PTO to do this or just quit my job outright or get severance to help as well. (All the above sometimes)
I don’t expect any less than 10 onsites for any job search regardless of tenure.
1. Ex-coworker or recruiter reaches out with an opportunity that sounds interesting.
2. I ask for comp range and make sure it's acceptable (50%+ increase).
3. I go through the interview loop and get an offer
In there have been maybe 3-4 short recruiter calls that went nowhere for fit or comp reasons. In my life, once I got to the tech screen stage I have gotten an offer 6 out of 9 times.
Is this other people's experience as well? Maybe I have just been extraordinarily lucky?
Anyway, my main point was that I have found inbound job requests from recruiters or referrals to have a very high success rate.
My recent job search was more like 8 -> 5 -> 3 rather than the 100 -> 10 -> 1 in the parent comment.
Don't take a call just because the recruiter asks for one. They're just trying to extract as much attention from you as possible because they think extracting lots of attention from you is a positive signal and increases their chance of closing the deal.
Ask for comp upfront. Only go forward with those who disclose comp in your desired range. This will eliminate 99% of the wasted time in your job search, if you're not doing it today.
This is definitely a pain, 100%. I've read as many as 90-95% of messages some engineers get from recruiters don't include comp at all within the outbound, it's a shame! On top of that, it's many times impossible to understand anything deep about the company, what projects they have going on, information about the team members you'd be working with etc. Recruiting, and job descriptions in general, can do so much more than they do today and actually be an asset to engineers instead of time drains.
Also helps to take a few days off here and there to get it all done, even if you're working remote
On top of that, each individual call/interview takes up some adjacent time to schedule + prep and occupies your headspace until it happens.
And then the resulting offer isn't even on par with your current comp.
It's almost as if the entire thing is designed maliciously on purpose.
> if a recruiter contacted me I would have to weigh all the benefits of the role against the hassle of interviewing, including figuring out how to leave the office discreetly and potentially block off consecutive days.
I wonder if remote working and remote (long-distance) relationships are facing similar challenges—maybe more "serial monogamy" (lower retention), "cheating" (secretly working for a second company or consulting), "polygamy" (openly work for multiple companies at the same time), "open relationships" (allowed to take consulting gigs and side projects on top of one's job), or just "dating" (freelancing instead of being exclusive with one company).
I really wonder how much the technology environment enables or pushes us towards these types of relationships, professional and romantic.
I have a suspicion this is another factor contributing to lower retention rates across the industry. Before the pandemic, if a recruiter contacted me I would have to weigh all the benefits of the role against the hassle of interviewing, including figuring out how to leave the office discreetly and potentially block off consecutive days. Now, it’s trivial for anyone to schedule interviews during hours without meetings.
Effectively, the bar for accepting an interview loop from a candidate’s point-of-view is lower when they are fully remote.
On the flip side, if you’re fully remote and find it difficult to job hunt while working, then that’s a good reason to leave! Your role likely isn’t giving you enough autonomy.