"You can’t just send random bullshit and expect meaningful results"
Unfortunately, this is entirely incorrect. The reason random bullshit occurs at all is precisely because it CAN produce meaningful results. The fact that it more often does compared to any other method is the reason why it is characteristic of tech recruiter behaviour.
It is matter of energy conservation.
Think of it like this: Recruiters can go one of two paths.
A)Carefully read resumes / profiles, up-level on tech know-how, even do a bit of programming as OP recommended. This is a ton of up front cost and therefore only those who can afford to risk the energy would do it.
or
B) Send lots of random shit, with low up front cost, accept low ratio return and only deal with the positives that come back.
The risk is front loaded in Option A, which is why it rarely happens. The recruiters that do do this, will basically be popular for the short time, but not last long as they get outcompeted by recruiters doing Option B.
A moment of empathizing will make it clear that option A is not an option. If I were a recruiter following that method, I would take 5-10 minutes to read someone's Github and only then send them a carefully crafted email that takes another 10 minutes, which will be ignored by all but 1 in 100?
I'm fine with ignoring unsolicited emails and politely declining phone calls.
That means you would hit someone you know is relevant once every workweek (at least) and because you took some time to figure out whether or not they were a match, you can be reasonably certain you can get 1-3 relevant candidates for a position every month. Having known recruiters, these figures are almost unthinkably high. Clearly this is a viable strategy.
I think there is a possibility of doing something in between A and B.
1. Select good candidates based on relevant criteria.
2. Spend 1 or 2 minutes reviewing each candidate with the Technical Hiring Manager who needs to fill a role.
3. Send the filtered candidates a templated message asking if they are interested.
Recruiting is tough. Thinking about my last job transition, there was probably a golden period of two weeks where I was truly open to all recruitment possibilities. By the end of those two weeks I was starting to move into the offer stages. So realistically I can't blame the frequency and volume of recruitment communication; it's possible a followup message would have struck at exactly the right moment.
That being said, for senior engineers surely it's more likely that recruitment will be more driven by referrals by trusted colleagues? I don't think I've seen referral bonuses rising at a commensurate rate.
> I don't think I've seen referral bonuses rising at a commensurate rate.
Unfortunately the referral bonuses I've seen have always been somewhere between 'insulting' and 'why bother?'. The only place I know that does decent referral rates is using it to get around their reputation for churn.
This feels like a fundamental mismatch between his expectations as an internal recruiter vs external recruiters
> built the technical recruitment operations in the last 3 start-ups I worked for, so I feel I’m somewhat qualified in the subject matter
Sure, your startup might have some very tight requirements for a position and the ability to research candidates before conversations. That's precisely what you should do since time is limited and (presumably) you're not hiring for a TON of positions
But an external recruiter needs to match X jobs to Y candidates. It almost doesn't matter what the tech stack is at that point, you probably have an open position to fill that'll match that person. It's a numbers game and it's a "Please respond to me at any cost" game.
And often, even if you did research, there are so many false negatives that it didn't even matter to begin with. I've had targeted recruiters reach out to me that are amazed when my current position doing $CURRENT_TECH isn't completely representative of my skills and I'm actually a viable candidate for $NEW_JOB_WITH_OTHER_TECH
The only real response here is to cut em some slack or ignore them. Guides like these don't help
For (some startups) it makes sense, especially if you onlu want a code monkey (for which I would recomend recriuters to go to colleges) but their teams (or they themselves) impose this stupid "minimum X years of experience". I've known golks with years and years of experience who know no shit, so if anything those years prove they are willing to suck it up bit no muvh more; as I have also knows some fresh college graduates who are a fucking bomb.
Now saying its a numbers game also makes sence yet they (recriuters) are ignorimg the fact that each one of those "numbers" they turn into an interview will require 2 or 3 hours from the developers who will actually serve as a filter... I (personally) am tired of having to interview people who from the first 10 minutes I know won't be a good fit just because the recruiter is playing the "numbers game"
Why would a recruiter spend time and effort on reading everyone's cv and writing personal letters to every candidate? They won't be able to reach more than 10 people in a day doing that, and probably will get 0% responses anyway.
I also get these spammy job ads every day but I understand why and I can't offer a better method that actually works better. If you were in their shoes, would you do differently? Only if it worked to be different. So far it doesn't seem to work.
Just today I got an email from a recruiter with her playlist so I would know her mood. So yeah. Recruiters try all sorts of things but it's very hard.
Some recruiting, like some sales jobs and like many things in life, is a numbers game. And there is zero cost for the bulk messaging campaign on the way to the 1/50 affirmative response they will get. If there is a way to solve this inefficiency, it's well worth building a better solution.
In a previous role a single engineering recruiter was goaled against >= 3 placements per month and even exceptional recruiters usually weren’t sustaining >5 per month over a sustained period like a year or more. A “placement” is people who start at the company having gone through the entire hiring process. I’ve seen similar expectations across three Fortune 100’s now with little variation. I’m sure this gets branded the “body shop” approach, fine, unclear how you scale other options to hiring 1000’s of engineers a year (you exhaust the pool of recruiters skilled at other approaches!).
Anyway, in order to meet that placement goal it’s common to hear a sourcer contacted 300 people per week on LinkedIn and via select other channels.
This is usually NOT a blast to 500 people without targeting… you’re usually looking at source companies, levels of experience, geographic location, degrees of separation from individuals in the hiring organization, keyword matching, education or certifications.
About 5% of contacts will respond to these efforts. About 15% will respond when the initial contact is made by someone who has an Engineering Manager title instead. Those response rates don’t change dramatically when you alter the messaging (this is somewhat usual to A/B test when recruiting at scale). Title of the EM matters when recruiting somewhat, e.g. a junior manager may see < 15% response rates if they’re trying to hire at senior (Staff+) levels. Someone with a Director or VP title will see better response rates when hiring for Staff+ levels, this is the “Could I see myself working for this person?” test, I guess.
At a certain career level you’re also out of “Professional Recruiting” / “Industry Recruiting” and you’re into “Executive Recruiting” which is a somewhat substantially different process.
There’s also “College/Campus Recruiting” which has its own quirks and differences!
Several startups have tried and are trying to change this model but I’ve yet to see a move away from ‘brute force’ hiring in huge enterprises, YEMV.
All of this is perfectly reasonable advice, but I think it'll fall on deaf ears. The jobs these bad emails/messages are advertising are often terrible, and while making a better pitch will let you attract the interest of better candidates, those same candidates will surely not accept the terrible job you're offering, so why bother?
I guess for the terrible jobs they'll still have the benefit of a better pitch working better with the not-so-great candidates that'd be willing to do that job. :-) Obviously there's a limit to how much a recruiter can do in such cases.
Recruiters are spam bots, period. Their job is to smash square pegs into round holes. Use them or don't use them... but the sooner everyone on both sides of the hiring equation realizes this extremely basic and obvious fact, the better.
I think we have this post/rant every few months on this site, so let me explain how recruiting works.
There's 3 types/market for recruiters and they almost never overlap.
The first are "body shop style" recruiters. It's basically a numbers game where they try to cold-call as much people with githubs/linkedin or blogs that reference programming. They don't know programming (not even what's the difference between languages or front-end/back-end) and are looking for a list of buzzwords. They'll send copy-pasted messages (you can tell because it references tech you never used or never even claimed to have used). If you respond (and really you shouldn't) you won't be able to get any relevant information about the position because... they don't have it. These recruiters are often contracted by external firms in "best value countries" and are given canned response to message you. That's probably what the author encountered.
Second type are professional recruiters. Their salary is by commissions will often be a percentage of your salary. They are knowledgeable about programming and tech (often former engineers who wanted a break from coding!). They typically are looking to match specific profiles to specific jobs at client companies. This goes all the way to recruiters specialized in C-Suite executives (and you can picture the commission finding a CEO will bring in). Their messages will be personalized and you shouldn't hesitate to reply back even if you aren't looking for a job. They know that most great software engineers are almost never openly looking for a job so their goal is to be on good terms with a large number of talented developers so that the minute they start looking for a job they can match them with positions. You'll know when you encounter one.
Third type is basically referrals. A players attract A players, smart companies know it. Make sure your referral bonus is a percentage of total comp. It's probably the most effective way of recruiting (it has an insane signal to noise ratio). But you only get access to that type of network by... bringing value and being part of it in the first place!
Yeah, I mostly had in mind the first group you've described, but in my experience they are by far the biggest group. Truly "professional" recruiters are very rare.
I agree that referrals often yield the best results, but that's quite orthogonal to the problem I wanted to tackle with my article.
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Unfortunately, this is entirely incorrect. The reason random bullshit occurs at all is precisely because it CAN produce meaningful results. The fact that it more often does compared to any other method is the reason why it is characteristic of tech recruiter behaviour.
It is matter of energy conservation.
Think of it like this: Recruiters can go one of two paths.
A)Carefully read resumes / profiles, up-level on tech know-how, even do a bit of programming as OP recommended. This is a ton of up front cost and therefore only those who can afford to risk the energy would do it.
or
B) Send lots of random shit, with low up front cost, accept low ratio return and only deal with the positives that come back.
The risk is front loaded in Option A, which is why it rarely happens. The recruiters that do do this, will basically be popular for the short time, but not last long as they get outcompeted by recruiters doing Option B.
It's not ideal but neither is global warming
I'm fine with ignoring unsolicited emails and politely declining phone calls.
Huh, isn't that the way nature works?
My thoughts precisely.
Oh, but you can, if you do it enough!
That being said, for senior engineers surely it's more likely that recruitment will be more driven by referrals by trusted colleagues? I don't think I've seen referral bonuses rising at a commensurate rate.
Unfortunately the referral bonuses I've seen have always been somewhere between 'insulting' and 'why bother?'. The only place I know that does decent referral rates is using it to get around their reputation for churn.
> built the technical recruitment operations in the last 3 start-ups I worked for, so I feel I’m somewhat qualified in the subject matter
Sure, your startup might have some very tight requirements for a position and the ability to research candidates before conversations. That's precisely what you should do since time is limited and (presumably) you're not hiring for a TON of positions
But an external recruiter needs to match X jobs to Y candidates. It almost doesn't matter what the tech stack is at that point, you probably have an open position to fill that'll match that person. It's a numbers game and it's a "Please respond to me at any cost" game.
And often, even if you did research, there are so many false negatives that it didn't even matter to begin with. I've had targeted recruiters reach out to me that are amazed when my current position doing $CURRENT_TECH isn't completely representative of my skills and I'm actually a viable candidate for $NEW_JOB_WITH_OTHER_TECH
The only real response here is to cut em some slack or ignore them. Guides like these don't help
Now saying its a numbers game also makes sence yet they (recriuters) are ignorimg the fact that each one of those "numbers" they turn into an interview will require 2 or 3 hours from the developers who will actually serve as a filter... I (personally) am tired of having to interview people who from the first 10 minutes I know won't be a good fit just because the recruiter is playing the "numbers game"
I also get these spammy job ads every day but I understand why and I can't offer a better method that actually works better. If you were in their shoes, would you do differently? Only if it worked to be different. So far it doesn't seem to work.
Just today I got an email from a recruiter with her playlist so I would know her mood. So yeah. Recruiters try all sorts of things but it's very hard.
Anyway, in order to meet that placement goal it’s common to hear a sourcer contacted 300 people per week on LinkedIn and via select other channels.
This is usually NOT a blast to 500 people without targeting… you’re usually looking at source companies, levels of experience, geographic location, degrees of separation from individuals in the hiring organization, keyword matching, education or certifications.
About 5% of contacts will respond to these efforts. About 15% will respond when the initial contact is made by someone who has an Engineering Manager title instead. Those response rates don’t change dramatically when you alter the messaging (this is somewhat usual to A/B test when recruiting at scale). Title of the EM matters when recruiting somewhat, e.g. a junior manager may see < 15% response rates if they’re trying to hire at senior (Staff+) levels. Someone with a Director or VP title will see better response rates when hiring for Staff+ levels, this is the “Could I see myself working for this person?” test, I guess.
At a certain career level you’re also out of “Professional Recruiting” / “Industry Recruiting” and you’re into “Executive Recruiting” which is a somewhat substantially different process.
There’s also “College/Campus Recruiting” which has its own quirks and differences!
Several startups have tried and are trying to change this model but I’ve yet to see a move away from ‘brute force’ hiring in huge enterprises, YEMV.
Nice sentiment, but it's never gonna happen.
Recruiters are spam bots, period. Their job is to smash square pegs into round holes. Use them or don't use them... but the sooner everyone on both sides of the hiring equation realizes this extremely basic and obvious fact, the better.
There's 3 types/market for recruiters and they almost never overlap.
The first are "body shop style" recruiters. It's basically a numbers game where they try to cold-call as much people with githubs/linkedin or blogs that reference programming. They don't know programming (not even what's the difference between languages or front-end/back-end) and are looking for a list of buzzwords. They'll send copy-pasted messages (you can tell because it references tech you never used or never even claimed to have used). If you respond (and really you shouldn't) you won't be able to get any relevant information about the position because... they don't have it. These recruiters are often contracted by external firms in "best value countries" and are given canned response to message you. That's probably what the author encountered.
Second type are professional recruiters. Their salary is by commissions will often be a percentage of your salary. They are knowledgeable about programming and tech (often former engineers who wanted a break from coding!). They typically are looking to match specific profiles to specific jobs at client companies. This goes all the way to recruiters specialized in C-Suite executives (and you can picture the commission finding a CEO will bring in). Their messages will be personalized and you shouldn't hesitate to reply back even if you aren't looking for a job. They know that most great software engineers are almost never openly looking for a job so their goal is to be on good terms with a large number of talented developers so that the minute they start looking for a job they can match them with positions. You'll know when you encounter one.
Third type is basically referrals. A players attract A players, smart companies know it. Make sure your referral bonus is a percentage of total comp. It's probably the most effective way of recruiting (it has an insane signal to noise ratio). But you only get access to that type of network by... bringing value and being part of it in the first place!
I agree that referrals often yield the best results, but that's quite orthogonal to the problem I wanted to tackle with my article.