Recruiters get a lot of scorn, but I've had good experiences with them as long as you understand their incentives. They usually get some percentage of your starting salary, so let's say they make 15k if your offer is 100k (making up these numbers, but probably in the ballpark. Also, they only get paid if you stick around for at least a few months). If your offer is for 120k, they might make 3k more, so they have some incentive to get you a higher salary, but really, their incentive is to close as many deals as possible. Better to close two deals for 15k each then to drag out one deal for 18k.

As long as you understand that their incentives are somewhat aligned with yours but not completely, you might have a good experience with recruiters. I've found some who are great and many others who suck. But the good ones will get you in the door with the right people and guide you through the interview process.

Those most likely operating out of the same boiler rooms as tech support scammers who have pitch terrible roles and employ a spray & pray approach where it's just a spam campaign with very little effort on their side. Those are a waste of time, the roles are terrible and are pretty much never matched to your profile, and when you go through anyway the recruiter will not provide any value (I had one insist on me writing a short resume of my profile... I mean you have my resume in front of you, why don't you do it?).

The rest which are typically alright. Again, quality varies, but I haven't had any outright "bad" experiences with any of this category. On the top-end of this category are those that understand the industry very well and what you're looking for and will only pitch you the right roles at the right time. The right recruiters can essentially be your sales team and are absolutely worth having on your side.

I suspect most people's interactions here would be exclusively those from the first category as they're the ones that typically send unsolicited spam. The second category will typically show much more restraint in reaching out out of the blue, so unless you explicitly seek them out you may not even be aware they exist.

A very small percentage of third party recruiters stay third party once they have a year or two of experience. If they are any good but don't love sales they go internal (recruiter for an actual company - less pay but far far less stress).

A tiny percentage of recruiters stay as third party recruiters and are actually good. They often built networks from their early inmail spam days when they did get lucky and place someone so they don't send as many inmails now.

You are almost always dealing with near entry level third party recruiters who are learning on the job. That is in large part why dealing with recruiters on average sucks.

This is never going to change but if you are looking for a new job or you are interested in a role a recruiter reaches out to you about you can absolutely ask to speak to a lead or a manager of their team instead of them.

"Hey I know the third party recruiting industry is tough. I am very interested in this position. Do you have a lead or a manager who I can speak with to learn more about this position and how to prepare for the interview?" That is how you get to the person who actually knows what they are doing. The immediate recruiter might make a stink but their manager likely wont. If you are actually a good fit for the job your chances of landing there do go up if they spend time to speak with you and help you prepare. They only get paid if you actually start there.

I guess I would just throw a few names out there and let you build from there. Disclaimer: I haven't worked with them enough to say they are truly exceptional, but at least they're not from the first category and actually have decent roles:

* La Fosse Associates

* Opus Recruitment Solutions

* Austin Fraser

* Gathered and Found (never heard of this one but got recommended it by someone just now)

Connect with a few people from each, have a few calls and go from there.

*While I have met some downright bad recruiters in my time, I have also met some really great ones, so if anyone wants a connection to one LMK!

That said, I feel that recruiters work harder the farther along you are in your career. They make more as a percentage and they realized that experienced candidates likely have a larger network and will send them more referrals. It's a sales business, they're not stupid.

Thanks recruiters you are mostly awesome!

If they work for a (recruitment) company, I'll look at vacancies on their web site. If I don't like them, I'll either tell them why (if I feel like they may be of use later), give them an annoyed reply (if they annoyed me) or ignore them.

Sometimes, I literally tell them to either give me more info up front, because I can't keep having phone calls just so you can tell me you have 10 vacancies that I might be a good fit. I'd be on the phone talking about Java jobs all day long (I don't have any Java experience). If they don't send me more info, that's fine. If they do, I'll give them some feedback and possibly schedule a call if I like it.

In short, this means I ignore most recruiters and the ones I've spoken to have mostly been pretty pleasant.

99% of the time a "recruiter" contacts me, it's a sweatshop spam recruiter who invariably says "Your profile looks interesting" and of course, has not seen the profile.

In my experience on both ends, they don't care about good fit nor qualifications. It's a numbers game - throw almost any candidate at a position to hope it gets filled, or contact as many devs as possible to make them a client.

Recruiters that are actually part of the company tend to be better in my experience. I won't even talk to 3rd party recruiters.

When the recruiters treated me well, so did the company. When the recruiters or HR treat me poorly (e.g. after the offer was signed, the nature of my remote work & travel was trifled over with little guilt trips), the company inevitably ended up being what was being reflected.

The outside recruiters, "I have a client in XYZ industry with 100M in funding!" type where they don't even tell you the name of the company, you should just ignore.

I get a fair amount of interest from recruiters and I don't consider it spam: they're doing their jobs and it might benefit me at some point. It's easy enough to decline someone's invitation if you don't want to connect with them.

Similar to how a Realtor doesn't really care to get you the highest offer for your house, or lowest price on the one you're buying.

Seconding this, and LinkedIn being more viable than Indeed. Serious recruiters, at the very least, have a clear incentive to find suitable candidates. On the contrary, though, so many offers coming directly from employers are just used to test waters: therefore, you need to send them a direct e-mail to stand out from the pile of applications.

Why they get a percentage instead of a flat per-head fee? Its not in companies' best interest to agree to a percentage, and recruiters have no leverage to push it.

I also very much hate how people keep trying to turn it into Facebook. Stop it. Get your validation somewhere else.

Now with that said, I've found almost all of my recent jobs via LinkedIn. It's the first place I go when I look for work. Recruiters will hit you up once you have at least a few years of experience.

I don't necessarily agree. There are jobs where appearance is important, especially customer facing ones.

And I'm sure I'll catch flak for this but if you're obese, slovenly, or unhealthy looking that kinda has to factor in. I would certainly question how well you could handle a job if you can't even handle your personal life. Discrimination sucks but it's just a reality. Everyone does it, and sometimes it's a necessary "evil".

I think if you've got good resume showing your aptitude most places are going to care less about your appearance. Besides, they're going to see your face in the interview anyway. So, if you think your appearance is causing companies to avoid you they're not going to suddenly change when you show up for the interview and you're probably just wasting your time.

Discrimination (hopefully) is a small percentage of most of our lives, but it is real. Black hands holding a product in a craigslist ad gets fewer hits. If you're a racist and buy a bicycle, get there and the guy is black, you'd probably still buy it, because you're already there

I think this can go both ways. As a black person, I honestly prefer when people reach out to me via Linkedin because I at least know they are aware of my race ahead of time. I've had plenty of interviews where, because I have a white name and sound and act white over the phone, people have treated me completely differently after meeting in person. I'd rather just be able to be up front about it.

In the US, UK etc. yes, but in Germany and DACH region, employers still expect a photo in the traditional resume, especially for non-tech/skilled positions or in more traditional companies (Audi, BMW, etc.). Heard it's the same in southern Europe.

Still irks me that they haven't outlawed this yet.

But I don't think things would improve much if they did though, as if an employer wants to not hire you because of your race/gender/nationality etc, it can do it anyway in a later stage, with some cookie-cutter excuse, regardless of photo/no-photo in your resume.

First, you're increasing the probability of discrimination by making it possible earlier on. The number of people that could exclude you goes up; e.g. the initial, possibly external, recruiter (who is screening hundreds of candidates) who would never otherwise have seen your face, can now discriminate on appearance.

Secondly, people are less discriminatory to people they've actually met and gotten to know somewhat. A picture of an anonymous person, with very little other information to go off of, may affect someone's judgement quite strongly; whereas, when you actually meet and talk with someone, have a lot of other information about them, and they are no longer anonymous, physical appearance will have less influence.

https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/discrimination-h...

That makes sense. It's sort of like how I wouldn't expect someone from Kentucky to have the same internship opportunities as someone from the bay area, but if I cant see their location then all I have to go off of is the listed experience.

> It's the first place I go when I look for work. Recruiters will hit you up once you have at least a few years of experience.

I have the exact same experience. I try to ignore the news feed as much as possible because it became a Covid flame war. To me, it is no longer a 'Business oriented social network', I now use it as a glorified job board with resume profiles.

>My physical appearance should have nothing to do with my hireabilty

but actually why?

you know - if you have two equally skilled people...

and one of them has tattoos on 90% of his/her body and your company works for banking industry, then is it pros or con?

It's a huge pro.

"Wow, they hired him despite the stigma around his looks in our hugely conservative business, he's that good."

Same thing with hiring a non-minority candidate from a school that's known to do a lot of affirmative action, you know he's there for the right reasons.

The problem is that you probably won't get that far if an employer doesn't like the color of your skin, your gender, that you're in a wheelchair, etc. Your resume will probably go in the trash as soon as they see your photo.

But if you can at least get into an interview, you have an opportunity to sell yourself as a candidate.

The problem itself is real of course, I just don't think that having or not having a profile picture will make any difference. And there's other factors too - do I need to hide my name so I don't give away that I'm from a foreign country or that I'm a woman?

I don't want to pretend that I have a solution for racism/sexism/etc. in hiring but I really don't think that tiptoeing around people's prejudices is the way to do it.

Racism can be very subtle and insidious, though.

You don't always need to talk them out of beliefs like "we are going to take your country away from you," it's more about dispelling unexamined gut beliefs like "the best candidate will probably visually resemble the people who have been good in that role before." The latter is less difficult to overcome if you can get yourself into the face-to-face stage.

This is not a world where "only your brain" matters. If you have brain and a decent surface (i.e., face, body, voice, manners) then you'll beat the ones who "only" have brain.

The longer answer is somewhat unrelated. If you never really interviewed or applied after college, it's going to be crappy if you take all the resume/application/interview classes seriously.

On the resume part, fill up your resume/LinkedIn profile. If you've done 'various QA and product roles' and 'project management to product management', make sure to write them all down as separate experiences within the same company. With every experience, add a start and end date, doesn't matter if they overlap or if you don't know exactly, it doesn't matter. Also, add the technologies, skills and other relevant info per experience. This way, you show growth and broad knowledge.

On the application part, I have noticed that a warm entry is the best. E-mail a recruiter with a question about a role anything is fine. Their response will tell you a lot about the company. Sometimes they ask you to just send your resume and set up a call. These calls are a much better way to introduce yourself than a cover letter. Sometimes a cover letter is necessary though, if it is, at least write something honest. You can also just pick up the phone and call a recruiter, that also works sometimes.

On the interview part, my most important advice is that it's a two way street. Not just the interaction, that's what they teach you at school. It's a two way street in the fact that the company should also be somewhat trying to convince you to work there. Especially because you have skills that are sought after. So don't feel like you have to impress the company too much, be yourself, be honest (of you can't answer a question, say that, don't make something up) and think of it as a conversation, not an interview. That can really help with the nerves too.

Finally, don't get discouraged. There are many shitty HR departments, shitty manager, shitty companies and of course, shitty interviews. If that's the case, just realize it's them not you. You've dodged a bullet by seeing that and you can continue to the next interview. I once rejected an offer because the interview process gave me such a bad vibe, that I couldn't see myself working there. And beyond shitty interviews, sometimes you're just not a good fit for a roll or company and that's fine too.

Lots of what you said resonates and is what I've done, so I'm happy to see some of that validation.

Having been on the interview end of things a handful of times, I 100% agree on the two-way street analogy. I've somewhat prided myself for at least trying to make interviews conversational, both because it seems to organically bring about more interesting (and relevant) parts about their job history, but also because it's a way for myself and the interviewee to get a feel for the professional culture.

That said, having not interviewed for a job in nearly a decade, I have little idea if that's the norm. Especially given how much "resume" and "interview" training from school was centered around spinning negatives into positives and glowing up a job history, both conflicting with the organic, and maybe too transparent style or resume and interviewing I gravitate towards.

Thanks for the reply and the assurance I'm not too far off track :)

> style or resume and interviewing I gravitate towards.

If that's what you gravitate towards, to me that seems like an incredibly good benchmark for your cultural fit from your side.

> spinning negatives into positives and glowing up a job history, both conflicting

Don't confuse 'glowing up your job history' with lying about your experience though. Many people under sell their job history, because things you do every day become normal to you. So people often actually need to 'glow up' their job history in order to not under sell themselves.

I've been told the opposite -- in the recruiter view on LinkedIn, they can only see your 3 most-recent positions, and they almost never expand the fold to see the rest. Thus, it's critical to curate those.

For example, let's say you previously worked at BigCorp, but left to pursue your startup idea (Startup A). In the meantime, you've consulted at another startup (Startup B), and you're working at SmallCorp to make the ends meet until your idea takes off.

You'd be better off listing StartupA, SmallCorp, and BigCorp (or StartupA, StartupB, and BigCorp) as compared with StartupA, StartupB, and SmallCorp, since only the most recent three jobs will be shown, and recruiters tend to more heavily weight BigCorp signals.

That's exactly what I meant. I've seen people with a single entry for their current job at am employer they've worked at for 10 years. That means they've either been stuck in the same role and learned nothing... Or their profile doesn't show what they've actually done.

I've also seen 10 entries of 3 months at client X. That's not what I meant.

- Yes LinkedIn is useful, but not in the way that you think. The job application function in particular seems to be a black hole. I've never heard of anyone even hearing back from any employer, and I did try it a few times myself as well. What it does do is it tells you who to get in touch with to try to get a job. Certain recruiters have the current vacancies, and you can see who they are. Talk to them directly, either by chat or by phone, and get your USPs in there immediately.

- Indeed, monster, etc I don't know much about, most of the financial jobs I look at aren't going to be there. I did use efinancial, but there the strategy is the same. Don't submit your CV, find the person who is listing the role, get a hold of them.

- Generally independent recruiters seem to be the best source of leads. They get paid for placements, so they're always calling with suggestions. It's frustrating if you aren't the right profile, because they want an immediate sellable candidate, but if you are the right person, they can open doors that normally are just total blanks.

- LinkedIn is where you find all those recruiters. Whatever your specialty is, there's a recruiter for you. Go and find them, talk to them, see what they have. Don't forget to cater for the buzzword bingo, the recs will search for common tech terms.

- I also cultivate longer relationships with recruiters. A coffee now and again is not such a bad time sink, and you hear a lot about who is doing what through the recruitment people. Sometimes they phone me and ask actual technical questions, like "how does this trade work", and they feed it back to their network.

My anecdata as a PhD engineer: my first job out of college came from putting my info into a faceless corporate careers website. I also got a competing offer through LinkedIn. My current job at a little <100 employee company was obtained through a recruiter on LinkedIn. When looking a few months ago I got another offer from a corporate careers website.

I felt pretty useless fresh out of college, but once I got my first job, I started getting messages from recruiters on LinkedIn fairly regularly. I'd be interested in how people do their due diligence in checking the authenticity of LinkedIn recruiters!

As for indeed, when I used it 5 years ago to get my first job out of school, it didn't impress me. I didn't get any leads from it. Zip Recruiter I think is an actual scam.

It's creation pushed me out of niche job boards. I imagine it will do the same to Indeed, and LinkedIn. All the major job boards syndicate jobs there.

Google made it:

they managed to signal how little they care about me even more clearly than the "Sadly we cannot show you this information since we are not allowed to use all our 900 trackers on you."

To be a little constructive: just about anything would be better. I guess old Google would have said something like:

- "This page is not adapted for your region yet, but you are free to look." or

- "This page is not adapted for your browser yet, but you are free to look." or

- "Sadly our lawyers won't let you see this yet, but we are planning to open it for everyone early next year." or something similar.

That was part of why this message was unusually bad: they didn't even care to tell us if it was our device, our browser or where we connected from.

Let the recruiters come to you. Optimize your LinkedIn profile so you get incoming traffic. Make sure keywords that a recruiter would search for are on the profile, in the body and skills section. As an example, a recruiter is less likely to search "software engineer" (too many hits), but rather might search "Python" to get a narrower result, or even something more narrow like "Numpy" to reduce the noise. Also be sure you have a fair amount of connections, which expands your ability to be found. There are additional settings.

Working with a couple recruiters can be useful if they are good at what they do and aren't just looking for a quick buck. You should be able to tell the difference (are they asking what YOU want, or are they just pitching every job to you and hoping you agree to be presented?).

Also use LinkedIn for outreach. Did you see a job posted somewhere that interests you? Write a short message to a recruiter at the company on Linkedin (instead of applying) to find out how to get some dialogue going.

Source: Former tech recruiter that now writes resumes and gives job search advice with a focus on tech.

Also, some recruiters are so bone-headed that you can list 5 programming languages in your work experience, and they will drop you because you don't have any 'development experience' or whatever term they received from their client.

I think linkedin is another good resource, yes. I know that when I interview people, I always check their linkedin profiles for their previous employment, skills, recommendations, etc.

The last few times I've looked for a role I've just googled for companies I'd like to work at and browsed their careers pages. If you have specific things you're looking for (eg more "I want to work for one of these companies" rather than "I want to join any company within these criteria") then going direct can work very well. Companies seem to like candidates who approach them too because it saves them a fortune in recruiter fees...

This is my current practice. If I get a bite, it's one I'm excited for since it's a company I already know I'm interested in joining.

On the flipside, I do this rarely and it seems like exploring jobs to the extent of seeing what the job market thinks I'm qualified for is a volume game. Based on what's been posted here thus far, sounds like balancing between one of the known recruiting sites and still cherry-picking careers pages is the way to go.

Thanks!

I'm surprised so many people are not mentioning this. I have applied to 7 companies directly on their websites recently and only 1 hasn't reached back out to me about interviewing.

I didn't understand what these job classes meant three years ago when I was getting frustrated, and was surprised that I could find a job within a week. Panic really hit me when it dawned on me that I had given up a pure developer job for a pure on-call pager rotation job. I learned a lot very quickly from that screw up.

It was a pretty smooth and quick process but that was about a year ago - I heard rumours they ran out of money and turned into a Linkedin clone since so YMMV (would be interested in peoples’ recent experiences in case I need to look again).

I do get quite a few messages from recruiters on Linkedin but I get a feeling they don’t read my profile closely before messaging. Some are clearly automated (catch these by including an emoji in my profile name).

Also almost everyone on LinkedIn had ~20% lower salary ranges they were offering than what I asking for on Hired, which was just a little higher than what Hired recommended after I took their short skills survey, so I think LinkedIn just has a bunch of recruiters stuck with offering low salaries for their clients and trying their damnedest for you not to notice.

The problem with all intermediaries is that they want to manage your attention. The more of your finite time they can use with their pitches, the less time you can spend considering alternatives. At least with Hired you're also using up the time of someone directly at the employer.

That said, as an experienced person with a large informal network, every job (only a few) since a long tenure one straight out of grad school has been through people I've known--in the majority of cases someone very senior at the company.

Indeed or similar are so basic that if you're lucky you will get an email reply from the company. Is less noisy than LinkedIn.

I hope one day the process will be simple and without recruiters in the middle. Nothing against them, but are mostly 0 technical and you have to take calls where they read you a company presentation but they don't know nothing really about the company and nothing about you. So what is their utility?

I prefer to speak directly with the company. And I don't like unwanted calls, and I don't like being ghosted (especially if I invested more than 20 mins on your company).

I read this article few days ago, 100% correct https://batsov.com/articles/2021/11/03/a-note-about-recruite...

I was active on LinkedIn for years but it got me in touch with so many bullshitters I felt I was being dragged down and becoming a bullshitter.

https://artechjobs.com/

I prefer to walk in to a building and shake hands with CEO/CIO without prior invitation. This has landed me my last 2 (serious) jobs, both of which have been fantastic.

Interesting to see how different people can be. I prefer to never meet or see a coworker in person or step foot in an office, which is why the pandemic has been the best time of my life. Even better if the company is so large I'll never meet the CEO or CIO.

So I would say using LinkedIn in this way seems to be working well: setting up your profile as well as you can, that should make it so you receive endless messages from recruiters. Then when you're looking for a job, just respond to the last messages you got.

I've had a lot of luck on AngelList personally. I find more creative interview processes and often you'll get to speak with the C-Suite very early on. Because, you know, startups.

I have several friends who have had luck on hired.com, but I haven't tried it.

Generally speaking, in nearly twenty years, I've had exactly two gigs that weren't based on a reference from someone I knew working at a place. The two that weren't a reference was 1) An actual quality recruiter got through the noise on LinkedIn and offered a lucrative one year contract, and 2) was contact directly (did not apply) on AngelList by a startup CEO. Cold-applying from the ether is a tough way to get a gig.

Next, hop on LinkedIn. Sort for individual profiles. Try different keywords, industries/verticals/markets. Use titles, ex: CTO, VP or Director of Engineering, etc…

Very quickly you should have a hit list of interesting potential employers.

Now— Reach out to them direct for an exploratory conversation.

Part of their schtick is you have to leave an employee review of your company to access their resources. You can see a lot of comments about different companies there.

I’m surprised not to see a plug here for WorkAtAStartup.com, YC’s job site. It’s pretty great and usually you get interviews with founders.

Since 2012 the whole recruiting and HR world have adopted applicant tracking systems (ATS) which heavily rely upon resume parsing and keywords. You’ll need to basically do some SEO on your actual resume PDF or .docx to ensure that your skills are visible to those systems. Much has been written about it but I’ll say that vanilla formatting and listing specific skills goes a long way to better visibility.

Do prep for coding interviews, especially with a guide like Cracking the Coding Interview. It’s just one of those skills that is another obligation of being a developer in 2021 like knowing git and containers.

Looking for tech jobs in 2021 is a somewhat brutal and dehumanizing process, but on the plus side compensation is unbelievable right now, demand is high, and remote work is amazingly common. It’s a great time to be a nerd. Good luck to you!

On a somewhat related note, if you think that LinkedIn is abused by managers, do check out https://www.shlinkedin.com/ and give it a go. It literally made me laugh out loud.

Tech is a seller's market and LinkedIn is s better shopping window for this kind of market, so all your future jobs are listed in LinkedIn.

Don't know at the executive level, I'm pretty sure that market move trough private channels and in limited times trough a public one.

With LinkedIn, the most effective strategy I’ve found is finding someone who is connected to the hiring manager of a posted open position, and crafting an intro note for them to send on my behalf. Just applying to jobs or waiting to be found hasn’t worked.

http://Levels.fyi

http://TeamBlind.com

Do not use numbers from GlassDoor. They are utterly outdated and misleading for our industry.

I would guess you are probably underpaid by 2-5x at this point.

LinkedIn's bread and butter seems to be spammers in India with addresses from New Jersey.

You will probably not find a good job on LinkedIn. Find niche-specific slack job boards and network with people. LinkedIn is mostly a waste of time. It was shit before Microsoft, now it's diarhea.

I'm glad I will be retiring soon and will never remove a connection for re-posting an Oleg Vishnepolsky post.

Fuck LinkedIn.

I've had to deal with those. The answer is to ruthlessly block/reject anyone you have doubts about. Thankfully most of these put up a very poor show and just a quick look at the quality of their website will tell you whether they're telling the truth. Frankly, you don't even need to dig that far - even just the quality/suitability of the roles they pitch will be a good enough indicator.

At least in the UK however there are decent local recruitment agencies that are worth having on your side. They don't proactively reach out (at least not as much as the aforementioned spammers) so you may need to seek them out yourself but if you get in touch and explain them your situation they will be helpful either now or in the future.

Whether this applies to the US is a different story however. When searching for jobs in my niche I often see tons of US-based positions posted by the aforementioned spammers, so it may very well be that US-focused recruitment has been completely overtaken by them.

LinkedIn feels a lot like Myspace at the end, when it had been completely overrun by spammers and the company itself stopped caring.

The "news feed" -- insipid at best. The farms of recruiters -- not super useful, I already have a job at a FAANG and I'm not looking to switch to a different flavour.

But the social network, which has been there for 15 years and kept me in touch with all sorts of professional contacts? Gold.