Engineer-to-Engineer Recruiting (opens in new tab)

Here is an idea for getting useful responses back - give the candidate enough info to evaluate whether they are interested. This means info on the company, detailed description of the role, ballpark on the comp. You are even more likely to get a response if your email suggests you went as far as googling the candidate.

I truly don't understand why recruiters think "unspecified opportunity at top startup in technology industry, send me your resume since I'm too lazy to google it, I want a phone conversation" is actually useful.

What's really frustrating is when I get a seemingly personalized email, and then six of my coworkers say that they got the same email. Do recruiters really think we don't talk to each other?

What gets me about recruiter spam is how similar to regular spam it is. I've received only a smattering of messages, but largely, they're entirely lowercase, they have almost no punctuation, and they frequently have patently obvious grammatical errors. I responded to one recruiter (she managed to contact me at a time I was looking at alternate employment), and on the phone she was well-spoken; something about sticking a keyboard between them and me apparently causes communication to devolve into a base form.

I hear a lot about this, but never had any recruiter emails at all. I'm 20 years old so I suppose my name is just not known in the programmer world (?), but then how does that work? How do you get your name known? Day after day you hear about unemployment in the news, yet here everyone is complaining about receiving too many "please come work for us" emails?

It's not that I don't believe that many developers receive so much spam, but I don't understand why or how. How'd they even know if you're any good? According to some internship places, >50% of the developers is incompetent. Do recruiters just pull as many people as possible in for interviews and check everyone out, is that the goal? Or is it mostly just because the company wants to expand, or to compensate leaving/older people?

Engineer-to-engineer recruiting works to some extent, but only as long as your engineers are willing to tolerate it.

Airbnb, for example, has (had?) an "Always Be Recruiting" dogma: Get your engineers so psyched about the company that they go forth and witness to every engineer they know. It seems to work–at least, until you dig deeper. The nigh-unto weekly "most recruiting recommendations" statistics single out the few who are willing to share the Kool-Aid, and–more importantly–the many hundred who are not. If your engineers are made to look bad because they're not proliferating their trade at every tech talk, it's a bad sign.

As an aside to my aside, this article seems to ignore the glaringly-obvious "Have the CEO do the recruiting" conclusion.

Good marketing spam about their product. Nothing for the end user here; just to sell to companies.

I wish recruiters would be:

a) honesty. Nothing good is built on a lie. b) personal. Get Feedback if you are not interested and actively engage in talking to your potential employee's as well as your potential clients. c) communication. Falls into b) but it also falls into a).

I immediately delete most recruiting spam that is not actually written to me. I realize this costs me jobs potentially but it also saves me face. Nothing worse than getting hyped up over a potential job that will never be.

Interesting article and its small sampling echoes what I’ve long preached – keep HR and recruiters out of the hiring process.

The claim that HR/recruiters are the only ones that have “pipeline management” (translation: multitasking), “offer negotiation” (translation: requirements validation; this is farce as HR/recruiters work for the company and not the candidate, thus they all have a take-it-or-leave-it approach), and “brand recognition” skills are completely false. If HR/recruiters were such experts on brand recognition then there would have been responses to the limited sampling.

If a recruiter is open to telling you the company name, I usually respond. If not, they're much more likely to be ignored.

I think the article raises / highlights a great point. When you're trying to hire the most talented folks out there, making that effort of integrating the team, be it the CEO, VP R&D or any of the engineers in the process makes a strong statement in my mind that a company is really interested in you and that you're not being carpet bombed by email. That in itself creates a slightly stronger sense of good moral obligation from the side of the candidate to respond, as he feels that there's a "real" person on the other end, but also that this company is making a real effort. The fact that they incorporate engineers into this, is also something to would send a strong signal (at least to me) that this is a company worth checking. My two cents at least.

I think spam is spam no matter who sends it (engineer or recruiter). If I send or receive a random message, it'll be just that: a random message in an inbox. Such messages are usually ignored. While recruiting for my startup, I've had the most success through introductions rather than sending random messages to people.

The best recruiters I've ever talked to have been from VC firms. I've actually ended up friends with recruiters working at VC firms that I've gotten calls from. With the better firms, they realize it's not all about placing people in one of their companies today, but rather fostering a positive relationship.

This requires recruiters to actually do work, instead of keyword searching resumes and spamming candidates.