Comment by dheera
2 hours ago
Reminds me of all the recruiters who reach out to me saying they're working on filling some engineer position but never say the company name, and when asked, they want to have a call.
Stop wasting my time, STATE THE COMPANY UPFRONT AND AT THE TOP, preferably in the subject line
This is not in the recruiter's interest though, because you may just go past them and apply to the company directly, so they miss out on their revenue.
I love picking apart a recruiter's emails, in a handful of cases I see the advert and I'm like "Oh yeah I used to work there". Go and React in a telecom company in NL near where I live? Yeah I set that up. No I don't want to go back, not unless they hire an actual team.
Every recruiter I have dealt with (on the hiring side) has had a provision in the contract: if they have a documented exchange with a candidate whom we hire during or within (a month, two months...) of the contract end, the recruiter is deemed to have done the work. Contrarily, if we have a documented exchange with a candidate before the recruiter does, the recruiter is not owed anything.
So: the recruiter has an incentive to mention the hiring company as soon as they get a response from you.
If they don't do that, they are either bad at writing contracts or don't actually have authority to recruit. Mostly the second: you would not be surprised at the number of cold emails I get saying that they represent a candidate (or a pool of candidates) who are exactly right for the position that we filled last month.
That's like domain brokers that contact you, saying they have a certain domain, and would you be interested?
They don't actually have the domain. If you respond, they reserve it, immediately, so you can't get it.
A fun thing to do, is respond, then block them.
My favorite was the game of trying to figure out if multiple recruiters were trying to forward me to the exact same job/hiring company and trying to get them to stop stepping on each other's toes and try to a pick a "winner" recruiter for that specific role.
It's a weird thing to miss, but this layoff cycle so far I haven't seen any recent recruiter emails at all, which seems strange on multiple levels.
I message them back and inform them I am reporting their message as spam. Seems to get a reaction.
It seems like all paths with recruiters lead to the phone call. I really wish some of them had an email only option.
Email only is not a good option for them. They need candidates that aren't at least a total embarrassment when presented to their clients, so the phone call really is a first screening interview.
> I really wish some of them had an email only option.
But why? If they need to convince someone you're a good hire, they will want to talk to you.
That stopped being super frustrating for me about a year ago. Wishing it were the other way though…
They can't, otherwise a significant fraction of the people they reach out to would just skip the head hunter and contact the company directly.
Same reason these same head hunters will usually strip any direct-contact details out of your resume before sending on to companies -- they don't want those companies running around them and contacting the candidate directly.
IMO, these people are all grifters and uses-car-salesman. Their goal is to get as many people as possible to use them to change jobs so they get bonuses. They provide little-to-no value add in the actual process and will actively try to shovel you toward shitty companies and dead-end roles, despite how well they dress them up.
You are ~20-50%~ cheaper (typical is 30% IIRC) in the first year of your employment if you are a direct hire instead of going through a recruiter, from a hiring manager's perspective. If you switch jobs often this compounds to make your offer chances lower as well if you're going through a head hunter (I've been part of these discussions from hiring side).
Not exactly. Recruiters often can guarantee an interview with the hiring manager while if you submitted your resume to the company directly, you'll just get lost in the sea of resumes so not much point going around them. I also always give them a PDF resume and I'm pretty sure they don't edit them as sometimes during a video interview the employer pulls up my resume as a screen share to go through it and it's always been the exact one I've had with all my personal contact details.
It's simply not worth it for either the employer and interviewee to go around the recruiter because they act as a filter for both sides initially.
There are a lot of places that are more interested in rejecting people than they are in accepting people and the act of getting a headhunter involved a commitment device that helps get them out of the rejection mindset.
Definitely could be selection bias, but every time I have seen a copy of a resume a head hunter has forwarded a potential employer it has _always_ had the recruiting firm's letterhead plastered above my content, and my email removed.
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Depends- my current position was via a staffing firm that was engaged directly by my new company to fill the position, since they had an existing trust relationship.
But they indeed were comfortable revealing the hiring company early in the process due to that trust level…
fwiw my experience building a small tech talent agency / recruiting shop disagrees with this. Cold application pipelines are overwhelmed by gen AI applications and many of the (very qualified) candidates we place report getting totally ghosted on all cold applications - even when we’re able to get them several interviews a week with companies in our network.
Seems like companies still value a curated pipeline. 15-20% of first year salary (numbers we see these days) appears to be worth saving the company time interviewing unscreened candidates. Recruiting can be a real time suck and a bad hire can be catastrophic.
I can't get interested in a job without knowing who the people behind it are, and what the actual mission of the company is.
Recruiters say things like "autonomous robotics systems"
For what? Weapons? Hell no. Doing dangerous industrial jobs humans shouldn't be doing? Hell yes.
That makes no sense becasue contacting the company directly is usually just a communication blackhole
Not if you're a valuable candidate.
An example (I have intimate experience with) is the finance/hft space in NYC -- if you're employed at a competitive player in this space in trading/quant/engineering you will almost certainly be given a phone interview w/o question at every other competitor when you reach out.
If you don't trust the 'contact us' forms on their website it's dead simple to search e.g. LinkedIn to find their own in-house recruiters and reach out directly.
Again, if you're a new grad? Definitely higher chance of your contact going right into the trash. But the target hires are still getting called back within a day.
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Or they don't have a job opening at all and are just looking to bolster the database.
I remember the annual cycle back in the day. During quieter times of the year, I'd suddenly get a tonne of calls from various recruiters with a job (no company name) ... almost as if they'd been told, "ok, no one's hiring or placing right now, no point you sitting there on your arse while I pay you. So pick up the phone and get some qualified leads"
The easy way to get around this is by telling the recruiter you've been actively applying with companies inside your state and for remote contract work and you don't want to be submitted twice.
They'll send over the company name right away.
Paste the job description into your friendly LLM and let it attempt to find the company for you and then contact the company itself.
Those recruiter spams generally just copy and paste the companies own JD so the LLM can usually figure out the source company.
We all know the company is going to be Amazon lol.