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Comment by sirsinsalot

2 days ago

Recruiters are never your friend. Ever.

I have had many poor experiences with recruiters. You have heard all the same stories I have to tell.

The ones you may not have heard is the odd post on LinkedIn from a recruiter which suggests that the role is so cutthroat that you have to ghost most candidates.

The one person I know from college who became a tech recruiter was someone who was not technical (English/philosophy double major) who loved telling people how stupid and wrong they were about things. He bemoaned once to me candidates that applied for job x which required experience x and not y which the candidate had, and how dumb they were for thinking it was equivalent. (They were mostly equivalent, which I knew having had a year of both under my belt; he never asked what I was doing at work in that conversation)

You can draw your own conclusions. I have met recruiters I felt were under enormous pressure to find the best candidates. I have met some who were the scum of the earth. Mostly, unless they were on the payroll of the company they were hiring for, I have just felt they were lazy.

  • >the role is so cutthroat that you have to ghost most candidates.

    There's no "have". We have automated systems and they have a list of contact info. Make a whitelist then blast out a generic message if you have to. But you never "have" to ghost.

    >Mostly, unless they were on the payroll of the company they were hiring for, I have just felt they were lazy.

    I think that's the biggest thing AI revealed in all of this; most people simply do not care, and now they have a solution to care even less. It's just preying off most people's genuine desire to do the bare minimum, to the detriment of the people around them. It's a vicious cycle.

Yup. Recently I had one all buddy buddy with me, even to the point of unprofessionalism, in hindsight. After the final rounds, there was a little delay but he wanted to reassure me that they'd be finalizing things and would have exciting news...

... that turned out to be that I'd been the runner up candidate.

Wow, thanks.