Were either of these different, I might feel differently than I do.
Some people do prefer email to the phone. I have no problem with a recruiter offering the option to have a phone call. I have problems with recruiters requiring the phone call before I can even talk to someone who will make a decision. Hell, the last recruiter blatantly told me they would not tell me the name of the company they were hiring for until I was on the phone with them. Perhaps it's my arrogance, but that doesn't to be a matter of "some people like the phone better".
You are right, not every recruiter needs to read my blog or Twitter enough to realise that I have a boyfriend. That is a terrible example. I'll iterate on it with an updated draft that better gets across the point--perhaps a suggesting I work in an enterprise environment would be a better example, as I'm decidedly unsuited to that environment, and that's obvious if you know anything about me at all.
I believe a bare minimum of a job description--the company they're hiring for, something about the culture or problem they're solving, the stack they use, maybe why they think you'd be a good candidate--is probably a good bet. I get too many recruiter emails like my sample that don't tell me, quite literally, anything about the company. At all. No name. No website. No size. Nothing that would allow me to determine if this is an opportunity I should pursue or not.
I believe I pointed out that recruiters are busy and that I am busy. I am well aware I'm not the only busy person out there. :) If you think this is disrespectful, I'd certainly love to find ways to fix this.
I think you may be unfamiliar with the level of interaction recruiters provide. The publicists sending the mass pitches you describe are the bad recruiter pitches I am talking about. It is not a matter of me having very specific guidelines for how I am spoken to before I'll consider a job; it's a matter of an industry whose norm is to type in search terms, then hit all the results with a form letter.
This letter is in case one of those who are trying to do a good job are seeing everyone else use the form letter and assuming that is how it's done. Or who simply don't know how to put themselves into an engineer's shoes to effectively communicate a pitch.
I resent your accusation that I believe recruiters are somehow beneath me. I actually, as I mentioned, believe recruiters have a really cool job. I don't have the aptitude for it, but I do not believe that making lights flash in a pleasing pattern is somehow a worthier job than connecting people to jobs that fulfill them. And yes, there are recruiters I love. They are the ones I send referrals to when a friend asks who is hiring. They are the ones I seek out. Which, for a recruiter, is a powerful card to hold in a limited market. I'm trying to give as many recruiters that card as I can.
I deal with recruiters all the time. I got my current job through a recruiter. He was fantastic. I have nothing against recruiters, or I would just set up a spam filter and call it a day.
I wrote this because I ask for feedback when I'm in the hiring process, so it struck me that recruiters might also like feedback. It seems to me that this is the opposite of what you accuse me of; if I didn't care about the recruiter, considered them lesser, or didn't think they cared about their job, why would I care if they got the feedback they needed to improve? I'd ignore them and move on. It's certainly less effort.
And it results in fewer people assuming I think my ass is the gravitational pull of the universe without bothering to find out anything about me.
This is the truest of all true things that are true.
Totally a first-world problem.
I share feedback with recruiters because I want feedback as an engineer. If they choose to ignore it... well, I'll have to find some way to deal with people trying to give me a job, I guess. Woe.
Not your fault. Recruiters make you feel special because they want you to just go the interview, but in reality you're the commodity being traded, and the real customer is the employer. Frankly recruiters hate me because I know how they operate and call them out on their bullshit.
If you want to stump a recruiter just ask "Why does does company X want to talk to me? What did they find so interesting about me?" Bad recruiters have no answer because they're just tossing candidates at roles and hoping something sticks.
It's as easy to figure out I have a boyfriend as it is to figure out what I look for in a company. Or what my preferred stack is. I'm not really subtle about it. But I'll give you that one; it's possible to get a good pitch for a state I wouldn't consider working in, assuming it has some other evidence that they know something about me other than "Matched my search results for 'writes Python sometimes'".
I don't work with local recruiters because _I'm not looking for a job_.
What is the intent of the blog post tho, if not just some vanity thing? Are you expecting recruiters to read this, are you forwarding this link to recruiters who send you emails? It feels like what you're saying is most likely not going to reach, or have an effect, on the intended audience.
Every interview I take, if I don't get offered the job, I ask for feedback on what I should have done in my past to take the job. Why did I fail? What should I be working on?
This post is that answer for recruiters. I've typed it out individually, over and over again, in response to bad pitches, highlighting what they did wrong and how they could have succeeded or saved themselves time.
This is a time-consuming thing for me to do, but I feel it's justified if it helps even one recruiter. So this is my shorthand way of handling it--just link them to the post instead of rewriting it for every single recruiter.
Most will ignore it. Maybe all will ignore it. But if a recruiter is sincerely trying to do a good job, it will provide them with useful information as to why their pitch was ineffective and how to improve it.
If I was a recruiter, this is the kind of feedback I'd want from someone I was trying to recruit, so this is the kind of feedback I offer to people trying to recruit me.
I'm sorry you don't consider it friendly. Personally, telling them why their pitch didn't work felt friendlier than just assuming they had no interest in improving and ignoring them, which is the other tenable option.
It would be unfriendly for me to send recruiters after friends without knowing if the friend is actually a match for the company or not. At least in my opinion.
Totally! I've had some great recruiters reach out to me. I've gotten bad pitches that were actually personalized, too. But I've also gotten the shotgun.
Obviously, no hope for the shotgun. I hold out hope for the bad pitches.
Second Disclosure: I am not on top.
Were either of these different, I might feel differently than I do.
Some people do prefer email to the phone. I have no problem with a recruiter offering the option to have a phone call. I have problems with recruiters requiring the phone call before I can even talk to someone who will make a decision. Hell, the last recruiter blatantly told me they would not tell me the name of the company they were hiring for until I was on the phone with them. Perhaps it's my arrogance, but that doesn't to be a matter of "some people like the phone better".
You are right, not every recruiter needs to read my blog or Twitter enough to realise that I have a boyfriend. That is a terrible example. I'll iterate on it with an updated draft that better gets across the point--perhaps a suggesting I work in an enterprise environment would be a better example, as I'm decidedly unsuited to that environment, and that's obvious if you know anything about me at all.
I believe a bare minimum of a job description--the company they're hiring for, something about the culture or problem they're solving, the stack they use, maybe why they think you'd be a good candidate--is probably a good bet. I get too many recruiter emails like my sample that don't tell me, quite literally, anything about the company. At all. No name. No website. No size. Nothing that would allow me to determine if this is an opportunity I should pursue or not.
I believe I pointed out that recruiters are busy and that I am busy. I am well aware I'm not the only busy person out there. :) If you think this is disrespectful, I'd certainly love to find ways to fix this.
I think you may be unfamiliar with the level of interaction recruiters provide. The publicists sending the mass pitches you describe are the bad recruiter pitches I am talking about. It is not a matter of me having very specific guidelines for how I am spoken to before I'll consider a job; it's a matter of an industry whose norm is to type in search terms, then hit all the results with a form letter.
This letter is in case one of those who are trying to do a good job are seeing everyone else use the form letter and assuming that is how it's done. Or who simply don't know how to put themselves into an engineer's shoes to effectively communicate a pitch.
I resent your accusation that I believe recruiters are somehow beneath me. I actually, as I mentioned, believe recruiters have a really cool job. I don't have the aptitude for it, but I do not believe that making lights flash in a pleasing pattern is somehow a worthier job than connecting people to jobs that fulfill them. And yes, there are recruiters I love. They are the ones I send referrals to when a friend asks who is hiring. They are the ones I seek out. Which, for a recruiter, is a powerful card to hold in a limited market. I'm trying to give as many recruiters that card as I can.
I deal with recruiters all the time. I got my current job through a recruiter. He was fantastic. I have nothing against recruiters, or I would just set up a spam filter and call it a day.
I wrote this because I ask for feedback when I'm in the hiring process, so it struck me that recruiters might also like feedback. It seems to me that this is the opposite of what you accuse me of; if I didn't care about the recruiter, considered them lesser, or didn't think they cared about their job, why would I care if they got the feedback they needed to improve? I'd ignore them and move on. It's certainly less effort.
And it results in fewer people assuming I think my ass is the gravitational pull of the universe without bothering to find out anything about me.