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What technical recruiters want from engineering candidates

174 pointsby lynnetyeabout 7 years ago

18 comments

alkonautabout 7 years ago
If someone has insight into recruiting, can you explain why contacts sound like sales pitches with vague language?<p>“You’ll work with the core of our digital strategy”<p>“You’ll work close to the systems”<p>“You’ll have a central role”<p>What systems? What is the company even <i>doing</i>? What about fundamental things like<p>- where is this?<p>- exactly what is the work I’m supposed to be doing here?<p>- What’s the team? 4 beginners? 4000 experienced devs?<p>- What tech is used, ie what is it about my skill set that makes me a good fit?<p>These questions are literally <i>never</i> answered in first contacts from recruiters. And of course I’m not willing to compose a response or have even a 15 minute phone conversation or a lunch meeting with a recruiter for a job that might turn out to be in the wrong city.<p>Is this some secret to the recruiting industry that it’s bad to give away details in the initial contact, so that the candidate doesn’t just apply directly to the company? Or do I have to high expectations on these contacts? Or do I have unusual bad luck with terrible recruiters.<p>This is obviously the opposite of what recruiters want from candidates, it’s what candidates want from recruiters. But seeing as there is obviously a gap there - does anyone have <i>any</i> insight in this?
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falcolasabout 7 years ago
In my opinion:<p>- designing your resume<p>- EQ<p>- having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company<p>- Think of your resume like a poem<p>- visual representation of their experience&#x2F;resume<p>These are great criteria for hiring a designer or marketing personnel, but these are TERRIBLE criteria for hiring a <i>technical</i> person.<p>In my fantasy world, a <i>technical</i> resume is in a monospaced font and is eminently readable; I would expect the resume to look good in a code editor.<p>My fantasy applicant would be very precise in the tech they list, and when asked questions, they would gripe about that technology all day long; if they can&#x27;t complain about its shortcomings and pitfalls, they didn&#x27;t use it.<p>They would not match the job criteria on the posting exactly, because the criteria on the job posting is for some fantasy developer that doesn&#x27;t actually exist. I would instead expect them to have figured out the core of the actual stack and list it instead.<p>Sadly, my fantasy world doesn&#x27;t exist, and we have to pretend we&#x27;re designers to work around people like this who have no idea how to hire actual technical people.
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kenabout 7 years ago
&gt; It may seem like common sense, but having a deep, enthusiastic, and genuine interest in some aspect of the company (whether it’s the company’s mission, product, technical challenges, or its work environment) is important.<p>This frustrates me so much. What if I can&#x27;t find a company that offers any such thing? This seems like anti-common sense to me.<p>If you have skills at carpentry, and do a professional job, you can get a job at any construction site. Nobody cares if you have a &quot;deep, enthusiastic, genuine interest&quot; in the type of structure, or the challenges of woodworking, or the layout of the job site.<p>If you have skills at programming, though, you might not even get a job these days if you can&#x27;t demonstrate that you&#x27;re sufficiently passionate about what exactly the company does and how they do it.<p>This isn&#x27;t a blue&#x2F;white-collar distinction. I once talked to the industrial design lead at Fluke, and asked if he ended up there because he had a particular interest in test and measurement. He laughed at me and said no, not at all. He just liked industrial design, and didn&#x27;t much care where he did it, or what he was designing.<p>If I didn&#x27;t know any better, I&#x27;d say it sounds like you&#x27;re searching for people with passion so you can get them to work unpaid overtime for you. I don&#x27;t know why else it would matter.
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CryoLogicabout 7 years ago
TBH I have never been impressed by any technical recruiter I&#x27;ve met.<p>I remember interviewing for a place and the recruiter thought he was an expert coder since he knew some buzz words. He was saying they wanted someone with SPA experience AND was able to build REST API&#x27;s. I spent thirty minutes trying to convince him that NodeJS runs on servers and I&#x27;ve been a back-end JavaScript developer writing large REST APIs and back-end services. He was convinced JavaScript only runs on browsers and I was full of shit.<p>That was at a big-name tech startup (one of: Lyft, AirBnB, Uber, Github).<p>Other times I&#x27;ve been told by recruiters things like &quot;Sorry, we want someone with at least 5 years of Ember3 experience, not Ember2&quot;. Stupid stuff like that.<p>I don&#x27;t know if the talent shortage is real, or if companies still haven&#x27;t figured out recruiting. I think it&#x27;s probably actually a combo of both.<p>I now write my resumes full of fluffy buzzwords, my GitHub is full of animated GIFS and pretty pictures and I adjust the buzzwords based on the job posting. Much higher conversion rate.
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andrewstuartabout 7 years ago
I fired one of my biggest clients because they appointed an HR manager who cared most about things like whether or not the career history timeline perfectly lined up and left nothing unaccounted for - like <i>really</i> cared - would knock someone back after 3 tech interviews if there was a glitch in the resume.<p>I felt it was because she really had nothing tangible to contribute to the technical assessment process so felt she must do <i>something</i>.<p>I can tell you this - I&#x27;m not wasting my time recruiting for a company that does that sort of thing.<p>Why I point this out is that many of the things that these people say they want are things that are not really very important when trying to find very scarce technical talent, but such recruiting people are happy to throw away a great developer because some unimportant thing was not present.
danesparzaabout 7 years ago
I would absolutely love to see a thoughtful &#x27;what engineers want from technical recruiters&#x27; post.
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bitwizeabout 7 years ago
Crooters never seem to be asking a whole lot, as they always seem to think I&#x27;m a &quot;great fit&quot; for any company currently waving money under their nose. Of course it usually takes some prodding to discover that the crooter actually knows nothing about my background, is ill qualified to determine who is a fit, and I wouldn&#x27;t want to work for their client anyway.
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nlstitchabout 7 years ago
I think recruiters should actually start giving a shit about the lives of engineers before making demands.<p>- Actually try to get to know and understand a person<p>- Dont use fill-in templates<p>- Have some actual knowledge of tech (java != .net)<p>- Dont make offerings for positions I worked on 10 years ago during college.<p>- Dont be greedy.<p>To just name a few...
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cuddlypsychoabout 7 years ago
&quot;EQ and self awareness&quot;<p>What a crock of sh*t!! This is what happens when you pack HR departments with humanities and gender studies majors.<p>Personally I do not read any resumes, all the hiring I&#x27;ve done was either by referral or through online websites like angelList.<p>This is my process:<p>- Check your linkedIn, look at your experience and education. Catchy schools and companies is good BUT also that you are not a branch hopper (2 months there, 3 moths here etc)<p>- Check your github for samples of your code and your work ethic. (If you don&#x27;t know proper git branch management you are no good to us). Opensource contributions are a major +++<p>- Check your StackOverflow to see how good a communicator you are (best engineers are the best teachers)<p>- Don&#x27;t bother with social media .. unless I am looking for a good excuse not to hire you.<p>If you don&#x27;t have any of the above, I will not even spend 10 seconds on you.
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kyberiasabout 7 years ago
&quot;Our hiring philosophy at Alto leans on hiring for experience as opposed to potential.&quot;<p>Wow! Refreshing.
ohaziabout 7 years ago
I don&#x27;t want weekly updates about key values in my inbox every week, I want the bottom quarter of my phone&#x27;s screen back.
jaredhansenabout 7 years ago
Note that what &quot;technical recruiters&quot; want is not guaranteed to match what the hiring firms themselves want.<p>There may not be a great solution to this problem from an applicant&#x27;s perspective (because if you fail to impress the recruiter, you may forfeit the opportunity to impress a manager in subsequent practice). Still, it&#x27;s worth keeping in mind, not least because your ultimate success at the company depends more on what happens after the hire than before.
alxlazabout 7 years ago
I was going to write a long and detailed post about how so many of these things are so very wrong from a technical standpoint, but basically, let me sum up the recruiting industry in a single quote from this material:<p>&gt; Watch for spelling and grammar. [..] After conducting my own A&#x2F;B tests on this matter, the data showed that candidates who had untidy resumes faired less (sic!) than those with well written ones.<p>Edit: I was going to write a longer post about what I am more interested in seeing as an engineer who does the interviewing. But most of it was obvious stuff. Instead, here&#x27;s what I <i>don&#x27;t</i> look at:<p>- What libraries you used. Languages, maybe -- libraries? If you&#x27;re past junior level, I expect you&#x27;ll be able to pick up a complex one, in a field you&#x27;re familiar with, in a week or two.<p>- Length of past tenures. I gave favourable feedback for a lot of kids who, early in their careers, left from two or three jobs in a row because they were hired by large companies who then proceeded to give them completely uninteresting work that was entirely below their programming skills, without any mentoring, any meaningful source of professional growth and any timeframe for when they&#x27;ll get to do some <i>actual</i> programming. I&#x27;m talking kids who, fresh out of school, could write a decent kernel driver, but were asked to write automated tests for REST APIs. I was never wrong about this.<p>- Hackatons, coding competitions and the like. The former are entirely unverifiable. I&#x27;ve seen plenty of people <i>claiming</i> they went to this hackathon and wrote this application that could potentially solve the problem of water crisis in Africa, using advanced GIS algorithms and numerical optimization and machine learning and whatnot. One of them even showed me the app on their phone. Then they don&#x27;t know how to iterate through a list or find the race condition in three lines of code which contain literally nothing but a function name, an initialization, and a race condition. Copy-pasting from Stack Overflow is a useful skill to have when it sits <i>on top</i> of other skills. The latter tend to be completely unrelated to programming in the real world.<p>- The length of the resume. If you have enough relevant experience to fill four pages of resume, then <i>write four damn pages of resume</i>. A one-page resume that drops three pages of relevant stuff will put you in the same basket as someone who can barely fill that page. It&#x27;s not ballast, it&#x27;s stuff I can ask you about in an interview.<p>- Layout creativity, cleanliness, typography, visual identity and the like. Pick a CV template for Word (or, if you want me to instantly like you, LaTeX). This is Andrew S. Tanenbaum&#x27;s resume: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.vu.nl&#x2F;~ast&#x2F;home&#x2F;cv.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cs.vu.nl&#x2F;~ast&#x2F;home&#x2F;cv.pdf</a> . When you can sport one that&#x27;s more impressive than his in terms of content, look into making it pretty, too.
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edemabout 7 years ago
How do I dismiss that subscribe box that takes uo a quarter of the screen on mobile?
nikanjabout 7 years ago
I&#x27;m surprised none of them mentioned the abominable &quot;culture match&quot;. I&#x27;ve heard repeated complaints that it&#x27;s much more important to be a brogrammer who likes craft beers, than it is to be any good at the actual programming.
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sparrishabout 7 years ago
&quot;Think of your resume like a poem.&quot;<p>Roses are red, Violets are blue, I need a job, You&#x27;re hiring, right?
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whataretensorsabout 7 years ago
These are all half-truths meant to avoid the real answer. They want high IQ ambitious people who don&#x27;t suffer from mental illness. They will put you through strenuous interview processes as a makeshift filter for high IQ.<p>No technical interview question I&#x27;ve ever been asked has anything to do with &quot;self awareness&quot; as Tammy pointed out. In fact self-awareness for the hyper-productive is a negative for the organization, as that individual eventually realizes they deserve a significant share of what they create and aren&#x27;t getting it.
cleansyabout 7 years ago
I love how they have a &quot;share on hackernews&quot; button on the side. As if hn let&#x27;s you submit more than one url at a time.<p>So the other way around: I would love to see tech recruiters with actual technical understanding.
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