The Recruiter Honeypot

&#62;In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends!<p>What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model.<p>I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bullshit. You're just attempting (rationally, I might add) to depress the market for your existing talent.<p>First and for all, especially in the climate we're in, banning two or three recruiting agencies isn't really going to hurt the chances of an employee who could be persuaded to leave. Secondly, if your employee can be persuaded to leave in the first place that's on you, not the recruiter!<p>I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet, but when the time comes I think I'll find it hard to hold it against them.<p>Edit: mandatory notice of: great article, would read again, A++!

This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters.<p>Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus.<p>[1] - uk.linkedin.com/pub/markov-bambam/15/643/a56

This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags.<p>Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy.

What is the contractual result for breaking a no-poach clause? Should companies inform their employees of no-poach agreements and request to be told when anyone is contacted by a recruiter from Company X? There is an on-going anti-trust lawsuit about no poach policies involving Google, Apple, Intel, Pixar, and more. How does that play into things?

There is a significant flaw in the logic here.<p>Create a fictitious individual where, prior to linkedin, the only place Pete London existed was his own personal website.<p>I used to be a recruiter and egotistical as it may sound, I considered myself one of the better ones. My previous history on HN should back that up. I never, ever used linkedin when searching for decent people yet even I wouldn't have found Pete London. The best developers I encountered over the years were people who came recommended by other developers or people I met face to face at meet-ups.<p>If no-one but the creator knew Pete London existed then the only thing this experiment proves is that most recruiters aren't very good at using search engines. That's all.<p>The one point I agreed with significantly is hiring internal recruitment specialists. I've given a talk on that exact issue in the past and I am in the process of writing a blog post on my updated perspective of that approach.

I was intrigued reading this to see what my inbox would say about Meebo's recruiting.<p>In May 2010 a recruiter spammed the Hadoop mailing lists with a "Data Engineer (Analytics)" in MV. A month later I was blessed with an email from the same recruiter for the same job sent to my @apache address. Another month later he posted the job on LI's Hadoop group.<p>Fast-forward one year, a new recruiter spammed the mahout user mailing list saying he was looking for "Engineers with Machine Learning expertise".<p>Finally 2 months later I got an email sent to my @apache address from the second recruiter for a "Data Engineering Lead" position.<p>So it seems that they haven't used LI a lot and mostly rely on those "other channels" and direct emails. I personally find it disrespectful to send recruiting emails to user mailing lists but I guess recruiters don't know/care about it.

"Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year."<p>Wait a second, he was interviewing 100X more people than he was hiring??? Does that seem a little extreme to anyone, or is it just me?

<i>&#62; In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends!</i><p>That is not at all unusual.<p>When we got rid of a useless lummox a year or two ago, he gave his recruiter (the same agency we got him from) all out contact details (if you are out there, thanks for that...). Within a week of him leaving that agency called three of us claiming to be looking for a reference but immediately asking if we could be called out of work ours to reduce disruption. One of us let that happen and it turns out they were trying to get us on their books (err, no thanks, we don't want to be associated with the other "quality" peopel on your books!). Similarly the company got several calls from them most of which involved lies ("I was talking to &#60;person x&#62; earlier today" when &#60;person x&#62; had been on holiday all week).<p>In summary:<p>1. Recruiters <i>will</i> hit you from both ends. They make money out of both ends so it suits their business model.<p>2. Recruiters lie. Repeatedly. Constantly.

Being a good external recruiter in Silicon Valley is a tricky balancing act. Everyone in the Valley wants the superstars, so competition is ridiculous. Additionally, cultural fit in small startups is of utmost importance, so you have to learn the culture of the company your engaged with. The culture is also highly insular and revolves around being a jedi master of code, so if you're a recruiter you're expected to have a deep understanding of the technical needs of the company in addition to the cultural ones. Plus most startups want people who have an active understanding of new languages/frameworks/methodologies, so you also have to have thorough knowledge of the bleeding edge of tech. Lastly, this person needs to have good in-person skills, network, and ability to sell a position against whatever the competition is offering.<p>Since each company is different, every time you get a new client you need to recalibrate and get up to speed on what they need. This is why it's rare to find a truly good external recruiter (and impossible to find a good contingency recruiter for a short term engagement). In my opinion the best arrangements are long-term engagements, giving the recruiting firm time to understand exactly what you're looking for and calibrate their searches against that. Of course these engagements are expensive and time-consuming, so it's also why I'm a big fan of internal recruiters since they a) absorb and presumably live your culture and b) can have a much deeper understanding of your technology and team dynamics.

I wish there was a job search website where to actually advertise a position there were mandatory requirements like the company name and salary being displayed as part of the ad.<p>Whats the reasoning behind posting completely vague job descriptions (sometimes the location isn't even provided!).<p>I Would say 90% of the job postings I see online don't even give me enough information to want to contact them.

---<p><i><a href="http://www.meebo.com/jobs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.meebo.com/jobs/</a><p>Meebo.com will be shutting down on July 11, 2012.<p>Meebo has been acquired by Google!</i><p>---<p>So Meebo was a recruiting operation for Google.<p>It puts that article in a new light.

This only emphazises how different the world for programmers is in the USA (especially in the SF area) compared to the rest of the world. I only get three or four emails a year on linkedin, of them one's from Facebook, the other from Google, and the others are from local companies.<p>This kind of make me envious and wanting to be there for a while., to experience how's it like to be valued and sought after.

We're attempting to fix the way freelancers are recruited at agencies / startups by changing the pricing model. At the moment with recruiters, the incentive is to place as many people as quickly as possible as you get a commission for each placement.<p>By changing the model to a subscription you can then open the market place up and make it very transparent. No more hiding peoples contact details from the employee, no more hiding the employers name from the job seeker.<p>We're only in Melbourne, Australia at the moment but if we get interest, we'll try and increase our reach. If you are in Melbourne and you're a freelancer / agency / startup, we'd love to talk: <a href="http://www.dragonflylist.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.dragonflylist.com</a>

How many females were on the recruiting team? (i.e., how statistically significant was all of them getting pregnant in the same month...)?

"No poaching" requirement is a mistake.<p>Small subset of recruiters that she was working with represents only minor danger to her company anyway (considering how many recruiters are out there).<p>By dropping "no poaching" restriction Elaine would be able to hire better recruiters.<p>Other than that - the article was an insightful read.

&#62; We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring<p>Whoa, wasn't there just a lawsuit where no-poach deals were determined highly illegal?

One of the best things I did was take down my LinkedIn account. I've gone from numerous recruiters contacting me to very few. But the ones who do contact me find me through my github account, my stackoverflow account or my website. These recruiters are of much higher quality, have much more compelling job opportunities and job opportunities that match me much better. I also no longer have to politely decline recruiters constantly.

The Kernel (UK) had a nice expose on recruiter tactics recently as well. <a href="http://www.kernelmag.com/topic/the-kernel-recruitment-report/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kernelmag.com/topic/the-kernel-recruitment-report...</a>

This raises the question of A/B testing fake LinkedIn profiles to optimize for the sort of leads you want.

I remember doing something similar to this after I graduated from college ('09) but a bit backwards.<p>I was totally frustrated by the lack of responses to resumes that were flying from my outbox like cards from a blackjack shoe -- so I created a help-wanted ad on craigslist for a job that I thought I would qualify for and might have a chance of landing.<p>The resumes I got were from people with 3-5 years experience, masters degress, laundry list of skillsets, etc. Needless to say, the whole experience was disheartening -- but it taught me to be creative in my approach to the job market and that generally the "resume" based approach to finding a "match" (employer&#60;-&#62;employee) is deeply flawed.

I friended Pete London on linkedin, because having connections with fictional recruiter honeypots is awesome.<p><a href="http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=60565153" rel="nofollow">http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=60565153</a>

<i>"Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn". You might be thinking, “Really? This is obvious!”</i><p>Uh... No, I wasn't thinking that, since there's a ton of places for recruiters to find candidates and LinkedIn is only one of them. Is this some kind of viral marketing piece for LinkedIn or something?<p>I have gotten maybe 6 recruiting messages on LinkedIn in my life. I finally deleted my account after the password debacle, it was so useless. Like a business contact sheet for people I already had contacts for. On the other hand, Monster.com is where most of the recruiters seem to come at me from. I get on average 8 positions sent to me a week when i'm not looking for work. My google voice gets less recruiter spam, but I had to set a separate GV line up just to catch all the recruitemarketer calls.

Recruiting is difficult, especially for initial hires. Often time founders are hiring for skilled positions that they themselves are not familiar with. Thus, they turn to recruiters. However, with the good that recruiters bring, the bad comes as well. That's why I am starting HireHand. We are different than traditional recruiters and will assist by screening candidates for skilled positions using screeners will matching skills. You get a filtered set of candidates and can interview for "fit" rather than skill. We charge a small fee based on the number of candidates you have us screen, and do not charge a percentage of salary. Check us out: <a href="http://www.hirehand.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.hirehand.com</a>

&#62;However, I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder.<p>Could someone elaborate?

Very interesting read full of good data and some interesting takeaways (especially about LinkedIn).<p>One thing I wonder about is given how boilerplate and sparse the honeypot's blog was, how little information there was to go on, and how uninspired the self-description was, I can't help but wonder if the good recruiters were the ones who didn't bother contacting him.<p>As a side note, I'm also confused as to why the metric for a good recruiter was figuring out that the profile was a fake (kind of in line with Peroni's comment above). Or was it considered good that he/she chose to use the phone as a recruiting tactic?

If recruiters actually gave job seekers asserted information about what companies need, this recruiting business would be a desert.

And here I was thinking I was special because I was getting two (sometimes 3) recruiting emails a day on Linkedin ... smh.

the most idiotic move a recruiter does is sending emails to work email address. That's a big no no. It's easy to guess a work email address, but sending a job offer to it? that's stupid. Also same with calling the company switchboard and asking for my name and leaving job offer info in voice mail. crap!

I am a co-founder of a startup. My takeaways from this article are:<p>1) Get a recruiter in-house.<p>2) Treasure the recruiter as much as the tech talent.<p>3) External Recruiters will violate non-poaching agreements.<p>4) It is still useful to have a non-poaching agreement, as it helps as a mild deterrent.<p>5) Dread thy fellow startup more than a large company.

Great article.<p>I was however confused by "I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder".<p>Was he saying this just because founders in SV are not a good fit to Meebo? Or are they bad employees? Or that it is considered bad to poach to hire a founder?

Awesome post, but I'd like to see the backing data.

Is it only recruiters approaching people about work? I would have imagined many employers are directly approaching people in much the same manner as recruiters.

"JavaScript engineer", really?