Lessons learned as a recruiter hiring developers the last decade (opens in new tab)

Tech recruiters: maybe there are a few tolerable ones.

In 2012, a recruiter proclaimed to me that Golang was "irrelevant" while having zero understanding of technology or the industry. I thanked them and marked their emails as spam.

In my experience in contracting is that most recruitment companies are run like sweatshops. They get lots of "consultants" (most with little to no IT knowledge) to do the recruiting. They are driven to hit KPIs and thus the candidate experience suffers. Yet another example of enshitification by biznoids.

> 15. Last but not least, treating your potential hires with respect is always a winning strategy!

LOUDER, for most of the recruiters.

I gave up on working with or even responding to recruiters a good two decades ago because even then, most of them - even in the tech industry! - were of the “washed-up jock/cheerleader” variety, trying to leverage social contacts to fill slots and having absolutely no clue about anything in tech.

And I mean complete technophobes that thought HTML was a sexually-transmitted disease… no shit, I had that comment back in the 90s from one of them that had only begun working with web developers.

For the final cherry on top, if you couldn’t materially further their career or metrics, you were noise to be ignored. If they determined that you weren’t a “rock star developer”, good luck ever hearing from them again.

So I just learned to ignore them back.

1. Are you licensed to legally operate an HR firm in my community?

2. Exactly why are you necessary to solve a given issue?

3. Why is it necessary to regularly cycle staff at your clients firm?

4. Have compensation packages been bid down in the time you have worked with the clients?

5. How bad is the coffee at your firm?

Unless your company can credibly answer all of these questions, than expect radio silence from intelligent life.

Have a wonderful day =)