Dear Recruiter,
It looks like you’re helping a hot new client that needs talented developers yesterday. That’s great! Get out there and find the best of the best! I should warn you about something, though. When you want to contact me about the next “YouTube meets Salesforce meets The Next Big Thing™” startup, I may be a little difficult to deal with. It can be boiled down to the fact that I, like many developers, simply don’t like talking to recruiters. We just want to talk tech and write great code, and a recruiter isn’t always the person with the information we need. Adding a middleman to any process sucks. Let me give you some guidelines for keeping things running smoothly when dealing with a stubborn developer like me.
-
Get to the point. I actually don’t particularly care who’s funding your startup. Investors don’t impress me. Buzzwords force me to read between the lines, so try leave those out as best you can. Honestly, I mostly care about what sort of cool projects I’ll get to work on and if I’ll be able to face interesting challenges. Tell me that you want a Flash or Flex developer, and give me some details about what I could be working on to actually get my attention. Informing me that some company is “the hottest new video startup” doesn’t help me because half the new startups out there call themselves “the hottest new video startup”. I shouldn’t need to ask, “what do they do with video?” In short, if you can’t tell me about the awesome products or services I’ll be able to help build, I’m not interested.
-
I have contact me links all over my blog. That’s the best means of sending me a message if I don’t know you. I set it up mainly for folks that want to send me questions about my open source projects or blog content, but it’s great for contacting me about anything else too. Messages sent from the contact page go directly to my email inbox. In fact, I’ll admit that I like getting email that isn’t from the zillion mailing lists to which I’m subscribed. Send me something there, and I’ll probably read it. The only recruiter that’s ever gotten me to change jobs started the conversation by sending me a message through my contact page.
-
LinkedIn messages are okay too. However, I’m unlikely to add you as a connection, even if I send you a response. If I added every recruiter that contacted me, I’d have expanded my network to a useless eighteen billion people that I don’t know very well. My LinkedIn connections are almost always people I’ve worked with or met at professional developer community events. Unless you’ve had a drink with me and talked tech, you’re probably not getting on that list.
-
Facebook messages are never okay. My profile on Facebook is for personal friends only. Your message will never get a reply on Facebook. Guaranteed.
-
Are you an employee of the company you recruit for? That’s better than if you work for some third-party recruiting company, in my eyes. Many recruiters don’t necessarily have enough information to interest me, and if you work for the company in question, you’ll be able to put me in contact much more easily with a person who has real answers. If you only have a basic job description, do you really expect me to go out of my way to learn more? I’m already happy with my current employer, so if I’m faced with too many steps to get from a recruiter to useful information, there’s no point in trying.
-
I’m a Flash and Flex developer. My resume has been known to list a few other technologies I’ve been capable of using, but I believe that I’ve made it extremely obvious that I dig the Adobe Flash Platform above all else. Don’t contact me about your company that wants to build AJAX RIAs. While I am proficient with some JavaScript libraries like jQuery or YUI, I’m not going to drop Flash any time soon. Definitely don’t contact me about server-side development because that’s never going to happen. I’m a front-end, client-side developer.
-
Do you prefer to contact me by phone? Please don’t. You’re interrupting me while I’m working, and you’re using up my precious time. I will do everything in my power to say, “thank you, but I’m not interested” as soon as possible. With email, I can read your sales pitch whenever I want, but the phone requires me to put everything aside specifically for you, yet another random recruiter. If you must insist on calling me, please see the following suggestions:
-
Don’t call me at work. Do you really think I want to say, “Sure, I’d love to work somewhere else!” when my manager sits nearby? Even giving you my email address (or a better time to call) feels impolite to my current employer. Why put me in a negative situation? It will only hurt your efforts. On a related note, calling the front desk of the company I work for to get my number only impressed me once. I thought the guy was being resourceful. Then I realized that apparently every recruiter does that. Thanks for wasting my employer’s resources too.
-
Don’t leave a voicemail if I’m not here. I’ve had phones that won’t let me delete messages until they’re finished playing. As you can probably probably imagine, I’m going to zone out once I hear, “Hi Josh, I’m a recruiter from [insert some recruiting company]“. I’ll read email or something while I wait for you to finish droning on and on about the boring life stories of your startup’s founders and investors.
-
Don’t ask me for additional contact information over the phone. The spelling of my email address seems to be difficult to understand sometimes. You got my phone number already with your dark recruiter magicks. I’ll bet you can find my email address too. Of course, for best results, consider using my contact page.
-
In conclusion, Mister or Miss Recruiter, please keep the interruptions of my day to a minimum, get to the point as quickly as possible, and try give me the juicy details. I promise I’m not actually that difficult to deal with. All I ask is that you have respect for my time and needs as an innovative technologist. If you have a job or contract that seems fascinating and stimulating, I’ll happily listen.
Ha…ha…that’s good. You should also put in your list some silly salary requirements. My favorite is when the third party recruiter reads my resume, which obviously shows my decade plus in the industry and then tries contacting my about a junior job (or a job with junior pay). My response, “Sure, I can do that, it’s going to cost you ______” That pretty much ends the conversation. I’m still trying to figure out the role of third-party recruiters for the smaller startups. I’m equally not impressed if I’m not talking to the developers or managers directly, especially if they’re trying to put together a small, potent team.
Thanks Todd. I’m glad you liked it. I usually don’t get far enough with a recruiter to talk about salary requirements, so unfortunately, I’ve got no amusing tidbits or jabs to throw on that topic.
Right on Josh. Give it to them. Both barrels.
I agree on all points. Especially the “I don’t care about investors. I care about cool projects.” And recruiters almost never have the info they need to talk about what we need to hear.
I’m working at a startup right now because the CEO of the company emailed me. If it had come from a requiter I probably wouldn’t have finished reading the email.
polyGeek, Nice. The tech industry could use a some more CEOs like that.
YES! This is the best observation EVER about being a Flex developer on an active career campaign in the bay area.
Flex developers are the king of the industry right now. There has been such a ton of demand that recruiters are extremely desperate and it shows.
And good call about AJAX, too.
By the way, would you like a job at the company I work for in San Francisco? No, I’m serious, I’m the only Flex developer right now and we are trying to grow, so I’m looking for more Flex developers to join the team. Please send me your contact information if you are interested so I can tell you more about this opportunity that I’m being stealthy about describing in this non-contact-form posting. Then, I’ll call you on Monday morning at Yahoo! and leave a long message with all the details. 😉
(Heh, another part of the fun is that we get to be on both sides of the coin!) I love Fridays that start out rainy then clear up, it always makes me post zany comments on blogs.
Hahaha nice mate.
Might be time to start a site that posts the worst recuriter contacts lol. I once got rid of a stats phone call (you know the ones) by saying I charge $150 p/h and I was fine with doing a phone interview if they were happy to pay that. She promptly hung up 🙂
Haha, come to the Netherlands, here they pay that hourly rate without hestitating 🙂
hahahahaha… great points!
I would only add, don’t call the company I currently work for. We only have one phone line and it goes directly to the CEO. If you think convincing me is hard enough, have fun convincing my employer.
ha ha, that’s funny but says some serious stuff….
-abdul
Wow, you have great people skills, huh?
I hope you are really as talented as you make yourself out to be, to pretentiously turn down work as much as you claim.
I don’t particularly like speaking to recruiters myself either, and I’ve had similar issues with them. But I think you are going a bit overboard on this one.
On that noe, a word of advice: As much of a demand there is for us flash developers, remember that doe snot give you the right to be condescending and cocky. I made this mistake once.
ANYBODY is replaceable, the key is to be diplomatic.
In fairness though, im sure you were probably angry when you wrote this, so I don’t mean to bash you. ITs just that, sorry I hardly sympathize for you for turning down work.
Steve, thanks for your comment. I was surprised that it took so long for someone to react negatively to this post.
For the record, I’m always polite with recruiters that contact me, and I know their jobs can be difficult. They’re salespeople trying to sell me something I already have. Obviously, that can’t be easy. While I try to end the conversation quickly, I do it diplomatically.
I didn’t write this post in anger. It was meant to be humorous. Judging by the above average number of recruiters who sent me messages through my contact page recently, it feels like a success to me.
Great list, Josh! I would add:
6. If you can barely speak English, and/or are calling me out of India and having your phone number show up as a U.S. number to try to dupe me into answering, don’t bother, because I will be extremely condescending and tell you to your face to go learn English because I can’t understand a word you’re saying.
7. Do you realize that I am already the technical lead on the project you are calling me about?!? (That happened to me like fifty times on the HP Print Studio project)
I liked the comment about the CEO contacting the guy…the CEO of XIF posted his job on Craigslist and it got forwarded to me by a friend. Since then Pronto! has been shown two years in a row at MAX…very cool result. 😛
Josh, nice site,
I particularly appreciated the code examples you have posted!
maybe I will return the favor in the near future!
regards,
BD
oh and the comment above about doe snot was great
[quote
remember that doe snot give you the right to be condescending and cocky [end quote] took me a minute to realize that it wasnt really doe snot, which actually would have been an interesting phrase…
Can’t delete voice mails until you’ve heard them?
Try pressing ‘3’ while listening?
I enjoyed your post, and I appreciate your trying to be diplomatic with recruiters. I’ve been a recruiter for a while, and it’s astounding how many calls back we’ve gotten this past year due to the recession- from people who hung up on us a year ago!
Your arguments are completely valid. That said, allow me to add 3 things everyone should know about recruiters:
1) If recruiters aren’t calling you, it’s because you’re not attractive to other companies. Stay where you are; you’re probably lucky to be there.
2) Most of the very best companies use recruiters, even third-party ones. After all, why post a job to the public? You’d get 15,000 applications from college kids and unemployeds to sort through, and none from happily employed candidates at the top of their field. Why do that, when your search firm can have the top 3 people in the industry in your office Monday morning?
3) If you hang up without listening, it tells the recruiter only one thing: “I wouldn’t have wanted to try to market someone like that for a senior position!” Word gets out, too.