Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.
Depending on sector, you may find you only get traction through recruiters. I work in finance, almost everything is through third party recruiters and there are two reasons for this.
1. We are only allowed to hire through either an approved recruiter or the company job portal. The company job portal gets so many applications for each job it's absurd, and we have to sift these ourselves to some degree (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots) so rather than sifting the portal applications we mostly use 2-5 known recruiters who only give us candidates who can do the job. They do the first screenings, if they give us shit candidates we never use them again, so we rarely get a bad candidate through them.
2. Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).
> yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates
Maybe 99%. This doesn't work on me. Any swag I am sent from a recruiter gets handed to someone else. I turn down dinner and drinks because I feel like I'm being manipulated. The harder a vendor or recruiter pushes here, the more uneasy I feel about using them. I don't want to hang out with people who only want to be around me so I can give them something.
Edit: Sadly, I think this doesn't help me from the perspective of being recruited, but I can't help not being comfortable playing this game.
> Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).
After a layoff I went through a recruiting/contracting firm that converted to full-time at my job. After that I kept an eye out on recruiters, and male or female it was the best looking set of people I'd ever seen in person.
It's an emotional thing. When you spend formative years in a financial condition where food expenses were significant, and free food significantly eased financial pressure on you, that reaction to free food can stick with you long after you have the financial freedom to make your own choices.
Source: finally realized that half the reason I went to technical talks that bored me was for free pizza and beer that were bad for me anyway
goddammit it's free stuff who turns down free stuff.
Your opinion is wide spread, but it erks me. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is an adage millennia old, and true.
The rule is, nothing is free. Nothing. There are exceptions the rule, but that is exceedingly rare, and if you think you're onto one, it's probably a scam.
"strings attached" is another adage, and often you get "free", by having the strings attached to you.
There isn't a free lunch, but there certainly is a lunch you've already paid for.
E.g. I was at an 'all-inclusive' resort for work and some of my colleages seemed to think it was their duty to get as much value out of the meals as possible, even trying to calculate the actual cost of different dishes.
This is a pretty expensive present not a free lunch. Please note if you work for a regulated industry you may be liable to report this as well and may even price-wise be well above your allowance
I was briefly a dev lead responsible for hiring contractors. The company I worked for already had a contract with a certain recruiting agency - the same one I came in through.
The brief stint I was at the company, the recruiter gave me tickets to the local professional baseball team that included access to premium suites and tickets to the local professional football team.
But yeah I get it, having a free meal wouldn’t mean much to me.
I work in finance and we have lots of mandatory training about to do about "gifts". Game tickets are a specific example used to illustrate corporate corruption...
The company I worked for already had an exclusive contract with the recruiting agency.
We weren’t going to hire contractors outside of that agency.
Heck, my manager asked me did I know someone with the same skillset I had, I had a friend who was looking for work and asked for a rate of $80/hour. They wouldn’t hire them directly. I had to negotiate with the recruiter and my manager until we also settled on paying the agency $120/hour to hire my friend so he could get $80.
No my manager also wasn’t responsible for choosing the agency. That was chosen on higher levels.
> (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots)
My last job tried to address this by having a small technical test of skill that could be thrown at anyone as a first pass before getting any technical people involved. We got virtually no senior role "spam", so we didn't have to worry about making a challenging technical test, we just needed to weed out junior applicants who basically didn't know how to do anything other than apply for the job.
It worked pretty well for us but we were a relatively small company. I don't remember the exact stats, but I'm pretty sure we hired less than 50 people a year (across a couple offices in the US) for the technical roles we used that test for.
I'm glad it seems to be working for you, but it's kind of unnerving to be asked a technical question by someone who doesn't understand the question and cannot actually evaluate your answer.
No, they're right. The only saving grace is that it's not limited to the private sector; our political processes basically run on bribes, too, so they're just following our leaders' example. Just need to get bureaucracy in on the act, and we'll have the "Eastern Europe on the Eve of Collapse" trifecta.
I don’t think the problem is just easy corruptibility. Organisation leadership may have let this fester by not paying any thought towards aligning the incentives of their workers at every level and their own incentives correctly. Corruption is an easy explanation. But it’s probably just human nature to subvert and rebel.
I've given up on applying through company portals for a few years. Last job I applied myself was in 2016. The rest was people reaching me via LinkedIn.
I'm not a recruiter and have no vested interest in this, but the experience with recruiters from the candidate side is just completely different to justify their existence. From the company side, we also get better candidates from recruiters.
Applying through portals make you feel like a second-class citizen. Companies often ignore you, ghost you, have terrible screening, take ages to respond, give no feedback. Recruiters that reached directly to you have your back and will push for timely responses, will help you negotiate a salary and will prepare you for the interview.
With that said: I had good experience with internal recruiting too. My best salary offer I got was from a company that had internal recruiting (I accepted and work at this company).
But I hope I never have to fill a form in a website ever again.
Just anecdotally, I got 2 of my last 4 jobs by direct applying with no networking, and 2 from recruiters. One internal and one external.
The internal recruiter oversold the job and it was not great. The other jobs were all good and about what I expected.
I think the right time to apply through a company portal is when you already have had conversations with folks at the company (hiring managers, recruiters, other team members) and are just "checking the box".
Definitely agree, hope I never have to apply via a portal again.
I would still probably refuse at this point, on grounds of having done this in the past and being "ghosted", even though there was prior conversations.
If a company is interested in me, they won't make me jump through hoops. On the other hand, I'm quite experienced and popular in the job market, so things might be different for other folks.
If you don't mind, could you tell me how I should go about finding a recruiter directly on LinkedIn? I've been out of the market for three years now (had to take care of sick family) and it's extra brutal; I've been contacted by a few recruiters but I'd really like to speed up the process of networking with them if possible. Thank you. (I'm in the Inland Empire in Southern California).
Um, personal data, and yes you absolutely can sell it, just not (paradoxically) if it belongs to you.
_Using_ LI, costs attention too, increasingly so, as with all social networks, but you also receive some in exchange, so if you don't value your own attention all that much higher than every other human's on the planet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Well, seeing that I got a job that will pay me 1 million+ over the course of four years from a BigTech recruiter reaching out to me in 2020 all at the “expense” of creating a profile and reading an email when they sent me a message, I think the tradeoff was well worth it.
How much money have you made by creating a profile on HN and reading and posting to it and giving it your attention since 2015?
I mean you can just have a LinkedIn and only ever use it for a job search. That's what I do. I write on top of my profile "email me, I check this once every 3 months."
You could go out, network, go to hiring fairs and various places.
At which point you're pretty much always going to be asked for a LinkedIn, and pretty much noone will want to put work in for someone not doing something has simple as creating an account. So, unfortunately, as the other comment said, swallow your pride.
These networks have made it so that the cost of idealism is being cut off socially, whether that's friends or employers.
I’ve done this about 50 times at this point with various strategies and have gotten ghosted on about 40, been told they aren’t hiring on 5, and told they had been fired on the other 5. I’m not sure this one works very well, at least at lower YoE.
This sort of mirrors what my experience has been during my search. In the past, reaching out via LinkedIn or otherwise would merit a response (at least); however, in the current market, I never get a reply and in some cases I see the application is rejected. I feel like sending messages is hurting more than helping.
Likewise with follow-ups. Anytime I follow-up on an interview, I never hear back or it is rejected, so I've stopped following up after interviews completely.
No profile picture, working in some big company that is entirely unrelated to me, lots of common connections but no posts, no engagement or anything. For example I have had five that works as "engagement manager at walmart" add me in the last few weeks, and also people common to me, I can see the number of common contacts go up by just updating the page because a lot of people will just accept any connection request.
Yeah but it’s all random phone calls from people with an accent so thick i can’t understand them, who obviously haven’t read my resume, and who won’t pick up the phone if I try to call them back anyways.
I had one gap I thought could be a problem(a couple years). I definitely lost ~50%-75% of the offers because of it, but I found what I was looking for in the end. However in my case during the gap I was working on my own projects that are at least tangentially related to my work.
If you haven't and your gap is for other reasons I'd write a "skills based cv" and definitely spend at least 2 weeks reminding yourself everything you need to know before you go for technical interview. There is no worse feeling than getting a technical question you knew an answer for, but you can't quite remember what is was.
I also found it's easier to apply directly rather than through recruiters if you have a big gap in your work.
I also had good results with recruiters. They will actually get you at the door, so you better be prepared. Seems to be a decent strategy for people who are bad at networking like I am.
Recruiters get a lot of flak here and elsewhere, but having recently interacted with a few for a recent job change, their incentives are aligned to have some skin in the game, and they can do the emotionally draining part of pushing the company to speed up the process for you without having to send multiple emails or waiting for months for your rejection.
When you say "recruiters," do you mean in-house recruiters or third party recruiters? Getting an in-house person on your side certainly is a great way to speed along the hiring process, but I've literally never had a third party recruiter send anything my way that ever came close to working out. It's gotten to the point where if I get an email from a 3rd party recruiter, I just don't look at it -- although I'm not sure if taking a chance on one of them at this point is a higher percentage play than 100 cold applications, TBH.
I suspect a lot of it has to do with the type of companies that tend to hire 3rd party recruiters. Namely, startups, and typically early stage startups who don't have any in-house recruiting staff. There's nothing at all wrong with early stage startup companies, except that my experience seems to indicate they don't actually know what they're even looking for. That's in addition to the likelihood that they just haven't been around long enough to develop a structured hiring process.
I don't know. What I will say is that your incentives and a 3rd party recruiter's are not the same. They want to place you quickly and get the commission, regardless if it's the best company or the most competitive offer. You're right that they do want to keep you at least somewhat happy, because if they get a reputation for treating candidates badly, that can be fatal in their profession. But, the people they really want to keep happy are the ones writing the checks. And, in this situation, that ain't you. You are quite literally the product here.
3rd party recs aren't entirely aligned with either the employee or the employer, but that fat cheque is a massive incentive that makes things happen. I've heard of recruiters who placed portfolio managers and ended up getting seven figures due to the compensation arrangement.
The thing about 3rd parties is they are really useful if you're already on the inside. If you have all the relevant CV points, they will get you interviews. This is the flip side of why people get ghosted by them: if they don't think you'll be easy to place, they won't bother with you, and in fact they think the employers will stop taking their calls if they push the wrong CVs.
Another thing about recruitment is that not everyone is good at it. There's a lot of young ones just out of uni who give it a shot, and suck at it. Badly organised, don't know the business, waste a lot time for a lot of people. I've got a bunch of LinkedIn contacts who are in various unrelated businesses because they started off in recruitment and couldn't bill enough to stay there. If you don't field a lot of calls the ones you do talk to might be these noobs who are looking for leads.
I can only speak for my little corner of the market. For systematic trading, there's LinkedIn and there's efinancialcareers. Those are places where you find ads for the type of jobs I'm interested in.
But don't apply for the jobs on those portals, that is just a black hole. Just look at the ads, note down the names of the recruiters and firms they work for, and either phone them or message them on LinkedIn.
They'll have a chat with you to find out your situation, and then they will tell you what jobs they've got. Note that every recruiter in the whole world thinks they have a great relationship with Citadel, Millennium, and every other well known employer in the space, so those intros have no value at all to you, since anyone could be your gateway. They'll also have a bunch of less well known firms, so you need more than one recruiter since they don't all know everyone.
Of course LinkedIn is also a way for the recruiters to get in contact with you. Just set yourself to open and wait around, a fish comes every week or so.
Putting your resume on job boards for 3rd party recruiters (at least in India). Not sure how it is in EU/US.
For recruiters within a company, try looking for them on LinkedIn, check out a recent post of theirs to verify if they still work for the company, and reach out with an application if they have an email address, or via LinkedIn messages.
When I search for companies in India, all I get are 3rd party recruitment firms. The recruiters themselves are hopeless and ask questions like "How many years of Git experience do you have?".
How do you find promising companies in the first place?
I have had some good experiences with 3rd party recruiters. You obviously need to keep the fact that they will say whatever to get you to take the job they find. But equally they will push the company to hire you.
I used local recruiters to find me jobs most of my career (1999, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018). I met them in person either at their office or for lunch. I met one in 2012 who found the perfect job for me in 2018. We stayed in touch all of those years.
My first job in 1996 was based on a return offer from an internship.
In 2008, I did the random submit my resume everywhere thing and in 2020 an internal recruiter from $BigTech reached out to me.
With remote work being more of a thing combined with my much stronger network and resume, I will probably lean much more on my network and resume the next time I’m looking.
> I suspect a lot of it has to do with the type of companies that tend to hire 3rd party recruiters. Namely, startups, and typically early stage startups who don't have any in-house recruiting staff.
That hasn't been my experience. In a startup people often wear multiple hats, so it's not uncommon for CTOs or CEOs to be directly involved in the hiring process. Startups usually list their open positions on their site and screen applications via email, or post on the HN Hiring and other niche job boards. Startups certainly don't want the cost and communication overhead of dealing with recruiters, especially because it costs them much more to make a wrong hire at an early stage.
In contrast, large and mostly technically out-of-touch companies love 3rd party recruiters. They give them a bunch of vague role requirements, and let recruiters do the dirty work for them. If there are problems with filling a role, they can always blame the recruiting agency.
Lots of recruiters are scum, but some are great, and it's not always easy to tell the difference. I get all my work through recruiters who find me on LinkedIn, and they've found me some great projects. I may hate LinkedIn, but it really works for me. (Mind you, I'm a freelance contractor, not an employee.)
Exactly, this is my experience as well. It has happened more than once to me that my application didn't get any response, but then when I contacted a recruiter he could get me in for an interview at the same company. One time I even got the job.
Not completely disagreeing with the OP but before going the recruiter route make sure you have exhausted the social network route.
Your resume has way more chances to be considered seriously if instead of just sending it to the company inbox someone already working for that company recommends you. If you have any friends, family or ex-colleagues working on a nice place, tell them that you are looking for a position and ask them if they would mind referring you. Although it's becoming rare, some companies still have a "referral bonus" for employees that bring up other employees. You might even do them a favor.
I would say an order of magnitude more likely, even. People always underestimate just how much even a tangential social connection improves your chances.
> This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link.
It sounds like your recruiter is purposely ignoring any resume that is not explicitly sent to her personally. It sounds like a job security move at the expense of both the company and candidate's best interests.
A lot of resumes are not even for the job she posts. Bots and other 3rd party recruiters are also trying to game the system so they drown real candidates.
When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description.
By my reading: ignore careers@acme.com, read ojford@acme.com (mail from the recruiter I hired, who has my email address, while direct applicants don't).
For what it is worth, I see a slight recovery in the software engineering job market. In the first half of 2023, voluntary staff turnover was historically low in my company after redundancies at the beginning of the year. Now the economy isn't doing as badly as predicted, industry-wide layoffs are reducing frequently, and staff are regaining the confidence to move jobs again.
You invest in Apple or Tesla, get hit with 30% tax, and receive communication from IRS while living in Europe and having nothing to do with USA. Then try to clarify the whole mess.
My self confidence and well-being from cardio was crushed by a 4-page letter from tax office in a language I don't understand, even though I speak 3 languages already.
>Work on a project that interests you and share it online
This is good advice, but remember it's not the only way. Not everyone is comfortable giving their work away for free.
(maybe its a new product/business idea etc). If the new business idea fails or you decide not to proceed with it you can still put it in your CV as long as you can describe it in detail and/or show potential employers your work. Assuming the project is related to your work of course.
Different way to look at freely shared online work: It's not giving your work away for free. It's an ad for your services. And because it has wide utility, you get seen by lots of eyeballs, possibly including exactly the people who can make a hiring decision about you.
I've had the best luck with recruiters that have contacted me directly on LinkedIn. Conversely, I've had zero luck with the recruiters that contact me via phone call.
My assumption is that this is because many of the latter are operating under the "if we get you hired we get XX% percent of your salary" model, and are thus inclined to submit as many applications as they can.
I think it's easier to get away with not having someone who specializes in front end and so a lot of companies just don't prioritize it. I think a lot of them also don't realize how much they're missing either, but I'm maybe a little biased because I specialize in front end, haha. I do think that this is a contributing factor to why so many websites and web apps work and run so poorly.
They keep fucking me over. Had one a few weeks back that messaged me with 2 roles that looked like a perfect 1:1 fit for my resume. Never heard from him again.
I would add to this that you should find a handful of recruiters and check in with all of them regularly. As long as you make sure that you don’t get submitted to the same job twice, the more recruiters you have working for you the faster you’ll find something.
To find recruiters, do a Google search for recruiting firms that have physical offices in your town, find an experienced recruiter who works for them on LinkedIn, and call into the front desk asking to speak with them.
I hate to say this, but many recruiters who contact me seem to reside and work from India. I get all kinds of recruiter attention, including unsolicited emails, calls, and texts, but most of them seem to be looking for a relationship where I do the work, and they subcontract with a subcontractor who's subcontracting for another contract for a major firm.
It's basically spam at this point. How can we "stand out" without getting bombarded with low-quality "proposals"?
I’ve literally never gotten a job that didn’t come through a recruiter (except my most recent job). 10 years experience, every time I want a new job I just reach out to recruiters who have contacted me recently and recruiters I’ve had good experiences with in the past, they’ll bring me a handful of random jobs and I interview for the ones that sound like a good fit.
The most recent job the hiring manager saw my post on HN: who’s looking to be hired, and they just reached out directly.
Fwiw: I’m an employer, and sometimes people ignore the “how to apply” instructions on our site (which say to email to jobs@) and reach out straight via eg LinkedIn and I always file those in my “can’t follow a simple instruction” pile.
Not to say that what you say will never work, but I think it’s worth pointing out that at some companies, application processes might exist for a reason. For me, having all applications in a single place is key to actually being able to deal with them effectively.
Finding a recruiter to apply through jobs which the recruiter is contracted or employed to hire for is very different than sending unsolicited spams to employees at a target company, even if both can happen on LinkedIn. It was the former suggestion that was being given.
Either way, really - many in-house recruiters do actively source via LinkedIn and encourage inbound messages there from interested candidates. But it seemed like this was a suggestion to use LinkedIn as a front door rather than as a back door.
The bigger the employer, the more likely it is, that after a first recruiter phone screen, you still havebto go through the normal recruotment / application process, for compliance reasons mostly. No big deal, as the recruiter is working on your behalf on the other end, if he decided to invite you to an interview with the hiring manager, to fast track you application through whatever arcane or byzantine process there is.
Yeah. The recruiter doesn’t bypass the process, except maybe the first stage. They just get you into it with enough attention to get at least a first conversation, and usually a polite way to nudge the company for a response if they get slow for whatever reason. Still sometimes helpful.
Honestly, an internal employee referral helps in similar ways, especially from an employee who knows you well in a professional context. But that isn’t always available.
Sure it works for you but if you need tools to manage then I can't imagine the average applicant in your process has very good odds.
Even if only a few companies hire through direct contact, many of the ones that do will hire more than 1 in 10 of the relatively infrequent direct contacts, while their HR process may be sitting on the thousands of regular applications.
Sure, anything that acts as an external structure to not even know the very basics is not a good sign for their odds..
People should write you a cover letter on the off chance that you open a spam folder of such volume that you can't bother to manually label a mail as belonging in it?
As someone on the other side of this - applications sink to the bottom and often never receive a response when sent to places like jobs@, so LinkedIn is a way to at least get the attention of a real person.
I’d suggest calling out on your job posting that LinkedIn messages may be missed and the email is the correct place to reach out.
If they're doing both, I'd reconsider that policy. A lot of people will submit a normal application and additionally reach out through LinkedIn, since for many companies their direct application process might as well be a garbage bin even for qualified candidates.
If it's solely through LinkedIn fair enough I guess.
Run enumeration on their company and see if you can figure out their boss's PERSONAL direct email address. Send resumes there instead of info@whatevercompany.com - Often if you can figure out some scheme like first initial last name @ whatevercompany.com you can get that contact.
I tend to do this by simply waltzing into the office and asking for a business card if I can. Apparently nobody does that anymore but it gets results.
Not necesarly the only way as someone who often interviews candidates, if I'm getting bombarded by spam applications, the least you can do for me to take your CV seriously is a cover letter related to the job posting / company.
I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter. if you're not willing to put that effort into your potential future position, it's not even worth opening the CV from my side.
>I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter.
I sent a cover letter to my first 3 jobs. They never checked it. Never directly asked but it comes up in conversation at some point when talking about other new recruits.
I don't see the point in a CV if you're reaching out to the recruiter. That fried request message on LinkedIn or first email is your "cover letter". Letting them know who you are and what you want.
That goes a long way, tailoring the CV and, if absolutely needed, cover letter for each application. The CV also when recruiters reached out to you, as they still have to present it to HR and hiring managers (also having a recruiter presenting the CV and candidate helps a lot, and means the CV can be a bit less polished). And if recruiters, or the companies behind them, require a cover letter, being contacted first by the recruiter makes writing those a lot easier since you don't have to cold sell yourself as much. And the first discusion / phone screening, ehich propably didn't require a cover letter, gives you hints and hooks to use in the letter (I say that as person who hates selling myself and especially writing cover letters, also I found my last job that way).
Now the trickey part is, so, to have solid recruiters hiring for real positions reaching out to you. For some reason, they did in my case more or less every time I kind of needed it. I have not the slightest clue so why, my LinkedIn profile was up to date but far from polished...
Well, I content myself with being lucky for some reason, and I am aware how lucky I am when it comes to that and quite grateful to universe, and hope to never have to go through that whole process again, because applying, getting new jobs, tinse and repeat, gets stressful at a certain point. And now I reached a point in my career where I like the stability of a job, collectively (and relatively high) bargained salary, good, bordering very good to almost stellar, retirement benefits, I job that is truely challenging (new stuff that allows me use my experience almost completely, while being borderline scary at times) working on a product for which projected end-of-service-life is over a decade after my legal retirement age.
That being said, I had a period in which I had to write a ton of applications whipe seeing the clock running down on my unemployment benefits. That alone can be soul crushing, so I try to cut people somenslack when it comes to CV and cover letter polishing. It still means one shouod put some thought behind both tasks so.
I will never do cover letters-- "Hey, spend 30-60 minutes on this so we can slip it into the pile of 500 applicants where it will never see the light of day! Yay!"
I've been on the interviewer side too and I must say that I had the complete opposite experience. I've never seen a cover letter help a candidate (they mostly don't get read at all), only hurt a candidate chances. I wouldn't even read them unless they had glaring issues (like it's way too long) in which case I'd bin the applicant.
Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.