The Problem with Recruiter Messages

I don’t know what happened to LinkedIn. I used to get maybe a handful of messages from recruiters every month, but now I have days where I get dozens of inquiries. Then again, LinkedIn used to be all about professional networking and now I’m just as likely to see it used to propagate baseless political narratives. Delusional former coworkers may be a lost cause, but recruiters could save us all some time if they could make a few simple adjustments to their messages. I’m writing this little article to vent a few frustrations in the hopes that it can help us help each other.

What are the Required Skills?

A lot messages don’t bother to mention any languages or technologies at all. Others use terms like “full-stack” or “backend” or “senior developer” that are so vague that they are almost meaningless. A message absolutely must provide a context by enumerating the required skills for the position. What. Are. The. Skills? I’m talking programming languages and related technologies.

When a message starts with how the company is a “Series A unicorn” or states how many millions of dollars of funding they have secured, it makes me feel like the company needs investors instead of developers. Do I need to write Java? Do I need to be familiar with MySQL or Redis? Do the developers use Git or Perforce? What. Are. The. Skills?

When a message omits these details, suddenly the burden is on me to research the company or send a followup email, and at that point, I don’t understand what value is the recruiter adding. Importantly, without a list of required skills I can’t forward this position to my network because I don’t who would be interested.

What is the Industry?

Will I be able to sleep at night if I were to have this job? Software development is weird in that the day-to-day work may not differ substantially between positions that appear diametrically opposed to the layman. You could be doing the same normalizing of database tables or optimizing message passing for codebases that support fintech or pornography or gerrymandering: the plumbing sometimes is very much same same.

One recent message from an in-house recruiter was for a position that turned out to be for a company devoted to the gathering and publishing of personal information. I was surprised to find my own information listed on their website, and when the site’s “Opt Out” functionality malfunctioned, I asked the recruiter to assist in removal, but he did not respond. That communicated nothing but a lack of integrity and I will avoid that company like the plague they appear to be.

What is the pay range?

This number may be more important than the job title because the job title offers no real clarity in an industry where “junior” developers sometimes solve a company’s most complex technical problems and “senior” might describe a developer’s tenure instead of their technical knowhow. The salary range helps tell me who the job is targeting.

Interestingly, the pay range can also say a lot about about the structural soundness of an organization. I’ve seen several positions recently where a high salary was actually a red flag because the positions seemed to be attempts to ignore the accumulated failures of the technical leadership by throwing money at the problem. As appealing as a high salary might be, I could read between the lines and see the misery that likely accompanies the efforts to squeeze blood from a stone (or, as the case might be, making web-based microservices with Python or achieving multithreading in Ruby on Rails).

Have a Job Description

This sounds “obvious”, but I am gobsmacked at how many recruiters are firing off emails without having a simple job description. If there isn’t a job description, there isn’t a job. Just think how much time you are wasting without this: with the click of a button, I could pass along an opening to hundreds of former students or coworkers. I want to help you, but you have to meet me half way, and not having this simple document says a lot about a recruiter’s and/or company’s preparedness (or lack thereof).

Just like companies judge candidates by their resumés, I judge companies by their job descriptions: you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. If the job description is riddled with grammatical errors (MAC vs. Mac) or something as trivial as confusion between backslashes and forward slashes (!!!), that says loud and clear that this company will not appreciate someone whose job requires massive attention to detail.

Read my Profile!

Just because I can write Ruby or Python doesn’t mean I want to. You found me on LinkedIn, but did you bother to read my profile? You know… the part that says that I am especially NOT interested in Node gigs and that I have retired from PHP?

I still remember the amazing gratitude I felt when a recruiter started her note by referencing specifics from my profile because she had actually bothered to read it. She is literally the only one in a year for whom I can say that with certainty. You can bet that when it comes time for me to seek another position, any recruiter who took the time to do that is someone I would prefer to work with.

Do not Call

Let’s not. I have at times literally set up email filters to trash messages containing the phrase “jump on a call” because it is almost always a waste of my time. As a recruiter, you may track productivity by the number of calls you have made, but I don’t know a single developer for whom phone time measures anything but productivity lost, so please: do not cold call or immediately suggest we speak so you can fill some Salesforce quota.

Developers need uninterrupted time to solve nuanced problems, so I am really not kidding when I say that a phone call must be scheduled in advance. When someone calls out of the blue, unscheduled, it not only wrecks my productivity for that moment, it usually destroys all the hard mental prep work it took me to get to that point. No matter how “efficient” you may imagine them to be, at best premature phone calls are a Pyrrhic victory.

I remember one recruiter who ignored my proposed call times and he phoned me at a job where I sat sandwiched between my manager and the CTO in an open office. Awkward! Another called me on the day of a major surgery while I was literally making adjustments to my living will to harass me about a position that I had unequivocally turned down. Please respect my time and I will respect yours.

Conclusion

Maybe this came off a bit too strong. For the recruiters who read my profile, and included sufficient details including technologies and pay ranges, thank you — that is extremely helpful.

I recognize that there is a spectrum of recruiting skills and styles out there, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Certainly, many developers could use pointers on how to make recruiters’ lives easier. But these recruiting messages can and should have the proper content so they can be planted like seeds. It would help make the hiring process easier and more efficient.