A Guide for Recruiters or How To Hire Me.
This is a very interesting topic to talk and write about. As one who belongs to the Software Engineering Species, I’m getting tons of emails from hundreds of recruiting firms and individual HR headhunters. And (maybe because I’m not a very social creature) IT recruiters make up about 70% of my professional LinkedIn network. Now a very interesting fact is that only very few ever get a reply from me. Here I’m going to talk about why. I will not cover everything, but will bring up a couple interesting points with help of Captain Obvious.
Okay we are done with the first paragraph and I would like to apologize for the click-bait title. I’m very curious about social engineering techniques and always trying a few things out here and there. Career-wise I’m pretty successful and not really looking for anything at the moment of writing this article. It’s worth it to point out that i have quite a unique criteria of success which I’m dying to share with you, maybe in one of the coming posts.
As we know it is a very interesting time for the Digital Universe, as we gradually enter the digital era (not there yet though). After just a quick look around it becomes quite obvious that there is a deficit of the qualified work force. I don’t personally think that there is a shortage of people entering IT industry as there are plenty self-taught/boot-camp graduates, but the only problem is that (almost) everyone wants to hire the best and only relatively few companies (usually corporations or default alive startups) are willing/can afford to hire, grow and teach juniors and take all the risks associated with it.
With current “everybody should know how to code” trends there are plenty of people trying themselves out as developers, out of the curiosity, or other mercantile reasons, and we see a drastic increase in potential candidates that we have to filter through and identify tremendous potential that only singles are carrying. Pretty tough. The situation was very different even a couple years ago, when only very few possessed required skills, and it was only a matter of a juicier offer to get a candidate aboard and recruiters were nothing more than a messenger.
A lot has changed and the pool of developers has grown extremely diluted, probably due to, as mentioned earlier, corporate efforts to engage large communities in the US and overseas to learn how to code, creating a cheap work force by increasing supply (there you go, another conspiracy theory for you to ponder with). And this is exactly the time for recruiters to get creative.
I poses an extremely valuable perspective: that of an engineer. What I will try to do in this article is to acquire a second perspective: recruiter’s. What I would (or wouldn’t) do if I was able to travel into a parallel universe where I was recruiter while carrying over my knowledge and experience from here.
We reach out to a potential candidate via direct email or LinkedIn messaging system. We will not go anywhere further than that, it’s just an article, I’m not writing a book. Also lets assume that we are not talking about recruiting for digital giants like Facebook or Google, but for the companies (large or small) no one ever heard of and recruiting agencies.
Lack of professionalism
The lack professionalism is the first thing I would like to talk about because the absence of it is a complete show stopper. If we are looking for serious candidates we have to be able and willing to show that we take our job seriously and we must understand that were are the voice of the company we represent when we reach out to potential candidates. Here is one of the good examples of the email that made me clench my teeth:
Did poor girl confused LinkedIn with Tinder? Is she flirting or trying to recruit a “Senior Engineer”? Can not be both. There is a very fine line between being friendly and unprofessional. My advice is if you are not 100% sure about what you are doing, don’t do it. That’s the easiest way to avoid imprinting a bad impression
Job requirements
There are plenty of recruiters that like to send job requirements in the first email. I would actively discourage this. As a candidate, I will not read them. Job requirements in first email communicate to me: “I [recruiter] spent my valuable time copy-pasting and sending you this email and if you don’t meet any of these don’t bother getting back to me”. Not a good message. And I will certainly not bother…even to read the email.
Sometimes the email will make a subtle attempt to balance the negativity of the requirements with a positive tone. Here is an example:
“This position requires 5+ years of blah blah blah”. This guy did not even bother to look at my LinkedIn profile. If he did, he would know that I don’t have 5 years of anything.
Personal touch.
This. Is. The. Key. Along with friendliness and positive attitude. Unfortunately very few recruiters take their time and thoroughly go through my profiles and compose what appears to be a very personal reach-out email. They bring up exact details about my experience, companies I worked for, my interests and technical skills. When seeing this kind of emails I see that they are genuinely involved in networking process, serious about their intents and about me. As a potential candidate I truly appreciate that.
I don’t have any really good illustrative examples, unfortunately. These are rare as a beautiful tropical birds.
Now it’s time to stop talking about the obvious stuff and lets dive in into something a little bit more interesting. Social engineering.
Hunting for the cheap labor
What if we don’t want you if you are a super star?
Now lets assume we are looking for the cheap labor. We do not care about developer’s level as long as they are capable of doing tedious work for as less money as possible.
Who would we target? That’s right. Desperate, vulnerable people, who have been on the market for some time (for whatever reason) and who will take any offer there is.
Now lets think about our tactics. As you have probably guessed we will have to spam! Using mass emails for recruiting would be the right choice, something that software platforms in companies like LinkedIn (InMail), CyberCoders and Mondo are really good for. Our goal is to reach out to as many people as possible about the position we need to fill and somehow filter out those who will only waste our time with their “ridiculous” requirements in back-and-forth email threads. We absolutely don’t care about candidates experience.
There is a very interesting research paper, we can take a couple lessons from: “Why do Nigerian Scammers Say They are from Nigeria?” :
Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self-select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor.
In another words: right now we are the attackers and our goal, in order to be profitable, is to reduce the “per-target effort” and amount of work we are investing into cheap candidate search by compiling self-selecting recruiting email that will allow us to drastically reduce false positives.
In our case false positives are developers who will reply to our email and will carry one the conversation without ever accepting the job.
So how would we build a self-selecting recruiting email that repels all but the most desperate candidates? Exactly. By following the worst practices there are. Flirt, demand resume (in MS Word format only), list the exact skill requirements and here you can afford to be rude. It will require a couple mass-email campaigns to adjust wording accordingly but when you get it right you will be golden.
Epilogue
I think I have told you everything what was on my mind today. For me, as for probably every engineer, I’m very interested in thinking about automating recruiting selection. Perhaps through a program (possibly AI flavored) that will make a scan through candidates resumes and social network profiles (professional and not) and will make accurate fit-prediction for the given company. I didn’t go down that road today since I’m trying to avoid deeply technical details at this time.
Topic is certainly not closed and do expect updates from me when I encounter something worth your attention.
