> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text. This means that it is very easy to get overwhelmed by the number of recruiters trying to call you, and we will explore time management a little further down the text.

This has been my experience as well, and while I understand the desire for introductory "sales mode" type calls, I think it's progressed past that point to something nearly pathological.

As an example, I recently had a recruiter that I was previously in contact with over email cold-call me while I was skiing, trying to schedule a meeting with a hiring manager (I picked up the call because I thought it might be one of the people in my group that I didn't have in my contacts). When I requested she please send me an email to schedule the meeting, as I was out of the office, I got an email where she sent an email to schedule the phone call, to then schedule the meeting over the phone. It was 100% the least efficient way to do this, and only happened because of this illogically strong preference for phone calls that recruiters seem to have...

When looking at his LinkedIn, I only see one job with tenure over 4 years almost 10 years back and most other jobs are well below 2 years. It seems like he definitely is able to find new jobs very efficiently so I think his advice here is valuable.

However if I were hiring for an engineering leader, I would probably pass him over. I don’t see anyone being an effective leader by only sticking around for less than 2 years. Having tenures less than 2 years especially at senior roles doesn’t give a lot of positive feelings of leadership in my opinion.

> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource

I had an experience with an independent recruiter that went so poorly that I haven’t been able to take those kinds of people seriously since.

A few years back, I was recruited to an up-and-coming startup in the healthcare space in a senior role. It was a massive pay increase, meaningful equity, and a company name I was proud to put on my resume.

An independent firm reached out to me about the role and I was definitely interested. One thing I noticed while doing my independent research was that lots of people had very poor Glassdoor reviews of the company, basically comparing it to Theranos in terms of its culture, constant firings, cult-like CEO, etc. I reached out to several former employees to discuss their experience and could not get one to talk to me about working there. Meanwhile, I was hearing from the recruiters that they hired a new exec team and most complaints were not relevant to the current situation there.

I brought the complaints up with the recruiter and the company during my interview process, and they both told me it was just a couple disgruntled former employees trying to make the company look bad. The recruiter offered to put me in touch with others they placed at the company, but I couldn’t view them as objective sources.

I started the gig and it took me all of two weeks to realize the company was in fact firing people constantly and I had been completely lied to by the recruiter and the company.

As much as I want to believe that there are recruiters out there that look out for devs, the reality is that software talent is the product in that relationship and there aren’t a lot of financial incentives to ensure transparency going into these professional relationships. Recruiters get paid when you sign, which creates an inherent conflict of interest when you’re looking to them as a trusted resource.

To clarify, “senior role” here means a senior management role (the author is a Senior Director Of Engineering) rather than Senior Software Engineer, as probably most folks will read it. Might want to update the title to “senior management role” to make that plain.

This article does not echo my personal experience. I recently left a company. Prior to leaving but after making it know to a few key people that I wasn't likely to stay, I had two exploratory contracts lined up. (Exploratory for me, not them.) Within two weeks, I had a massive offer in front of me from a third company. When I let them others know I was going to take that, there was a minor bidding war. I landed a senior (Head of ...) role with little to no effort and negotiated maintaining advisory roles with non competitive orgs.

I have two decades in my specific eng field. I (very intentionally) have little name recognition but I come highly recommended and have a proven track record. Getting senior roles is not all that difficult, if you have proven yourself and know how to network. I don't look for jobs any more, I consider offers. To me, that's how senior roles should and do work.

Definitely get comfortable with independent recruiters. I've written a few blurbs about this to people who've contacted me here on HN.

Basically the incentives make sense, to a point. They get paid a quarter of your first annual compensation. So they want to place someone, and they will do a lot for you if you are a profile that seems like a match for the roles they are covering.

Note it's important that you find people who actually have the goods. There are a lot of recruiters who seem to think spamming peoplev with crap is a way to get placements.

The thing to do is look at the jobs you like, for finance that's on efinancial and one or two others, and then call the most pertinent recruiters. Don't use the application systems, they're a black hole. Get the person on the phone, sell yourself, hopefully get some interviews lined up.

The really good recruiters will keep the relationship open. They call me now and again to check my status (I'm also a hiring manager prospect), they call to ask me technical questions, and they get me to refer people I know as well. It's actually a lot of work if you consider the average candidate is only going to change jobs a few times in their life.

And yes, keep organised, try to know where you are with each firm. It's important not to get introduced by different recruiters to the same firm, it messes with that incentive I mentioned and the recs are scared of being the second person to intro someone.

I see a lot of comments here talking about how many recruiter messages and calls and bidding wars they get, and I'm seriously wondering how much of these are tall tales...

I've been a professional software dev for 25 years, spanning five countries (edit: including 5 years in San Francisco) and almost every part of the industry from embedded to enterprise, startups to multinationals, hardware to finance. I have written software in almost all major languages for multiple years, have worked with many major software stacks, and delivered major 6-month-to-multi-year projects. None of this is hyperbole.

I have hundreds of github projects that are not forks, ranging up to tens of thousands of LOC, some that companies have built entire businesses out of (for example https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash).

I receive one, maybe two recruiter emails per year (only from Facebook - I think whenever my contact info goes to a new person), and that's about it. I've never been in a bidding war, and I can't remember a single job search that's completed in under 4 months.

Are people ACTUALLY getting inundated like this so badly that they need a SPREADSHEET to keep things in order? Or is this just bragging?

Keeping a spreadsheet is such a good idea - during my last search I was talking to a dozen different companies initially, and it would have been impossible to keep on top of everything without some sort of organization.

My big gripe with the phone calls is that it is 30 minutes to just have your resume presented to someone and likely rejected (I am on the low end of experienced, so get recruiters pitching my 2 years of experience for senior roles).

While I have worked with some great third-party recruiters in the past and actually got my current job through one, most of the time the phone call is equivalent to the resume submission stage.

It would literally be faster to apply directly than have a conversation.

15 years of waiting for a green card. 15 years of being on a visa that can have you kicked out anytime no matter how much you’ve invested into life there. Hats off to the folks who put up with this.

I’m done with recruiters. They’re only looking out for themselves. They basically rent seek and make things more difficult. They never have the information I need. And they never seem all that interested in the relationship if it doesn’t serve to fill their desired quota of candidates in a pipeline.

I made a boilerplate page on my personal site to send back to the occasional job that looks interesting and some recruiters have legitimately been offended by getting a form response.

> Independent headhunters and recruiters are a valuable resource

I wish, I find that there seems to be an infinite amount of recruiters collecting names and resumes willing to waste infinite amounts of time… and then you discover they don’t know Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing.

> Recruiters love phone calls and don’t like doing things over email or text.

This has really hindered me as a person with a severe hearing impairment. It's annoying how pushy some people can be about it too, insisting that there has to be SOME way to make it work.

> 5. Do not waste your time, but part as friends

It’s completely counter intuitive but that was my biggest take away from interviewing this year. You would think it’s the unqualified candidate that were the time waster.

Prospective employers will lead you on and waste your time with nonsense and hope of employment with numerous interviews until their bias either qualifies or filters you.

My recommendation: put your cards on the table at the very beginning and filter yourself out. There is no point in pretending it will be a beautiful marriage when they are an old man undergoing midlife crisis looking for a hot teenager. If, as an actual senior, that’s not what you want to be then it’s not going to work.

The article is sound but I am on the fence regarding external headhunters.

The arguments supporting their use (e.g. hiring company does want to leak information) seem weak.

I would tend to think that a strong hiring company should be able to bypass this information leakage on their own and own the process. Using an external headhunter does not prevent the leakage that much and removes ownership and control from the hiring company’s hands.

As a senior lead, being approached by an external head hunter has always triggered a knee-jerk negative reaction with me.

I would not mind being proven wrong.

Using a spreadsheet as a cheap CRM to track your job search and where you are in the process, cold leads, warm leads, follow-ups, and so forth is precisely what I do. I thought I was the only one who did that. Nice to know I am not crazy. :-)

And the article is on-point with the "you get 30 minutes of my time otherwise you are wasting my time." Recruiters love their phone calls because they are trying to sell you something.

[OFF] Isn't this one of the guys mentioned at the soundcloud post a long ago about Brazilians and their engineering culture (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14712840) ? Curious if these takeaways can be sort of a protection for that kind of situation.

> And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you.

This is something I always wonder, why there are no recruiters who are paid by the candidate rather than the hiring company? Kinda like an agent-client relationship.

Probably wouldn’t work for junior people, but it could be a good fit for seniors

At 20+ years into my career is it super weird that I've never once worked with a recruiter?

Everything I've done in the past 10 years has not been from a job that was advertised as an opening anywhere, but through industry contacts.

I specifically removed my phone number from my CV when I noticed companies like to call and scheduele a meeting immediately.

Such things gotta be done in an async manner e.g. by email.

Key sentence:

> And this is something to keep in mind working with recruiters: they work for the hiring company, not for you.

Perhaps there's a new venture opportunity here: recruiters that find jobs that are on the employee side. They get the same money (e.g. paid by the employee's sign on bonus) as those working for the other side, but try to find a good role for the employee.

I did the exact same thing with a spreadsheet. Pursuing only the few roles I could keep in my head at a time was not keeping me busy and was letting a lot slip through the cracks. It was incredibly helpful to take a systematic approach, to track who I'd talked to, save references to job descriptions and background information, and to separate by tech stack, locale, etc.

As an alternative to the spreadsheet I maintain dedicated repository for job search with directory for every company I apply to, then one dedicated CalDAV calendar where most important remote and onsite interviews go.

So I worked in London for several years. Over 15 years I still get emails from these people. It was the most soul-destroying experience of my professional life and I could talk about this a lot eg fake interviews, not being put up for roles they said they would put you up for, modifying your resume, pricing you out of contention by adding a markup to your rate they never told you about, submitting you for positions you never authorized.

It's not as bad in the US now but I get a ton of cold emails (and even phone calls). I've seen similar advice here on HN about how you should respond to these and make a personal connection even if you aren't looking now. Do people really do this? I think this would take me hours each week. I'm not even a superstar. Far from it so please don't take it that way.

I'm an introvert. I'm far from alone in this as a software engineer. Now this, contrary to popular belief, doesn't mean you want to avoid social interactions. It simply means those social interactions have a cost. For some people (ie extroverts) the opposite is true. They feed on those interactions. I imagine you'd need to be that sort of person to be a recruiter.

The author here posits that independent recruiters are "valuable". Now this could be London colouring my view but I've found the complete opposite to be true. I've only looked for a job twice in the last 10 years and each time I quite deliberately only ever spoke to a company's recruiters. I've found independent recruiters and agencies to simply make a difficult process even more difficult.

My advice for any recruiter thinking of cold calling is:

1. I've long since stopped picking up unrecognized numbers. If you call me instead of emailing me, it's going to get ignored;

2. If your email doesn't look personalized it just gets immediately binned. I'm talking something like:

> Hi, I came across your profile and like the look of your skills and experience...

3. My experience has been that even sending a polite "I'm not currently looking" or even just a thank you is far too often taken as an invitation for follow up contact to "get to know you" or "discuss [whatever] further" so it's best for my personal sanity to simply ignore pretty much every email;

4. Just because I don't respond or respond immediately, it doesn't mean I haven't read it. The last time I looked for a job I ended up contacting a recruiter who'd sent me an email months earlier. This may not be how you as a likely extrovert deals with communication but you're not me and you inserted yourself into my inbox. It's not personal;

5. If you aren't able to cater the hiring pipeline to my experience then seriously don't even bother. What I mean by this is I've worked at Google and Facebook for >10 years. Do you or your client really think I can't code? If you are going to get someone a year out of college to give me a test on bisection search because "that's their process" then that tells me a lot about their culture and/or how they value your input. You want to talk systems design? Coding philosophy? Tech leadership? All of those are fair game. Bring it on. Happy to do it;

6. Realize that many of us engineers find phone calls to be disruptive and a profound waste of time, particularly when it usually entails a 30 minute "getting to know you" chat before you even start the process;

7. Do yourself a favour and if we must chat, send your calendar so I can pick a slot when you're available. I know my own schedule. I don't want scheduling to be a conversation;

8. If you reschedule or cancel once we've agreed to talk you'd better have a good reason or at least don't lie about it. Tech is a small world. If you tell me an emergency came up and you actually went skiing, don't think the candidate won't find that out from a friend or a friend of a friend who can check. Trust matters;

9. If you send the same email more than three times, it gets binned; and

10. There are certain areas I simply have no interest in (eg finance, Blookchain Andys). You're not to know that. It's not your fault. Everyone differs on this. Again, it's not personal.

Thank you for the wisdom!

How many jobs is normal to consider at a time? I saw he had 50ish in 2 weeks which is an awful lot for senior jobs. Even as an IC I can only really handle a fraction of that. Should I be applying for 100 roles/month? I'm not sure what is normal or a good strategy.

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I ignore all of this. The OP is coming from a no name company and don't have any expertises. If you are senior and you don't have any expertises or deep experience in a domain, you will have tough time getting a job even in this hot market.