Is this really necessary? If you get this worked up about contact from a recruiter, I imagine you also might write back to every piece of direct mail junk mail telling them how your interests don't align and to please stop contacting you.
Why not just delete it or reply no thank you? Google is a massive company, and unless they are specifically head-hunting you, it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site. You're going to get picked up by automated scripts for big hiring campaigns. Accept it, and don't waste time or mental energy getting frustrated or mad about it.
Recruiting is a sales process just like any other. No one would ever say it's unfair to expect a business developer to spend 5 minutes researching a prospect just because he/she sells for a big firm and doesn't have the time.
Large corporations do not have to sell employment.
Potential employees should feel honored to merely be contacted on the basis of an opportunity.
This sounds a lot like a cargo cult, or some weird corporatism worship.
Frankly if I'm contacted by a recruiter who is a direct employee of a company, and it is blatantly obvious I'm receiving a form letter based on a keyword search of a resume data base. I know exactly what my role will be at this company, an employee ID in a database row.
I don't think the argument is that you must feel "honored". Just not personally affronted by it.
I work for a company that has open developer positions. None of them are related to keyboard firmware, but if you told me nothing about a potential candidate except that he'd been doing keyboard firmware for fun, my first instinct would be, "great! Let's see if he wants to come in for an interview". Don't we all spout the company line about how specific skills are less important than "passion" or whatever? Well, then don't bitch if someone contacts you about something other than the specific skills on your CV. You don't have prostrate yourself before their glorious presence, but I don't see a reason to get upset about it.
No, it doesn't. You're putting an awful lot of words in my mouth there.
Generally speaking, they'll be two types of recruiting companies like this are doing:
1) General filling headcount. X department has N open roles for developers who they need suitable people for. It doesn't really matter who the person is, as long as they're suitable (and they'll figure that out with screening calls and interviews). These are the types of roles that these shotgun form emails are sent out to.
2) Headhunting specific people (for specific roles). A company is after someone in particular who they already know about, or they're after a fairly specific type of person (for an IMPORTANT role) so they'll do a bit research on who they want to approach.
Of course I don't think anyone should feel honoured to receive a form email. I just don't think it's worth getting your knickers in a twist over it. They irritate me slightly, but I get over it. If I wrote a 1000 word article on every piece of recruiter spam[1] I receive I wouldn't have time to do actual work.
[1] Amusing anecdote: One day In the office a whole bunch of phones and computers when off. I assumed it was a whole company email, but nope - it was a recruiter who had emailed everyone looking for MERN developers.
This is where you're wrong, they're not specifically recruiting this individual. They're playing a statistical game - use as many sources as possible to fill the pipeline in hopes that some percentage will make it through to the end. I'm sure the recruiters are incented to make as many contacts as they can. Google is all about automation, and I'm sure their process for identifying potential candidates has no human input whatsoever.
Maybe I poorly phrased my comment, but I don't think sending an automated form email counts as 'specifically recruiting' OP, nor do I expect Google to spend time prior researching them.
You're right, I totally misread your comment - if they were recruiting a specific person, they would have spent the 5 minutes to check them out.
I don't think the emails are automated, I really do think there's a human at the other end, if nothing else they need someone to read your response. It's just that they're spending a minimal amount of time just to try to get you on the hook, and they'll use whatever information the automated system gave them to do that.
Taking this analogy, cold calls and similar sales tactics are still being used, so they must bring at least some positive return. If the error costs are effectively zero, the recruiter may be still be getting benefits from mass mailings, although as a corporate strategy for Google it may not work too well.
In the sales world, the merits of research are well-known. An increased hit-rate is always worth the additional time in researching and qualifying before-hand.
> ... does not maintain a blacklist of the sort he wants them to.
I wonder why... Is the potential for one person changing their mind worth the negativity? I've also been contacted repeatedly by Google's recruiters, even though I live nowhere near a Google campus, and have no desire to move back to that area.
Technical solutions not always being practical in meat space and all that, but seems like a backoff like we would implement against an API which isn't responding would not be a terrible idea here.
Blame the 100's of recruiters working for google on contract and a internal CRM that likely doesnt work very well. Add in the idea that everyone is looking around eventually and you have people reaching out to you weekly about things you already said no to in the past.
Discounting the motivations behind recruiter's cold calls for a moment; people do change. Someone who felt comfortable telling Google to haul off one year might feel different one or four years down the line. Making the assumption that they didn't burn bridges, re-contacting them a respectable amount of time later may result in a different outcome.
If I change my mind, I will contact them. Repeatedly hitting me up with impersonal contacts I don't want is not going to do it. In fact, it will make me lessl likely to change my mind.
Part one is linked, though not clearly, from the article.[0]
Checking the category under which this was posted, Rants, gets you to number two in a single page where a good old Mark I eyeball grep is enough to get you there with some brief scrolling.[1]
> Google is a massive company, and unless they are specifically head-hunting you, it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site.
Every time I see someone bring up this rough point the time gets shorter. "I'm important, I don't have 5 minutes to look at your personal page!" or some variant of that. It's ridiculous.
If I'm reaching out to someone to start hiring, I'd be looking at personal pages, github pages, looking through their code, etc. The only reason you wouldn't is if you don't actually give a shit and you're just working through a list of candidates and trying to get your conversion rate up.
Plus someone who goes around recruiting without looking at WHO they're recruiting is not somebody I'd work for...
> The only reason you wouldn't is if you don't actually give a shit and you're just working through a list of candidates and trying to get your conversion rate up.
Conversion rate is $number_hires / $number_prospects_contacted.
It seems that indiscriminate spamming would pretty much tank the conversion rate.
You're assuming those two parameters, mine were $number_of_interviews / $number_of_prospects. Unless that's an industry term I misused, in which case I apologize.
But we don't know if this recruiter is hiring "the best" or just some schlub to sit behind a phone and tell small business owners how to update their email signatures.
Not every one of Google's 61,000 employees is "OMG super A+ number one hot code engineer geek!"
There's a pretty low signal to noise ratio on recruiting. They typically don't start going into a candidate's details until they've managed to get a resume.
> it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site.
If a company wants to hire me, I expect them to spend hours going through my site and assess my previous open source work, and how and why I might be fit for them, etc.
If they don't do at least that, there's nothing for me there.
And yeah, Google is spamming me too, like the author of the article.
My own employment history in the past 10 years or so clearly demonstrates this is not the case. Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager). A job they needed done, and a job they clearly understood I was an expert in.
I am am talking about senior-level jobs here, where the employee is hired because of his specific skill set and expertise in some particular domain. If the company does something that doesn't require any particular expertise, and no particular skill set, or if they don't know what they need, yeah... I don't want to be working there. Why would I? I would be selling myself short, and I would not advance in my technical career.
Companies can very well assess whether someone is interested in the job. They can't know without asking if someone is willing to tolerate the company, but they should be able to tell whether someone would likely be interested in a particular job. And if someone likes a job, most likely they won't mind the company, so it's worthwhile for the company to reach out.
Companies should also be able to assess with good reliability how qualified is someone for a particular job before contacting that person. If they can't, they either don't know what they need, or they are looking at the wrong person to hire.
> Companies I have worked on spent at least days, if not weeks before approaching me with a job offer (and no recruiters, direct contact from my future manager).
I'm honestly curious what they would have done during that time. I mean, are you literally saying it took them days or weeks of constant analysis to decide whether to approach you about coming in for an interview?
I'm pretty sure that in a world populated entirely by people like you, the only thing that would cause anyone to ever actually become employed would be some confusion over what "minimally interested" means.
Well, when the recruiter emails, and says that they're interested in my skills, I'd like to believe that they're not full of crap, and that they actually have looked at some version of my resume.
I'd like to think that when they email and invite me to a local event, it's in a city I've been associated with before, not somewhere across the country, when I live in the same city as the HQ.
I'd like to think that when I've spent an hour on the phone, they at least let me know that they're interested or not, not just go completely silent.
"If a company wants to hire me, I expect them to spend hours going through my site and assess my previous open source work, and how and why I might be fit for them, etc.
"
I hate to say it, but ... it's unlikely to happen.
The problem for you is that for most companies, there are plenty of leads in the sea.
For everyone like you, there are 100 who aren't. The likelihood you are objectively a better candidate than all those folks is ... low
Until that changes, your request pretty much won't happen.
(As for spamming, the author says it was 5 years ago,
"My first thought was "what took them so long?" - it has been five years since my last contact with a Google recruiter."
I don't think i would qualify reaching out every 5 years as spamming)
Yes, the talent shortage is bullshit. There is a shortage of some specific combinations of credentials, but that has very little to do with how easy it is to find people to do specific jobs.
The original statement was "plenty", which is the opposite of "shortage". Also, while you can certainly have a lot of something in the absolute sense while still having a shortage relative to your needs, "shortage" applies that the additional things are not available. Having those things available but not having the resources to make use of them is not a shortage or that thing, it is a shortage of whatever resource is required to use that thing.
Uh, at a guess: because if you don't expect to get a job at Google the next best way to pad your CV is to make it very publicly known that you've turned down an offer from Google?
But it also doesn't take much to win someone's love and respect.
A Korean journalist (from here on referenced as Ms. Kim) once interviewed Guus Hiddink, the football coach for 2002 World Cup SK National Team. The SK team had placed fourth, an unprecedented miracle. Hiddink instantly became a household name in Korea.
After the World Cup, countless journalists interviewed him; but Kim sought to foster this relationship — to win Hiddink's love and respect.
Upon finishing the interview, Kim, the journalist, handed Hiddink a portable drive with highlights of all the matches he coached this World Cup.
She gleefully recommended that he watch them on the flight back home.
Hiddink was so touched by her care that he took her out for lunch two days later. This time, Ms. Kim brought kimchi that her grandmother made, and shared that story at the table.
Kim and Hiddink kept in touch, and five years later, Hiddink came to her wedding.
Hiddink flew half-way around the globe for the wedding of a journalist — whose initial meeting was a typical interview.
Hundreds of people interviewed Hiddink. But only one managed to get him to come to her wedding.
And all she spent was a little time, care, and attention.
I thought the punch line was going to be that Hiddink was duped into installing malware on his laptop that recorded and broadcast his tactical plans for future matches.
Years ago I had a rather poor internship with Google. Wrong team, wrong time, wrong me at the time. No one's fault really, but no one would call it a success.
Their recruiter contacted me a couple years ago using the sentence "everyone who worked with you had great things to say about you!". I replied back "really? Who in particular?". Things went downhill from there.
I really do wish their recruiters (or all recruiters really) did a better job of remembering what their company's previous interactions with candidates were.
I think you have to put things in the right perspective. The bar for a software engineering internship (for a student) is not that high. The expectations are not that high. When I was in college, I knew several fellow students who were bored with their projects, felt like they didn't get along with their team, and didn't really do anything useful, who got return offers (which implies positive feedback).
Did you deliver any code features / bug fixes during the internship, even if you hated it and/or the code got thrown away? There is a good chance that is considered enough for an internship. I'm pretty sure one of my internship project's code got thrown out at a company, but I still got a return offer.
For some reason I doubt the recruiter would lie about something like this. Perhaps the recruiter couldn't name names because the feedback was years-old and/or anonymized?
I see. Well this is just a standard feature of human interaction. I am always polite and cheerful in tone when I write emails. Even if I'm actually annoyed or bored or tired. It costs me absolutely nothing to use certain words instead of other words, to add an exclamation mark in certain places, etc.
Or at least not lie. I am guessing that they could have referenced the internship without saying "everyone had great things to say" and that would would have at least started the conversation on the right foot
There may be laws prohibiting them from keeping information about employees/interns for that long. Many countries have information privacy laws (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_privacy_law) stating that companies can only keep PII insofar as needed to operate their business, and keeping, for instance, your address around years after you left the company isn't needed to operate the business.
It typically is easier for a company to ditch an entire employee/intern record than to filter it for to-be-discarded information.
Of course, for employees or interns, they also typically are obliged to keep records for some time, for the tax office or because former employees might still file a claim.
Still, they probably will ditch everything they have on employees as soon as they are allowed to.
If they do that, they shouldn't say details about the employment in the email. You can get the same point across, that you want a candidate, without saying something potentially false.
A while back, as spent 3 months sourcing my own candidates as an engineering manager and it was enlightening. I spent a while on each candidate, finding their github repo, personal webpages, and the roles they had held, then wrote a personalized note explaining who I was, what I was doing and why I thought their experience was useful. Out of hundreds of emails I sent, I got a handful of responses. I had a few takeaways:
- People with really good information on-line get tons of responses. Someone from LinkedIn confirmed that a small number of profiles get most hits.
- Most public information about engineers is total crap. Most LinkedIn profiles have no detail to determine if someone is a fit. I looked at the profiles of some of my coworkers who I thought were really good and there was nothing interesting in them. Most github repos have not substantive or interesting projects. Looking at github was a big waste of time.
- Being a recruiter is hard work. It's exhausting looking through profiles and dismaying to get rejected and ignored all the time, especially when you've spent time researching people.
- Often you need to contact people several times before they will respond, even if they are interested. I've found this even when I've been contacted by recruiters: I think "interesting, I'll get back to them" and forget about it.
Recruiting is a volume game. Carpet bombing is the only effective strategy in my experience, which is why recruiters do it. It's simply not worth doing that much research up front.
Also, bear in mind that the recruiting staff is usually divided into recruiters and sourcers. The latter are who are doing a lot of the contacting, and their job is mainly to find lots of profiles, not do deep research. Once they get a response, the recruiter takes over and does more of the relationship building and candidate vetting. Given low response rates, this is also a more effective strategy.
Yes, I do the same and it's a real slog. I feel I get replies from some people I normally wouldn't have - top folks. But most messages are ignored, even highly personal, friendly, relevant messages to people I'm connected to through a friend. I haven't given up on this strategy, but would definitely like to find ways to make it more effective. Even if they just clicked the LinkedIn "Not interested" auto response, that'd be an improvement.
we sourced all our candidates through https://lispjobs.wordpress.com . Given hard requirement of relocation to Australia Adelaide that was very efficient and pleasant experience.
We also tried recruiters and stackoverflow. One recruiter was very good at selling himself to upper management and was pushing unqualified engineers into our throats. Stackoverflow was less targeted than lispjobs blog, but much better than typical recruitment company.
lispjobs was so good that another our practice of flying candidates in to spend a week of hacking together after brief phone screen wasn't that expensive at all.
Best advice I ever saw about dealing with recruiters, from someone on this site, though I don't remember who you are; sorry, internet-friend:
Hi $recruiter,
I appreciate you taking the time to reach
out about this opportunity. Luckily, I am
quite happy at $current_employer and not
currently pursuing other options. I do
have one question for you, though. Right
now, what would a typical salary range
look like for someone with my background
and level of experience for a position
like this?
Thanks,
greggyb
I'd say anecdotally that I get an answer more than half the time with a salary range, sometimes based on the position they're hiring for, and sometimes their ballpark based on my profile.
It's not scientific, but it is helpful to keep a pulse on the types of opportunities and compensation available.
This is great advice. I'm a recruiter known for being critical of recruiter behavior, and when people claim that recruiters are mostly worthless to them, I encourage them to simply use recruiters for this kind of information. An experienced recruiter, specifically an agency recruiter with a wide variety of clients, should be able to give you a fairly solid expectation on your marketability and market value.
Instead of wasting the opportunity, a reply like this can be quite useful. If the recruiter doesn't reply, don't respond to them again.
Recruiter here, though of the agency variety (even less popular than the internal recruiters).
Google has no real excuse not to have a better candidate database in place where this kind of thing doesn't happen. This person's information (email, GitHub account, LinkedIn, name, web pages, etc.) should all be entered into a system and marked as "DO NOT CALL" based on his previous interactions with Google. Google recruiters should be required to check the name and contact info of anyone before they send any correspondence - that only takes a minute.
The Google recruiter might be required to do this already and just didn't do his/her job properly, but I can't imagine a company like Google doesn't have this system in place.
The recruiter appears to have done some minimal level of research on the candidate, but it's hard to tell that the recruiter discovered anything other than the fact that this person had a GitHub account. Some recruiters looking for software engineers of any kind will contact anyone with a GitHub account, as most of those people will be developers.
The recruiter could have done a bit more, and most recruiters could do a bit more research.
All this said, if this candidate actually wanted to work for Google, this blog post never gets written. Candidates will accept a bit of laziness from the recruiter if it's from a desirable company. If this person was interested in Apple and this same email came from an Apple recruiter, the response is probably "Sure, let's talk!". Because it's Google, and because this person (unlike many in the world) doesn't want to work for Google and really wants us to know that he doesn't want to work for Google, this is supposed to be interesting.
This kind of thing happens thousands of times a day. It's not unique or interesting.
One reason that people like the author might not be on a 'do not call' list is that long lists of crappy leads are often what gets passed to the new sales person [and what is recruiting other than a sales process?]. I mean why waste good leads on someone who is just learning the ropes and might screw up a slam dunk or why pass good leads to someone who may not be cut out to handle the high rate of rejection and will move on to a better match for their talents in a few months?
An automated github keyword search to shotgun job offers? Pretty much like the rest of the place. A couple of hundred guys wrote some scripts to automate everything a few years back, then retired to their isolated clubhouse. That is the only logical explanation to lack of useful contact with the outside world. (The bot that posts to hacker news once every 13.87 articles saying 'Hi I am Tony from this project and we really do care' is a similarly poor imitation of a real person BTW).
I've never had ANY good experiences with ANY recruiters in my career so far. Ditto with most HR of ANY company I've worked for. That being said, being miffed because the recruiter didn't research him thoroughly (because he is such a special 'snowflake'?) seems like a bit of a stretch. But then again, who I am to talk? I've never had such offers from ABC Company's subsidiuaries.
Have you ever considered that the issue could be you, not HR/recruiters? Not trying to insult here in any way. People at times are super oblivious to small stuff that causes huge issues.
Actually, I just remembered I did have 1 recruiter do a fantastic job which landed my my first job in Video games. And yes you are correct in pointing out I could be the problem, however in my case the only interaction I've ever had with recruiters was very courteous but they always seem to be "shooting from the hip" and simply contacting me in a haphazard way without any real or concrete offers other than to expand their contact portfolios? Never any follow through or any contact after the first initial email. As stated before, I did my best to help them help me. I just simply ain't no rockstar/ninja/10x dev enough for them I guess.
As for HR, their incompetence seems more due to the fact that:
1) There seems to be a turnaround rate in HR departments, which if harvested could power a small city
2) The head of HR is usually not given the power to enact proper recruitment efforts (see #1)
3) The level of disorganization is at best amateurish.
This is not a personal statement against any HR employees, which seem like great people who are stuck in sinking ship.
I got my current job via an EXCELLENT recruiter from an agency. I had been of the view based on my experience that I should have a one page resume. Rather than just setting it aside, the recruiter actually specifically asked me to submit another resume with more. I did, and it was what they were looking for, so I got interviewed and got hired.
During the same time, I was working with a couple of headhunters to find a place for me, some good, some bad. One got me an interview pretty easily, for a job I didn't really fit too well with, but that was cultural really. But that guy was really helpful, and really on task. I had another one though that was super unhelpful because he wanted to talk on the phone before hooking me up with any given job posting, and would only be willing to talk to me during work hours... when I was at work.
You WILL have hit and miss experiences with recruiting, but there's good ones out there.
Everyone I worked with was Chicago local, but James Forberg at Infinity Consulting Solutions was a good contact for someone looking for a technical job here in the city. He wasn't ultimately how I got the job I did, but he was probably the most active recruitment contact I had when I was looking for a job, and he got me the only other interview I did last year.
The great thing about these recruiting companies, is that since the employer pays them for referring you, they do a lot of the job search work for you, and it costs you nothing as a job seeker. This is a life saver if you're currently employed while searching.
"... I do not wish to work for Google. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever."
Are you really sure? How about in 15 years when nearly all programming jobs have been replaced with AI[1]. Programmers are jobless, hungry, homeless and without any access to healthcare. However Google bizarrely needs some keyboard firmware written because AI is pretty shitty when it comes to keyboard firmware.
[1] maybe even less dramatic, how about a year 2000 dot-com-style crash when you are out of work for 12 months?
Many – including myself – would rather then go and work in a supermarket or even work with the garbage disposal men than working with Google.
Many people just have strict morals and refuse to work for multinationals that try to use their market power and might to influence local laws, or think they’re above the law.
While I agree with the sentiment, and Google recruiters have shown to be disconnected from the candidates several times, I disagree with the tone of the message
(However I can't condone their recruiter's behaviour - on average - as well)
I know, so many "amazing career opportunities" show up in my inbox from people that can't even read that I'm not in the US and send me "no visa sponsorship" openings there. Those get the 'report as spam' treatment
The tone of the message is appropriate to the state of acceptance of his initial wish stating "Thank you, no".
This kind of behaviour irks me in RL too. If someone can't respect your decision of a polite "thank you, but no", then still keeps riling at it, then there's perhaps no other way for them to realize that.
My favorite "opportunities" are all the short-term contract gigs in places I've never heard of. Oh, and because it's a short-term gig there's no relocation assistance. Oh, and the gig has nothing to do with any of my professional experience.
I'm sorry but I don;t understand why you are posting this? This is a personal correspondence between you and Google and I'm not sure why it needs to be made public. Do you also post every other conversation you have with every other entity?
For a company who specializes in data and search, Google is remarkably disorganized and doesn't seem to have the right data.
Mind, this is far from the first case of Google being disconnected from the outside world. Like Google's lack of support for web standards, while loudly supporting them. Or not communicating vital information to YouTube's creators when they screw up, and disable monetization on all videos for no reason, or unsubscribe people seemingly randomly. I could keep going, but I think you get the picture.
I think it's kind of overreaction and a waste of time responding that way. What is he tring to prove by responding in that maner and publishing it on the blog?
What pisses me off is when companies get my contact information off Monster and then try to recruit me for a job in another city or a contract position.
My profile on Monster, and on other sites, explicitly states that I am not interested in relocation and I will only accept full-time employment.
And I know for a fact that these recruiters are getting my information from Monster because I get a flood of calls and emails every time I update my profile there (which I haven't done in a while because I just started a new job and thus I'm not looking anymore, so fortunately the calls have died down lately).
Most of these are Indian recruiters hawking positions at no-name companies, but I've received a disproportionately large amount of emails from Amazon. Every few months, I'll get another email saying they're checking in on me and that they've got positions open for me.
Your first mistake is having a profile on Monster. Recruiters that use Monster are probably the bottom-feeders most in the industry hate, and the reason they are on Monster is that is where you can generally find the bottom of the talent pool. I don't think I've known any decent industry pro (I recruit engineers for startups) in 10 years that has posted their info to Monster.
If I were him, I would have replied with something really interesting for anyone at Google (I'm guessing actually recruiters would not care), for example, what would it take me take a job at Google?
Certainly I'm not so arrogant to say I would never accept a job at Google. You will never know the future, so you will never know if 3 years from now Google would be funding the side-project of your dreams...
But even then, there are some things about Google that bother me. And this is what I would have written in an email to a recruiter. Some examples below:
- Stop spending resources on developing bad languages such as Go. (Or at least, really improve it please by adding generics and removing ignoring-errors-by-default. And merge it with Dart, or just throw Dart down the toilet please...)
- Stop tracking everyone and be more like duckduckgo.
- Take down GooglePlus, it doesn't make any fucking point nowadays, it's just useless and shameful.
- Resurrect GoogleReader (I still sometimes begin to write "reader.goo" when I open a tab nowadays), or at least make the code opensource and publish it.
- Open source the software that brings automation to google cars. We need accountability and transparency here.
- Stop the inclusion of proprietary software in Android. And stop blackmailing smartphone manufacturers by forcing them to include these services.
- After you have fixed Go (and flushed Dart), stop pushing for Python so much. If I get hired I don't want to write code that is going to be broken 6 months down the road.
- Same thing as previous bullet, but Java. Move Android to be Swift or C# based.
- Deprecate the stupid GoogleWallet thing and just adopt bitcoin, for once.
- Don't ever stop organizing Google Summer Of Code please (not everything in this comment was going to be criticism).
If these items get fulfilled, I would be less annoyed about working for Google.
Why not just delete it or reply no thank you? Google is a massive company, and unless they are specifically head-hunting you, it's not fair to expect them to even spend 5 minutes going through your personal site. You're going to get picked up by automated scripts for big hiring campaigns. Accept it, and don't waste time or mental energy getting frustrated or mad about it.