> That way, when candidates were pitched to us with "X years of MOVA experience", we knew that somebody was full of it.
I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchange 2000. I had no experience with Exchange 2000, so I told them, and watched their faces drop.
That was specifically why they wanted to speak to me. The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. I'm surprised I'm not still doing time for murder.
What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it. I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.
Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java, I don't have enough to list it as a skill on my CV.
Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and magically my CV had modified itself to say I had 7 years of Java experience.
I told them I did not put that on my CV, I actually had my own copy with me and showed them that. We all realised the recruiter changed my CV. They apologised and wished me luck.
Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me and berating me for not going along with the ruse. He said "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?"
Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.
> Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.
This doesn't always help either though. I have only ever sent PDFs to recruiters for this reason. Yet I have still had a recruiter completely rewrite my resume and add false information.
I generally keep a resume on me when I go to an interview just in case an interviewer had not seen it. I'm glad I do that.
I've had them re-type the resume and add typos and errors. I don't need a recruiter for that. I can put typos and errors on my resume by myself just fine.
I was doing some interviews and the resumes we were getting were like 5+ pages long. Maybe it was some cultural difference or something but I'd always been told to keep my resume to 1 page front & back at the absolute longest.
Turns out it was a different resume that the recruiters would send us. They were garbage in quality and I hate them.
It's not cultural. I think the agencies are trying to put in every single keyword and "skill" to get past algorithmic filters and also make sure non-technical managers see the words they are looking for.
At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie Chart Tableau", etc.
After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake. I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After that they sign a contract with one of them."
The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or have anybody in their group that does X. For all they know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.
I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of course, those people were curated by the agency after I made my comment.
I'm not sure entirely that it's not cultural, though I'd love for someone to confirm. I interviewed with a recruiter for jobs in Australia, and they asked that I make my resume into a novel.
I wasn't trying to imply that all countries have similar expectations of resume format and length. I was just saying that if all the resumes from recruiting firms are atypically long, it's probably the recruiting firm that is responsible. It's not because they employ people on visa or anything like that.
I'm an immigrant to the US, and in my home country resumes are all really long. Even people who have never had a job and just finished their bachelors somehow find a way to have 5 page resumes. I think immigrants to the US in IT/Tech roles figure out fairly quickly that they need to drastically reduce the lengths of the resumes.
Huh. How long ago was this? Genuinely curious (pessimism and cynicism in cheek, if you will) if this is a good idea for me to do if I'm applying somewhere not deeply technical (eg, FAANG).
I'm actually in Australia myself. Guess my choice of reference for "nearby offices of competent tech companies" had unintended geographic connotations, woops
Some companies want resumes submitted as text or .DOC, for easier keyword searching perhaps. Or to avoid viruses? So the recruiter may OCR the PDF, then "improve" on it.
It's really not made to be and with the exception of an embedded file that's actually editable (eg: LibreOffice optionally keeping an ODT version inside the PDF), "editing" a PDF tends to be a disaster of trying to match the layout with whatever text you are attempting to edit.
Certain tools, such as Word and LibreOffice, make it a bit easier as most of the source text is in the document, others like LaTeX end up looking like garbage through machine processing.
> Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me
I once refused to let a recruiter send my resume to this company because I thought the company was slimey (it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government)
The recuriter started getting angry at me, so I made it clear I would not work with someone who didn't respect me, and hung up. A recruiter who views you as simply a product to sell is not worth keeping. There's a million recruiters.
A recruiter called me out of the blue years ago when I was looking for a job, probably from LinkedIn. I didn't know much about contracting so I was just curious as to what he could do for me.
He called me once screaming at me because he thought I was not being exclusive to him with regards to a particular job. I told him quickly where to go, it was him who called me, grow up and stop wasting my time. To this day I have no idea what he was smoking that day cause I'm as bewildered now as I was then about what he was on about.
> it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government
> Had the almost exact same experience, but with Java. I'm a C# developer and although I have some experience with Java
>Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?
Yea, hear that from the other side:
I went for interview at Amazon (~2017?) for Java backend engineer. During the interview they were asking me only JavaScript questions from what looked like a standardized form to filter out phonies. I obviously failed the interview. Was told if this isn't the job I wanted I should apply for a different job and come back when I get some more experience in... Java. The recruiter had absolutely no idea that Java isn't JS and was interrupting me when I tried to explain the situation. I really should have applied for a job I wanted. One of the worst interviews I event went to.
Java devs with wide recruiters network got such emails weekly, calls monthly, until TypeScript came to rescue.
That's something I've noticed over the last 10 years or so as job descriptions get longer.
All those new terms like React, Vue, SaaS, Azure, AWS etc. They don't really know what they mean.
I was asked if I could code in Azure. This led to a weird conversation where I was trying to explain what Azure was, whilst he wouldn't listen to me and was adamant that it was a programming language.
"But can you code in API? I don't want your life story, just answer me! Do you know API?!"
I'm so lucky, I think I found the best recruiter in all Vancouver. He helped me get my ideal role and was generally kind and competent. Just to offset the horror stories.
How did you find your recruiter? Do you mind sharing the rough process that unfolded? Not asking for you to share them, just wondering if there are any takeaways you would have for others on the process.
No prob. He actually had a position advertised on roberthalf.ca.
The position seemed right up my alley. The directions part explained he was the recruiter for this position, and to reach out on LinkedIn first. So, I did that. I guess it was a pre-screen to see if I read directions.
He accepted the request but didn't respond to my message for a few days. I'm really not good at self promotion, but I also really wanted to get his attention. I saw that he posted regularly to LinkedIn and also engaged with a lot of posts. So I posted a cool side project[0] to LinkedIn that I had recently done. I was feeling pretty exasperated, I think I wrote something like "if i will do this just for fun, imagine what I will do if you hire me." I don't necessarily recommend that exact approach, but he did notice it and that is what got the ball rolling. Thankfully he thought it was cool, because it is a little bit edgy. I was looking for a smaller company that valued a hacker mindset, so it was a bit of a filter as well I suppose.
We immediately hit it off. He seemed to understand what I was all about, which is cool. I'm an aspie and a lot of ppl just don't get me. He has over 20 years experience so he really knows his stuff and he was just nice and down to earth.
I got extra lucky because he was friends with the hiring manager for 20 years, they worked in the game industry together in the 90s.
I'm not capable of generating any takeaways currently, as I am real tired, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Hopefully my response was vaguely coherent and at least tangentially related to your question. Sleep time!
Seems like a wonderful red-flag system to me. I'd rather live in a world where bad recruiters make their values apparent than in one where they are well hidden.
TBF the recruiter likely was parroting what a previous candidate they were repping told them. I frequently find I have to re-educate recruiters who were previously informed incorrectly.
Absolutely, but that was kind of my point. A lot of recruiters I've encountered are like talking to a markov chain trained from some job ads. It sounds right if you don't actually know what the words mean.
..."maybe they are"...
did you check for a pulse?
I suppose there's nothing preventing walking Markov chains from having pulses...
But your comment is the pithiest most succinct one here.
Throw away the OP's tweet and all these comments, especially mine, and just put your comment on a blank page and let's call it's the succintestist summary possible.
I had one where "OWL is just like MFC, right?". At least she did listen while explained the differences. Sadly, I took a report writing gig to get out of one place. That was a hell of a bad call.
C# and Java the language are similar enough; the ecosystems are very different. A C# developer would mostly be expecting to develop Windows programs or possibly Windows server / IIS applications. A Java developer could be working on all kinds of different things.
I do most of my development in a what looks like a watered down version of JAVA. Last year I had to dive into C# and asp.bet for a bit. I felt like at home. The language makes sense,there are hardly any surprises and most of its features are excellent. You are right, however, that the ecosystem itself is different and it will take some time to get used to it. However, unless a company hires a contractor on a short term basis,the expectations are that he'd be there for at least a year or two. That's plenty of time to get going and adjust to the ecosystem,which,I think any competent developer would do in a month or two.
There are also arguments when it comes to some very niche types of jobs,e.g. deep optimization all the way to the compiler,some esoteric use cases,etc. Yes,in those cases it's better to hire language native,but for most jobs that won't be the case.
Keyword-happy business HR: "Sorry, we're looking for Java. Case-insensitivity? No, we have to be sensitive to everyone. Being insensitive is not what HR does."
Even one month - two months is a long time for any non-esoteric language except maybe C++ (even that one I doubt) for any developer with experience picking up multiple languages. Most teams are actively working on making their ecosystems easy to pick up for beginners.
That is, unless the company in question has made a complete mess of their pipeline and aren't aware or unwilling to admit it.
The trick isn't memorizing them. The trick is discovering them. I've been emitting various versions of Wingardium Leviosa at Spring Boot for days now, with no effect. Once I've learned the incantation I'll have it and can repeat it in ten seconds, but until I have it I'm producing no actual work.
Arguably, I'm more valuable because I have the capacity to eventually figure this out, rather than having already memorized it. But if this were a crisis rather than a minor bug, it would be much, much better to have somebody who'd already spent that decade learning all of the many, many, many incantations that Spring Boot requires.
(I'd also argue that Spring Boot in particular is much, much, much too dependent on incantations, and the main lessons I've learned could be put on my resume as "Expert in Spring, and you can be too in one lesson: Don't.")
That really applies to all ecosystems. Hiring somebody smart is better. But there really is something to be said for having somebody with X years experience, who can therefore do some things in 10 minutes because they've already done the painful part on somebody else's dime.
I was once backed into a corner to write a web app in some form of Java. So I chose Spring and Angular. After months of frustration, trying to find examples, and put something together, I had gotten just one "show" page and an "edit" form worked out (but not the "update" function side). I put it all aside one day, and wrote what I was working on in Rails. It took me 1 afternoon, including authentication with SAML.
That's when I realized 1) how much Spring and Angular were NOT doing for me (compared to Rails), and 2) how much knowledge lies buried in BOTH stacks. I feel that Rails is by far the better tool for creating CRUD simple web apps, but the ability to be quick with it comes from years and years of living with it, and understanding how 3 or 4 lines of configuration work together to produce the effect of several hundred lines of explicit Java and JS in Spring and Angular.
Disclaimers: YMMV. TACMA. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Et cetera. Et alia. Ad nauseam. E Pluribus Unum. QED.
From my perspective, a great advantage of Java over non-statically-typed languages is that when I make a stupid error, most likely the IDE will notice it and underline it immediately. Thus I don't waste my time hunting for stupid errors.
That is, unless I use Spring. The stupid Spring-related errors only appear at runtime.
Ok, honestly, after a year, using Spring is more convenient than not using it. (Basically, there are two or three types of stupid errors I usually do, and I learned how to decipher the intimidating error messages.) But the first experience is quite a shock. You write something with algorithmic complexity of Hello World, then you run the program, it throws a screenful of error messages, and you want to scream.
It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should have been, but usually the beginning of the next line. After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time it's definitely not.
Oh, if only you get error messages. My most common mode of failure in Spring is "nothing happened". Which there's no way to debug, or Google. At least error messages show up in Stack Overflow. You missed an annotation, or provided the wrong kind of annotation, and Spring just said, "Well, apparently that code doesn't matter."
Inversion of control means you have no control.
At least Spring has switched mostly to annotations, which are sorta like Java. The IDE can spot some errors.
Until now, I felt bad that I haven't learned Spring earlier. Now I feel happy that I only met Spring after the annotations were added. I can't even imagine the horror...
> It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should have been, but usually the beginning of the next line. After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time it's definitely not.
C++ template expansion and linker errors come to mind. First time you encounter those it's typically either very short and cryptic or at least 500 errors and the compiler hitting an internal limit of how many of them to display.
I reach for Spring Boot as my tool of choice for most APIs, but I feel your pain. There’s always a particular corner, the dreaded “configuration” folder, filled with a collection of random annotations, single-purpose beans, filter chain setup, etc.
I find that most of my business logic ends up being really compact and powerful, but the tradeoff is that one chunk of the project is really dense.
The problem isn't can I learn, the problem is do you want to wait. You need a few great developers who have a lot of experience to ensure that a mess that is hard to clean up isn't main. If you have a 10 great developers who know how to do whatever right, then 100 other great developers who no nothing about the whatever can learn. However without those 10 experts in the domain to start with nobody knows what the right decisions are in the first place - in 3 years they will realize their mistakes but by then it is too hard to fix them.
To qualify the anecdote below, let me be clear that I’m an outlier: I have shipped‡ software on _lots_ of different stacks and 35+ different languages°.
I know exactly the difference between having to deal with the Java ecosystem for SOAP and the Microsoft ecosystem for SOAP—I had to deal with both at the same time at one job a decade ago. At that job, I worked with a lot of really smart people, but it was a Windows shop. Most of the people I worked with _could NOT_ work with the non-Windows platforms we had to deal with (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, VMware, and HP-UX). They would _constantly_ break code that was written to be cross-platform safe because it wasn’t what they were used to. On the other hand, at least I didn’t have to become familiar with how Exchange worked in order to integrate with _that_.
The number of people who can make the level of context switch you’re referring to, or working with multiple contexts like this, is vanishingly small in our industry. It can be done, but I think that you deeply underestimate the surface area of those ecosystems and the _willingness_ of people to put themselves in uncomfortable positions. The OP who talked about knowing C# but being interviewed for a Java position would have been _deeply_ uncomfortable writing Java because the tools they were used to weren’t available.
I would not make the same judgement you’ve made here. That said, if someone _wants_ to learn a new ecosystem, I’m happy to have them explore that (I prefer ability to learn over proven experience when I’m in a hiring position).
‡ Shipped: made it so that others could use, not just myself. This would include a project that I ported from Ruby to IO so that I could learn IO and a project that I ported to Elm in order to learn Elm. It does not necessarily indicate pickup. If we restricted this to stuff that I know that other people used, I might lose a couple more than the two I just mentioned.
° Languages: I include variants of languages that are _sufficiently different_ from their predecessors so as to require translation. This mostly affects the shell scripting variants (Posix sh, ksh, bash, and zsh are all _similar_ but sufficiently different that I count them; I have shipped substantial scripts in each). I don’t count gawk vs awk. Regardless, I vary between 3–4 languages and ecosystems weekly at my current job.
Yup. Very similar language, but good luck going from ASP.NET MVC to Spring Boot without missing a beat. Or from WinForms and WPF to Swing and whatever else is new and hot in Java-land. Not to mention NuGet vs Maven, EntityFramework vs Hibernate, etc.
I think this hides/hints at a greater point, though. C# or Java is a technology choice (among many, such as which ORM to use or even whether to use an ORM at all). All technology choices have an impact, and, in my experience working with both of these and other languages, it's just as likely for two shops that chose the same programming language to have made enough other different technology choices to make the transition challenging.
No one said there wouldn't be some ramp up time. Especially if there is another senior Java dev on the team that can "show the ropes", I don't think its that bad.
If we're talking about a lead or solo dev position, it would cause issues though.
This. I can do programming problems in Java, but I definitely can't lead a team doing a Java project. I don't what Gradle/Maven/etc really are. I don't have years of experience with how libraries, the API request pipeline, middleware, etc work. I don't know little tricks / nuanaces, like the fact that Visual Studio has to be restarted for local code to pick up new environment variables, why String and string are the same thing, etc, etc, etc.
I actually find the things _around_ the languages like build tools and ansible and such by far the more confusing parts of dev work just because I never know which of them I should spend time trying to understand and if I just want a runthrough for someone who can already program I never know where to look.
Lots of new languages that arose in reflex to the "stack complexity" of Java ... eventually achieved the same stack complexity with a totally different set of framework/tool names.
Ruby/Rails in particular became this. Javascript rocketed to this complexity level, with the added chaos of seemingly reinventing the entire toolchains every 2 years.
yeah, i never understood that part. People wanting to use javascript on the backend, but not having any of those tools. They exist for a reason, and it's not to make things more complicated.
When I started developing I felt the same way. One day I finally decided that maven was going to be around long enough (and I was going to be a java dev long enough) to spend some time learning. It didn't take long, couple days at most, man has it saved me a lot of grief over the years. CSS was the same, although it took longer than a couple of days, it has been more than worth it.
Honestly unless a candidate would have to learn to code in a significantly different paradigm (eg has only OOP experience and the work is in Erlang), I can’t think of a reason why prior experience with the language would be an issue.
Ironically, going the other way seems to be more difficult. C# has more features to learn, but simply not using them until you learn them won't really hurt you. Going from C# to Java, on the other hand, has some traps. You can get yourself into hot water if you don't know, for example, that the boxed and unboxed numeric types have different equality semantics.
I think the biggest hurdle going from Java to C# is how you think about asynchronous code, more so for desktop software. My last role was C# with me coming from Java and I got a few rude awakenings.
I think it also depends on the role. If the role expects a deep dive into the language and its ecosystem (more of a senior role), then the ramp up time is longer. But if it is a more junior role where you are just implementing stuff using core components of the language, then it should be easy enough to make the switch.
> "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?"
While it was extremely unethical for him to change your CV, Java and C# are indeed very similar, to the point that most organizations use devs with that background interchangeably.
If that company really ruled you out because you had 7 years of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience, you likely dodged a bullet.
> If that company really ruled you out because you had 7 years of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience, you likely dodged a bullet.
Respectfully, I disagree. Things that you should learn over 7 years of experience go far beyond learning the language itself or the fundamentals of its standard library. We're talking about two very different ecosystems.
Yeah, there's some truth to both your points. If you need to backfill someone for an existing production project that doesn't have the bandwidth to train them effectively you are setting that person up to fail. This is why tech interviewing is such a pain in the ass though as there are a lot of competent programmers who can pick up new languages quickly. When we decide on who to hire while at megacorp it is always - generalist or specialist. When we decided on who to hire while at a start up it was always - growth minded and quick learner.
> We're talking about two very different ecosystems.
Are we talking about the vast differences between Akka and Akka.NET? ;-)
Honestly, to the extent the ecosystems are different, it is probably more valuable to add someone to a team with experience with a different ecosystem unless there is literally no one on the team with experience with the current one (and in that case, you might question your commitment). Yes, it takes a while to learn a given ecosystem thoroughly, but that's not really what is going to drive the productivity of your team.
Meh, sure a C# dev can do Java and get up to speed with it pretty quickly, but certainly a proper Java dev will be more productive immediately. Knowledge of frameworks is a real skill for example.
The frameworks are typically very analogous between the two as well, it takes a while to learn them but in the meantime it's googling "how to do concept x in framework y". Apart from the initial project setup you're also generally spending a lot less time dealing with the framework and instead looking at other code.
I fired a recruiter looking for jobs for me once when he created a .doc version of my resume (unmodified from what had been in the PDF, but it looked like _crap_). I told him that was completely unprofessional and I couldn’t trust him to find jobs that suited my targets or skillsets.
Now, I tell people to look at my LinkedIn profile as that is the only resume that I keep. I’ll download the PDF of it if they want, but I haven’t maintained an actual resume in at least ten years.
It's common practice for recruiters to replace your personal contact info with their agency's header/contact info.
I don't mind that. It makes sense.
I generate my resume as a PDF from HTML/CSS. It's fun to see how recruiters handle that. I think most use image manipulation to insert their header. One recruiter sent me some image assets and let me add the header/footer myself.
I'm sure some recruiters go too far with the .doc, but there are legitimate reasons too.
Last time I applied for job through a headhunter (2010), they ran my LaTeX resume through an automated .doc converter that destroyed all the formatting and then didn't even attempt to fix any of it. Somehow I still managed to get some interviews, and when I saw the printout on the interviewer's desk I shrieked in horror and handed him one the original paper copies that I'd luckily had the foresight to bring with me.
What are these recruiters you all talk about? Are these some middlemen you contract to get you a job? Like an athlete's/actor's agent?
I only had experience with recruiters who work for the organisation I'm interviewing for. None of this contact info / skills tampering makes sense in that context.
Post your resume on one of the really big job boards like Dice or Indeed and you'll see what we're talking about. Last time I did that I was getting 4 or 5 calls a day. Most of those recruiters were from the same three companies and you could safely rule them out because they would ask for your SSN. But anyone who calls you and tries to establish a personal relationship might be worth working with.
Rather than wait for applications, some companies will hire third party recruiters to find candidates to apply. Some will have in-house recruiters doing the same. If they find a successful candidate, they're paid with commission. Sometimes, being contacted by one is the only way to apply.
I've worked with several recruiters who are trying to shop around as an outsourced recruiter. Basically, they take your resume and slap their name on it in an effort to show companies "You should use me because I provide well-qualified talent."
If you're not going through internal recruitment then this is a great way to go about it. The recruiter isn't just trying to get their 20%, so they spend a lot more time getting to know you and also getting to know where you're going.
The biggest down side is that you'll never hear a negative word about anything, so you gotta be good at asking some pointed questions.
Never send doc. Always pdf. Next time I'm lookin I'm gonna send a jpeg for shits n giggles.
Same goes for references, always, "available on request for the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't have them. Go find your own clients".
This may be a benefit in this case, as sneaky edits to a JPEG full of text will show up as a difference in patterns of artifacts - original text will be compressed twice, while the edits just once (or once and zero if they save the edited image to PNG). Takes a bit of time and skill to make this unnoticeable.
Ages ago, I was looking for a job. I made my CV using LaTeX, and provided it as a PDF to the recruiters. They straight turned around and asked for a Word format version instead. So I converted each page into an image, and pasted each one into a page each in a Word document, then sent that to them. They complained that there was something wrong with the document, and they were having trouble editing it.
I later had a job interview, and saw what the potential employer had been sent. They had re-typed it, and it looked awful.
> Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?".
Are those types of exchanges still take place at the interviews? I was lucky enough to avoid them, having worked at companies that are able to afford to spend extra time training people. Those types of discussions often remind me of the Linus' quote: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
Pretty much every interview I've had has been like that. Asking lots of exam style question about the language/platform.
In my experience most employers say they want good programmers, but in reality they want quick programmers. People who can get the product out the door ASAP. And that's why I wouldn't take a Java job without learning the ecosystem first. Even if they promise training, there's a high chance of them reneging. So I would end up in a stressful situation trying to learn as I go.
I'd rather stick with what I know and what I'm good at.
Had this happen to me as well, only my background is JavaScript. I've had more than one conversation with a recruiter where they didn't understand the difference between Java and JavaScript, so I'm unsure whether this was done due to malice or incompetence.
+1 to the PDF resume, if for no other reason than you don't have to deal with format issues on windows/mac.
That usually results in a drop in quality if they burn the pdf, and at least so far I haven't had that trick used on me. I suppose you could add some watermarks to discourage it.
> Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.
Although it depends how you generate it how easy it will be, Word has built in support for editing PDFs. So does LibreOffice (in Draw I believe). It's pretty accessible to non-technical people without expensive software to edit PDFs nowadays.
Weird. The recruiter did not show you the job description? Whenever there is a job sent by recruiter, I also ask for JD and the range of annual compensation. For the JD part, it is quite often that it is just a copy-paste from some employment website.
If I felt like I wouldn't get blank stares a lot of the time, I would absolutely love to use this. I'm at a completely different level of the industry than most of HN, so I don't get the benefit of (sometimes) interviewing with someone who is technically inclined rather than just a manager.
The IT market is pretty good compared to other fields but in the and, the market might have collapsed already.
""The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism" is a well-known[1][2] 1970 paper by economist George Akerlof which examines how the quality of goods traded in a market can degrade in the presence of information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only "lemons" behind. In American slang, a lemon is a car that is found to be defective after it has been bought."
So most good candidates and most good companies have long exited the official job market and work with referrals or whatever. And all what is left is that now shitty companies are receiving shitty applications. And if a non shitty company offers a job in this market or a good applicant applies to a job, the other side will never believe it.
In Johnathan Swift's “Gulliver's Travels” (published 1726) it is stated that fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market. Your comment describes a situation where exactly that happened. It is frustrating to see such an important (and simple) lesson, known literally for centuries, get forgotten or ignored.
> fraudulent behavior needs to be punished systematically since the erosion of trust will eventually destroy a market
Can you expand on the quote from Gulliver's Travels? It's been decades since I read it and I can't think of where in the book it could have been from, I don't remember much economics being in the book...
They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man’s goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. I remember, when I was once interceding with the emperor for a criminal who had wronged his master of a great sum of money, which he had received by order and ran away with; and happening to tell his majesty, by way of extenuation, that it was only a breach of trust, the emperor thought it monstrous in me to offer as a defence the greatest aggravation of the crime; and truly I had little to say in return, farther than the common answer, that different nations had different customs; for, I confess, I was heartily ashamed.[330]
[330] An act of parliament has been since passed by which some breaches of trust have been made capital.
What a gem this quote is. We index so much on punishing even fake violence in situations where there is real risk to both parties, and as a result, we incentivize fraud on a massive bubble scale level.
Probably some of that, plus the factors mentioned in Joel's old blog post:
In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job through references they made at their last one. If they happen to not have any references who can get them a new job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get snapped up quickly.
Bad Developers tend to get fired or forced to quit a lot. Nobody who has experience working with them wants to hire them. They spend a lot of time on the general market applying for tons of companies that reject them. They keep doing this until they either finally learn some skills or figure out that development just isn't for them and find another line of work.
> In an over-simplified world of Good Developers and Bad Developers, the Good Developers generally don't get fired or quit much, and if they do, can usually get another job through references they made at their last one. If they happen to not have any references who can get them a new job and enter the general recruiting market, they usually get snapped up quickly.
They will also get snapped even before they end-up on the open market. For college hires, might be more than a year before they graduate or accepting a full time position at the end of an internship.
Hey, I said it's oversimplified. Don't get hung up on trying to categorize yourself as one or the other. You CAN get into another stack or another company if you really want to.
Do you think this would explain the status of places like LinkedIn? Long ago, it was an OK place to have an online CV. Now it is a place people use show off with non-relevant _stuff_.
LinkedIn is a weird place indeed. Every couple months or so I pop in to check something or somebody out, and my eyes briefly skim my "feed". What I've noticed over the past year or two is that people who I know personally that have much more clout and much better network than I do, particularly the ones I know from the local startup culture - the people who have no reason to visit the site - they seem to be posting and reposting a lot of _stuff_ there recently.
I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.
Unemployed middle class people who suddenly have a lot of time on their hands -- more than job hunting can possibly consume -- not to mention that many people mope around a bit (dealing with a kind of minor depression) just after fired and take a couple of weeks to get their mojo going again.
I think the "middle-class" comes from the fact that such people have cash savings to weather a job hunt, whereas people without savings have to start working pronto on whatever if they're going to be eating and roofed in two weeks.
> I have two competing hypotheses for it. One, they're just bored, and LinkedIn is the new Facebook for middle/upper-middle class people. Two, there are signalling to and chasing people with access to lots of money, who for reasons unfathomable to me, also hang out on LinkedIn.
Here's a third one: It's curated to folks with similar professional interests and isn't political.
Though I don't really use it myself, it's apparently very effective for companies to use to post stuff. So there's a fairly systematic effort at a lot of places to get employees to post recommended articles/posts on LinkedIn.
I don't know. I deleted my Linkedin Account long time ago.
People receive a lot of BS on Linkedin but for some people it works. This being said, the people I know whit 8-9 fig net worth, you wont find on linkedin.
Yep, for my first programming job out of college a recruiter arranged an onsite interview for a Java role, when I was under every impression it was for Ruby/Rails. I don't know Java.
The first interviewer laughed and walked out. I explained things to the recruiter, he cursed, said he would "visit the Ruby team upstairs". He actually managed to setup an impromptu on-site interview with the Ruby team on that same day. I got the job.
I'm not sure. Recruiters can spray and pray with candidates the way candidates can spray and pray with applications. They're not going to be great quality, but if you're paid commission on a hire and the recruitment channel can handle the load... what's to stop the recruiter?
Aside from it destroying future business (we've had recruiters change candidates' resumes on us and that recruiter is blacklisted - by name - forever, to anyone who will listen), most contracts will have a 30-day clause where if the employee leaves for any reason within 30 days the fee is returned. Some even have if employee is fired within 30 days that the next placement fee is discounted.
When I connect with recruiters on Linkedin, I often notice they've spent a short time at their current position. Their tactics might not be sustainable.
That said, it's a bit absurd there aren't separate classes of users on Linkedin. Do I need to know a recruiter's work history?
Spray and pay works for sending people a little underqualified for a job. Sending people who don't know why they've been put forward for a job under false pretences just means the client won't interview any more candidates you send, especially if that candidate is plenty employable enough not to bother bluffing their way through.
And unlike candidates, recruiters can potentially get paid to fill a lot of a company's vacancies, provided they don't get blacklisted by them...
Nonsense told to me repeatedly by recruiters over the years:
- (your point) no incentive to send you for an interview if not a good fit.
- "I make more money if you make your money" often said to spin the "what is your salary requirement" question
Most recruiters work for an agency. Agencies have accounts with businesses. The account is central. You are in no position whatsoever to make determination as to what incentives drive the recruiter's business.
Recruiters also routinely b.s. young developers by "I get more if you get more money" when pressuring them into agreeing to a "salary expectation" right at the beginning of the employment negotiation.
Yes, recruiters have accounts with companies, but in my experience the recruitment fee is a percentage of salary, and the individual recruiter compensation is on a commission model. In short, I personally have no problems in believing that the higher the salary, the higher the payment to both the recruitment company and individual recruiter.
However, I think we all know that closing the deal is far more important to the recruiter than negotiating small changes to the salary, so your point stands.
I haven't worked with a recruiter, so this is pure speculation, but it seems to me that a recruiter's greatest incentive would be to close any deal at all as quickly as possible, because they're competing against the alternative of you finding a position on your own first (or otherwise no longer requiring their services). Getting you a high salary is just gravy.
You’re an engineer with a certain degree of experience and the recruiter will have an idea of how much that’s worth when they start the conversation with you, so they know up front how much money they stand to make as a ballpark figure, and how much work is worth putting into getting you an offer.
Once they get you to the offer stage, and most of the work is done, they want to close the deal as soon as possible for as much money as possible. They know the band for the position so, if you’re lowballing your ask, they have every incentive to bump that up.
On the flip side, if you’re asking for something on the top end of the range, and it looks like a long negotiation, they’re looking to spend a lot of incremental time for not a lot of incremental money, so it’s better to get you to accept an offer - any offer.
> they're competing against the alternative of you finding a position on your own first (or otherwise no longer requiring their services)
Almost every recruiter will constantly ask you if you're interviewing anywhere else or working with any other recruiters. They do this so they can be sure nobody else has the right to represent you to a client but also to gauge how much effort to put into presenting you to any of their clients. If you're not working with a a single recruiter exclusively, you'll often find that the amount of work they put in to get you in front of their clients drops dramatically to the point they no longer return your calls/emails.
It's one of those things that are technically true, but doesn't matter as much as the candidate is led to believe.
Negotiating $10k more for a candidate might see them get some percentage of that. But if they place you now, they can move on to another candidate and get a percentage of $100k or more.
Churn is far more important than min-maxing any single candidate.
Yep, recruiters like other middlemen make most money with volume not price/quality. It's not the size of the deal it's the constant flow of deals which makes them money.
For them to pay lots of attention on a single deal it has to be rather large, so that's why head hunters exist for top CxO type personnel, but not really for rank and file positions.
> You are in no position whatsoever to make determination as to what incentives drive the recruiter's business.
My god, how patronising.
My view on his comes from speaking to several hundred recruiters and owners of recruitment agencies as part of research for a product targeted at those businesses.
I also have close friends who worked or have worked in that industry and we have had very frank conversations about what their incentives are.
Maybe they all lied to me, but none of them wanted to put anybody forward for an interview who would make them look incompetent.
Their ideal flow for a deal was as follows:
- Receive brief from client.
- Find about 3 good candidates and get them booked for interviews. Could be more or less, depending on the role.
- Interviews take place and the client considers all candidates to be at least somewhat suitable, but decides to pull the trigger on one of them.
- The recruiter manages the candidate's salary expectations within a range based on their experience of placing other people in similar positions so that the deal gets done. Generally this means that they will try to get it closed within one or at most two offer-counteroffer loops. That may mean disabusing candidates of unrealistic salary expectations. It may also mean convincing clients to increase the previously agreed salary range to accommodate a candidate who is significantly more attractive than the average.
- The recruiter receives a placement fee equivalent to a percentage of yearly salary in most cases.
This does not mean that individual recruiters or agencies may not have other incentives. I know that sometimes interviews of external candidates are a procedural requirement and are conducted just for show so that a preferred internal candidate may be offered the position.
But in general, I am quite sure that the above is a reasonably accurate account of what the usual incentives are.
My second ever job was at a startup that put me through three rounds of interviews, all of them in Python. The homework task, the questions, literally nothing else was mentioned through the entire process.
After I got hired, I showed up the first day and one of the managers asks me, "So I heard you know functional programming, right?"
I said "yes" and was immediately whisked off to the backend division that worked entirely in Scala, a language I had literally never spent more than 5 minutes on before dismissing because the online tutorial I was using broke about two chapters in.
Is it unusual? I’ve changed jobs three times now going into places with different languages than ones I had much experience of. IME it takes about as much time to learn the codebase as it does to learn a new language and both go hand in glove.
IME it depends on the shop and it's own skill level. If you've got a bunch of devs with only experience in the tech stack the company is using, they'll be heavily selective for a match to their stack. If they've got a broad set of internal tools in a bunch of languages, they're likely selecting more broadly based on overall skill or the ability to get up to speed.
And I'm 100% with you there, learning a new place's codebase can often take as much or more time than learning a new language (at least if you've got experience with a couple of languages already). There's at least tutorials and guides for a new language, and there's rarely good docs and resources for the codebase.
I once applied for an internship at EA and thought I was invited for an interview on C. They gave me some C++ code to fix, which I didn't know, it wasn't on my CV. They just said "well this code is basically C", although I was pretty confused about those extra "&" the whole time, and it was a pretty rough experience.
In the end I didn't get the job, but their response said I didn't get it because the found that my experience didn`t match my CV. Go figure.
Similar situation for me on the other side. Interviewing a guy that would be my colleague. Asked him a few things about his resume, he gave me an odd look then asked, "May I see that?" When I handed it to him he scanned it over, handed it back to me and said, "This is an utter fabrication."
We hired him (interview went on discussing the job, his actual background, etc.) and he was really good, but I don't know what my bosses did with that recruiting agency, if anything. Above my pay grade, that.
This was early 1990's, so this charlatanery is not new.
I get as angry with recruiters as everyone else, but then I remember then time where I worked for a company that shared a floor of a serviced office building with a recruitment company. They were brutal in their treatment of staff - they were too cheap to get rooms for staff appraisals so they would do them in the coffee area we shared with them so we could hear how they were treated by their management - seeing people (men and women) in tears was pretty much a daily event.
Used to work at a place that shared a kitchen with a recruitment company and the same thing would happen. Very awkward to have to make a coffee right next to someone in floods of tears getting absolutely monstered by their manager.
It's a sales job and a hard one and most people are crap at it,hence the churn. I've spoken to a few in their early 20s that were very good but then they aren't your usual Java is the same as JavaScript type of people.
My sister worked at a recruitment company for a while and basically described the same. They set targets for everyone that were basically not achievable ever, and managers were expected to basically personally berate you for not meeting them and place you on warning to get you to work harder and more hours.
She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets (obviously wrong.) She is very much NOT the type of person to do something unethical like that and felt extremely bad about it, apologized and got fired.
Recruitment companies will literally push their employees to and over the edge. You either live to work for them or they break you and fire you.
Outside of tech, mental abuse in jobs is shockingly common and frequent.
Outside? I got mobbed an entire year while doing tech support for a what-used-to-be poster child of successful tech.
Manager would randomly chronometer the time it took me to answer tickets and warned me I spent too much time thinking before typing responses... (turned out the rest of the team was just smarter and pretended to work hard: hitting backspace as often as they typed other random words... oh but the display of “intensity” and “customer delight” was glowing hot.)
At my last job I wasn't micro- but nano-managed - the "project manager" sometimes sat next to me and looked at me while I was debugging code. The IT sector definitely has its share of morons.
In a large company I once worked for I suggested a ticket prioritisation scheme based on assigning a numerical value to each staff member (e.g. CIO = 1000, lower values for lesser deities) and calculating a value for each ticket based on the sum of the values for each person standing behind the person actually fixing the problem.
This was based on observing 4 people (CIO and managers from intermediate levels) standing behind some poor helpdesk guy while he fixed a problem with the CEO's desktop background being the wrong picture or something....
I wasn't entirely serious and short of surgically grafting location detectors to all managers (maybe not a bad idea in itself) not sure how their location could be tracked with enough precision to make it worthwhile. ;-)
Great advice. Another variation on that is just getting them to look something up for you that is at least tangentially related to your work. Anything where they are now helping you changes the power dynamic and will make them super uncomfortable.
A good project manager will be confident in their position and in doing whatever they can to help the project and won't mind. But that type of person wouldn't be looking over your shoulder unless invited.
As someone of a more libertarian bent myself, I find the opposition to unions slightly puzzling. It's clear the disdain is driven by opposition to socialism, as so many unions are subverted by socialists and their influence, but as a general idea they are perfectly acceptable if not ideal and should be championed - free association, individuals coming together to use their bargaining power to provide corrective balance to a part of the market suffering from power and information asymmetry… there's so many good things about unions.
In fact, if they were championed by - shall we call them economic liberals? - then they might be a damned sight harder to subvert and be a whole lot more effective and palatable. I know Sweden has strong unions and workers on boards (something I learnt from the very readable though still arguable book 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism[1]), with restricted power (the employees can never become a majority in any vote on the board) and it seems to me to be an obviously good idea.
"She wasn't in a position to lose a job at the time, and felt she had no other choice but to begin lying about numbers to meet the targets "
But what have they done to deserve the truth?
More or less this is how we get thinga like Chernobyl, when the entire chain is lying because the cost of tellong the truth is too high and there is no incentive to do so.
Still, after the accident some of the engineers went for a literal suicide mission to open some ventil to make it all less catastrophic. And unlike the poor construction workers, who died, too, they knew what they were doing.
I doubt they did it just for the postmortal fame. Some people have actually moral standards and can stand by it, even if it means disadvantages.
Absolutely, but the events are not comparable. Sacrafice at Chernobyl might save thousands, sacrafice at %xcorp% saves a fat bonus for the guy responsible for the whole mess in the first place!
Edit: Everyone at the time probably thought that they were being sent to their deaths so they were staggeringly brave - but that's not how things turned out.
I am talking about actual voluntary suicide missions in chernobyl, like Lelechenko, Aleksandr Grigoryevich:
"in order to spare his younger colleagues from radiation exposure, he went through radioactive water and debris three times to switch off the electrolyzers and the feed of hydrogen to the generators, then tried to supply voltage to the feedwater pumps. "
Nope. Sales is sales is sales. It’s a pretty harsh world. If you’ve been a solid performer for years, maybe you can miss one monthly quota. Lots of abuse.
I used to know a chap who was a successful partner at a top UK law firm - he had a very successful run of work that lasted for years and made a lot of money for everyone. However, eventually he it came to an end and he had a less than successful month - he got the same bollocking about performance as everyone else, and in front of his entire team too.
the thing with sales is one you develop a sales skill and network - you go and set up your own shop and become an equity owner.
consider sales as a learning experience to set up your own shop
I imagine a lot of people here would consider it pretty awful if they would be routinely punished because something happened totally out of their control--like a decision maker at a customer changing jobs tanking an "in the bag" deal. Yet that sort of thing happens all the time in sales.
Sales is especially harsh in some environments.
I knew someone who ran the business side of a small company. They thought they were really good at sales. But they were really just handling client service, billing, etc. for jobs that the consultants brought in through their own relationships. They ended up going on to do "client service" (i.e. sales) for a big NYC financial institution which lasted about a year. I'm sure it wasn't pretty.
My brother worked in commission-based sales for a while. He said the performance bonus structure was awful. It was basically based on your performance increase, rather than your absolute performance. So the top performer would likely get the lowest bonus because it's hard to improve when you're already at the top. If 100% of your calls led to a sale, you might get a good bonus the first year, but you will have made it impossible to get anything in subsequent years.
It gave an incentive to deliberately do a bad job when you first start so you can "get better" every year and get a bigger bonus.
What made it worse was that each year, they would "adjust" the commission structure as well. Of course, it was never in favor of the sales people. Commissions went down while expectations on sales went up.
It's funny, you actually see this broken incentive system everywhere once you start looking for it. Here's a quick example from outside the business world.
I've been playing with Duolingo. The main incentive is seeing your "streak" increase (the number of days in a row you complete a lesson). You are allowed to make five mistakes total every day on the free version. If you struggle with a lesson, you might use up all five of them, in which case your streak will die. Duolingo allows you to spend points to buy a new thing of five "hearts" (the traditional video game lives). So you have a fairly strong incentive to make sure you always have a cache of points.
Once you blow through some easy incentives in the first few weeks, there aren't that many ways to get points (besides completing more lessons, which you can't do if you run out of hearts). One of the main ways to get points is to do well in the bracketed competition system, where you are compared to 49 other users you are grouped with every week.
Unless you're in the top 3 (hard, because there are a handful of people who treat Duolingo like a full time job), you don't earn any points from your bracket placement. You only earn points from going up a bracket at the end of a week (top 10). Once you reach the top bracket, you don't get any more points. So the system is actually incentivizing you to repeatedly drop down one bracket so that you can climb it again.
(Interestingly, there's a very easy time-zone based trick to get yourself much easier competition because their matchmaking algorithm is unintelligent. All weekly competitions start at midnight UTC on Monday morning, which is what allows the trick to work. I managed to get top three finishes in a pretty high bracket without much work. Been meaning to write this up...)
Sadly, it’s not as rare as it should be. Most of us here have limited experience with jobs where the company doesn’t respect you much and is confident that you can easily be replaced. Unless there’s a union the odds are pretty good that you can find a manager like that at a large organization once you get out of the high-status areas - especially when it’s something like an outsourced labor company where margins are low and replacing people doesn’t have much visible impact on customers.
At a tech company, anyone from the helpdesk down on the status ladder probably has a risk of this. Think about what it’s like being a cafeteria worker or janitor at a place like Google or Facebook where the managers probably joke about you as the example of where you end up in life if you don’t work hard.
It was a branch office of one of the big UK recruitment companies - I can't remember their name (it was ~10 years ago).
I suspect the management knew that berating people in a semi public area added that extra level of humiliation - their managers were all pretty scary and I didn't even work for them!
they get paid a recruitment fee equal to a 1 month salary of their recruit
It can go a lot higher than that, 3-4 months salary for more senior hires. The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivised to help you negotiate higher pay
Just like the real estate agent is incentivised to get you a higher price for your home?
No, the increase they get is marginal, compared to just 'closing the deal'. Especially when the company is a repeat customer their incentives are to get decent candidates quickly into a role without causing any issues.
"The good news is this means the recruiter is incentivized to help you negotiate higher pay"
Not really. Like realters, "Real estate agents do not generally represent the buyer," says Florida real-estate attorney Barry Ansbacher. "But buyers think they do."
I learned that quickly, so when I go into an interview I'm always honest and take a couple of extra CVs just in case the recruiter has changed something.
At one interview they told me they thought I would be a good fit, but couldn't hire me at my requested salary.
I hadn't put down a requested salary, the recruiter had put down an unreasonably high salary and almost cost me the job
Really, the breakdown was with the recruiter doing that without telling you.
Flip side: I helped interview someone to replace me for an old position. He was put forward by a recruiting company as having had .NET and Ruby on Rails experience. I asked if he had done any Rails projects. "Oh yes, 2 or 3." Because of time, I didn't press further. We knew we were hiring a junior guy, and I didn't want to tangle with specifics, or trying to smoke out how much he knew through technical questions. I'm a brutally honest person, and I can never quite catch myself being naive at the wrong moment...
When the time came to hand off the Rails project to him, I told him it was written in Rails, and he literally opened a browser, went to Google, and typed in "Ruby on Rails" in front of me. And that's when I knew the recruiter had lied FOR him, and coached him to just go along with the lie. At least THIS guy had THAT going for him.
When I told my new management about the lie, knowing what was coming, I just got a stupid look, and a "Well, this can be an opportunity to learn something new."
It took him 3 years to rewrite my 3-month Rails app in .NET, and I've heard it doesn't work.
Yes, recruitment is broken. In this example, it was an utter lack of care to follow up on malfeasance from a recruiting firm. They got what they ultimately wanted -- a warm body on an H1-B visa -- and that's what they'll continue to get with their process.
Had a similar experience when I showed up to an interview for a Windows sysadmin job that a recruiter had arranged. First thing they said was "so your resume says you have 5 years of AS/400 system administration experience?"
I think I was 22 years old at the time and had never seen AS/400 in my life, and told them so. They showed me a copy of my resume which had AS/400 and a few other skills falsely inserted by the recruiter. They appreciated my honesty and did call me back for another open position later, and told me they'd fired that recruiter.
In the spirit of Hacker News I'd like to respond to this decidedly human problem with a technical question: which file format did you use for your CV? Was it an easily-edited .docx file, or a PDF?
The PDF format is somewhat awkward to edit. I've never put much stock in the idea that this is one of its virtues, but for this specific kind of manipulation I can see it might be effective.
Having read a lot of CV's myself, recuiters will still edit PDFs.
Subtle formatting errors make it apparent when recruiters have reordered lists or inserted bullet-points here and there.
They'll try to cover contact details with white rectangles - infamously not great at removing data in a digital document.
Even when it it's not clear from the document itself, I like it when candidates come in with their own copy of the CV, I'm always interested in comparing the difference between that and the one the recruiter provided.
I have to say that it pretty much doesn't matter anymore.
In the last ~4 years I've only sent out PDF copies of my Resume to Recruiters.
A couple of have turned around and asked for it in DOC/DOCX, but a whole bunch more have just copy/pasted it into their own template and sent that to the employer.
I've turned up to interviews and offered the interviewers copies of my resume, and they wave something with the recruiters's logo all over it and not looking at all like what I sent in.
Exactly this. As someone on the hiring side, most Resumes that come my way are identical layout for every candidate a recruiter sends.
As soon as I'm talking to a candidate 1-on-1 (without the recruiter proxying) I ask them to provided me an original copy of their Resume, because the recruiter may have left out important details (thinking them irrelevant, as recruiters typically aren't tech-savvy) when copy+pasting into their template.
Just a note to anyone considering using PDFs for their CVs. Plenty of companies use Applicant Tracking Software (ATS) to manage recruitment process. Most often keywords are extracted from the CVs. PDFs are harder to extract from meaning you might not even be considered (or even ever seen) by a recruiter due to a far from perfect implementation. Of course the case here is different all together but maybe this insight will save someone's a fair bit of frustration.
On the other hand, I've seen companies where the ATS is able to perfectly extract information from a PDF resume, and I'm always quite impressed by that.
Recruiters routinely & legitimately edit CVs to remove your identifying information when they send your profile over to clients to prevent them from bypassing the recruiter.
You're right of course that with OCR, and the right typefaces, it's always possible to automate the process of building an editable document from a PDF or printed page.
But I doubt anyone would take the hazzle of doing OCR. Because it is still a lot of work to spot misstakes (which still do happen, also with standardfonts).
Also, who would want to lower the perceived visual quality of his resume? And scanning a document, means just that. It will be still readable, yes, but you can see, that it was scanned in.
I just went through a round of job hunting and got plenty of private sector responses using a latex-made PDF. My resume is really not obvious that it was made in latex though.
I've gotten my last four jobs with a LaTeX made PDF and plenty of other offers.
I had a couple of recruiters ask for a doc/docx. I think I only made one conversion where it was the actual HR from the company using it for keyword matching and I refused to do it for the other recruiters. Still got invited to interviews of companies for those other recruiters.
Intermediary recruiters are well-known for asking for editable formats, e.g. docx. So technically you can stop them from editing your CV, but non-technically they can just decline to represent/use you. Or, they might just copy-paste your PDF into a new doc and present that to the potential employer.
If they come to me with a vague offer they can get my LinkedIn URL, and if they can't work with that, or really need a .doc then the conversation is mostly over for me.
It might seem harsh, but it's an easy way to weed out lazy recruiters that just want to spam your C.V. to many clients based on a keyword match when they upload it into their automated system and the recruiters that want to take time and even invest into a relationship to build a decent portfolio.
When I was fresh out of college, a recruiter altered my university grades. I literally asked to see the paper they were holding and told them it wasn’t right.
The same here!
I tell them that I don't own MS Word and that I don't know how to use it. If that's deal-breaker then I don't want to work with this recruiter.
But I must add that I am only looking for C Linux coder contracts.
I am really surprised so many people actually use recruiters :O Why not just look for a job yourself? They are so annoying to me, I can barely imagine anyone actually taking them serious...
> I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance.
I do technical interviews and I never look at CVs before doing the interview. I do this to avoid bias. I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job.
Also, people are adaptable, and soft skills matter a lot. So the error bars for recruiting even based on hard skills on a resume are really large.
> I want to treat them the same no matter if they went to Stanford or were not working for 10 years or if this is their first job.
I don't agree. If I'm interviewing someone straight out of college there are things I wouldn't expect them to really know and focus on whether they are focused and motivated enough to learn those things on the job. If the person at 15 years experience and doesn't know things which are a normal part of the kind of job I do, it would be a deal breaker.
Where I work, the interview is based on the level we're hiring for, not their background. If someone's expected to perform as a mid-level engineer, it doesn't matter to me how long they've worked as long as they can solve the technical problem as expected for someone of that level. It's a different philosophy, and has it's pros and cons.
I start off by asking them about an interesting technical problem they worked on recently, so I get to talk to them about that stuff. Unfortunately, many candidates mention the company they work for off the bat, which may introduce unconscious bias or whatnot.
Reading all these replies and - what the hell? Are recruiters really that common? Are bad recruiters really that common? I wasn't aware this was even a thing.
Recruiters are quite common in cities with a lot of jobs going, and industries with a lot of demand.
In terms of bad recruiters: A recruitment agency will often get a fee of ~20% of an employee's first year's salary - meaning they are extremely motivated.
That high level of motivation has some benefits - for candidates, they'll happily take care of any BS like entering your details into different companies' candidate tracking systems, writing carefully customised cover letters for each job, following up with companies after interviews and so on. And for employers, recruiters will deal with grubby business like cold-calling candidates and will often have access to more candidates.
It also has a bunch of disadvantages - recruiters will happily post fake high-salary jobs to gather resumes, add lies to candidates' resumes, help candidates cheat on work-sample tests, send generous 'gifts' to hiring teams that take their candidates, apply high-pressure sales tactics to wavering candidates, call candidates they placed after a year or two and encourage them to move jobs, and copy the contact database any time they leave a job.
Having been in the software business for nearly 20 years I can state that from my own experiences, recruiters are overwhelmingly bad.
The thing is that there are big incentives for the recruiters. Where I live (Dublin) the recruiters finders fee would be around 30% of the candidates salary. In IT that could be a fair whack of money. That sort of incentive can cause some peoples morals to loosen a bit.
Here are some of my experiences...
Recruiters editing my CV to make me look more skilled or possessing skills I don't have.
Editing my CV so that it contains the right information, but the formatting has been destroyed and it looks terrible.
Costing me a job opportunity when I applied direct to a company and because I was on a recruiters system they demanded a fee when they learned I was made an offer. Because the recruiter threatened legal action, the company withdrew the offer.
Calling at me at work. Even on occasions calling me via the company switchboard.
Arranging interviews without my consent.
A recruiter shouting at me for cancelling an interview because I was running a 39 degree fever.
Taking my LinkedIn profile data and creating profiles on their own systems. I added a fake job to my profile to weed those ones out.
Individual recruiters taking my data from one company to the next when they themselves changed employers.
Refusing to delete my data from their systems forcing me to go to the Data Protection Commissioner.
When I went self-employed they started calling me asking if I would hire one of their candidates. Even though I said I was a one man operation and would stay that way - they kept calling.
One recruiter calling my wife when I blocked their number.
Of course different peoples experiences may vary, but in my case I can honestly say I have never had a good experience with an IT recruiter.
Interesting in the UK every agency I have directly dealt with has asked first and got my verbal permission to represent.
Sounds like the employer is a shitty as the agency here, if I had had an offer like that withdrawn I would have sent a stiff letter from a lawyer wanting a "compromise agreement"
Prior to the GDPR I was only ever formally asked a few times for permission to represent. Since the GDPR the few recruiter I've dealt with always asked. I think the GDPR scared them a bit.
As for the offer withdrawal, until the contract is signed they had every right to do that. To be fair having seen it from the employers side, when an agency does something like that it can be messy. You may be the best candidate ever, but if the company has to drop a five-figure sum on solicitors and legal stuff then you may be more of a hindrance to them.
yes, even on larger agencies, you can find shitty recruiters that think their work is to move meat around.
once a recruiter made me run trough 5 interviews. I had a full time job at a time, with a decent pay, and explicitly stated my requested salary upfront. after the whole charade, which burned a significant amount of my vacation days since I was working at another city at the moment, they just came out and said the budget for the position was less than the asking price, but feel convinced it would have been a great opportunity for me.
goddamn scum.
oh, and the "opportunity" went into bankruptcy forced liquidation two years later.
Bad (external) recruiters are absolutely the norm. I'm sure a good one exists somewhere but I've never interacted with one. They are shady, they lie to you, they edit resumes, they are rude, they waste your time, they don't listen, they have no attention to detail, and they berate you if you even consider not accepting an offer.
Many small companies use them anyways for some reason.
Recruiters who work for the company they are recruiting for are normally pretty good.
That's why I always take multiple copies of my CV with me to any interview that's arranged through a recruiter and give the interviewer one at the beginning of the interview.
I once had a recruiter do the opposite to yours and remove something really important that I'd included specifically for the kind of role they put me forward for. They had just decided that they didn't think it was important. The interviewer disagreed and we spent a while talking about it.
The interviewer in that case referred to the recruiter as "the car salesman" throughout the interview. He said the guy was a bit rubbish, but better than all others they'd tried. They were a small firm so had turned to recruiters to take some of the workload. I think he was regretting it.
Just a question, is it common in your country to actually bother with recruiters? I ignore them by default as I consider it a slimy business and quite frankly I dont care what they have to say. If I am interested into working for some company, I will send them an email, regardless if they are recruiting or not and I was rejected in around 30% (but I do have something to show in my resume or even if they ignore it, in my hobby projects). 3rd party recruiting, with their generic letters? Come on, at least try.
But I must say this is something relatively new to me, I started to get those letters on linkedin like 2-3 years ago, is this like a common practice?
> The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them.
It's been a while, but when I doing technical interviews I would give the candidate a copy of the resume that I had and ask them "Before we start, is this your resume? Is everything on it accurate?"
Oh my experiences of the CV days when agencies would take your CV and send the client their formatted one (your contact details excluded of course) saw many fun times , today they kinda push the work onto you and just robot send what you give them for most area's. Some contract work with good earning rates for agencies will still see them tailor your CV somewhat, but for most for the best focusing on relevant area's for the role.
But a few of my more interesting experiences in the past in interviews regarding CV's have been:
1) Them having somebody else's CV content with my name attached - had that a few times
2) Them having 3 versions of your CV and first question is which one do I use and why I always carried a copies of my original printed out on nice paper.
3) Being interviewed for a different job than applied (my CV and experience covered wide area) for and not finding out until the offer came thru.
4) Turning up at an interview expected to speak Hungarian as I had Hungarian notation upon my CV.
5) Many instances of reused aberrations or when one letter be mistyped by agency making for much fun, maybe been bitrot/errors at play thinking about how some of those transpired.
But often my favourites would be when you turn up and the interviewer is down to earth and starts by glancing over the cv he got and pops it into the bin saying, we don't need that and gets into some technical questions and banter. Those always enjoyable and in a way often been a sign of a good boss - somebody who can cut thru the crud and get down to the issue at hand without the song and dance.
I had a front-end long-term contract many years ago that required expertise with C#, WPF, Silverlight and something else I forget. I had those things covered, but I soon learned that I was also supposedly an expert in SharePoint and an experienced graphic artist. The reality is that if they had given me any requirements for SharePoint I could have built that for them even though I had never used it. But graphic design I had no interest in. A few weeks in there was a lunch with recruiters and contractors for the project and one of the other recruiters (not the one who submitted me for the job) asked me something like, "when did you first realize that you loved to draw?" or something. I told her honestly I was horrible at drawing and not interested in it.
One of the reasons I got fired from that contract eventually (aside from a fight with a manipulative SOB who was fresh off a career as a local TV news personality and was holding the project up in his backend role) was that they were disappointed with my lack of interesting user interface designs.
I never told anyone I was a graphic artist. Even if I did have that skill (or interest) (which I had neither), I was too busy dealing with new WPF/XAML/C# features and software design etc.
Recruiters are very different from “the good ol’ days,” when they acted more like talent agents.
I was a hiring manager for decades, and appreciated recruiters that acted as advocates for their prospects; even when I ended up not hiring the prospect.
Nowadays, it’s all tag searches and fake “personalized” emails. If I have “I once had a cup of coffee” in my CV, I’m a “Java guru.”
I regularly send people interested in working with me to things like my SO Story[0], and they regularly ignore it.
Nowadays, I have the rare luxury of choosing with whom I want to work. If folks don’t want to work with me, then let’s not waste each other’s time.
I had a similar experience when I decided to move on from my first job. I naively accepted a recruiter's request to help and ended up going on a couple interviews where I was completely out of my depth.
5 minutes into the second such interview I asked the interviewer to see the job requirements and handed them a copy of my resume. I then explained that I didn't have any of the qualifications they were looking for, not even relevant experience, and noped my way out the door.
I received a nice email from the interviewer thanking me for not wasting their time and saying they'd keep my real resume on file if they had anything come up.
Yeah, recruiters are incentivised to sell you to a company, that's when they get paid. I believe a lot of companies have a clause that the recruiter only gets paid if the new employee works at the company for an X amount of time, but I suspect they gamble on the employee blending in.
But it's damaging, and the company will not be pleased with the recruiter if they find out they've scammed them into hiring.
I meet couple of recruiters who insist on me sending them CV as DOC. I tell them that I have carefully typeset my CV in LaTeX in PDF and I am not willing to rewrite it to Word. Usually this is the end of it and they just take my PDF.
I have once been on an interview and interviewer pulled out my CV, obviously horribly mangled in Word. I told him that no, this isn't my CV and that I take too much pride in whatever I make including my CV to make such horribly looking document.
I have once met recruiter who insisted I rewrite my CV to include description of my experience with everything that was listed in the ad. I told them that this is my CV and it already lists a lot of stuff and it doesn't make sense for me to list obvious things (like knowledge of Excel) or things I have no experience with and that in general the CV is about me and not about the ad contents. I got no reply.
Re word documents do go in document systems in the hiring firm so they might be the one asking for that.
As for the latter. You don't have one CV you have a separate CV for each application and tune it to the ad. The ad is what the hiring firm is interested in and if you fit their needs and not does the firm fit your needs, that is for you to discover from the ad or from the interview process
I've had a recruiter from a recruiting agency and a HR person at a company (different jobs) ask me to update my resume with something I wasn't comfortable with.
I didn't do it, both still offered me interviews and the focus of the interview was those technologies. I pointed out that it wasn't on my resume and yup it wasn't, everyone seemed confused.
At the time I was trying to break into the industry and didn't feel like telling them.
I really just want to talk to some technical folks at the company, 10 minutes and if they're honest we probably both know if I'm a good fit or not... but rather it's recruiter and HR filters up the wazoo.
The whole thing is a stupid game where companies, recruiters, and etc don't know what they're talking about, play alphabet soup, ghost people ... and then get upset when it happens to them...
The whole process seems disconnected and shockingly dishonest.
Recruiting should require basic familiarity with the target industry, and knowledge of what type of background is actually relevant to a position. The overwhelming majority of random recruiter messages I’ve received over the years have basically just shown the cluelessness of the recruiter.
There are so many programming languages out there, as a hiring manager it’s not uncommon for me to see resumes with languages I’ve never heard of and probably don’t care much about. The cheat code just depends on how it has been inserted into the resume.
If I threw out every resume with some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem, etc. I’d probably never hire anyone
> some weird quirk, spelling or grammar issue, layout problem
I don't dock points for layout issues (unless they say they have experience in front-end work...), but spelling and grammar is exactly what you should be getting right in an resume. I don't meant to say I would be unreasonable pedant about the use of prepositions, and I'd probably overlook an MS Office autocorrect (like how Excel always changes "HSA" to "HAS", grrr) - and small mistakes must never invalidate someone immediately - but it means I'm going to be in the session with a dim view of the candidate until and unless they demonstrate otherwise.
That said, recruiters and agencies do edit resumes - so if something seems off with a resume (e.g. "20 years experience with Rust") then I do have a policy of directly contacting the candidate with the resume attached and asking them to verify that this is the resume they wrote. It's also why I sign my own resume PDF with my AATL certificate and mention that fact when I get to contact the hiring manager (e.g. "oh hey, did you have a chance review my signed resume? if it wasn't a signed PDF please let me know, thanks!)
I had a recruiter dress up my (at the time) plain sysadmin resume as a .NET developer with sysadmin experience and I got blindsided by what the position I was interviewing for actually was when I got there. What a waste of everyone's time. And to this day it's always third party recruiters reaching out to me for positions I'd be "a great fit for", even though even though they're only loosely related to what I've I've done. I tried to avoid external recruiters for the most part these days.
When looking for a job after university, I once got invited to an interview via a recruiter who - as they do - said I'd be a great fit. I booked a train ticket for the Monday interview, with multiple hours of leeway, and said I'd be glad to attend.
On the Friday morning before the interview, the recruiter gave me a rough idea of what kind of technical questions they'd ask me.
They were nothing like my area of expertise.
If something like this happened to me today, I'd cancel the interview, apologise to all the parties, and wouldn't drive there on the day of the interview. But I was a poor student, I didn't drive, I'd already bought the train ticket and, with the limited funds I had, being able to go to any further interviews was contingent on me getting paid expenses for this interview.
So I spent the weekend dreading the interview, skipped Monday's lectures, and went to my ritual humiliation. During one excruciating question about AC motors, I came within seconds of telling the interviewers that it wasn't going to work out. But, to ensure I got the train fare back, I had to do appear to be trying my hardest.
> The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.
Exactly this. The most depressing thing to me is that whenever I suggest to my colleagues that 99% of the work we'd hire someone for anyone with half a brain could learn in a few weeks (I work in an office for a big company), they still insist on listing all sorts of required skills. Even though the people we land with job adverts like that don't usually have the skills and then get hired anyway.
>The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end
It is. Have you filled out an online job application lately? I've abandoned multiple opportunities when I was directed to an online application that looked like it was written in the 1990s and literally asked me to rekey every bit of info that is already on my CV. There's no reason for a job application to ask for anything other than name and email with a button to upload your CV in this day and age.
A lot of comments under here are talking about recruiters changing CVs, but I can't imagine why anyone would do that. Like, what is the incentive there?
Are these "outsourced" recruiters that get paid regardless of the quality of the candidate? Is that a thing? (I genuinely don't know, I've only ever talked to in-house recruiters that had their incentives aligned with the company so there's no reason for them to lie about candidates)
We interviewed a person a number of years ago now in a similar boat.
We'd asked him how proficient he was with a number of technologies he'd listed on his resume, and he didn't seem to know what any of them were.
Finally, frustrated, we asked him why he'd put these things on his resume. He said "my recruiter told me to". Sigh. I don't know for certain but I believe we didn't work with that recruiter again.
This happened to me as well. I am so glad I had a copy of my CV with me that I could hand over.
The recruiter had copy and pasted from my perfectly formatted LaTeX typeset resume and changed what I did and when. They were looking for someone to help them migrate from one system to another and I didn't have experience in the first to help with that.
I had a recruiter ask me for a .doc version of my CV, which I had written with LaTeX. I explained to him that I had no way to do that, and after he insisted I understood that the point was for him to pad it with skills that prospect employers might be interested in.
I wonder if that's a factor in the rise of new industry terms - I think devops is quite a good descriptor but it's still quite unnecessary, operations (or the like) is perfectly good - but, for a while at least, it does help mark you out from the crowd.
My dad had a recruiter delete his PhD from the education section. During the interview a topic related to his thesis came up, he mentioned his thesis and the interview was over because "we don't hire people with PhDs"
1. Having interviewed otherwise similarly qualified recent graduates, those with PhDs absolutely were worse on average at writing code[A].
2. Having a PhD raises the salary you can get at other jobs (less true today then 25 years ago when it happened, but still somewhat true), so if the job isn't paying particularly high rates then they either worry about retention or quality (i.e. you can either get a better paying job elsewhere because of the PhD or you can't despite the PhD, neither of which bodes well for the company hiring).
#1 didn't really apply to my dad since he had over 10 years of industry experience at that point, but might be the reason for the policy.
A: I don't know why this is so. I suspect it's a combination of factors; those with good practical skills may be lured away from academia after one of their previous 2 degrees and never get a PhD; the PhDs looking for industry jobs are already those who were disqualified from academia for some reason? I never pursued any education after my B.S. so can really only speculate.
This is why I don't hand out my resume as a word (or whatever doc). It goes out as a PDF. My assumption is that someone smart enough to edit it, is smart enough to know that adding needed shit to the resume is a bad idea.
Exchange 4.5< admin popping in to say hi. The management interface to 2000 was basically the same as 2003 & 2007, it wasn’t until 2010 iirc that the web based interface + everything is cloud doctrine hit.
Where were you when I needed you in the interview? ;-P
I don't remember the year it happened but it could even have been 2001, even 6 months to a year at that time would count as "extensive", I suppose. Can't say I had extensive 5.5 experience at that point either, to be fair.
They were probably concerned about their upgrade path from NT to 2000 and active directory more than just the mail server. I'll never know!
That's pretty wild! I've worked with a fair number of recruiters at this point, from both sides
of the table, and the next one I see pull something like that will be the first.
MOVA stands for “multiple object versionless architecture”, which is something I’d imagine any experienced full-stack developer should be able to handle- if it were real.
Did anyone else catch the hilarity of their animal choice on that fake book cover? A Lion! (Lyin') I guess a "Bull" relieving itself would have been too obvious?
I'd put my money on the recruiter. I once had an excruciatingly awkward interview at a company on an industrial estate in the middle of nowhereland with no train station nearby that took me bloody ages to get to… which was actually going well until they asked me about my long experience with Exchange 2000. I had no experience with Exchange 2000, so I told them, and watched their faces drop.
That was specifically why they wanted to speak to me. The recruiter had inserted it onto the copy of the CV he sent to them. I'm surprised I'm not still doing time for murder.
What I'm not surprised about though is why they do it. I've been to plenty of interviews where my CV hasn't been given more than a glance. At moments like those I feel a deep sense of pessimism. The whole recruitment process seems broken from end to end and has been for a while.