Yap. I said it. Let the flame war begin! 🔥
If you’re on LinkedIn and you’re, in some way or another, in the Tech industry, I’m sure you have a few (or a lot!) of recruiters on your network.
Recruiters are a strange group of people that search for Developers and other professionals to fill up a vacancy (or more) in a specific company that needs a person with that set of skills. Some recruiters forget they’re dealing with actual people. You know, fellow human beings with families, friends, desires, fears, expectations and demands. Sometimes it’s hard not to think of recruiters as cartoon villains, reducing everyone to a number in a body shop, especially if they’re working for shady outsourcing companies with an evil mastermind as CEO.
You’ve probably seen recruiters whining on LinkedIn about how a candidate did this and that or stopped replying at some stage of the recruitment process. There are rude people everywhere, but seriously, can you blame them? I dare to say, most of the time they had good reasons to be rude or they simply reflected the way they were treated in the first place.
Here’s a list of things most recruiters do that make no sense and reinforce the stereotype:
- Sending the same old template to everyone, no matter the seniority, project, tech stack, etc.;
- Not knowing or not giving details about the project or company they’re hiring for;
- Assuming everyone in Tech must love Star Wars — Darth Vader/Stormtrooper image “Apply now!”, “Join the dark side”, Yoda image “Join the force!”. You know what I’m talking about… ughhh 😒;
- Having 5 recruiters from the same company hitting you up with the same message in the same week;
- Ghosting after you had an interview with them;
- Not providing feedback;
- Saying they have THE perfect opportunity for you, when they don’t even know you;
- Calling you during your working hours, knowing it might get you into trouble;
- Saying someone referred you, when you know it’s bullshit;
- Creating fake job ads just to put you on their database for future opportunities.
Just to be perfectly clear, I am a recruiter and I’ve had some of these things happen to me when I was job hunting and it sucked!
I try to use what I learned from that process to be better at this job. Do you remember that old saying: “treat others the way you want to be treated”? The same applies here.
Some companies do put recruiters through a lot of pressure, unreasonable deadlines and objectives, outdated tools and give them no space to think about what they’re doing and no room for improvement (Numbers, numbers, numbers!). Believe me, I’ve been through it and whining about candidates on LinkedIn isn’t going to make things better.
If that’s your case, I suggest you find a better company to work for, because if they don’t treat you right, it’s way harder to do the right thing. Besides, you’ll be on the other end of the recruitment process again. It’s a great time to learn how candidates think and feel when you are the candidate.
We’re not reinventing the wheel here:
It all comes down to respect and treating people fairly.
I follow a strict no bullshit approach to HR and I’m glad Runtime-Revolution supports it. If you are interested in who we are and what we do, make sure to reach out! I’ll make sure you get a clear picture of our way of doing things.