The recruitment trap
My learnings on working with recruiters and some thoughts I’d like to share with fellow technocrats.
Please note this is not a rant, just observations I have made; some amusing, some frustrating and most pleasant and enduring.
A few points before I continue:
- Recruiters are just doing their job, they are nice people who want to help you and their clients.
- Your super awesome portfolio using the latest architecture, deployed with terraform into a kubernetes cluster in AWS isn’t really helpful to them, as cool as it might be to you and perhaps even a technical hiring manager (once they get to meet you after your cv has landed on their desk by the recruiters that have processed your application).
- Unless it is in-house recruiters, they do not represent the hiring company.
- Always be polite (duh!)
I was quite disappointed when I learned that Stack Overflow had decided to sunset their Developer Story feature as I am sure many others were, including Stack Overflow jobs. I found the feature really illustrated your developer story and it made no damn sense to remove the feature…Stack Overflow is our story! At the very least, it used to help me write my resume in a way that I wanted to express my work experience, even if I knew that recruiters weren’t going to look at my SO profile.
Another way to tell a story for developers is your Github repos, contributions, etc. Again, these are often ignored by recruiters but any hiring manager worth their salt will take a pique, I know I have when I’ve been involved in recruiting for my own teams.
Talks, presentations, conference attendance, side hustles, mentoring, the hard work and effort it takes to learn a new programming language or grasp the latest concepts and the blood, sweat and tears of our toil all get left out and you’re just a piece of paper floating around in a .docx file extension, not a person with a real story to tell.
So here’s what I suggest and have had some success with:
Sometimes you’ll notice recruiters are pretty excited about your profile and a potential matching client that is looking for something with your skillset. Ask a bit more about the company and if you share the recruiters sentiment then put your best foot forward. Ask the recruiter if any profiles, portfolios etc can be included with your application for the client’s perusal. Tell them you want to provide a more illustrative summary of yourself.
Should you move on to the interview stage, I’d suggest doing a presentation that tells your story, being respectful of their time and consider that your interviewers may have interview fatigue if they’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates. If it’s your portfolio, a developer story you created or a project you worked on that you are really proud about; talk through it as you would in a demo, giving the interviewers an opportunity to ask questions like “why did you choose to use that tech stack?” or “can you explain the architecture of this project to me?” and so on. Questions they most likely already had waiting to ask you, but you are now able to answer them more confidently and comfortably in your own narrative, before they’ve been asked.
Give back. One mantra we all love and agree on about opensource is giving back to the community, right? The same goes for recruiters. They are very much a major part of our career successes and deserve to be treated with respect and cordiality. Give them feedback on your application and interview process, thank them for their time and effort and offer constructive suggestions on how you’d have liked them to engage with you during the process, if you have any.
