Recruiter! 10 things you are doing wrong

5 minutes crash course

Recruiter, I’ll go straight to the point, I do want you to know:

1.You seem not aware that I’m receiving 5–8 new LinkedIn offers from recruiters per week. The competence is hard. The winner is always who wrote a short email highlighting what will be important to me and at first, it catches my attention. Not the shitty, not filtered, offer template you spam to everybody that you don’t even read or understand.

2. You are sending me offers that don’t match with my experience and skills, it hurts our new and fresh relationship. For example, imagine someone sending you (a recruiter) job offers for an “English to Russian” translation position… Weird right? Same when you write my name wrong or your templates get confused with my gender (this one for recruiters in Spain using templates).

3. It feels like you are trying to waste my time with unnecessary calls… When you call me, it’s like an insurance company trying to sell some service that I don’t even ask for. Sorry. Maybe that hurts. But you have to accept it. Don’t call candidates. Please don’t do it if you don’t even talk to them before. If you want to call, wait until you proposed something good, they accepted to go to the interview, then you can call to show some support and you will be a rockstar recruiter.

4. From a developer’s viewpoint, I will lose time with you if you convince me upfront that you can help me improve my professional situation. Improvement could be a more interesting project in terms of the value that it adds to the society or technology it uses, better team (smaller, bigger, better organized or with A players) better salary, better location, flexible hours, vacation, perks, and other benefits. Write all these things at the beginning of your message, if I do have a job, these are the only things I care to consider a job swap.

5. You cannot send an offer at the same time you are asking for my skills, languages, and technologies. If the job offer you send doesn’t match with my profile, it will mean that you haven’t read my CV or the job description you are sending, one or another.

6. You are not saying anything but send me your CV. Don’t ask me for CV as fast as possible. Send me an offer that could match with me upfront. Give, then ask for the CV. Get candidate’s details slowly. Like in a normal conversation. Build trust.

7. Don’t’ call me to know more about my “situation”. You probably have everything in Linkedin. I don’t need that call. you don’t need it too. Again, I receive 5–8 new offers every week. Use the email. Send me something short that could be of my interest.

8. Excuse me, but you don’t know shit about what are you recruiting for. Ask someone a brief description of each technology you are recruiting for. It’s not alien technology, everything could be explained in English. Understanding it with your own words will be enough.

9. If you act like a bounty hunter, maybe you convince someone to get a job, but that candidate won’t come back to you on his/her next professional move. Would be amazing to get back to someone you trust for every professional move.

10. Your spammy robots and scripts are not good enough. If you really want to automate your communication with candidates, I can help to do it better. Get in touch with Ninja developers at http://www.phpninja.info

Excuse me, if I could be some “rude” or some sort of a jerk writing like this. I really would like to help recruiters. In the end, they are my 75% audience in Linkedin. Don’t hesitate and leave your thoughts in the comments area.