Roughly three months ago (in the beginning of March), for a variety of reasons, I decided to put my resume out there on the interwebs. Here I chronicle my experience being a software developer on some of the most popular and widely used job channels.

Background

For some context, I was doing research on an idea I had (now GroupTalent) and was also willing to entertain the idea of flexible interesting mobile projects. My resume included the following:

B.S. in CS and Math SDE at Microsoft YC Founder (Team Apart S'08, now defunct) Misc. consulting Independent app development (iOS and Android)

My objective read:

Seeking freelance or short term contract iPhone and Android development positions.

I posted this resume on Monster and CareerBuilder. I had also previously created a profile on StackOverflow careers and GitHub jobs. Additionally, and importantly, I had indicated that I would be willing to relocate.

Results

To relate my experience, I will begin with some numbers and then move into a more anecdotal portrayal.

Over the course of the roughly three month period after posting my resume, I diligently labeled all incoming emails from recruiters in GMail. Thankfully, I also use Google voice, and was easily able to identify and count calls and voicemails from recruiters. The numbers I am about to give exclude the numerous automatic emails sent from these sites; they all represent contact from actual people (or at least present themselves as so). The screenshot at the beginning of this post would suggest that I had received 252 emails, but this number is from when I began drafting this post roughly a week ago.

As I write this, all in all I have received: 266 emails and 96 voicemails. This roughly equates to 12.7 emails and 4.3 voicemails per workday. There were also some additional calls that I actually answered or that didn't result in a voicemail. My Monster.com profile was viewed 261 times and "saved" 37 times. My CareerBuilder.com profile showed up in 343 searches (presumably by employers), and was viewed 31 times. My profile on StackOverflow careers was viewed by employers a whopping 1 time and had 3 search hits. GitHub jobs doesn't appear to reveal any data of this kind.

The emails varied immensely in personalization and adherence to what I was actually looking for. My CV's objective of short term Android and iPhone projects functioned as a mere leitmotif or not at all. My overall impression was that many recruiters simply do blanket keyword searches for terms such as "java". Interestingly enough, many recruiters reached out to me on the premise that they found my resume on other sites such as Dice that I had never even created a profile on. It turns out that most recruiters do not even interface with the job sites directly, but instead use 3rd party software which crawls all the job boards for them.

Employers ranged from small startups to large corporations, the average being somewhere in between. The companies also included the likes of desirable A-Companies such as Amazon and Zynga. The split of jobs that were local and those which required relocation was about half and half with perhaps a few more on the relocation side.

Most recruiters were either head hunters or part of 3rd party staffing companies, but many were internal recruiters as well. For the first week, I actually answered all incoming calls, but this eventually became unmanageable. I used the opportunity to hear them out and also sometimes give them a reverse pitch on GroupTalent for feedback. Some recruiters were actually extremely savy people who wanted to build a relationship with you. Others were pretty abrasive. My favorite conversation was with the recruiter who actually suggested that I take a job at a mega corp while I still could since everything was going to be outsourced in the near future anyways.

Thoughts

According to Joel Spolsky, most good developers will never even be exposed to this situation since they will never be on the market. Combine this with the fact that everyone sucks at hiring and you have an industry that is basically a crap shoot. I also wonder if companies realize that many of their candidates are acquired through pseudo-spam.

In the interest of full disclosure, I actually have used Monster a few years ago and did wind up with an excellent consulting gig that was very flexible, but my experience was similarly noisy. I consider myself at least a decent developer and believe that good developers are on the market or are at least willing to entertain new opportunities. I predict that in the coming years the demand for top talent will be even higher and companies will need to resort to new ways to find and incentivize developers. While the experience I have presented here can vary, especially for new grads and developers travelling through reputation or word of mouth, my goal here was simply to give some perspective.

What is your experience being recruited?