Dear Recruiters

Dear Recruiters,

As a recent job hunter, I talked to a lot of people at a lot of different companies, and words cannot express how appreciative I was when I finally talked with one of you — a professional whose entire role was to work with people in my position, looking for jobs.  You were kind, you were empathetic, you were interested in my success as a candidate, and you lent your company an air of credibility.  In many cases, you went above and beyond, scheduling on-sites at the last minute and expediting the process from start to finish during a two-week whirlwind of interviews on both coasts.  I truly cannot overstate how thankful I am for your services.

But, in the aim of being open, honest, and constructive, I have some feedback for you.  This may not apply to each of you — in fact it may apply to only one of you, or even none of you — but I urge you to examine your practices on each point and consider how you might apply each lesson going forward in your professional activities.

My first piece of feedback is simple and easy to do: get scheduling right.  Let me know when I should expect to hear back from you, and write it down.  That date is now a deadline.  If you can’t get back to me by then, it’s not a problem, but you need to let me know before that deadline passes so that I can adjust my expectations.  Just to confirm, it can be helpful to summarize all action items and deadlines in written form — a quick email — after our conversation.  In an extreme example where such action would have been helpful, I ended a phone call with one of you with a discussion about my availability for a phone interview; we discussed a particular date and time, and I took that to mean that the interview would be at that date and time.  I waited an hour and a half for the phone to ring (maybe there was a time zone issue?), and it never did.  Finally, I emailed you, and to my embarrassment, our discussion was but a preliminary one, and in fact the interview had not been scheduled.  A simple note indicating the schedule was tentative, and that I should expect confirmation from a third party, would have saved me a lot of embarrassment.

While we’re on the subject of scheduling, could you also try to make sure you’re on time for our calls?  This feedback is not just for recruiters, but is especially aimed at people conducting interviews.  Since you’re calling me (and I’m not calling you), I have no recourse in the event you just don’t show, save to email the recruiter (see above).  About three minutes after you’re supposed to call, I start to get anxious.  After five minutes, you’re late.  After 7, I assume the problem is on my end, and that I’m somehow wrong (sometimes I am; see above).  Again, it’s fine if things change or you’re running late, just communicate that to me.

Speaking of time, let’s talk about time zones and daylight saving time for a moment.  I may be on record as being vehemently against both concepts, but we live in an unfortunate world where the places we inhabit, be they San Francisco, New York, Washington D.C., or any other where in this otherwise great nation, are subject to not one, not two, but three separate time zones¹.  If you don’t know which one you’re in, Google “What time is it,” and you’ll find out.

On the one hand, I’d like to express my appreciation — especially to the west coast companies, as I was on the east coast², for always giving me a time zone.  On the other hand, it was confusing to me to see things like “11:00 AM PST on June 14, 2015,” since there are literally no places in the U.S. that observe PST in June.  A normal person would see this as an honest mistake³ and assume that they meant Pacific Prevailing Time, but as someone who was interviewing for data-centric positions, I honestly had the thought run through my mind that this might be some sort of test, given the importance of time zone information in time data and the indescribable complexity of dealing with such information.  I was so frustrated with this phenomenon that I composed an entire tweet about it:

Hopefully that tweet gives you a solid understanding of just how passionate I am about time zone data: Honestly? Not very.  I am pretty much 140 characters (or less) passionate about it, give or take a few blog posts.  You know what else I’m not passionate about?  Messaging apps.  Nor am I passionate about scalable web services, cloud storage, social networking, dating apps for 30-to-32 -year-old Zoroastrians with kids, or whatever your company’s app does⁴ that you put in your job posting.  Pretty much the only thing I’m really passionate about is sex, and even for that, only when I’m actually in the middle of having it.  For certain stretches of the term, you could claim I’m passionate about automation, or maybe dinosaurs, in the way a 6 year old’s unbridled enthusiasm about a topic well beyond his comprehension will undoubtedly leave a mark on him for another 25 years.  But Hadoop? No, I am not, nor indeed is Jim Q. “Apache” Hadoop himself, passionate about Hadoop.

However, as part of my new job, I am learning about Hadoop; it seems real great or whatever.  But besides passionate, you know what else I’m not?  I’m not the best at Hadoop — in fact I haven’t actually touched it yet.  So if you tell me that you only hire the best of the best, guess whose application you’re gonna be missing out on?  Hint: it’s mine.

 

But wait! There’s more!  Think about how many other, actually great people aren’t going to apply either.  Somewhere in there is probably a candidate that could transform your business, and you’re missing out on that candidate.  Bringing this back to my last post, in the words of Laurie Voss in his post “You Suck at Technical Interviews,” “Don’t hire [people] for what they already know.”  Hire them for what they can learn.  Going even fuller-circle on my last post, Joel Spolsky on the Stack Exchange podcast brings up some excellent points on that practice.  You can find them at about the 31:36 mark in the embedded episode below.

To paraphrase his point, which is actually Sara Chipps’s point from a previous podcast I haven’t (yet!) listened to, you don’t get fewer bad applicants, you just get fewer non-traditional ones.  The message you’re trying to send is that applicants will work with really smart people, but you end up scaring off anyone who doesn’t think they’re already the best, which means you miss out on a lot of really smart people who will learn what they need to, enrich the overall environment by teaching others what they know, and ultimately get things done.

Also, as a side note that I can’t make into a footnote due to *technical difficulties*, I didn’t start listening to the Stack Exchange podcast until recently, so it didn’t make it into my posts about podcasts, but in my own tweetwords⁵,

I know that I have been throwing negative examples left and right at you, but again, my experience was overwhelmingly positive.  To round this out, I want to take a moment to call out something that was done right.  Specifically, whether or not I actually was special in any way, a number of people, from recruiters to CEOs, went out of their way to make me feel that way.  There is nothing worse than feeling like you are one of a thousand people in a pipeline — a feeling I did experience — but the personal touch of people at a number of companies really made me feel like a valued individual, even at places I had no business applying to.  A small thing, like a 30-second phone call from an executive after receiving an offer or a text to say that the schedule had changed at the last minute significantly raised my perception of the company and my likelihood to recommend it to someone in my professional network.  It just goes to show the power of even the smallest gesture; a little thing can go a long way.

So, recruiters, hopefully I have given you an idea of a few little things you can do that will go a long way to improve your performance.  I look forward to seeing how far you’ve come on our next encounter, whenever that may be.