Recruiters are continually looking for technical talent, and they know it’s overwhelming. Just yesterday one opened an e-mail to me with:
“I am a recruiter, and I am guessing you receive a dozen messages every day from people like me trying to convince you that their company is the best place in the world.”
Developers are overwhelmed, and because of their frustration with the process, they are trying to work around it. The first thing they do is complain, to their friends, coworkers, and the internet in general. Here are the first 3 Hacker News threads I found about it:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7128221
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6965263
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7171442
Go search Hacker News (a place where lots of smart people tend to be highly opinionated about technical things and their industry) or the rest of the internet and you’ll find more examples than you have time to read.
Occasionally, they start to actually do something about it. The first one I saw was recruiterspam.com.
“Do you hate getting spam from Recruiters? Me too! Send your unwanted recruiter email to Recruiter Spam and we can collect data and study their habits.”
There, developers forward e-mails from recruiters they receive and they generate some statistics on recruiters. It never really got up much steam, but has made the rounds several times.
“We have a database of over four million developers, and let you cut & slice that data in various ways, such as filtering by engineers by skill, location, whether they work at a top company, or are connected to someone in your team.”
The team at Sourcing.io built a better database for recruiters to help targeting work better.
“The best way to find a job is to meet a smart colleague, and to hear the words “We’d love it if you’d come work for us.” FiveYearItch is dedicated to making that happen.”
The team at Five Year Itch built a better database of job postings for developers to poke through, and just announced “Developers recruiting developers” which allows candidates to ask questions to developers working at a company they are considering.
“Hired is the first two-sided marketplace created specifically for Engineers, Data Scientists, Designers and Product Managers who are overwhelmed with job opportunities.”
The team at Hired.com built a way for tech companies to bypass recruiters and compete to give offer directly to technical people.
And of course here at The Recruiter Project I’m trying to share information that’ll make it easier for developers and recruiters to work together.
Have you found any other ‘responses’ to recruiting pressure?
