I figured out fairly early in my career that if a company/team really wants you, the recruiter is going to roll out the red carpet, irrespective of seniority. It's happened multiple times for me, and has led to the few successful offers I've had. But if they're ambivalent, or you're just there to fill in the statistics, then problems will pop up: lack of proper communication, no clear timelines, canned responses, ghosting, the list goes on.
So I look for markers: if I see a quick turnaround time for my emails, I know that I'm in the right interview loop. Else I spend as much time as the other party spends on me, ie not much.
Absolutely. I've had two experiences that stick in my mind - one, where the recruiter told me within the first three minutes that the hiring manager had already seen my resume, they'd both agreed there was amazing alignment, and then proceeded to talk to me for forty five minutes about the company and answer questions to make sure I was interested in the company (I was). Yes, of course, his job, but it wasn't just trite vague and generic "We have excellent benefits", but talked about their path and plans and approach. He was very responsive, and sure enough, excited hiring manager call, and then just one more call, with the VP of Product, who outright said the hiring manager was making the call and decisions, if I was talking to him, I was basically a "finalist", and that he wanted most of the interview to be me asking him questions, not just so I could learn more, but he could see my levels of inquisitiveness, etc. I got that job, the recruiter was very responsive, we even joked that I had a brief moment of doubt when he sent me a message "to connect" after the two interviews: we'd had all our previous conversations via Zoom. I said in my email, "feel free to schedule a Zoom for any time after X or give me a call directly" (admittedly trying to feel things out), and he said "Oh, I can just give you a quick call" (and I assumed it was thanks but no thanks).
The other, they made things work. While normally, we're all accustomed to "Actually X has a conflict, so we need to reschedule" and on and on and you can find yourself a week, two weeks later, waiting still, this company said "X has a conflict, but we're going to put someone else into the interview", and then they had a challenge with someone being sick for a panel interview - "We're going to do the interview without them", i.e. they were committed to "we need to and want to keep moving forward". Every time I've had that rescheduling limbo, as you say, it's a sign (obviously there can be some exceptions), but when a company is working to make things happen, it's generally a good sign about your prospects, the company, or both.
I wanted to sympathize with OP, but I sense that the blog post was written while they were still fuming, and some of their behavior during the process (esp the first job) gave me pause. Maybe its just the timing that makes it feel aggressive.
Imagine you are a contractor on a gig. You don't wait until things break before you ask for access. You ask, before the job starts, what all the doors are and who has the the keys. So: "hey, Recruiter, in order to make this task a success next week and make you and me both look good I will need some stuff ready on day 1: what's your code repo system ? MFA?internal comms channel? bug system? internal knowledge base? and most importantly, if it's not you who can administer access to these things, who is the person I talk to, and can you arrange an intro on day 1?"
To not show this level of initiative, and sit around while your friend navigates the corporate machine for you, is the behavior of a new intern, not a senior developer. OP also doesnt say that they arranged a live end of Day 1 checkin with their task manager, which is another miss, since it allows for the latter to mop up any lingering issues ("oh yeah I forgot you need access to X, let me sort that out") and for the former to remind them that this is an odd task ("it was interesting that you asked an Elixir dev to work on a browser extension")
As far as being asked to work in TypeScript not Elixir, thats certainly odd, but could have been deliberate and not necessarily foolish. Maybe they wanted to see how intellectually adaptable OP was. Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates. We'll never know because OP sent a wall of text which surely would not have helped defuse the situation.
I think I agree with the spirit of your post mostly, but this bit:
> Imagine you are a contractor on a gig. You don't wait until things break before you ask for access. You ask, before the job starts, what all the doors are and who has the the keys. So: "hey, Recruiter, in order to make this task a success next week and make you and me both look good I will need some stuff ready on day 1: what's your code repo system ? MFA?internal comms channel? bug system? internal knowledge base? and most importantly, if it's not you who can administer access to these things, who is the person I talk to, and can you arrange an intro on day 1?"
I could not imagine asking a recruiter this, if it’s anything like the current recruiters we use, they know none of this, are likely incapable of figuring out how to learn this, and it’ll be blind leading the blind to expect this.
Honestly, it’s fine to expect a fair bit of inefficiency in your first few weeks as you onboard to systems, learn who people are, etc.
I think it’s just as well he was opinionated and realized it wasn’t going to work. Ironically, if this was actually the start of the job, I think bailing might have made more sense. Given that it was just a one week work trial, I feel like there’s little downside in just toughing out the remaining couple days and then deciding. Personally, if I found out the Typescript thing was a secret test of adaptability (which seems extremely unlikely) I would move on, I wouldn’t want a place that plays those kind of games.
> Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates.
I did speak up during the call if that is really what they want me to do as I have literally 0 experience with that. It was literally my first action after I heard that. I pointed it out to them, that it is not what I was expecting from this position.
> I wanted to sympathize with OP, but I sense that the blog post was written while they were still fuming, and some of their behavior during the process (esp the first job) gave me pause. Maybe its just the timing that makes it feel aggressive.
I do agree. The situation is certainly frustrating. But to me, "by the first evening, I was ready to go postal" is... something of a red flag about their manageability? I'll acknowledge that we have our lanes, and that LI is much more established, but if you were at a startup or smaller org, the whole "not my job" anger after just a few hours would be problematic.
Every time I've gone through the hiring process I contemplate starting my own recruitment agency because to a man (or women) every recruiter I've worked with has been shit. The internal ones are decent but 3rd-party recruiters know almost nothing. It's a revolving door of staff with zero expertise of recruiting and zero understanding of the roles they are hiring for. They are terrible at communicating, will ghost you for scheduled calls, and you have to prod them constantly.
In once case I knew someone at the company I was apply to, the recruiter I was forced to interact with did nothing and kept stalling. Finally I had my friend end-run the process and hand my resume to someone and a day later I had an interview and got the job.
That said, while I know it sucks being on the receiving end, giving feedback is a minefield and not an easy task. I understand the frustration, I've felt it myself many times but being on the other side of the table helped clarify the challenges.
That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s an obviously solvable problem but companies don’t solve it because incentives push them to this model.
There are of course exceptions where recruitment is well run, but for the most part they want (to the extent that emergent behavior from an institution can want something) useless people doing it.
(As an analogy, it’s sort of the same reason why all corporate training is shit, all HR is dumb, etc. Part of the explanation, but not all of it is the need to give the appearance of doing something for compliance purposes. You need something and to be seen to be doing it, but the quality is irrelevant so you get the worst possible.)
I figured out fairly early in my career that if a company/team really wants you, the recruiter is going to roll out the red carpet, irrespective of seniority. It's happened multiple times for me, and has led to the few successful offers I've had. But if they're ambivalent, or you're just there to fill in the statistics, then problems will pop up: lack of proper communication, no clear timelines, canned responses, ghosting, the list goes on.
So I look for markers: if I see a quick turnaround time for my emails, I know that I'm in the right interview loop. Else I spend as much time as the other party spends on me, ie not much.
This approach works extraordinarily well for essentially all interpersonal communications. Friendships, relationship prospects, etc.
Absolutely. I've had two experiences that stick in my mind - one, where the recruiter told me within the first three minutes that the hiring manager had already seen my resume, they'd both agreed there was amazing alignment, and then proceeded to talk to me for forty five minutes about the company and answer questions to make sure I was interested in the company (I was). Yes, of course, his job, but it wasn't just trite vague and generic "We have excellent benefits", but talked about their path and plans and approach. He was very responsive, and sure enough, excited hiring manager call, and then just one more call, with the VP of Product, who outright said the hiring manager was making the call and decisions, if I was talking to him, I was basically a "finalist", and that he wanted most of the interview to be me asking him questions, not just so I could learn more, but he could see my levels of inquisitiveness, etc. I got that job, the recruiter was very responsive, we even joked that I had a brief moment of doubt when he sent me a message "to connect" after the two interviews: we'd had all our previous conversations via Zoom. I said in my email, "feel free to schedule a Zoom for any time after X or give me a call directly" (admittedly trying to feel things out), and he said "Oh, I can just give you a quick call" (and I assumed it was thanks but no thanks).
The other, they made things work. While normally, we're all accustomed to "Actually X has a conflict, so we need to reschedule" and on and on and you can find yourself a week, two weeks later, waiting still, this company said "X has a conflict, but we're going to put someone else into the interview", and then they had a challenge with someone being sick for a panel interview - "We're going to do the interview without them", i.e. they were committed to "we need to and want to keep moving forward". Every time I've had that rescheduling limbo, as you say, it's a sign (obviously there can be some exceptions), but when a company is working to make things happen, it's generally a good sign about your prospects, the company, or both.
I wanted to sympathize with OP, but I sense that the blog post was written while they were still fuming, and some of their behavior during the process (esp the first job) gave me pause. Maybe its just the timing that makes it feel aggressive.
Imagine you are a contractor on a gig. You don't wait until things break before you ask for access. You ask, before the job starts, what all the doors are and who has the the keys. So: "hey, Recruiter, in order to make this task a success next week and make you and me both look good I will need some stuff ready on day 1: what's your code repo system ? MFA?internal comms channel? bug system? internal knowledge base? and most importantly, if it's not you who can administer access to these things, who is the person I talk to, and can you arrange an intro on day 1?"
To not show this level of initiative, and sit around while your friend navigates the corporate machine for you, is the behavior of a new intern, not a senior developer. OP also doesnt say that they arranged a live end of Day 1 checkin with their task manager, which is another miss, since it allows for the latter to mop up any lingering issues ("oh yeah I forgot you need access to X, let me sort that out") and for the former to remind them that this is an odd task ("it was interesting that you asked an Elixir dev to work on a browser extension")
As far as being asked to work in TypeScript not Elixir, thats certainly odd, but could have been deliberate and not necessarily foolish. Maybe they wanted to see how intellectually adaptable OP was. Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates. We'll never know because OP sent a wall of text which surely would not have helped defuse the situation.
I think I agree with the spirit of your post mostly, but this bit:
> Imagine you are a contractor on a gig. You don't wait until things break before you ask for access. You ask, before the job starts, what all the doors are and who has the the keys. So: "hey, Recruiter, in order to make this task a success next week and make you and me both look good I will need some stuff ready on day 1: what's your code repo system ? MFA?internal comms channel? bug system? internal knowledge base? and most importantly, if it's not you who can administer access to these things, who is the person I talk to, and can you arrange an intro on day 1?"
I could not imagine asking a recruiter this, if it’s anything like the current recruiters we use, they know none of this, are likely incapable of figuring out how to learn this, and it’ll be blind leading the blind to expect this.
Honestly, it’s fine to expect a fair bit of inefficiency in your first few weeks as you onboard to systems, learn who people are, etc.
I think it’s just as well he was opinionated and realized it wasn’t going to work. Ironically, if this was actually the start of the job, I think bailing might have made more sense. Given that it was just a one week work trial, I feel like there’s little downside in just toughing out the remaining couple days and then deciding. Personally, if I found out the Typescript thing was a secret test of adaptability (which seems extremely unlikely) I would move on, I wouldn’t want a place that plays those kind of games.
OP here
> Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates.
I did speak up during the call if that is really what they want me to do as I have literally 0 experience with that. It was literally my first action after I heard that. I pointed it out to them, that it is not what I was expecting from this position.
They didn't care. It was how they roll.
> I wanted to sympathize with OP, but I sense that the blog post was written while they were still fuming, and some of their behavior during the process (esp the first job) gave me pause. Maybe its just the timing that makes it feel aggressive.
I do agree. The situation is certainly frustrating. But to me, "by the first evening, I was ready to go postal" is... something of a red flag about their manageability? I'll acknowledge that we have our lanes, and that LI is much more established, but if you were at a startup or smaller org, the whole "not my job" anger after just a few hours would be problematic.
Every time I've gone through the hiring process I contemplate starting my own recruitment agency because to a man (or women) every recruiter I've worked with has been shit. The internal ones are decent but 3rd-party recruiters know almost nothing. It's a revolving door of staff with zero expertise of recruiting and zero understanding of the roles they are hiring for. They are terrible at communicating, will ghost you for scheduled calls, and you have to prod them constantly.
In once case I knew someone at the company I was apply to, the recruiter I was forced to interact with did nothing and kept stalling. Finally I had my friend end-run the process and hand my resume to someone and a day later I had an interview and got the job.
That said, while I know it sucks being on the receiving end, giving feedback is a minefield and not an easy task. I understand the frustration, I've felt it myself many times but being on the other side of the table helped clarify the challenges.
> every recruiter I've worked with has been shit
That’s a feature, not a bug. It’s an obviously solvable problem but companies don’t solve it because incentives push them to this model.
There are of course exceptions where recruitment is well run, but for the most part they want (to the extent that emergent behavior from an institution can want something) useless people doing it.
(As an analogy, it’s sort of the same reason why all corporate training is shit, all HR is dumb, etc. Part of the explanation, but not all of it is the need to give the appearance of doing something for compliance purposes. You need something and to be seen to be doing it, but the quality is irrelevant so you get the worst possible.)
The first story seems to be more of a problem with the engineering team's onboarding process than the firm's recruiter.
AUDACITY !!!!!!!