Cal Evans asked a question on Twitter the other day of his followers for advice, from developers, to share with recruiters and how they can do their job better when it comes to recruiting talent.
I post this not to belittle or ridicule recruiters. I think that good recruiters are a valuable part of the tech ecosystem. I post this to hopefully help more recruiter become good recruiters.
He's listed all of the responses he's gotten in the post (via Storify) as individual tweets. There's a few recurring themes happening and lots of good advice including:
- "treat developers as human beings"
- "We're smart people, we can see an email isn't personal. Treat us like the individuals we are."
- "Read the profile before sending out CV, I am not a Ruby developer."
- "Googlebing someone before emailing them. Know who they are."
- "don't try to sound like you know what you're talking about if you don't. You just lose respect."
- "build a relationship with me, not a one night stand"
- " Have the decency to at least get back to devs if the end client hasn't chosen them"
If you are or know of a recruiter, please share this post with them. The unfortunate fact is that there's a lot of recruiters out there that don't realize that this is how to talk to developers (and sadly, some don't event care).