Frustrated! Recruitment!

I find one of the hardest things about being a freelance developer is dealing with the recruitment process. Its a process that is with you twenty four hours a day and 7 days a week, it is relentless and encompasses the good the bad and the ugly. I just took nearly 3 months off to travel after getting to the point of I have had enough, I got to Spain and my phone was completely switched off, so all agents got was "This number is not available at this time" which is quite meaningless but it actually means that the phone number is still being paid for and is active and you can text me, but you just cant call me because I am in another country. Tremendously this was a massive release as I no longer got any calls from recruiters.

No this is not another candidate saying I hate recruiters post, I have over the last year grown to understand that recruiters are part of doing business I have to learn to handle them gracefully and always have a positive connection with them irrespective of the process behind and the reason why they called me. Yes I know your not going to send my resume to an employer without talking to me and yes I know a phone conversation or a face to face encounter will tell you an enormous amount about whether or not you think I am right for the company your recruiting for. However you do need to bear in mind that I take calls from recruiters all day every day whether or not I am currently on contract. You also need to realise I may often be in scenarios where I cannot speak freely, for example my boss is standing next to me, I am surrounded by a group of colleagues who I am contractually obliged not to reveal how much I am being paid to. NB: Some questions are best asked via email.

Recruiters for many roles have to be and are predatory, when a recruiter gets a role with requirements as long as your arm and no salary they don't have a choice. If I was a recruiter I would be doing it too! Here are just a few of the predatory processes I have seen:

• Recruiter sends you for an interview with a top company calling it talent scouting there are no immediate jobs available, gives you no feedback on the interview. Months and months later the recruiter notices you haven't worked for a couple of months so rings you to see if you will take a permanent job with that employer. This one is probably both the recruiter and the employer being predatory. I absolutely would not take any job this way!! I would advise any candidate not to take any job this way either! I would advise recruiters to cease this practice.
• Recruiter scans through old resumes on job boards and looks for contractors who haven't worked for 2 months or more and calls you for permanent work or a low rate contract. They are not subtle either they literally tell you "I noticed you haven't worked for a while and had considered you might be ready to lower your rate or consider a permanent role". Seriously it is not ok! to say this no matter what. I would advise recruiters to stick to marketing the role and candidates that have applied.

When you do this, the feelings associated with what you have done stay with the candidate for probably about one or two days after the encounter. Candidates get fatigue! Seriously it is very hard to maintain 24X7 positivity towards recruiters! With this kind of behaviour being so common and frequent you are not the only recruiter in the world. There more than 14,000 of you in London alone!

Coding Exercises

Frequently these days companies want a coding exercise before they engage in an interview.

Before doing this you should think about the following:

1. How much effort is involved in doing the exercise you have sent? Realistically (not ohh I should take someone who knows what they are doing no more than hour) have you tried doing the exercise yourself and how long did it take you, take that number and double it for realistic estimate. Also remember if the candidate is experienced or a veteran think about how many of these tests/coding exercises they have received or already have. If I did every coding exercise I was sent I would never work!
2. Context! where is the candidate what are they doing at the time. If the candidate is travelling in another country sight seeing and relaxing etc the likelihood of them being able to do a coding exercise is quite limited, with even less desire. Yes that is even if your ThoughtWorks or Google, surprisingly the ThoughtWorks head hunter was courteous enough to realise there was no chance before I got back to London and he was also courteous enough to ring me and asses a whole stack of information about me before even sending me the coding exercise.
3. You are one company in thousands, and I am one candidate in thousands. This modern information age means employers get 500 resumes for every job but I get 500 jobs in my in box too! I have experience on both candidate and recruiting side I know you might get 1000 resumes but out of those resumes probably only a handful are appropriate for the role! The same as I know that out of the roles in my in box only a few are suitable. So if your sending a lengthy involved coding exercise, and the candidates resume looks good and appropriate, they probably have a whole queue of coding exercises to do which probably might take them an entire month to get through.
4. Do you really need a coding exercise? Why are you sending one? I have been recruiting with another individual and we both interviewed a guy and for some reason both of us weren't sure about the hire, so my colleague sent a coding exercise, the coding exercise came back and it was fine we still didn't hire him! You should be able to tell from someones resume if someone can code or not, this is not a reason to set one, and if you cant you shouldn't be doing the resume assessment you should delegate it to someone who can tell and work with them on the hire. Also in many cases a 20 minute phone call with someone technical is going to tell you everything you need to know and is likely to be a much faster and more productive way of handling things.
5. Remember the exercise itself reflects on you as a company. If you send a stupid exercise to a very experienced candidate, the candidate might laugh their socks off and perhaps publish something that can be quite humiliating for a company. Things in writing are in writing!

People are not Stupid

We are human beings trying to sift through all of the bull shit (yes we know 50-80% of what we are told is either an out right lie or at the very best an exaggeration) and figure out what the best thing to do is. People have to read between the lines, the more we have to do this, the greater the recruitment problem becomes, wrong candidate wrong job! all sides of the equation very unhappy.

Many companies think they are Google or the next Google and send you stack of material explaining why they are. Here is an example:

We are creating a new breed of life insurance service, providing a fairer comparison of the different life insurance providers by aggregating all of their online journeys into a single consolidated journey. We are doing this algorithmically, allowing each insurer to configure up their own set of questions, the flow through them, their decisions and then combining these to create a single view for the customer. The configuration of these rules is done within a visual editor, served as a single page app within the browser (think Visio in a browser). We are looking to take a software as a service approach, providing hosted underwriting (rule) engines for these companies, and offering this as up a service that can be consumed by other sites (such as moneysupermarket for instance). We are a small startup company of about 15 people (with a core dev team of 8) and are expanding our delivery capacity to support the build and roll-out of new products that augment our existing offerings by optimising new business and supporting servicing functions. As we are small and leverage new technologies in order to move forward as quickly and efficiently as possible. We are always open to exploring new ideas / technologies that can help us move deliver more effectively, for instance we recently ran a small spike into the usage of vert.x for one of the front ends. Our current tech stack is YUI, Grails, Groovy, DropWizard, RabbitMQ and MySQL. In order to be as flexible as possible we are looking to deploy onto Cloud based infrastructure (AWS), and are automating this with Puppet. We are looking for new developers immediately, based in London Victoria (close to the station), paying highly competitive rates dependent on candidate. If this sounds good to you, then we would like to meet and have a chat. Firstly, as a part of our interview process we conduct a technical test. The test is Grails-based and while I appreciate you haven’t had much/any Grails experience, attempting the test tells us a lot about you and your approach to development in general and we’ll take your lack of prior experience into account. Therefore, please can you take a look at the following and submit your solution to me;

This recruiter is asking for a coding exercise, he hasn't called me and knows nothing about me at all, and has clearly demonstrated that he hasn't read my resume, as I include Groovy in my resume but no Grails! Also Groovy/Grails is well known as fast development environment for producing web apps rapidly and is quite well known to have performance issues! (This is a financial application for underwriting) YUI is also probably one of the worst UI ajax frameworks in existence with the dominant player now being Angular.js. DropWizard (Spring Boot being a competitor) and vertex.x are both fairly esoteric technologies and not well established as being a good solution for anything. Yes I am an experienced geek! I am critical for good reason. I am not thinking this company is so amazing. However I have seen much worse! and worked on a hell of a lot worse! This is not the worst material I have seen. The recruiter should have made the effort to have a phone conversation first, and before he sent me this he knew I was travelling in France and Spain. Seriously! what are you thinking!

So many companies think what they are doing is amazing! but most developers working for companies know what they are doing is patching things together and plugging wholes and experimenting, this is the case no matter who you work for! Yes most developers are pessimistic and realists. So if your approaching veteran developer or IT person, keep this in mind, I have friends that work for Google and ThoughWorks! and yes they do think they have great jobs but they aren't telling me that everything they do is awesome! Also some of my friends have left ThoughtWorks and Google jobs! for a range of good reasons. Please please please if you are talking to an experienced developer lose all of the graduate recruitment spiel! I am a grown adult with lots of experience! not some pimply teenager!

To recruitment companies.

Recruitment companies I know many of your staff are young, but you need to train them to handle experienced people to cut down the recruiter/candidate fatigue.