A Job Hunter Interviews a Recruiter, Ep.3: Ashley Carmichael of DistroKid

Introducing Ashley Carmichael and DistroKid

Every time I interview a recruiter, they become my favorite recruiter. Ashley Carmichael is now my favorite recruiter.?

Why? To start, her recruitment foundation is built atop four pillars:?

• Organization
• Time Management
• Attention to Detail
• Empathy

Recruiters, this is your cue to start taking notes. Do you have pillars? You should have pillars. Has Ashley always been this amazing? No! She earned it by recruiting for Apple, Google, Nike and other top brands until she realized she wanted to make an impact at a smaller company; to build something. As a music lover, too, she found herself at DistroKid (DK). DK is one of those behind-the-scenes companies doing really cool stuff, and more folks should know about ‘em. DistroKid was a place that welcomed Ashley for being human first, employee second. They empowered her to build out the recruitment process and she single-handedly runs the show in terms of talent sourcing and recruiting. She’s the ONE person running recruiting at DK – Reminder that it’s not all big teams with faceless recruiters.

Despite DistroKid being a more lowkey company, their job postings still receive a high amount of traffic as they have a great reputation. Ashley tells me that one role was open for only 72 hours, was not posted to major channels, and yet, still managed to receive 800 applicants. Ashley, being a human and not a robot, cannot possibly work through 800 applications in a reasonable amount of time; she’s got so many applicants that the first 400 go into the “Review Now”, and table the second four-hundred in case the first hiring round fails. If you’re in the second batch that got tabled, it sucks and I know. But from the recruiter’s side, there’s really nothing else to do with the state of things. “The market is so, so bad right now [for job seekers]”, Ashley says. It is an Employer’s Market to the utmost degree, and employers are able to expect nearly perfect matches to their job descriptions.

Are there Blocklists?

The job market is bad for employees, right now. And it’s worn me down, personally. I’ve been unemployed long enough to have days where I am convinced that recruiters are scheming together to not hire me (I wish I were kidding!). So, I asked just in case. As far as Ashley knows, there are no official dont-hire-tim-andes dot ai? sites or anything. HOWEVER, that doesn’t mean that recruiters don’t notice how you behave on LinkedIn, X (FKA Twitter), via email, upon receiving rejections, et cetera. People remember how you treat them and how you treat others, folks especially remember being treated poorly. So, are there blocklists? Let us instead remind ourselves of the Golden Rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated.

An Apology Due

Upon reflection… Sometimes, I have bad days. Sometimes those bad days land on weekdays while I’m applying to jobs. Answering “Why do you want a job here?” for the 1,000th time means at least one of those answers will probably be snarky. I owe some poor recruiter at HuggingFace ?? an apology, they did not deserve my application cover letter sass that day.

I am sorry, recruiter!

Ashley’s A-Z Recruiting Process

1. Receive job posting from her manager (VP of HR)
2. Ashley sends an Intake Form she’s created over to the Hiring Manager (amazing!)
3. Conduct a kickoff call with the hiring manager, focusing on the job description and skills required in the job
4. Ashley then Posts the job to job boards. She personally visits LinkedIn first, and other DEI and Remote job boards; “Passive Recruiting”
5. Ashley sources candidates based on the role’s niche, maintaining a talent pool in LinkedIn; “Active Sourcing”
6. As applications trickle in, she manually sorts them into folders: REVIEWING, ON DECK, and HIRING MANAGER REVIEW, and Knockouts (“Knockouts” eg. rejections for overlong resumes, failed knockout questions (explained below), etc)
7. Consult with the hiring manager’s team to determine which candidates to move forward with
8. Transition candidates to technical and hiring manager interviews, while managing the pipeline
9. Funnel down the pipeline until one remains (see image for reference)

On Giving Feedback

Hard-won experience as an Elder of the Unemployed has taught me not to expect much in the way of truly actionable feedback from recruiters (there’s an opportunity for some sort of up-front-feedback-loop-standard-agreement between recruiter/job seeker here, just sayin’). Ashley tells me she’s constrained in giving feedback for a few reasons, the biggest one being liability / legal reasons, followed by resource & time management.

As Ashley runs the whole recruiting show at DistroKid, accountability will fall on her if someone perceives feedback as discriminatory, selective, biased, etc. For recruiters in this age, it is safer to fall back on “Unfortunately, we found a candidate with more experience”, regardless of the true reason.

In terms of resource and time management, a single recruiter simply does not have the time to send a detailed rejection to each and every applicant where roles are receiving 100s or 1000s of submissions. As the pipeline of prospects for each recruit funnels down, a recruiter like Ashley has the ability to spend more time on each applicant, but time management is crucial to her work and has to be minded constantly.

Helpful General Feedback on Resumes

• Keep your resume less than 5 pages. Anything over that is an auto-reject due to time constraints.
• Make sure your resume is legible and the font is not too small. Uh oh. I use Rezi, and now I have concerns that my resume font is too small! Sounds like legibility is more important than keeping the CV to 1-page.
• Having a Skills* section in a tech resume is important. I am frequently torn between Objective or Skills at the top of my resume - What do you think, reader? What do you place at the top of your resume? *This mainly applies to the #tech sector
• Don’t burn bridges! The tech industry is smaller than you think (and could honestly be said for any industry).

“For the resumes, I know some of these things may sound harsh for rejection. But when a human is looking for 4 straight hours through 400 resumes, they need a process to look through them quickly. Most [resumes] are pretty easy for a job seeker to polish up, so it should increase your chances!”?

- Ashley Carmichael

Next Hurdle: Hiring Managers

My personal job hunt is now at the point where I’m trying to align perceptions of my own level of experience with the hiring manager’s perception of my level of experience. I pass plenty of screener calls, I pass plenty of initial recruiter interviews and technical assessments; Hiring Managers are my next bottleneck to target.

I asked Ashley what I could do to get past the Hiring Manager hurdle. Ashley shared a few insights:

• Oftentimes, “It’s simply a numbers game and splitting hairs and it sucks”. Ultimately, the business is usually aiming to fill 1 spot. This Employer’s Job Market is a tough game to play, and it’s important to remember what is in your control and what is not; it is not worth stressing over the external variables outside of your locus of control.?
• An action a proactive job hunter could take might be to ask the recruiter what the hiring manager’s email is so that you can send them a thank you note, or at least have the recruiter forward it for you.

My personal concern is that I’m not marketing my experience well enough and proving that I can handle the work. Next set of interviews, I’ll change my answer on the “Tell Me About Yourself” question: I’m going to walk through each bullet point of the job description and relate that to previous experience. I need to tailor my answers to match the job a bit better so they don’t have to connect the dots themselves. I would plan to email these answers to the Hiring Manager as an “Interview Package”, as well. Maybe then, my perception and their perception of our alignment will be… well, aligned.

Not All Companies Rely on ATS (Applicant Tracking System)

Ashley does employ an ATS, but she manually reviews and vets each resume to ensure that they match the requirements of the role.?

Ashley does use Knockout Questions (KO). You’ll see these on almost every application form. The most common KO Questions in the USA:?

Ex 1. Will you need sponsorship? Are you a US Citizen? Some companies do not have the resources for sponsorships.

Ex 2. Do you have at least 2 years of JavaScript experience?

• Don’t lie! And probably just don’t apply if the Job Description requires 2 years and they have a Knockout Question stating the same.

Note from Ashley: “[In Ex 2] It's worth applying if they have 1 year of experience (YOE) - sometimes these YOE targets can be moved. But if a role requires 5 YOE and someone applies that has only 1, it's less feasible they'll move forward.”

Next time on A Job Hunter Interviews a Recruiter

Aiming to schedule one more tech recruiter interview so that I have four different recruiter perspectives to share with job hunters. After that, I’m looking at you Hiring Managers.

Leave your Reactions, Thoughts, Comments, Concerns and Dog/Cat/Pet Pics below.

??Repost to support DistroKid, Ashley, and great hiring practices!

I am #opentowork and DistroKid is #hiring. Link(s) in the comments.

?? A huge thank you to Ashley Carmichael for being a wonderful human and a top-performing recruiter.?