I haven't worked in recruiting but have experience with sales, and a prospect who is "not interested but up for a chat to learn more" is exactly the one you should be putting all your energy into. I really hope this recruiter gets paid a salary and doesn't rely on commission.
Yeah, 'Just lookin' on a car lot is generally a decent buying and signal. Also if this recruiter took the time to build network and pipeline people they could reap the results as people are ready to move positions and thing 'That AWS recruiter sure was nice to talk last year, wonder if they are looking.'
My interactions with recruiters have generally been similar. I think it must be a numbers game where basically they just "spray and pray" and only engage the most dedicated prospects that they trawl up. I'm surprised the recruiter didn't just ghost him. That's what's happened to me whenever I say I'm not looking but happy to chat.
“Happy to chat” is just part of their sales script same as the fake concern wrt covid and whatnot etc. Never had anyone agree to chat when I’d actually taken them up on that.
My job is 20-50% sales. I would always take a first call with someone who knew what my job was and wanted to talk to me. It makes me curious about recruiting, are they really spending their time on higher value stuff? Like I said above, my guess is it's a numbers game, more telemarketing than relationship building, at least for people cold-messaging on LinkedIn.
It’s true - I’ve had much better luck setting up purely exploratory calls with actual sales than recruiting. Not sure why that is, perhaps recruiters’ commission is maximized by the steady flow of smaller “deals” vs sales where they prefer to score big ones
No, the initial conversation was in LinkedIn private message. The OP would have had no reason to use "coded language that obscures my intent in public" at the time that they wrote that message (which was long before they decided to screenshot and publicise it)
Public anecdata from leetcode/teamblind shows that FAANG hiring rate after those 'virtual on-sites' is a single digit percentage. So it looks like a number game indeed. Bad thing that now all companies are on that never ending interview cycle https://www.linkedin.com/news/story/when-job-interviews-are-...
When I get recruiter emails from Amazon, I tell them I'd be interested but only if they've made any progress improving their infamous work/life balance. I never get a reply.
Even if they thought they had, they still wouldn't reply. Why hire someone unless they are enthusiastic about joining? (or unless you can't find anyone else, which I doubt applies to AWS).
"Enthusiastic about joining" is very, very far and different from "willing to accept shit wlb to join". You can have both genuine enthusiasm and healthy boundaries / self respect
> Why hire someone unless they are enthusiastic about joining?
Because they need engineers. As they grow they will need many more. Their success will partly depend on their ability to get those engineers to work for them who might be productive but don’t drink the kool aid.
I’ve had a couple Amazon recruiters message me with the most generic copy/paste spam along with some third party recruiter claiming to be trying to fill a contract role for them.
Frankly I just ignore them because of how painfully low effort they were, but I have no interest in going through the FAANG interview circus, nor are they likely to give me enough to relocate.
I got an email from an AWS recruiter recently with the subject "Join the AWS family yes or no?". My first reaction was to think "good god this feels like someone just passed me a note in middle school that said 'do you like me [ ] yes [ ] no?'". There's something to be said for a bit of professionalism in recruiting, especially when talking to someone who's been in the industry for 25 years.
No it is not fine at all. That was a terrible answer from the recruiter.
It is fine only for junior engineers. For people on the higher end of the ladder, you have to let them know what type of roles you are recruiting for, and see if they are willing to make a move. Some will make the move if the job is an upgrade. This recruiter doesn't get it.
The recruiter is just bad at his job and makes amazon look bad. He/she is bad because amazon probably just requires hard quotas, and doesn't care about relationship building.
Every last job I have had, it was a recruiter sending me a message, then maybe months later, when i was ready we went through the process.
This recruiter is destroying the long term pipeline of the company for short a term quota.
since this is amazon, I am not surprised of it.
For a while I was getting contacts from AWS pretty regularly. I was mostly ignoring them but they got annoying enough that I started replying with links to articles about Amazon's terrible labor practices. One recruiter replied that he would put me on his do-not-contact list. A couple of days laters I got another contact from the same recruiter, and I replied with the same links.
It's been a while since them and I have hardly heard a peep from them, but I suspect it's just a matter of time before I'm back on their lists.
On LinkedIn, there's a recruiter I was acquainted with before he went to Amazon, and I notice (on my news feed or whatever it's called) he's always looking for people for cleared positions these days. Not sure why.
I don't get the animosity for recruiters. I tell them no thanks I'm not looking right now but let's stay in touch. Every single one politely replies with genuine relief that I was actually polite to them and says thank you. I also keep a list of all their info in case I can send them a referral or want to change jobs later. It's just common courtesy. You should be thankful you're getting those emails.
Recruiters are like realtor/real estate agents, they work for themselves (to close deals) and that's it. They never give you the appropriate level of information about the opportunity before you commit to a phone/Zoom call (yes sure, I am going to spend 30' talking to you rather than directly to the client...).
If you are not interested, their habit of asking you to help them doing their job is really annoying. The "if you know someone which might be interested by the opportunity, please let me know." is maybe the worse response ever.
I try to always reply by asking the name of the company, the job description, and salary ranges. And they almost never share these info but "we can discuss it over the phone because it is confidential". And my next reply is always "You know, an email is confidential too..." and that's generally ends the discussion until the next ping on LinkedIn. At least, they are rarely rancorous :)
Keep in mind there are two completely disjointed networks of recruiters.
The first is basically LinkedIn spam at this point. It's typically an outsourced operation (can be several layers of outsourcing for larger organizations) where the "recruiters" are given keywords to match with profiles and a set of canned response to literally copy-paste in the chat. The point is simply to have a steady incomming stream of resumes of people looking for a new job. When there's headcount they might start sending automated messages advertizing recruiting events.
The second is, well, a network of recruiters where nobody is a "recruiter". They are "headhunters", "talent acquisition lead" or just "involved with hiring". It's when your friend insists on buying coffee a week before the next funding round of the startup he works at is announced and he is curious if you like your current job. It's when you make a few referrals for a new project before headcount is officially announced (watch out for the commission!) and so on.
This is just obviously untrue, and I have to think clearly so to almost anyone who has worked in the tech industry.
Every tech company I’ve ever worked for absolutely has recruiters on staff who absolutely do outreach and shepherd candidates into the process for specific roles we are trying to fill.
The idea that all unsolicited outreach is outsourced canned response quasi-spam just doesn’t fit with the reality I know from over a decade in this industry.
There absolutely are low quality outsourced recruiters in the world, but the idea that there are two disjoint sets with low quality in one and only very warm referrals or specific headhunting in the other, yeah, thats really not true.
These types of posts that are authoritative in tone but just clearly factually deficient are really the worst thing I see on this website.
I think it's pretty fucking scummy that LinkedIn is showing my profile when I have everything set to private and set as "not interested", yet recruiters are cold-emailing me through LinkedIn multiple times a day and insisting on next-day calls. Some of them cold-text me.
