matt shelton

I wrote this several months ago after a particularly annoying set of calls with a “recruiter” from a local staffing firm. At the time, I was helping another team in my division interview candidates for a Senior Developer with exceptionally strong JavaScript skills. In one particular month, the same recruiter called me four or five times, each time using a different name from the same “services” firm. It is entirely possible that he actually was someone new each time, but each call sounded the same to me. Every time my response was nearly identical:

I don’t make financial decisions related to hiring, so I’m not in a position to hear about recruiting services, nor do I have any interest, but thank you anyway.

Each time, he kept talking.

Dude. I know you’re just doing your job, but you’re doing it wrong.

As a hiring manager, I have a strong personal distaste for recruiting firms and staffing agencies. I know that sometimes, these services are necessary in order to find the right candidate for a specialized position, to find a short-term whiz to save the day on a tough project, etc. I have nothing against recruiting companies that are working for me. I am, of course, notably complacent when it comes to the one time I needed a staffing firm in order to find gainful employment. That experience was incredibly painless, having met a representative from the firm at a job fair and starting work the next week.

No, this sort of experience has nothing to do with what ails me. Instead, my beef has to do with the cold calls from folks I’ll refer to as Job Sales Engineers, or JSEs for short. I absolutely will not paint them with the same brush as I do the recruiters I work with on a more regular basis inside of my company for the primary reason that the technical recruiters in the office are pretty darn good, and it would do them a serious disservice to be categorized in such a way.

So, Rant on:

JSEs are never technical enough and/or have not worked in the industry

Every JSE I speak to, which is currently averaging one every two weeks or so, has about 20% of the technical knowledge required to find the right candidate for a position. So, when the recruiting department posts a job saying that we’re looking for a Senior Web Developer with experience integrating a Java Applet with a JavaScript-driven user interface, and the recruiter calls and thinks that their ASP.Net candidate with the term “AJAX” on their résumé is qualified, I hang up on them. It’s not even the platform disparities that are so bothersome, it’s that they don’t know what these terms mean. Here I am, looking for someone who can sub-class a language (whose object-oriented nature is basically a hack) in their sleep, and a recruiter toddles around each word.

JSEs lead with acronyms, not accomplishments

Yes, the irony of using an acronym to complain about someone using acronyms is not lost on me…

Every call starts with something like “I see you are looking for a web developer. I have a candidate coming out of XYZ Blue Chip Company. He’s got Struts, AJAX, HTML, XML, Oracle and SQL…” Ok first of all, why do I care that he has both Oracle and SQL experience? The syntactical differences between PL-SQL and SQL (I’m presuming SQL92 unless they’re using a new revision of an engine which supports one of the later standards) are insignificant enough for a developer who isn’t solely a database developer, that no one should ever put both of them on a skills list. I could possibly consider them individually important if you’d been responsible for writing specialized database connectivity modules. Then again, if you’re listing AJAX without mentioning JavaScript, what exactly do you mean?

Secondly, brevity is just as important on the phone as it is on a résumé! Tell me what the person DID. Say “I have a candidate who just finished a very successful cross-functional project utilizing similar technologies to the ones listed in your posting. They have a long track record of delivering quality work on time.” That might catch my attention, should I be in the position to care. Heck, I know a guy whose nickname was something like “the bugless wonder”. If you’ve got someone like him, tell me about that.

JSEs cold call rather than establish relationships

This shouldn’t even be an issue. Even the most tenacious, annoying salesperson knows that the best way to make a sale is to use an existing relationship to get you in the door and into the front of someone’s mind. Recruiters don’t do that, and if they’re trying to, they do a terrible job of crafting that initial relationship. You’re going to have to convince me to talk to you, so why not buy me a cup of coffee? You have until I finish drinking it to convince me I should ever want to pick up the phone again.

Careful, though, I can drop a cup of coffee in seconds, so talk fast.

JSEs don’t do their homework

This usually manifests itself in an obvious data-mining of LinkedIn without regard for the appropriate person to call. I’m sure many sales folks do things like this as well. They need to find any “in” and I can’t entirely knock the tactic in theory. In practice, though, it’s a waste of my time to talk to you, so don’t call me. That’s why my LinkedIn contact settings explicitly say “Please do not contact me on behalf of recruiting or third-party services for my company.” READ IT!

On top of that, I’m not the development manager. Nuance is a publically traded software company with thousands of employees. We have more than one division. There isn’t one “development manager”. I mean, I’m flattered that you think someone of my tenure could run such a vast empire of developers across several countries, but seriously? Flattery won’t make me want to listen to you, it just tells me you didn’t do your homework.

Besides, Nuance has an entire recruiting staff of its own to do the dirty workawesome task of finding candidates for open jobs — the “hiring managers” are only called that because they have positions to be filled, and get involved in the process once candidates are selected. Our recruiters do a pretty solid job at finding leads once they fully grok the position, which only adds to my annoyance that independent recruiters call me directly to try to get a foot in the door here.

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Since writing this several months back, I’m down to about one call every six to eight weeks, which is tolerable. One of our in-house recruiters told me to transfer said calls right to him. Ever since I think they figured out that my easy out makes me a bad mark.

This is perfectly fine by me.

Image courtesy of us (design studio)‘s Human Chicken project

In my current position, I’m doing a lot of hiring right now. I have a new team to build from scratch, and it’s tough! The job market seems to be chock full of candidates who want either way too much money for arguably little experience, or who think that a resume is supposed to tell their life’s story.

I mentioned to a co-worker that I was a little frustrated with the process and he asked me a very honest and thought-provoking question: Is it more enjoyable to look for a job yourself than to look for job candidates? He wasn’t asking if I’d prefer to find a job… rather if my own experiences trying to find one were better or worse than my experiences looking for a crack team of software engineers. (At least, I don’t think he was intimating I should look elsewhere!)

My experience with job hunting has been varied – after completing my undergraduate degree, the market was empty. The dot-com bubble had burst and jobs were simply gone. I applied for what positions I could, near and far. The best I could hope for was about 50% as much pay as graduates from the previous class had received. It wasn’t really enough on which to build a future (and start paying off student loans, of course), so I chose graduate school.

A year later, new Masters Degree in hand, I searched again. Salary rates were beginning to level off again, but now that I had a Masters Degree, I felt I had “matured” and was looking for “more than just a good paycheck”. I found “nothing”. I was unemployed for about eight weeks and finally got a nibble from a temp agency working as a level 1 support tech at a corporate help desk, fixing Outlook PST files 8 hours a day. Since then, on the other hand, I’ve been offered every single position for which I’ve applied. While that sounds self-inflating, it was really my experiences hunting for jobs (and utterly failing) that got me to the point at which I could go into an interview and secure said offer.

New graduates tend to expect a position. In general, they believe that the world is supposed to “give them” a shiny new career as soon as they graduate. They also expect to be paid well. This is counter-intuitive as entry level positions almost never pay “well”, and college graduates have exactly zero non-academic work experience (save an internship, on-campus or retail job – they’ve never been a full-time employee in their discipline). This is one of many, many reasons, that it took me 10 weeks to find a job that I didn’t even want. I figured two degrees must bequeath me some sort of benefits such as, say, a $50,000 salary (in economically depressed Buffalo) and a cushy position with upward mobility.

Dead. Wrong.

First of all, I didn’t “deserve” squat!

Second, getting work takes work, and I hadn’t mastered the concept.

Third, a company pays you what they think you are worth as an employee, not what your degree is worth.

So, after being humbled by a short taste of jobless poverty, I changed my perspective, stopped talking about my degree like it was so hard to obtain, was perfectly honest with myself and interviewers about my lack of professional experience and need to increase said experience and landed the next interview I had.

Gone are the days when I even speak about my college degree work. It stops being relevant after about two years in the working world, or at least it should.

Fast forward to now. I’m in my fifth position since graduating from college. That might sound bad, but it’s only the third company and the first was a six-month contract position. It’s the third in which my role includes hiring people to do my bidding work for me, one of which barely counts because I was hiring current students. My perspective is vastly different now than it was then. My resume doesn’t include a lengthy technical skills/languages list any more because it’s far more interesting to potential employers when you can describe what you can do with real-life experiences. (It still helps to list your top few skills and areas of expertise for keyword-searches.) I also stopped listing my responsibilities for jobs I haven’t had in several years. Who cares how many students I managed in 2002?

So, as I look for candidates, I’ve noticed that multi-page resumes have become the norm with every single position, project and language ever used (or even heard of) listed in great detail. I’ve also noticed folks with 2 years’ experience expecting to make a salary grade for those with 5-7. I don’t understand the phenomenon, but it helps me to weed out those I’m simply not going to hire!

To answer the question, I think, in some sadistic fashion, I liked being job seeker more than I do looking for them. It boils down to one very important contrast: As a candidate, I can have a direct effect on the outcome of my interview and can even accept a position below my expectations just to pay the bills. As a hiring manager, convincing someone to take a pay cut is nearly impossible unless they came up with the idea themselves, which almost never happens. On top of that, I have to hire people that are capable of doing the job or else I might not have one! I can’t “settle” for a candidate who doesn’t really meet the requirements of the position just to fill the team.

The current hiring market is very job seeker-friendly. There are dozens of companies per applicant, so the competitive environment is a huge pain for me as a manager. I find I have to do far more to sell the laurels of my company than I do to sell the position itself, which is thankfully fairly easy since the benefits here are pretty darn good.

I hadn’t intended to blog about management geekery, but it’s what I do, so it makes sense. I’ll follow-up at some point with thoughts on interviewing, coaching and any other tricks I pick up along the way.