[andrewstuart]

I'm a recruiter and I sometimes say that "recruiting is the business of rejection".

At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I'm searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants.

It is incredibly hard to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons.

The Business of Rejection - that's recruiting.

[kafkaesq]

Reject all you want, but at least be classy about it.

A vast amount of empirical data suggests that recruiters are very, very bad at this.

And many companies, when engaging candidates directly, aren't much better.

[vijayr]

Most recruiters are terrible. The other day I was asked to fill a form (skills, work experience, personal details, the whole thing - in great detail) before the recruiter would even tell me the name of the company he is trying to hire for. I knew arguing with him is futile, so I didn't. Job search in general is a depressing experience, even when it is easy. Good recruiters are extremely rare :(

My funniest experience with a recruiter - he called me up and tried to recruit me to the same company I was working for at the time.

[smartbit]

> My funniest experience with a recruiter - he called me up and tried to recruit me to the same company I was working for at the time. I had that too once. She apologized and asked not to tell the company :-)

[will_pseudonym]

I'm a great recruiter! My approach is to help both sides understand the other side's needs completely before signing on the dotted line. I'm only happy when everyone else is. I also only work with people I would want to work with in the future, and that goes for both sides :)

Are you looking for something right now? If you are, I'll dig through your HN comment history and try to understand your needs and desires. If you aren't, I'm still going to, because good people are as hard to find as good recruiters! :)

[relkor]

That's creepy

[will_pseudonym]

Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity.

You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the needs and desires of another human in the aim of helping that person land a job they would live?

Like I said, it's a thought experiment. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm always learning. Unless I'm an algorithm--they never learn. Or do they? Maybe you're just a poor Turing Test judge?! ;)

[relkor]

To be more formal, there are two possiblities that I see:

1) You are RecruiterBot born from the forge of a brillant engineer smarting from rejection and trained to communicate using audio samples from bugs placed in business schools.

- The announced intent to harvest data is a flaw in the algorithm because it is known that humans find overt monitoring "creepy". My response is to submit a ticket to your maker using the contact info, with steps to reproduce and other data.

- I assume the monitoring itself is rational because my priors tell me the marginal cost is likely low enough to be worth it.

2) You are a real person

- In this case your decision to stalk the above user represents a significant economic investment. The idea that you will spend 30 minutes? or more following stranger on the internet shows to be an imbalance in your economic incentives. I begin to wonder, are you a rational actor?

- In the interest of safety I will avoid you because the data points I have do not fit human models of behavior. My percieved risk is much higher because your economic incentives do not appear to align with mine. Therefore it is unlikely that trade is worth the opportunity cost when I know of others who do align AND have lower risk assements.

[zeroxfe]

> Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity.

Spoken like a true stalker.

> You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the needs and desires of another human in the aim of helping that person land a job they would live?

There is a difference between machines aggregating large datasets and individuals directly targeting other individuals.

[devsquid]

Dude I couldn't imagine telling a hopeful young person that they didn't get the job. Do you tell them why, so hopefully they can take that info and grow from it, or do you make something up so they don't feel like shit?

[ido]

You are often not allowed/better off not saying anything due to legal risks of letting slip something that could get your sued.

[AlwaysRock]

Really? Is that a real thing? (I'm a tech recruiter in Chicago) If I recruit someone good I don't expect them to nail the first interview. Sometimes they do and that's great but more often then not it takes some fine tuning. I'm not going to give up on them after one interview.

Half of my job is helping developers with their soft skills. I see tons of guys who can do anything that's asked of them but they just cant interview well. Some people are really bad at telling interviewers what they want to hear, some people are bad at sounding excited about what they have been working on, and some people are really bad at talking to people they dont know.

After first round interviews I sit down with managers and ask specifically why they were a yes or a no. If he tells me it was a technical problem then I get as many specifics so the developer can fill in the gaps for the next interview. If it's a personality thing then I'll work with that developer so they can nail the next interview.

I've had maybe 2 managers ever be sheepish about telling me why a developer was a yes or a no.

[loup-vaillant]

In my experience, you have to separate 2 very different situations:

-- When I ask why I didn't got the job directly, I never get an answer. It only happened to me once, over a couple dozen interviews (I failed their silly test: debugging flow charts on paper). Even the companies who were polite enough to tell me of the rejection over email never replied when I asked why.

-- When someone else asks on my behalf (an acquaintance of the company, a recruiter, or whoever tried to sell my services when I work for a consulting company), they always get meaningful feedback.

If you're looking for a job, and keep getting rejected, try to go through recruiters. I've heard that constant pestering over the phone also works, but I never dared.

[ido]

In my experience, Google for example were not willing to tell me why I didn't pass an interview some years ago. I don't know what their actual reason is & can only speculate.

I didn't experience it often but it did occasionally happen with other companies too (I have been working as a programmer for the past 14 years & worked/interviewed with many companies).

[Retra]

That's the fear, though. If you say "We didn't hire you because X", people might think "I have X! So clearly you are unlawfully discriminating, and if I can make the argument that I do have X, then you must be lying about why you didn't hire me."

Besides, people apparently do make hiring decisions based on things like "culture fit", which is a pretty good proxy for race, age, and social status anyway, so...

[vijayr]

Isn't it true in many things in life though? Shopping, buying a house etc (even dating sometimes) - most of us rarely select, we often reject and pick the one(s) that remains, isn't it? Not saying it is good or bad, just that it happens more often than we think.

[sillysaurus3]

It doesn't have to be that way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699997

[sah2ed]

> In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants.

What tools do you use to manage that many applicants? Certainly not your inbox?