[ldbooth]

Some recruiting, like some sales jobs and like many things in life, is a numbers game. And there is zero cost for the bulk messaging campaign on the way to the 1/50 affirmative response they will get. If there is a way to solve this inefficiency, it's well worth building a better solution.

[nixgeek]

In a previous role a single engineering recruiter was goaled against >= 3 placements per month and even exceptional recruiters usually weren’t sustaining >5 per month over a sustained period like a year or more. A “placement” is people who start at the company having gone through the entire hiring process. I’ve seen similar expectations across three Fortune 100’s now with little variation. I’m sure this gets branded the “body shop” approach, fine, unclear how you scale other options to hiring 1000’s of engineers a year (you exhaust the pool of recruiters skilled at other approaches!).

Anyway, in order to meet that placement goal it’s common to hear a sourcer contacted 300 people per week on LinkedIn and via select other channels.

This is usually NOT a blast to 500 people without targeting… you’re usually looking at source companies, levels of experience, geographic location, degrees of separation from individuals in the hiring organization, keyword matching, education or certifications.

About 5% of contacts will respond to these efforts. About 15% will respond when the initial contact is made by someone who has an Engineering Manager title instead. Those response rates don’t change dramatically when you alter the messaging (this is somewhat usual to A/B test when recruiting at scale). Title of the EM matters when recruiting somewhat, e.g. a junior manager may see < 15% response rates if they’re trying to hire at senior (Staff+) levels. Someone with a Director or VP title will see better response rates when hiring for Staff+ levels, this is the “Could I see myself working for this person?” test, I guess.

At a certain career level you’re also out of “Professional Recruiting” / “Industry Recruiting” and you’re into “Executive Recruiting” which is a somewhat substantially different process.

There’s also “College/Campus Recruiting” which has its own quirks and differences!

Several startups have tried and are trying to change this model but I’ve yet to see a move away from ‘brute force’ hiring in huge enterprises, YEMV.