[pronoiac]

Isn't the dislike for external recruiters? They can be wildly variable in quality - spamming by keywords, regardless of geographic areas. And the good ones may overprepare, asking questions that the company won't.

Edit: oh yeah. Sudden radio silence. Adding bogus resume tidbits. Posting bogus jobs, just to pump their contact numbers in the database.

I see a lot more bad external recruiters than good.

[Blackthorn]

I've had sudden radio silence so much, even after talking to them on the phone. I don't understand because sure they wasted my time, but now they're wasting their time too!

[ottertown]

The dislike probably is directed mostly at the external recruiters, but a lot of this stuff applies to them as well.

I've only had two bad recruiter experiences, one with an internal and one with an external. The former lured me in with a 'big equity' role that turned out to be junior developer. The latter was a recruiting contractor for Tesla who told me they were building a new frontend team. When I got on the phone with him it turned out the team had existed for two years, was over 10 people, and was simply refocusing their product.

In both cases, the recruiter was dishonest about the position. So what I've learned is not to take next steps until I have much clearer details on the role.

External recruiters tend to be way more vague on details, so I can understand the annoyance of having to reply with "tell me what you're actually trying to sell me on." But I find that sending a direct reply like that tends to be pretty effective at eliciting details.