An open letter to all recruiters

An open letter to all recruiters

On behalf of all candidates

Dear recruiters,

Sometimes you call. In this call you offer the supposed perfect job opportunity to work in the outstanding perfect company: The company has amazing benefits, the salary is great and the environment is outstanding.

Sometimes you are serious and focus only about the position. Sometimes you are friendly and love to talk about your dog. And, of course, sometimes we can notice that you don’t want to talk. That’s ok, everybody has the right to be different. And we all have bad days. Personally, I prefer the friendly ones. Only because they make me believe that I am the most special person in the world. And when you call me in my bad day to make me feel special, you totally won. But the serious ones are good too.

There is only one thing: Apparently you have some issues on matching my profile with the job offers you are presenting to me.

Allow me to explain.

Most of the offers I get from you are “C# Developer”. And yes, I know C#. But the problem lies in the field and also the projects. Mostly this kind of position would lead me to work in a company where I will go very deep into C# and never see anything else. For example, some company where I should work on a system to control, let’s say, traffic lights. Would I work there? Maybe. But it's not a good fit.

See, I am a web person specialized on the ASP.NET stack. In my line of work I need to understand a bit of front-end so I can make a good quality back-end, matching them together in a nice result for the client. This is what I have been doing most of my career. If you doubt just check my Linked In profile. Go to my specialties and certifications so you will see that they are mostly focused on web.

But it's alright, I still like you.

I believe it’s not your fault. You might have goals to reach and you might not have enough time to check a a lot of profiles thoroughly. All of this is understandable. And it’s ok for me as I can say that I am not interested in case you offer something which is not a good fit.

But I care about you. I care about the time you are devoting with me and other candidates which are not a good fit for the positions you are presenting. We know that every candidate you interview who is not a fit makes you lose money (time = money). And your company is losing money as well.

So, here is the advice: Try to understand the position you are going to offer and also try to learn a little bit more about the candidates before the call. And don't shoot e-mails crazily about random job offers only because there is one key word matching. It's not about keywords anymore - it's about meaning. Of course, sometimes I would be motivated to change everything. It can even happen that, some day, I will really be interested to work programming for NASA and see my code going to other galaxies.

But not yet.

In my perticular case, I am focused on web. After all, I am a web person. And since I am a web person you can talk with me about websites developed and I will gladly listen to any offer you will present related with the ASP.NET stack.

Sincerely,

Davidson Sousa