Clues for Recruiters

I real­ly wish I could get this mes­sage through to every recruiter in the world.

1) If a job requires ANY work expe­ri­ence a job with the same requirements/title, it isn’t entry-level.
2) If a job requires expe­ri­ence with soft­ware that isn’t acces­si­ble to 99.9% of the peo­ple in this world unless they’ve worked with it in a pri­or job, it isn’t entry-lev­el. It’s rea­son­able to expect com­pe­tence with com­mon appli­ca­tions like Microsoft Office, email pro­grams, and web browsers. It is not rea­son­able to expect that an entry-lev­el help desk per­son will have used Rem­e­dy, or that an entry-lev­el QA per­son will have used the Mer­cury or Ratio­nal Rose suites, or that an entry-lev­el tech writer will already know Robo­Help and Framemaker.
3) Junior means some­one with some expe­ri­ence, but not a great deal of expe­ri­ence. A junior QA per­son would prob­a­bly have a year of expe­ri­ence in the field, two years at the most, and none of it in a super­vi­so­ry capac­i­ty. Ask­ing for five years of expe­ri­ence in the field for a junior posi­tion is a mes­sage to appli­cants indi­cat­ing that you sim­ply don’t want to pay what that five years of expe­ri­ence are worth.
4) When ask­ing for X years of expe­ri­ence with a par­tic­u­lar appli­ca­tion, make sure it has actu­al­ly exist­ed that long. You look ter­ri­bly stu­pid when you demand five years of expe­ri­ence using and sup­port­ing WindowsXP.
5) Spec­i­fy­ing typ­ing speed for a tech writ­ing job makes it look sus­pi­cious­ly as if you’re look­ing for a glo­ri­fied sec­re­tary. The two jobs are very different.
6) List­ing jobs that require relo­ca­tion to Seat­tle or DC in the Atlanta job data­base is sim­ply stu­pid. Put them in the Seat­tle and DC data­bas­es, since that is where peo­ple who want to work in those areas would be look­ing. The fact that YOUR office is in Atlanta is irrelevant.
7) Take the time to fig­ure out what those words you’re throw­ing around actu­al­ly mean. If you run across some­thing you don’t under­stand in a résumé or a job list­ing, ask the appli­cant or employ­er, or do a quick web search. The fact that you haven’t heard of Segue Silk Suite does­n’t mean you should ignore that expe­ri­ence on a résumé, espe­cial­ly when you are seek­ing peo­ple with expe­ri­ence in auto­mat­ed test­ing. You’ll be able to do a much bet­ter job of match­ing peo­ple and employ­ers that way.
8) When giv­ing some­one a quiz, use mul­ti­ple-choice ques­tions. If you can’t, then you need to know what the heck the ques­tions and answers mean or del­e­gate the task to some­one who does. Oth­er­wise, it’s all too like­ly that you won’t rec­og­nize a cor­rect answer when it’s giv­en sim­ply because the appli­cant used dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lary than what you have writ­ten down and you don’t know enough to fig­ure that out.

I real­ly did like it bet­ter when most com­pa­nies did their own hir­ing rather than using recruiters.

Cur­rent Mood: 😡annoyed
Cyn is Rick's wife, Katie's Mom, and Esther & Oliver's Mémé. She's also a professional geek, avid reader, fledgling coder, enthusiastic gamer (TTRPGs), occasional singer, and devoted stitcher.
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