Helping tech recruiters vet client requirements and job candidates for technical roles by blending 20+ years of Engineering & Recruiting experience.
Interview with Leverage: Recruiter Edition (Part 1)
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Reader, PART ONE · RECRUITER CONFESSIONSHere’s what’s actually happening on our end Let me be honest with you about something the industry doesn’t like to admit out loud. By the time a job gets posted and you apply, a lot of things that should have been figured out, haven’t been. Roles change mid-process all the time. Budget shifts. Leadership realizes they don’t actually agree on what success looks like. Someone internally gets considered after the requisition is already open. Or there are so many stakeholders involved that the left hand genuinely doesn’t know what the right hand needs. "Everyone has a hand in the pot. Not everyone is on the same page about what’s actually needed.” Recruiters are supposed to fix this. The job, our real job, is to scope the role, identify the genuine need, define what success looks like, and build an interview process that actually tests for it. Technical evaluation, competency mapping, the works. Then we source, recruit and broker introductions with the candidate and decision makers. Too often, that doesn’t happen. Some recruiters are order takers. Some are just lazy. And you, the candidate, end up paying for it. Common scenario #1 “We need an automation engineer, coding language doesn’t matter.” Then three rounds in: “Oh, they actually need someone in X language. The recruiter never accounted for that.”
Common scenario #2 You’re told to prep for a deep-dive on Kubernetes. You spend three hours on it. That last one is worth sitting with. The recruiter didn’t understand the technology well enough. And now you’re sitting in an interview with no idea what direction to take the conversation and the manager thinks you’re not technical enough, even though they never gave you the chance to prove it. It’s not your fault. But it is your problem. On Friday...let's find out how you can start steering the ship away from the iceberg 🚢 🚨 -Jaclyn |
The Better Vetter Letter
Helping tech recruiters vet client requirements and job candidates for technical roles by blending 20+ years of Engineering & Recruiting experience.
Reader, PART TWO · WHAT YOU SHOULD DO How to get real information and use it Here’s the shift: stop treating the recruiter call as a formality and start treating it as an intelligence operation. You have more leverage than you think if you ask the right questions. okay, maybe not like this The goal is to figure out what the actual deal is: what the company thinks they need vs. what they realistically need whether you’re a real fit how to talk to the specific manager you’re about to meet Ask...
Reader, On Monday we covered who to contact and when. You did the work, found the right recruiter and team. Now what? Let’s talk about the message itself. I read a lot of outreach. And I'll be direct: most of it sounds the same. Not because the people sending it are bad candidates, but because they're following an outdated professional template that signals "I didn't really think about this." I’m guilty of it myself. I have looked back and read outreach for sales activity I’ve done and...
Reader, The generic "apply and pray" approach doesn't do anything. It sends you straight to the bottom of a pile that a recruiter may never actually touch. As someone who works in technical recruiting, I want to pull back the curtain a bit. Because the people who actually hear back are playing the game smarter. And it all starts with who to contact. Step 1: Find the Right Recruiter What you want is a recruiter who is actively working in your space, ideally the one listed directly on the job...