We are tired. Really. We do respect our time and the time of others. It is probably because we are taught to be effective and productive, to optimize every single aspect of software that we create. There was a time when we felt sorry for all those poor people that have to make dozens of phone calls each day, asking same questions all over. What technologies are you familiar with? What were your last 5 projects? Could you please send me your CV? We are not sorry anymore.

Now, almost all of us are aware of the purpose of the majority of those contacts. It is to get as much data as possible about us. About our experience, availability, financial requirements. There is nothing wrong with providing this information if intentions are honest and the timing is right. What’s wrong is the fact that those people use the following practices:

1. Do your homework. As much information as possible about us, candidates, can be gathered from CVs, social networks, github, stackoverflow etc. before reaching us.
2. If financial requirements are not met they continue their interview informing us about the mismatch later on, only after we told them almost everything about ourselves.
3. They consistently ask about things that can be found in the CV right away. Why? No idea.
4. Sometimes there is no open position yet, (nor they have any) or they don’t have an agreement with a company that supposedly recruits; they hope that if they gather a lot of data about us, they would become credible and sign an agreement to have 1-3 monthly salaries in success fees.  

We could just stop answering calls (and more and more of us do that). Why do we care at all? First and foremost, because we have a deep, unconscious need to make the world more effective. We love to reduce waste. Second, we strongly believe that #1 IT leader task is to hire great teams. It is not outsourceable. It can’t be delegated. And yet very often it is. We strongly believe that if we can’t constrain introductory talks to 15 minutes and after that have a pleasure to talk to our future boss then something is fundamentally wrong. So, Dear Recruiter, here is what we require from the good recruitment process:  

1. Do your homework. As much information as possible about us, candidates, can be gathered from CVs, social networks, github, stackoverflow etc. before reaching us.
2. Preferably we would like to be reached by hiring manager = our future boss/team leader.
3. If above is not possible – we could understand it. We know that the best HR people are very good at screening. But keep it simple. No bullshitting and gathering data for the future. In most cases, a 3 minute call is more than enough to tell if there is a match. Don’t ask (on the call) about our 5 last projects, technologies that we are most experienced in and especially about where we see ourselves in five years.
4. If there is a match it is absolutely crucial that you explain the whole recruitment process at the very beginning and provide information about compensation level. If we feel comfortable with the terms we can go further. If not, let’s be honest to each other and stop here.

Being faithful to those 4 principles we’ve created inhire.io. We would like to assure you that companies that we are working with are following these rules. It is our job. But we need your help. If you will find out that someone reached out to you through inhire.io and is clearly violating the above rules, sending their recruitment spam, please let us know. In cases of recurring reported violations, we will be terminating our cooperation with companies that are represented by people who can’t do their job in a professional, honest and non-violent manner.

We respect professional recruiters. We met them on our way and we enjoy working with them. But it became a rare opportunity as there is an army of spammers obscuring everything else. It’s time to say STOP.

Inhire.io team