I always thought the preference for phone calls over e-mails is so there's no written account of anything that might be convenient to backtrack on in the future.
Not really. No recruiter is trying to avoid a paper trail, that's not their gig. It's a reputation based industry, there's no limited liability like with corporations.
There's three reasons:
#1: The phone call allows them to get a read on your personality by listening to your tone of voice and your attentiveness.
#2: There's a whole body of research that says building rapport etc means the deal is more likely to get over the line, basic sales.
#3: Recruiters like to talk on the phone. The primary reason people get into recruiting is that talking on the phone all day sounds like a swell time to them.
Having worked with recruiters on the other side, I think the biggest contributor is a version of number 2 - they think they will get a better result via their amazing powers of verbal persuasion and charm.
In reality they are probably applying selection bias and only moving forward on the people sufficiently interested that they actually pick up the phone.
That sounds effective, they are probably happy with that bias. If people aren't interested enough to talk to them for half an hour then the outcome will probably be so-so.
Even if the selection part is true, it chases away people who cannot be bothered to interact with a human being for 20 minutes or so. High value is a different set of people with unknown intersection.
No, it is not people who can't interact with a human being for 20 minutes, but with tens of them. If it were an agent / talent model, where it is a somewhat large amount of interaction with a single individual, that would be one thing. But interactively sharing the same information with 20 different recruiters is just a waste of time that has nothing to do with an inability to be bothered to interact with people.
When I get 10 LinkedIn messages a day, no, I cannot be bothered to interact with each of them for 20 minutes. And since they all refuse to send along any relevant details whatsoever, I can't even cull that to the subset that's plausibly interesting.
I'll add that sales is about overcoming objections. This is done most effectively in real-time. Sales of all variants have a preference for real-time discussions because they can get people to agree with things and navigate the turning no into yes.
Right, this makes sense for the person doing the selling. And it's why it makes sense to have a strong bias against people treating one's career as a sales engagement.
I don't think that is true anymore now that several jurisdictions says that the recruiter must mention a number first on the salary. They would never do that if they can at all avoid doing so. At any cost.
When I was a recruiter, mostly I wanted to make sure you could speak English well enough to hold a conversation, make sure you were interested enough to go through the process, and make sure you weren’t an asshole. Also I could help sell you to the hiring manager by getting details I know the manager is looking for, and getting that information over email can take too much back & forth. But really just making sure you could hold a conversation was big, as so many applicants cannot.
I've heard many people, often project managers, mention 'fit' and filtering out assholes, but my definition of an asshole is one who's mean, uncaring, and arrogant. But I've never seen that kind of person in the 10 years I've worked in software development.
What do you define as and asshole, and do you run across many of them?
When you are a recruiter, you talk to all types. You probably have seen many in part because the recruiter filtered them out. And you are right, most people are not assholes. But if a toxic grade-A dip shit applies, it’s my job to make sure that person doesn’t get within 100km of the hiring team, or they will start questioning why I’m even around at all.
> my definition of an asshole is one who's mean, uncaring, and arrogant
By that definition, I've worked with three clear matches and four pretty good runner-ups over the past 20 years. The absolute worst one was not a dev, but a PM.
For obvious reasons I'm not stating even the time frames when I crossed paths with such characters.
> When I was a recruiter, mostly I wanted to make sure you could speak English well enough to hold a conversation, make sure you were interested enough to go through the process, and make sure you weren’t an asshole
that makes sense and I respect that. the problem is that it is a jerky thing for the recruiter to do. and as someone looking for a new job/gig one of my top filters is to avoid/eliminate jerks where I can.
it might feel paradoxical or counter-intuitive to the recruiter, but in trying to weed out jerks, they themselves can behave like a jerk. and thus we will weed you out. ;-)
Strong disagree. As a candidate I want to make sure everyone’s time is being used effectively, and I’m perfectly happy to offer up information that can be used to make sure it’s a good match. It’s not “jerky” to want to know a candidate can hold a conversation: it’s (in my opinion) eminently reasonable due diligence.
what I was saying is that if you as a recruiter demonstrate that you disrespect my time -- important upfront when one is bombarded with hundreds of recruiters a month/week -- then that is jerky behavior. one's "reasons" don't matter, they are indistinguishable from "excuses". only actions and impacts. upfront folks ought to use their time efficiently. treating every random recruiter ping to the red carpet is a recipe for much time wasting and frustration. its more polite to nail down and filter out any showstoppers as upfront as you can. email is much faster and easier at doing that, and less prone to being gamed/abused by the recruiter as a bonus.
once an initial fit is determined, then yes doing a brief call can be nice. but as a candidate, I dont honestly care if the recruiter himself/herself is sane or pleasant to talk to on the phone. I do care much more about the job details, and about whether the hiring company likes me or not, upfront. Anything that is an obstacle to that should be minimized or routed around.
but in a sea of alternative uses of my time the recruiter is competing for my time, the talent candidate's time, just as much as the reverse, and arguably more so
CAVEATS: decades of real world experience, not theory. I'm also talking more about third-party recruiters not in-house. and when I say "recruiter" I dont mean like the CEO of the hiring company, or a senior tech leader -- those folks tend to be MUCH better uses of call time, plus they inherently signal a hiring company is interested in you. and yes you DO want to get a sense for whether those folks are sane and not-jerks -- they are potential bosses afterall -- and calls help with that.
Third-party recruiters are the ones who always waste my time. Before Covid, many would insist on meeting in person at their office. I even had one that wanted to meet me at 4:30pm in downtown Dallas. That was an easy 'no' for me.
In-house recruiters are totally different. They represent the actual hiring company and aren't just submitting your resume to a job posting.
Someone who immediately jumps to calling someone a jerk, not knowing that there are probably good reasons for what a professional recruiter does (like phone calls) probably is a jerk themselves, honestly. I personally appreciated when my recruiter would talk with me on the phone versus email, as they took the time to really listen to me and find out what I wanted from a job, rather than treating me like another dart they had to throw out of twenty darts to try and get a bullseye. Maybe I’ve always talked to good recruiters but I’ve never questioned their methods and gotten several good jobs with great pay raises from them.
I totally agree. The problem isn’t that I don’t want to get on the phone. The problem is that I don’t want to get on the phone for half an hour without even having a job description or a pay range. That makes the recruiter a jerk.
because when recruiters want to do that it feels like they're just fishing for how little they can pay you, or perhaps just collecting PII for <reasons>.
software companies are becoming much too coy about setting pay expectations upfront. its disrespectful of the talent's time. and feels like a growing fad of gaslighters. "Well they get away with it so we'll try as well..."
No. Phone calls are more personal than emails. Some people like that.
For everyone complaining here about getting phone calls, there is another half who'd jibe "Damn, another templatized email. Why should I be interested if you haven't put any time of yours into communicating with me??"
TL;DR: programers are hard to please. No good deed goes unpunished.
I mean, all I expect is a mail written by someone personally, referencing at least any of my work, offering a job I’m actually qualified for and would fit previous experience.
Receiving fifty mails for a senior Java developer is pretty jarring if there’s no single Java role on your CV…
Is that too much to ask from recruiters?
Programmers as a group may be hard to please. The programmer in question, though, is not so hard: Send them an email to schedule the meeting with the hiring manager. That's not hard.
And if you're a recruiter and you can't listen to a request like that, how are you going to listen to the rest of what the candidate says?
> The programmer in question, though, is not so hard: Send them an email to schedule the meeting with the hiring manager. That's not hard.
It is not trivial either. Neither side wants to show their full availability immediately and you eventually have to block multiple timeslots till a response comes in. On a call you can give out preferred times at first and if they aren't a match look for alternatives. And you can confirm on both calendars at once without blocking other slots as well. But yes, shouldn't be hard to manage ...
I'll typically give out 3 slots that work for me and "if none of those work, propose a few days next week where you have availability and I'll offer additional slot in those days".
I've only had that go more than a couple rounds when trying to setup meetings with someone incredibly busy (and those people often have assistants that I can work directly with to find a slot). I'm not opposed to getting on a phone call to setup a meeting, but only after the vastly more efficient method has failed twice.
Sure, if I wanted to offer “take any free time” to the counterparty. It’s more common that I want to offer a slot that’s adjacent to other interruptions in my day. If I have a 4 hour block of focused work time, I’m not offering as an opening bid 30 minutes in the middle of it to my CEO let alone a recruiter.
Now gomand schedule five interviews that way. Makes 15 slots blocked, till responses are in. And then the day not packed in a way that remaining time can be used in meaingful ways.
What happened to the happy middle ground of sending a personal email? Why are the two extremes having someone insist on synchronous voice communication on the one side and a fully automated e-mail on the other?
I don't think it's that simple really; it seems like people (not just programmers) are hard to please because the circumstances and available time differ from day to day, and different conversations are better sometimes in email and others on a call.
I'm very protective of my time in general because I tend to be involved in many things: sometimes technical, bureaucratic, sometimes internal-political, and so many more. Each category requires a different part of my attention/focus which I'm not always readily able to shift to, or more importantly, would rather not shift to as I'm more preoccupied with a different category.
Most importantly, the majority of the time all these calls have one common denominator; the requestor wants/needs something from me, not the other way around. Wanting/needing my help or input isn't something wrong in and of itself, but if it's not reciprocal and especially if it's not something I'm obligated to do, I absolutely tend to be pretty defensive of my time.
It's perfectly common in modern business to exploit people's tendency towards good faith interpretations and our aversion to conflict, and disengaging from situations/requests that aren't one's responsibility is something many people have difficulty with. (Just think in your work place if you know someone who just has a hard time saying "no" and over-commits themselves constantly) And it's a skill to identify these situations and gracefully disengage depending on the person who is creating the situation in the first place.
When there are complaints about a template email, the opposite of that isn't a phone call, it's taking the time to state a point clearly and directly and showing that it has specific relevance to you and justifying your time/attention. A conversation can be just as "template" as any email, even more so sometimes when you are listening to someone who speaks only in aphorisms but cannot go deeper than that. ("You have a chance to get in on the ground floor of something truly revolutionary!", "It's a high-paced high-reward environment that a 10x-er like you can thrive in, and the growth opportunities are limitless!", or even we can think of the hey-day of descriptions along the lines of "the Uber of _____") If the conversation lacks substance or purpose to someone specific and relies on general advertisement like attention grabs to keep you going, it doesn't matter what the medium is, the conversation simply offers next to no value.
A phone call doesn't mean personal by any means, it just means a slightly higher amount of attention and a situation that is sometimes difficult for people to exit. It has it's time and place, but far too many people exploit the good nature of others to peddle some agenda that serves only themselves. Absolutely, we should be more protective of our time/attention, and we should be more respectful of other people's time/attention
> Each category requires a different part of my attention/focus which I'm not always readily able to shift to, or more importantly, would rather not shift to as I'm more preoccupied with a different category.
...
> but if it's not reciprocal and especially if it's not something I'm obligated to do, I absolutely tend to be pretty defensive of my time.
You have every right to protect your time - I did not state otherwise. For abrupt interruptions on the phone, the simplest way that has worked for me is to not answer the call.
All I stated was that phone calls have their value, and the reason for using them is NOT exclusively to avoid leaving a paper trail. If one of the people on the call wants to leave a paper trail, it is easy to email "Hey, thanks for the call. Just so I totally understand, we agreed XYZ on the phone. Please confirm if that is your understanding too."
Also, if I understood correctly, the person I was replying to was not exclusively talking about phone calls for the first outreach. But your response suggests you are talking about interruptions on the phone.
