Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MichaelCrawford | Hacker News Reader

MichaelCrawford

Among my pet peeves is that when I search for telecommute jobs at Craigslist - which is often the case, as I am a consultant - it gets me posts that say "no telecommuting".

It is quite cruel that the name of the employer is usually not provided: "We are a hot startup in the cloudspace" rather than "Example.com is a hot startup in the cloudspace". This has the result that I apply to a lot more companies than I otherwise would, because there is no way I can learn more about the company _before_ apply.

See if you can find a recording of the original Apple Computer radio ad. It was on their very first developer CD - "You can change the world!"

Well I expect Apple did, but now everyone says they're going to.

I've gotten to the point that when I see an ad seeking a "rockstar coder" I just don't apply.

How about a job posting that's looking for someone with more than ten years experience?

Someone whose products got reviews in the trade press, or sold well?

> It is quite cruel that the name of the employer is usually not provided: "We are a hot startup in the cloudspace" rather than "Example.com is a hot startup in the cloudspace". This has the result that I apply to a lot more companies than I otherwise would, because there is no way I can learn more about the company _before_ apply.

There's a workaround for this. Take a few sentences from the job description - some of the non-standard ones - and google for them. Frequently, you'll see the company's job page in the results as the first hit. From there, you can usually even contact them directly, and skip the recruiter middleman.

In my (a few years out of date) experience, it got me hits about 50% of the time.

yes! I just did this today and it works very well

Awesome! Thank You!

Actually I used to do that for my own web pages, to find scraper sites. Funny it didn't occur to me.

One additional bit of search foo to add to this if "non-standard" doesn't work well is the last and first few words of abutting sentences, like "a workaround for this. Take a few sentences from the job description" (with the quotes) from the message I'm replying to; right now that gets no hits from Google, and I just got exactly one hit from "provide strong isolation? Partly because it is hard and partly" from 5 hour hold comment in another discussion.

One recruitment consultant contacted me about a job. Told me blah blah blah, how such and such a company were hiring loads of people etc. I told him I was interested and he didn't get back to me. So I posted my own application to the same company, and got hired a month later.

I wonder how effective that is vs going through the middleman. I'd guess if the "end company" is small enough without the bloated HR structure, it's more effective to get in the door by contacting them directly. On the other hand, if it's a behemoth like GE or similar, it might be more effective to go through a middleman to get past clueless HR.

I'm struggling with these decisions currently, as I see the same position posted by multiple middle men, as well as the "final client" directly, and sometimes it's difficult to figure out the best way to handle it.

Does going through a recruiter typically mean that you bypass HR? I always assumed that HR would be involved regardless.

I've only worked for one company large enough to have a dedicated HR team, and they don't seem clueless to me so far.

My understanding is that some (most?) recruiters work directly with hiring managers.

haha I forgot about the 'rockstar', which makes even less sense than the others

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