I care about the future of work because I have always been fascinated with how people earn money and the jobs they hold.

I grew up in a family that valued household chores, so I got a job washing cars in my neighborhood when I was nine years old.

Often I am asked (by my parents no less) what the next few years will look like in the job markets. I used to work at Indeed, the employment-related search engine, and spent a lot of time thinking about how people will work together - and in companies - in the future.

Specifically I am asked: What will change?

Alas, I can’t predict the future.

But what I think is an equally interesting question – although one that is all too often overlooked – is what about the future will not change? In other words, what will look the same today as it will next month, or next year?

I believe how companies attract and retain talent will change. But some of the methods used today will remain constant.

I have observed how hundreds of firms attract new workers successfully. And I have boiled down the key learnings from their job postings and hiring pages. From them, I have extracted learnings that are useful if you are looking for a job or if you're a hiring manager looking for workers with technical skills.

I want to share these lessons with you.

#1. Companies will need to offer new and differentiated employee perks and benefits.

When looking at tech-centric job openings at companies today, it is common to see perks like “office dog” or “unlimited cold brew” or “team happy hour”. These keywords appear on many job descriptions as benefits of employment.

But in the era of COVID-19, it is painful to see job postings that are misaligned with how staff spend their time.

I have hired staff that works remotely and know that their needs are in many ways different from traditional office workers.

Welcome packages, a personal budget to optimize a home office, or a food delivery account are probably better aligned with what remote staff want.

Companies must think holistically about their benefits packages and ensure that they are relevant to today’s workforce.

As companies become more in tune with what workers care about, they're changing their hiring policies and interviewing strategies to accommodate remote talent. And the innovative companies will continue to offer differentiated benefits and perks to empower their staff.

An emerging perk that a growing number of firms are offering is in-house technical training and upskilling.

Helping staff develop and grow not only keeps ambitious workers around longer but it deepens the human capital and intellectual property possessed by the firm.

I have one friend who works at a company that is giving staff “time off” to learn how to create e-commerce sites and chatbots.

If you are a builder and creator, can you think of a better retention perk?

#2. Companies will embrace authenticity culture so that workers can bring their whole selves to work.

Mark Zuckerburg, best known for co-founding Facebook, made the hoodie popular among tech workers. While Silicon Valley has long valued a more informal culture, non-tech companies from Main Street to Wall Street are evolving as well.

Fewer people are shopping for suits and ties. Tailored Brands, the parent company of Men’s Warehouse and Jos. A. Bank, filed for Chapter 11, a form of bankruptcy that involves a reorganization of a debtor's business affairs.

When Tim Cook, the American philanthropist and Chief Executive of Apple recently made a press announcement that Apple would produce one million face shields a week, he did so in a cotton t-shirt from his home office.

Such informal attire would have been unrecognizable at Apple in years past.

In order to attract and retain technical workers, companies will need to embrace talent in a holistic manner. From how they dress to how they vote, workers will demand that companies let them bring their whole selves to work.

Many large technology firms - including Indeed, Google, and Facebook to name a few examples - have internal resource groups. Amazingly, these groups - designed to bring people with similar backgrounds together - are all too often not used in job postings or recruitment efforts.

If your firm doesn’t have resource groups, it should consider building them out. If your firm has resource groups, it should consider telling prospective staff about these communities.

If a firm wants to attract and retain technical talent, it will need to embrace authenticity culture. Companies will want to bring their culture to the forefront of why their workforce is unique and exceptional.

#3. Salary and job structure will continue to matter but so will holistic compensation and autonomy.

My parents, and many of their generation, valued jobs that had predictable compensation, simple to understand benefits packages, and structure.

It is well documented that baby boomers spent far more time in jobs and changed roles less frequently than members of today’s workforce. A pension, a once common corporate benefit, is now a rarity.

I don’t see people, or job postings, focusing less on money. Rather, I do see that job seekers want more holistic compensation packages (time off, mental health services) and increased autonomy.

I recently heard a peer state the following about his manager: “She is great because she is entirely hands-off in her approach to how I run my book of business. I give her updates but it’s my product to take to market.”

His freedom to take the actions he deemed in the best interest of the business was a currency that made him value his role more.

Today, innovative firms are attracting and retaining staff by offering childcare stipends, monthly food or health benefits, or pet adoption policies.

One innovative startup is offering its technical workforce access to virtual games. By encouraging staff to play games and understand the mathematical models behind games like solitaire, the firm can help their teams develop new mental capacities in a fun way.

Final Thoughts

The future is yet to be written. Labor markets, like technology, are constantly evolving.

Even though there are more workers than job openings, some sectors of the labor market are seeing red-hot demand. This is particularly true in the fields of cyber-security and Information Technology.

That is why re-conceptualizing how to hire and attract staff is so important: if you can’t predict the future you need to be well equipped for anything the future holds.

The heuristics one will choose to find a great job are unlikely to change. People will want a good salary, a good manager, and a good culture.

What will change is how we work, the mediums we use to communicate, our attire, and the underlying values underpinning work culture.

Companies need to be aware of these changes to retain the best staff and to keep these workers motivated and in their roles.

As a female technical founder who is heavily involved in recruiting efforts, diversity in hiring is an issue I think about every day. A growing body of research shows that diverse teams perform better, and as that research becomes common knowledge, companies of all sizes are prioritizing diversity efforts.

Though larger tech companies like Facebook and Google are making steady progress towards their diversity goals, the metrics for technical teams at startups remain dismal. I find it encouraging that so many startup hiring managers and recruiters have recognized this as a serious problem, but there are a few areas that are routinely overlooked. This article focuses on five points that I have found effective in helping our startup recruit women. While there are many different facets of diversity and inclusion, this post will specifically focus on gender diversity.

1. Recruit at least one female founder, investor, advisor, or leadership team member.

Hiring at early-stage startups is difficult and largely network-based. A diverse founding team will have a more diverse network from which to hire early employees, whereas a founding team who is entirely male can unintentionally recruit an all-male team.

Having no female leadership, no female investors, and no female advisors is signal that a startup doesn’t truly value diversity, and could influence female candidates against joining. Even if your founding team isn’t diverse, you can reverse the trend by recruiting a woman onto your leadership team. Female leaders often add a diverse network to the candidate pool, and their presence in an organization indicates less bias against promoting women into management.

While searching for the right hires, also put effort into finding a diverse set of company mentors. The right female advisor or investor can help recruit female candidates and serve as a role model for people at the company. There are so many accomplished women who would make incredible assets as advisors to startups relevant to their area of expertise.

2. Prioritize pipeline diversity at the top of the recruiting funnel.

Companies with women can more easily recruit other women, and the best place to start is at the beginning. Early diversity problems can compound down the road, when candidates may view a lack of women as indicators of systemic bias or a toxic culture.

To systematically focus on diversity from the beginning, constantly monitor your candidate pipeline. At our company’s outset, our engineering hiring pipeline was around 50% women. While we benefitted from the network effects of having a female founder (myself), we filled the pipeline by pushing ourselves to brainstorm a diverse set of candidates from our networks, looking at LinkedIn and Facebook to spark our memories. However, over the next few months, we noticed that our pipeline gradually became less and less diverse, and flagged this as an issue.

To fix the problem, we focused on balancing the top of the recruiting funnel. Early startup hiring tends to bias strongly towards in-network referrals, and team members often think of people to refer in an ad-hoc way, which is an opportunity for bias to seep into the process.

To improve diversity among referrals, hold one-on-one meetings with members of your team and ask them to systematically search their networks for female and minority engineers they have worked with in the past, even if they are unsure about their technical skill. Create an internal system for tracking referrals, and make sure to check in to see whether team members have reached out. Many people don’t realize that they subconsciously tend to only refer white and asian males, but by verbally acknowledging that common bias, the team can start to work against it.

3. Incorporate diversity efforts into every external company event.

“Women in engineering” events seem disingenuous when other company events are not ordinarily inclusive. Integrate diversity and inclusion into every event by aiming for a better gender balance at all office events (e.g. board game nights and dinners). Ask the team to conscientiously invite both male and female friends, with the explicit goal of reaching a 50/50 gender ratio at the event.

The benefits of making every engineering event inclusive go farther than helping the women who attend such events feel more comfortable. Often, the burden of throwing diversity-oriented events disproportionately falls on women and minorities, when in reality, it should be the responsibility of the whole team. Ultimately, the most progress happens when the men on the team participate in diversity and inclusion efforts as much as the women.

4. Encourage the team to actively reach out to and mentor women.

Men and women who have made it a priority to mentor women will have more diverse networks. Because there are fewer senior women than senior men in tech, it’s important that those who are able to provide mentorship go out of their way to do so for both the men and the women in their lives.

Good mentorship goes a long way, both inside and outside of your immediate work environment. Within a company, mentorship builds internal role models and helps teammates grow more quickly. However, not every person you mentor needs to be a current coworker, or even a potential hire.

I personally go out of my way to provide guidance to anyone who reaches out, regardless of if I know them or if they are a potential candidate. This involves assisting with interview practice, connecting people with companies that match their interests, helping others deal with workplace conflicts, and even providing advice over the phone to someone who cold-emailed me after reading one of my blog posts.

Providing guidance to a diverse set of mentees helps move the needle on an industry-wide problem. Besides, you might find that your help comes back around in unexpected ways; maybe you can’t recruit that mentee today, but you may be able to recruit them years down the line, or recruit someone else from their network. By consistently and conscientiously offering career advice to both men and women, anyone at your company can establish themselves as a role model for others, and role models are a powerful incentive for someone to join your company. Many people join startups because they’re following a mentor — myself included.

5. Focus more on the system than the statistics.

Often, startups focus too much on diversity metrics, seeming to forget that metrics are merely a symptom of systematic problems in sourcing, interviewing, hiring, and retaining diverse team members.

Lack of diversity is not a problem for which deployed solutions reap immediate results. There is no way for a startup to implement perfect hiring systems and see the metrics start improving the next day; often, results take years to manifest. By rewarding only the results and not the process, leadership may slow gradual improvement towards a better culture and a fairer system.

Instead, create internal metrics that focus on bite-sized issues that can be addressed through day-to-day actions. Reward team members who refer diverse sets of people. Reward those who come up with ways to make company events feel more inclusive. When performance and compensation reviews come around, reward employees who went out of their way to move the needle on diversity initiatives, especially those who are neither hiring managers nor recruiters. Improving diversity is a team-wide effort; to generate change, every person at your company should be aligned on its importance.

The press has placed a lot of emphasis on company-wide statistics — the percentage of women and minorities in leadership or technical roles. However, the companies who have most successfully fostered change didn’t simply discover a previously-unknown source of female candidates. Instead, they invested years into building an inclusive culture, and those years of investment eventually proved fruitful.

Long before working together on Impira, Ankur and I would discuss at length the bleak state of diversity at small startups. We wanted to make sure that, at minimum, we would build a company with an inclusive culture, following the guidelines set by organizations such as Project Include.

Our technical team is currently 30% women, and this number will soon be higher. By continuing to reflect on the successes and failures of our diversity efforts, reinforce diversity as a core value, and improve our hiring processes, I believe that that number can continue to grow in the future. If this is something you’re also passionate about, we would love to work together!

Thank you to Ankur Goyal, Sashko Stubailo, Carl Grennes, and Richard Ni for edits and feedback on this post.

You’re just sitting at your desk, minding your own business, trying to get some work done. Then, as inevitably happens, you hit a minor roadblock: your code throws a cryptic error message.

“No problem” you think. This isn’t your first rodeo. So you copy and paste the error message verbatim into Google and see what you get.

No luck.

There are plenty of search results, but none of them fit your situation closely enough to really provide a useful answer.

And so begins the creative Googling process. You try several combinations of the error + the context that you’re using it in. You try including the name of the library that you’re using. You know you’re getting closer…

Now on your sixth attempt, you try another combination of search terms and hit return. The page loads and you’ve just begun skimming over the results when, suddenly, your browser window splits open and you see this:

“You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?”

“Wait, what?”

“Where did this come from?”

“Some sort of challenge from Google… Is this based on my search history?”

You forget about the bug in your code entirely. You are now completely engrossed in the bizarre situation that you find yourself in. And, as interesting as all of this already is, you notice something that only adds to the intrigue. Alongside the message, you see that the first button says:

“I want to play”

Oh, so this is a game? Interesting…

Overcome with curiosity, you accept. The split in your browser window slowly grows to reveal a large black screen, which then fades away. You are then redirected to www.google.com/foobar/. A black screen fades in and some text appears. It looks like a Unix shell.

The aesthetic of the page (the retro computer font, the hidden terminal, the lack of a modern UI) combined with the “007 — Your mission, should you choose to accept it” feel of this whole experience makes you feel like you’ve been drawn into a secret world. You are now completely engrossed.

There is some text at the top of the screen:

“Google has a code challenge ready for you”

Just below, there is a paragraph of blueish text that sets the stage for a sci-fi adventure:

“Success! You’ve managed to infiltrate Commander Lambda’s evil organization, and finally earned yourself an entry-level position as a Minion on her space station. From here, you just might be able to subvert her plans to use the LAMBCHOP doomsday device to destroy Bunny Planet. Problem is, Minions are the lowest of the low in the Lambda hierarchy. Better buck up and get working, or you’ll never make it to the top…”

“Alright, then. So it looks like I can either explore the terminal or start the challenge…”

Your curiosity gets the better of you again and you think “I can’t just start the game without snooping around a bit”. So you type “help” and hit return. A list of shell commands pops up.

“Very interesting. So we’re clearly going to be working with a file system. But this is a pretty limited list of options.”

You decide to see if any of the unlisted common commands are available, so you try something simple:

foobar:~/guest$ pwd

It works! You see:

/home/guest

Awesome.

“Alright, let’s take a look at that home directory. There’s bound to be some more interesting stuff there”

So you try:

foobar:~/guest$ cd ..

And…

Nothing.

You get a new line with no error but when you run pwd again, just to check, you still see /home/guest. Ok so this thing probably isn’t the open-world unix shell chocked full of easter eggs that you’d hoped it was. So you decide to just get on with the challenge.

You type in the word “request” and hit return.

A prompt appears, warning you that this is a timed challenge and you will have 48 hours to complete it.

“Wow. Ok, so it’s timed…”

You agree and proceed.

More sci-fi narrative, and then you see that something called solar_doomsday was added to your home folder. So you navigate to the folder, open it, and find four files:

constraints.txtreadme.txtsolution.javasolution.py

Readme seems like the obvious place to start. You open the readme file and see the following:

“Ok” you think “when you strip away the narrative, they want me to write a function that returns a sorted array of all the square numbers (including 1) that add up to a given number, starting with the largest.” Pretty cool.

“So this is the kind of challenge that Google uses to test problem solving ability?”

“Well, I’ve already gone this far. Might as well give it a shot!”

About the Foobar challenge

The above is a description of Google’s Foobar challenge: a kind of easter egg in Chrome that is ostensibly used to source new talent for Google’s engineering team; although Google doesn’t seem to have acknowledged Foobar in any meaningful way (at least, not that I’ve found). There are, however, plenty of first hand accounts by developers who went through the process that make it clear this is what it’s all about.

The unique thing about the Foobar challenge is that it finds you. And not in the way that an unsolicited recruiting email or salesy text message “finds you”. It finds you by tracking your search activity and (seemingly) matching it to known needs in Google’s engineering departments. Furthermore, the sudden visual disruption of something that is otherwise so constant & unchanging, the Google search results page, is jarring enough to really draw you in — certainly a very clever use of Google’s assets.

Given Google’s access to (1) your personal browsing activity and (2) the platform that you are browsing the internet on, they really do have the perfect opportunity to snag talented people no matter where they are in a really direct and engaging way. They seem to try and suss out your basic skill level & area(s) of competency based on your search history, and then try to engage you to enter their talent funnel with this “game”, which, if completed successfully, might or might not lead to an interview invitation.

The first mention of the Foobar challenge seems to have been this post on HackerNews from back in 2014.

Side note: withgoogle.com

When you’re on the Foobar challenge page, if you open devtools and look at the DOM, you will see that the whole page is in an iFrame, whose source is: https://foobar.withgoogle.com/?eid=... When I first saw this I thought “Withgoogle.com? What on Earth is that?”

Again, this is a total aside from the whole topic of the Foobar challenge, but it turns out that the challenge itself lives on google’s “side project domain” called “withgoogle.com”. If you dig into this a bit you will find some other pretty interesting projects. Here are just a few that I came across:

Paper Signals, Quickdraw, CSFirst, QiblaFinder, AIYProjects, ScienceJournal

If you’ve ever wondered how to land an interview with top tech companies or know someone who’s been struggling to get an interview with one, then this article is for you.

This is a compilation of some extremely useful tips from a conversation between a software engineer and a senior technical recruiting coordinator.

A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with a friend, Bernadette Lagman, who is currently a senior technical recruiting coordinator for Qualtrics, an experience management platform. Prior to Qualtrics, Bernadette was at Amazon. She’s also a TedX speaker! I highly recommend watching her talk on the Art of Hardship to know her thoughts on how to overcome adversity.

10/19/2018: Read more about my courses here to learn how I prepared.
8/25/2018: Read here for my experience after a year at Twitter.

What this is about

Here is the list of questions that Bernadette and I tackled from my perspective as a software engineer, and from her perspective as a recruiting manager.

• How to network?
• How to work with your recruiter?
• What does a great résumé look like?
• How to land an interview?

How To Network

Software Engineer says

Networking should happen somewhere that’s closest to you. If you’re a student/fresh grad, then a great place to go is your school alumni network.

Many schools have an active alumni network that is kept up-to-date. It’s a great opportunity to get to know people who’ve been in your shoes, who can relate to your college experience and know the rigor of your curriculum, and can vouch for your ability.

I highly recommend reaching out to the alumni either through LinkedIn or email. There are many resources like this that talk at length about how to write a great introduction email, so I won’t get into that today.

Take note that you should not barge in and start demanding that they spend their time on you. You want to keep the interaction professional and respectful.

My suggestion is to be proactive, and offer to buy them a cup of coffee or lunch in exchange for their time. Sincerity goes a long way.

Here’s something to give you an idea of what to say, and what not to say, in a first introductory email:

Hi _, my name is Zhia and I found your contact information on LinkedIn. Thanks for your time in reading this email.

I noticed that we both graduated from the same university, and we also graduated from the same Computer Science program with Dr. X. She grilled me very hard on my CS fundamentals, but it was one of the best programs I’ve ever had!

I’m currently in Seattle, and I’m actively looking for an internship. Can I buy you a coffee or lunch sometime near your work place? I’d love to pick your brain on how to find a job in the tech industry.

Simple, respectful, and to the point.

For industry hires, Meet-ups are a great place to go to network. Finding an area of interest to start is a great idea. If you’re interested in mobile development or data analytics, then you should make time to go to meet-ups nearby so that you can meet more like-minded individuals. More often than not, these people are also working in the area you’re interested in, and you can build an organic connection that way.

Recruiting team says

Bernadette loves the idea of networking through alumni as well. She adds that networking shouldn’t be a strenuous stretch that requires you to dress to the nines at cocktail parties to strike up awkward or unwanted conversations with executives for that next big move.

Even the most unconventional places from your doctor’s office to your local coffee shop can provide opportunities to learn if you are open to them. The key is to keep networking natural and open - don’t ask others for jobs but instead ask how they reached their point of success.

She says that recruiters are humans too, and should be approached with a sense of humility. The recruiting team wants to help you succeed, and it should be a two-way discussion with a lot of humility and respect for each other.

People are always open to helping others if you are open and genuine about it. Even if the job interview doesn’t work out, keep an open mind, be respectful, and the next time an opportunity opens up, who do you think the recruiter will call? The candidate who treated them with respect and showed genuine interest in working together, or the jerk who slammed the phone shut after the recruiter told them the team decided they weren’t a good fit?

How to work with your recruiter

Software Engineer says

A recruiter should be your partner or resource in a job interview. Finding a job is a bi-directional discussion between you as a candidate and the company. The recruiter acts as a bridge between these two parties, coordinating and orchestrating communication and making sure things go smoothly.

As a software engineer, you should ask questions like

• what is the interviewing process
• how to best prepare for my interview
• what should I expect during the process
• what does the timeline look like, etc.

These are all valid questions to ask.

A recruiter should be a resource, much like StackOverflow is a resource for engineers. Ask the recruiter questions that will help you make informed decisions, or have a better expectation of the process.

The career levels of software engineers differs across companies, and you can find them on certain websites like levels.fyi. But the most accurate leveling information will come from the recruiter, and that’s one way you can use your recruiter to figure out the title, compensation band, or job requirement for the interview.

Recruiting team says

Bernadette acknowledges the frustration candidates feel when recruiters don’t communicate with them effectively. Often, a recruiter is doing multiple things at the same time - recruiting, scheduling and coordinating between multiple candidates and multiple teams at the same time.

She recommends that even if a job interview doesn’t pan out, you should stay on friendly terms with the recruiter, and send follow-up emails to ask for your recruiter’s opinion on how you can improve, which areas of your resume didn’t resonate with the team etc. Again, be genuine and respectful in your interaction.

A recruiter will provide help on salary, level, and compensation information. She says that most recruiters refrain from asking current compensation information due to legal reasons. When a recruiter asks for your desired compensation, you should be as transparent as possible because your recruiter will be representing you in front of the hiring team.

She notes that compensation information is very transparent in the industry. Recruiters know what is the average compensation for a SDE-2 at Amazon or Microsoft or any other well-known tech company. Thus, you should use your recruiter as a resource for figuring out what the expected compensation should/can be and work towards bridging the gap between what you expect and what the hiring team is willing to commit to.

What does a great resume look like?

I wrote an article on how to write a great resume for software engineers. So I won’t be spending a lot of time on that. ?

How to land an interview

Software Engineer says

In general, there are three ways of doing it:

• Online application
• Coding challenges
• Referral

In the tech industry, there’s an unspoken rule that online applications have the lowest chance of success. There are some exceptions to the rule, but that’s the exception. You’re being pitted against hundreds of other online applications, and the chances that you’ll get picked are extremely low.

There are some online coding challenges, which give you the opportunity to interview if you solve them. In my view, these are 50–50 because some companies don’t actually reach out after you solve them. This has happened to a lot of people, and generally I don’t recommend this approach unless you really have no other way of getting in.

For college hires, there’s another great opportunity to get noticed: job fairs. Most universities will organize an on-campus job fair where different companies set up booths to attract new graduates. I’ve seen a lot of companies, like Google and Facebook, conduct white-board interview sessions on-site. Sometimes, you’ll even get an offer the same day if you do really well.

On rare occasions, some companies also offer interview blitz where there’s a room full of candidates and you’re put through different interviewing loops in one day. These are great, because you get to talk to different teams on the same day, and if you do well, you can expect to get an offer pretty much the same day too.

My best recommendation is to ask for referrals. Referrals are the best in terms of getting in front of a hiring manager. And you’ll get fast-tracked through the process, because you’re not competing against hundreds of other faceless applications anymore. You’re a highly coveted referral from someone who already works there and can vouch for your abilities.

If you want to know how to get a referral, then refer to the above section on How To Network.

Recruiting team says

All of the above we touched on will help you land an interview. Bernadette adds that when you’re applying online, you’re competing universally with everyone else like new grads and industry hires.

However, if you know someone from the company or a referral, you’ll likely leap bounds ahead because internal references are trusted sources within a company. She notes that there are some companies that much prefer referrals over online applications.

When a recruiter goes through hundreds of resumes in a day, everyone looks the same on paper. She adds that it’s important to get face-to-face time with recruiters or hiring managers either through meet-ups or LinkedIn. A recruiter is much more likely to recommend you for the position if they can put a face to a name and they know exactly who you are and what your skills sets are.

Resources and Tools I Recommend

• How I landed offers from Microsoft, Amazon and Twitter without an Ivy-league degree - I share my journey, learnings and resources that helped me land a job at Twitter.
• How to write a great resume for software engineers - A collaboration piece between myself and a senior technical recruiter from Twitter.
• A guide to cold emailing - A Harvard Business Review article that talks about how to write an appealing cold-email.
• Meetup - Platform for finding activities around you. I’ve used it to find software engineering related meet-ups around me.
• Cracking The Coding Interview: Great for covering foundational CS
• Evernote: I use this for storing everything I write. From code snippets, to contacts information, Evernote has everything I need.
• Refdash: Best free mock interviewing platform. The quality of mock interviews here is ?. The interviewers are ex-Googlers. I highly recommend trying them out.

Credits

Thanks to Open source portfolio for proof-reading and providing invaluable suggestions on how to improve this article. They are a contributor on effai, a publication that writes about intentional living, mindfulness, and financial independence.

Zhia Chong is a software engineer at Twitter. He works on the Ads Measurement team in Seattle, measuring ads impact and ROI for advertisers. Twitter is hiring!

You can find him on Twitter and LinkedIn. Subscribe to his newsletter to find out his code snippets, tricks and daily life!

This is your last chance. After this, there’s no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and continue your job search on your own. You take the red pill — you stay in Recruiterland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

In the 1999 movie The Matrix — you’ve seen it, right? — Morpheus recruits Neo to join his dirty sweater gang and fly through the sewers in a rusty hovercraft.

Of course, that’s not how he pitches it to Neo.

Instead, Morpheus sits down in a worn leather recliner and proceeds to stoke Neo’s curiosity about this whole matrix thing.

“What is the matrix?”

“Unfortunately, no one can be told what the matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.”

Morpheus talks Neo into taking the next step — swallowing the red pill — while revealing as little as possible about the Matrix itself. And in doing so, he succeeds in creating a sense of mystery. Of urgency. A fear of missing out on a better life.

If all this sounds familiar, it’s because these are the same tactics used by recruiters, who want you to take the red pill and reply to their unsolicited messages.

Recruiters use a tool called “InMail” to blast out messages to you based on keyword matches from your LinkedIn profile. They know that if they send out 1,000 messages a day, and even 1% of people respond, they’ll have more than enough job seekers to stay in business.

Who knows — maybe they’ll even hit the jackpot and hear back from a senior DevOps, a platform architect, or someone else with an especially in-demand skill set.

Lucky for you, these spammers are easy to spot. If the “InMail” label doesn’t immediately give them away, their impersonal nature will.

LinkedIn has built a $26 billion empire by supplying weapons to recruiters, who compete in spamming arms race. And with Microsoft acquiring LinkedIn, things may get worse before they get better.

Recruiters aren’t merely the butt of friendly jokes like these. Recruiters are widely reviled among developers, who often delete their LinkedIn accounts just to escape recruiters’ clutches, or fight back by trolling them.

But as annoying as recruiters can be, they are a reality of the developer job marketplace. Many hiring-focused startups have attempted to eliminate recruiters by using the same type of two-sided marketplace that you’d use to order a car (Lyft), rent a room (AirBnB), or buy a copy of the Matrix Trilogy.

I won’t lie to you, Neo. Every single hiring startup who has stood their ground, everyone who has tried to automate human recruiters out of the recruitment process has failed.

That’s right — all those fancy websites that promise they’ll make employers “fight over you” are really just funnels into more traditional, people-driven recruitment agencies.

It turns out that selling a human being (a job candidate) to an organization of human beings (an employer) is not an easy problem to solve with software.

With hiring, you have humans on both sides of the transaction. Both sides are constantly weighing competing options. Both sides are under time pressure. And both sides carry around their own expectations and cognitive biases.

Algorithms are a long way from being able to reliably close these types of deals without human involvement. This is why recruiters still exist, and will probably continue to exist for a long time. Their time-honed diplomacy and matchmaking skills help keep the hiring process moving forward.

Recruiters aren’t going away. So let’s talk about how they work.

Internal recruiters work for a single employer. They recruit candidates exclusively for that employer. Their job is more clerical in nature, and most of their compensation is in the form of a salary. There isn’t much to say about internal recruiters, other than that you can follow an interesting one on Quora.

When people talk about hating recruiters, they are talking about agency recruiters, who are essentially salespeople that work for multiple employers.

You may be asking at this point — if all recruiters work for employers, then who works for us developers when we want to get a new job?

Well, as much as agency recruiters might lead you to believe they’re working for you, they’re working for employers, because that’s who pays them. If they were working for you, they wouldn’t be called recruiters — they’d be called agents. But most (non-freelance) engineers are too cheap to pay for agents, so they resort to using recruiters instead.

Employers pay these agency recruiters — also known as “third party recruiters” or “contingency recruiters” — a commission based on your starting salary. This is usually between 15% and 30% .

So if your starting salary is $100,000 (bonuses aren’t included) then your employer will pay your recruiter $15,000 to $30,000, depending on their agreed-upon percentage. The recruiter will only get this money if you stay with the company beyond a trial period, which is usually 90 days.

It’s important to reiterate that this money doesn’t come out of your salary — employers have already budgeted this expense. In theory, going through a recruiter costs you nothing.

Recruiters’ incentives are thus remarkably well-aligned with your own as a job seeker:

1. Since they get paid based on your starting salary, they are inclined to help you negotiate as high a starting salary as possible.
2. The more candidates they place — and the faster they place them — the more money recruiters make. So they’ll want to help you get a job as fast as possible so they can move on to other job seekers.
3. Since they only get paid if you succeed as an employee (and stay for at least 90 days), they want make sure you’re competent and a good fit for the company’s culture.

This system sounds healthy enough, right? It actually worked quite well up until about 10 years ago. That’s when LinkedIn showed up and turned recruiting into one giant spam fest.

InMails assemble!

Today, anyone can create a LinkedIn account, get a free month of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, do some quick keyword searches and start filling developers’ inboxes with spam.

They can pretend they’re from an established recruiting firm — real or fictional. They can claim to have close working relationships with major employers you’d like to work at. They can throw around large but plausible salary figures to get your attention. Anything they need to do to get you to take their red pill by clicking that reply button.

Next thing you know, they’re applying to companies on your behalf, only to reveal to employers later on in the process that they are not fact a candidate, but actually a recruiter. They’re modifying your resume to omit your personal contact details and strengthen their position as an intermediary. They’re using all manner of black hat tactics to try and score that fat recruitment commission with as little legwork as necessary.

And in the process, they’re wasting your time, tainting your reputation, and possibly even alerting your current employer to the fact that you’re looking for another job.

If enough of us stop responding to these InMail spammers, the expected value of their spamming efforts will fall, and eventually spammers will give up and stop spamming us.

But not all recruiters are spammers. Some can actually help you.

There are still plenty of experienced, trustworthy recruiters out there. These recruiters already have working relationships with employers, and can understand employers’ needs and expectations much better than you can as a one-off job seeker.

Take job requirements, for instance. Up until about 20 years ago, the requirements section of job postings were intentionally written to scare off unqualified people. But times have changed, and now there’s a massive talent shortage. Even though it’s a seller’s market for programming skills, job requirements are still written with a buyer’s market mentality.

A good recruiter can sit down with an employer to understand their true minimum requirements for a position, and discern which of the dozen bullet points in their job requirements really matter the most to them.

For example, if you’re experienced with Express.js, but have never worked with Ruby on Rails before, a good recruiter knows whether an employer will consider those skills to be comparable. And each employer — and each hiring manager who works for them — is different.

You can be up-front with your recruiter about your knowledge and experience. Unlike with employers, you can be candid about your current salary and your desired salary. Recruiters are incentivized to help you get as high a salary as possible, and they have a much better idea of the salary ranges for different companies, locations, and job titles.

A good recruiter can also save you a tremendous amount of time by steering you away from positions they think are a poor fit for you, and toward positions in which they think you’ll be happy and succeed.

Oh, and have you ever been turned down for a job when you thought you totally nailed your interviews? The employers probably wouldn’t tell you why they chose to “pursue other candidates.”

So you spent hours of your life — maybe days — interviewing for that job, and you don’t even have feedback to show for it.

Well, if you have a good recruiter, they can act as a backchannel. Since they have a working relationship with the employer that transcends your one candidacy, they are in a strong position to find out why the employer didn’t hire you. Your recruiter can turn that information black hole into a source of actionable feedback, coach you on what went wrong, and set you up for success with your next interview.

I know Bar Foo.

If you’re looking for a good recruiter to help you with your job search, don’t bother with LinkedIn. Go straight to your friends. They may have had success with a particular recruiter before. One candid opinion from a friend is worth dozens of dubious 5-star Yelp reviews.

Many established recruiters focus only on senior roles, which are easier to place and command higher commissions. But if you keep looking, you’ll find that there are recruiters who specialize in a wide range of disciplines and skill levels.

Don’t get discouraged. If you want an ally in your job search, your Morpheus is out there, ready to show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

I only write about programming and technology. If you follow me on Twitter I won’t waste your time. ?