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Comment on Ask HN: How to effectively deal with recruiters?

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My advice:

1) Don't ever interact with MPC recruiters. These are recruiters who do not have a contractual agreement with a client in place and want to use your resume to sell their own agency to new clients. 100% wastes of time.

1a) Don't do a lot of legwork (background checks, reference checks, official documents, etc.) before they even submit you. This is a way of filtering out MPC recruiters who are vetting you to become sales material for THEM, not for the job.

1b) Send them your resume in PDF, not DOC form. If they insist on DOC then this is a sign that you may be working with an MPC recruiter.

1c) If they insist on knowing what your current salary is, say you'll tell them if they reveal their bill rate for an equivalent candidate for this client. Again, this is another way of filtering MPC recruiters who will have no way of answering this because they don't have any clients.

1d) Build up a good spam filter to filter out MPC recruiters you've identified. They all share tactics and templates, so they're pretty easy to spot.

Essentially, just be a nice person and avoid MPC recruiters.

What are MPC recruiters?

"Most placeable candidate". It's just the insider term for the strategy I described above where you find a good candidate and then use them as bait to dangle in front of clients.

TXVOP

what stops these people from downloading mine or anyone's resume off LinkedIn and use that for their purposes? they wouldn't even need to bother contacting me first

Nothing. And they do already convert your PDFs to Doc for editing, often destroying part of your layout. At one job interview for a frontend developer position, I was very embarrassed to learn that the idiot recruiter had done that to my CV. My interviewer jokingly showed me how my CV looked all messed up - wrong alignment, missing icons, mixed up fonts, weird borders. All this because the recruiter wanted to remove my email address from the document...

Well, one could print the PDF on paper and then scan it as image, it will probably loose some resolution/detail, the layout will stay, unless the recruiter uses OCR, and then you will have, besides a messed layout also several typos ...

literally all recruiters ask you about your salary, does that mean they are all MPC?

His point here is if they're MPC they won't be able to tell you their compensation from the client for filling the role.

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