Behind the Recruiting Curtain: What Do Recruiters Really Say and Do

so this is our our final panel for the day it's our only panel for the day I was trying to cheat and it's going to get me in trouble hang up so the wonderful gentleman who's running around is also involved to a circle Sadiq Khan he's involved with beside San Antonio he is the organizer for p-site San Antonio and he also is now on the speaking circuit because he has developed his career by volunteering at various different Khan's and so it is definitely a role model to follow so is this me you're quite welcome so are we done are we check check yeah near me okay we're great so I always have fun with this panel because

it is a really great way for people to see that recruiters are real people they they they actually do exist and one of the things when I came into this industry is that everyone was bad-mouthing recruiters and there's actually several YouTube channels about it there's also several twitter handles about it there is so much bad-mouthing going on about recruiters that it was hindering job search for many job seekers because they didn't want to talk to a recruiter because they thought the recruiter was stupid that the recruiter was unethical that the recruiter was not doing their job well I hate to tell you yeah they're going to be people like that in any industry unfortunately you're closing yourself off to

opportunities if you don't network with recruiters so I'm going to have each one of the recruiters up here introduce themselves briefly tell us what kind of positions you're hiring for and one thing people do not know about you and I'm gonna end with you last because I know exactly what you're gonna say is down here silence I had to pick something that's like politically correct I suppose my name is Meghan Kelly Donna I work with blackberry silence I'm not sure if everybody's familiar but blackberry just bought silence out in February it's been an amazing merger we're just super excited about it we're hiring for pretty much everything across Red Team Blue team 24/7 stock analysts throughout hunting

operations all of that as well as jobs sac ops at sdlc something nobody knows about me I don't know I'm not a strong swimmer I can't swim

my name is Richard Cho the head of recruiting at Robin Hood for the last 10 years of my 22-year career I've been at hyper growth startups so these are startups like Facebook where I got to solve I saw them grow from five hundred over six thousand Dropbox and now here I am again doing it all over again so I love the pain it turns out we're hiring across the board every every company every startup gets into this inflection point where you're going from hiring the one unicorn that could do everything like can you do everything under the Sun and under security to now we're actually building out our our organization and and so security engineers program managers at anything

you can think of we're building the team oh yeah in high school I sang in a Garth Brooks country cover bands will give me give me a tune out there Karthik will confirm I'm saying a country song during my orientation in front of the entire company which is super not nearly as exciting hi my name is Erica Schneider work for a company called Val mail for an email security company hiring for both San Francisco and Denver the roles that were hiring for software engineers across the board using a lot of golang on our platform Ruby as our full-stack react on the front end as well program managers product managers alike so I've got a lot of great roles even

sales I I had a ball of technical recruiting so I don't want to shortchange our non-technical departments within Valley mail but we're also hanging for a lot of sales customer success and so forth so Erica Schneider Valley mail connect to smile LinkedIn happy to connect with anybody here now something that nobody knows a well I'm moving to Denver because we're opening an office in Denver and two months so office has already opened but I'm spearheading that so that was a really exciting project and so now we're hiring in San Francisco and in Denver thanks Matt all right Avery when I met her and I'm senior manager of talent acquisition and talent attraction if you want to

know what that is let me know because I'm still trying to figure that out myself but I I'm terrible I've been there for almost seven years now prior to that I was at a Geico for about ten years doing both technical and college recruiting I still do college recruiting today with mark back there marks our college recruiter and I'll shout out to my folks that's my my seniors Tim marks on my team John is not on my team but she's cool anyway and then Jeanette you as well but yes things were hiring for actually a lot of remote research so if you know anything about you know a little bit of pen testing skill set it's

not pen testing your goal is to build the plug-ins for necess so you do get to hack things and do all that fun stuff but you're you're writing scripts at the end of the day for for nessus plugins also in the pre-sales side sales engineering we actually have something here in las vegas where you could actually be engineer for tenable in Vegas the manager for that team is wandering around if you're interested I will connect you personally for that person and then Pro sir a lot of things globally for that kind of stuff so anything to do with necess installs yeah oh and sales I already said sales sales engineering customer success things like that that's all with Maryland I want to

know what you want to say about me that nobody knows costumes oh well yeah I've run around in a inflatable t-rex costume it's before I almost brought it here and I almost ran in with it that was my plan but it wouldn't fit in my luggage so Matt and I worked together a good 10 12 years and I retired from an organization and all I really wanted was someone to come out and the t-rex outfit and at my retirement speech he came running out so it was pretty awesome it's it's really kind of hard to run those things you see no so my first question Richard give me one thing that job seeker has done that

really impressed you and what is the biggest mistake that people make when they're applying for a job I'll try to keep this security-related and I can I make it not impress me I think so this is actually documented so there's a number of folks that fit into this category but very early on a 17 year old programmer decided to hack into Facebook and make like weird things make it look like MySpace do some other things and and so both Mark and Dustin Moskowitz the cofounders of a Facebook decided to call him in and Chris was like he told his dad he's like dad I'm gonna take my phone with me I'm pretty sure I'm gonna go to jail but if

I if I if I do go to jail please bail me out and the dad's like what did you do and he's like doubt but don't worry about it I'll talk I'll talk to you later he gets into the media with mark and and Dustin and gets a job offer so Chris was one of our early engineers in security at Facebook so it wasn't my story because I wasn't there yeah but it's Facebook story so what is one thing that people do all the time that just plugs up the process for them I think just assuming that application means that you're gonna have visibility you gotta put a little bit of a work into it by

the numbers the the number of applicants to any opening is in the tens of thousands and and so as a result you want to differentiate yourself and so that so why don't you pick that up what are some of the things that people can do to differentiate themselves in the process yeah that's great I think follow-up is super important finding who it is that might be the recruiting manager the hiring manager and reaching out to them on LinkedIn you know you're you're looking for a red team role you wouldn't really want to work at X Y & Z company just reach out to someone in that organization a lot of times that sets you aside from it and one thing

that I think is the biggest thing that we see a lot of times is just if you don't know something just just don't know it it's fine and just look it up and be open and honest about that I think that that's probably the biggest thing that we see is people when they do have shortcomings is when they just try to make things up on the calls around the interviews so Erica same two questions that I gave Richard so something that people have impressed you with and what are a mistake that people have done one of my favorite things are when candidates come with a leave behind like I get super impressed they'll be really creative and it depends on the

role UX UI designer not always sometimes a product manager will come in and they'll they'll have one of them had a candy bar with their business card or than her face on it at their contact information they're like hey to sweeten the deal to hire me here's I leave behind and that just made really made them stand out I didn't end up hiring the person because I had a much stronger candidate but I thought really impressed me and connected with them still stay in contact with them today if there's any I can hire them for I will start what was the second question something you see that people flip up all the time applying for roles that they're not at

all I'll get scrum masters applying for a director of product management just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see it sticks I like to see at least a 65 to 70 percent fit it doesn't happen no one's ever 100% fit hardly ever but 65 70 percent is definitely needed so Matt let's get this a little bit more granule in a technical interview so what are things that people really mess up in a technical interview either face-to-face or over the phone I mean the number one thing is always having examples I mean so have you put things on their resume and you know just pick on college students a little bit here they go into an interview that go for an

internship they they did a class in something and they put it on the resume and then they can't talk to it if you're gonna put something on the resume have an example of almost every single skill or every bullet point that you have on there be able to tell more stories about that particular bullet it should be just a like just a quick tidbit on what it was and there should be a lot more underneath that if you can't talk or give an example for something that you know could go on for a couple of minutes and several follow-up questions you know it's it's probably best to leave it off or at least put it in a related

interests category or something like that so I would say be able to talk about the things that you put as a highlight on your resume so one thing that you know that I've talked about a lot is getting experience in the community when you don't have work experience so what are some of the other ways that you want people to show that they have work experience about in America and then we'll go down the line yeah I think coming up something like this I mean I think we've learned by the the 194 countries one community aspect of 'besides is that there's one in every city in the u.s. at least and those that are international there's something big

nearby and and they're really just driven by volunteerism I mean everybody does it for for their own there's nobody's getting paid for that even if it's just you know the people run on the doors out front that has nothing to do with security but you're around it you you take that time to to do the volunteerism and then you take advantage of the rest of the day I don't know what the shifts are for that stuff but maybe two hours a volunteering doing something completely unrelated to InfoSec just checking badges just checking people in at registration but then you get that ability to go and see the rest of the day's talks and learn so much and do the

the hallway con like we talked about before there's a lot of things you can do just in your local community if you don't have one in your local community start one up there's a lot of places that that are kind of really want this type of experience and go out there and if you can't find it for yourself create it Erica I would say especially on the engineering side if it's engineering github repositories I look at those aside from any engineering assessment that I've ever sent out I always look at a github repo if it's not engineer related like matt said to piggyback off of that a little bit meetups are a great way and if you don't have one start one

your community you can learn a lot from that community I've gone to many different language specific meetups or you know career specific meetups and I pick up something new every single time and there's a myriad from junior you know novice is to very senior people in those groups and you can always learn from each other and if I could add on to that ask your company for help yeah ask them say hey I want to do this and maybe they'll offer space maybe they'll offer a couple of bucks for pizza to pay for things so one thing building on what both Erica and Matt said was you know when you come back from hacker summer

camp write yourself a trip report what did you do on your summer vacation it sounds real bogus but there are going to be several aha moments that you're going to get and if your company provided you to come here give them a trip report what did you learn what were some of the new trends you saw you know did you help out did you volunteer did you work on your soft skills while you were volunteering we just did a study that said you know community volunteering people we're learning planning communication budgeting leadership all of the soft skills that we're looking for in you know this community also looking at CT ops because there are a lot of times when you're

going to go through that interview process and people are going to say well what did you fail at well no one's gonna really want to say what you failed at at your last job or your current job but you certainly had fail opportunities in the CTF you you know were there for a short term you had limited resources you had limited time you were meeting with people and you were going against an adversary you had never known before chief what does that sound like that's work experience so if you're not tiling up the CTF that you're part of and incorporating them in sort of your story that you tell in an interview about your work experience you're leaving a lot off

the table so to this side of the panel can you explain to the audience sort of the interview process at your companies because a lot of times people think it's one week and I'll get the job I have a colleague that spent 18 months from the beginning of the application to the final you know job offer she actually took another job in the interim so Richard can you sort of like explain the process you know because a lot of people aren't prepared for the long haul right and then Meghan let me also copy out this by saying there are certain companies that that that take a while because they could think they can they could afford to take

a while because they already have a brand we're not in that boat we're we're new to the to the to a highly competitive markets and we're hiring a ton by the volume so what we try to do is try to stay within a two to maximum three week time period there's a engagement call with the recruiter just to make sure that you are aligned to the role that you're applying to or the world that we we obviously you know reached out to you or and believe or not we get it wrong sometimes I might reach out to and you're like I don't do any of that we're like oops okay sorry and we try to

learn from that then you go to a screen which is a more technical nature just the validate that those skills that you have are valid that's usually done over the phone if it's if there's coding involved there's a shared way to actually show your code while you're talking to someone on the phone and then it's the on-site and then from the on-site by that by that time period I'm I'm already at within two weeks depending on your schedule and depending on our schedule and an offer within the third week or so is what we're what we're aiming to do Megan yeah our process can you guys hear me on this hello our process is usually actually a

little bit longer sometimes shorter though so all her it depends you know if we're working on our consulting practice and our consulting roles sometimes we need people in seats you know that that week and so it can be really really quick and those can be actually more challenging sometimes than the longer roles because it takes a little bit longer to get to know that person our recruiting process always starts off with an intake call and that's usually led by me or one of our other recruiters and it's actually technical questions we have a hard time of getting resumes that aren't 100% true you know and so it's actually led by some technical questions that we kind of go through and were able

to weed out some folks through there we don't do many on-site interviews though a lot of our people work remotely or they work at client sites and so you don't get an opportunity to actually go on-site and meet the team so my biggest thing is just trying to get them to meet with at least two or three hiring managers and just focusing on your interviewing us just as much as we're interviewing you as well okay add to my hair so you triggered something so one of the things that's important to note it's like there's going to be things that actually there's going to be things that actually add to the time part of that is if you're the first that we

reached out to you could imagine we need to take some time to evaluate as many candidates as we can even if you're perfect the first time we want to at least evaluate a good cohort of candidates and that might take a week or two to get a full cohort before we invite you on on-site the other could be maybe we didn't get enough signal during the interview process and we want to invite you back that could take another week or so so you know they're there they're sort of the the goal of trying to get through from beginning to end and a whole interview process within three weeks it could be extended based on those

circumstances so it's all right in the process to ask what is the interview and hiring process that actually should be one of your questions what are the steps that I'm going to go through Who am I going to meet with when am I going to meet with them and how long should this process take because we all have sort of an assumption in our mind that it's going to take maybe two weeks and it ends up taking six to eight weeks and a lot of that isn't because they're not interested they're trying to line up other people's schedule I mean we all know what it's like to try to get together for drinks with some friends

you know imagine trying to put eight or nine people scheduled together so how many of you guys get thank-you note not enough honestly every single time you should follow up with the person not just the recruiter but every person that you spoke to ask the recruiter for their infer therefore their email and send it to every single person you spoke to every time anyone else want to add to that when I agree it's not that hard to find people's emails it's usually first dot last name at company comm is it a way to differentiate I mean is it how you differentiate your candidate yeah I think my manager is differentiate that way as well yeah I take stock in that and also

customize your thank-you to and a different person because by my engineering team does talk to each other and if you spoke to the hiring manager and then one of the engineering leads and one of the your fellow engineers or whomever it might be in the team they're gonna know that it was just copied and pasted and you know put some effort into it state maybe you know what you really found interesting about your conversation with that person but the most you can possibly do is at least customize that note please I also have another thing to add to that one too is also if they asked you a question that stumped you write it down and answer

that question in that email and that that speaks volumes to our team so what happens you know what's interesting is that when people don't get accepted for the job they then sort of wipe that company off their list so Matt and whoever else wants to jump in on this if you don't get accepted for one particular job do you just sort of write that company off your list Matt no I mean there's always gonna be something different next year next week you know people might leave that company and open up another job and that person might be a good fit for it there's somebody I've been talking to for like three years I think the person is awesome I I would

love to see this person work for us we just haven't had the right opportunity for them and if they had just written me off the first time I said no you know we wouldn't be talking next week about another opportunites come up you know it's keep at it build the relationship that's really what what's it's a game I understand that there's there's things that you have to do the things that we have to do as companies to keep you engaged but it's your career if you think it's a great company to work for and you would like to see yourself there it may not be today it may be next year but I'd say keep the doors open always

and unless they screwed you over some way and you know Richard is a really great example I mean you heard all the various different companies that he has been part of if you are not including Richard in your networking you are missing out on so many opportunities all gonna be lighting up for you but realize that recruiters also talk to each other and they'll say hey I mean I can't tell you how many groups that Matt and I are part of that we say hey we just you know we just met this really great candidate it just wasn't the right fit is there anyone else out there that can take this person I can vouch for

them I've done the interviewing I've done everything I think they would be great we just don't have the right position so I mean do you guys network with job seekers and keep them sort of you know in your face absolutely if I can't hire them I always say if it's not right now I hope it's in the future and if it's not at bala mail then who knows maybe it's not the company that i'll be at in the future you never know like matt said it's all about building that relationship and connecting and I've stayed in contact with people for years same person with a candy bar I still talk to them I just can't hire them just

because I don't have anything open for them right now but I've referred them to my recruiting background includes agencies k4s and Robert Half and I will send them to all of the recruiters that I know they're please help find this person a job so thank you Sam yeah look that's definitely aspirational on both sides so I actually think a lot of recruiting organizations don't do a good job following up from folks that have failed to interview process yeah just you know to people to be frank and then you know to the point of this panel you should you should make sure you try to make that connection but it's awkward we know it's like a breakup or like

sorry you didn't get the job in your life you know there's a little bit of emotions human the whole thing the most important thing is that knowing that talents not static like you're gonna develop some new skills that's probably gonna make it really important I know of two examples in my mind in my 22-year career where we said no to somebody only for that person to actually be one of the most important contributors to a technology or something and then now we're now we're like can you please come work for us so so it's the moral of story is recruiting organization should do a good job staying in contact with folks that and that were rejected and and in

kenneth should do a good job trying to stay in contact with a company as well so how many in the audience can say that you have five to seven recruiters that are in your network that you network with not the people that are spamming you okay all the readers in the back of the room thank you so we have people that were go to for restaurant recommendations v recommendations or vacation recommendations your career is somewhat important why are you not adding recruiters to your network and keeping in touch with them and saying hey I just passed my CISSP that was something that was required for this shop I mean I know recruiters who check in on a regular basis you can check in

with them we have a few minutes left I want to take questions from the audience we have a lovely woman back there with the microphone so do we have any questions what do you feel that college students are missing or fresh out of college they're lacking in that to anybody in particular or you're looking right at me [Laughter] yeah so III think a lot of I love the energy I love the aspiration you're not gonna be CEO next month all right I think the willingness to do it some of the work that you know is at the entry level it's there for a reason that is there are things that you need to pick up that later on in life you're gonna

need for your career having a say SSP as a you know 21 year old that's cool but that's a that's a management and strategy based certification you know are you gonna build on that and then speaking of certifications I have a kind of a love-hate relationship I'd love hating on certifications because I I think they're just great for being able to say I passed the test I knew the information for the time it took me to study and close the book and then open the test book and submit on the Sun the answers but I don't retain the information I see a lot of entry-level people in our tech support interviews that we go through the OSI

model all networking based all this stuff all the layers of networking and they say oh I remember that for my studying is like well then it didn't really work did it so I say have some humility and saying I need to do some of this this grunt work and I know it sounds bad but it is grunt work but there's a reason behind it and then make sure the death studying sticks there's a lot I mean googling an answer I hear it all the time it's not that impressive but I understand that's the way it works but no enough of the basics to know that I need to go to the basic level and then

if it's advanced then I got to go look it up yeah anyone else have anything for college yeah I think so look yeah getting a job is really it's it's not easy especially if you're if you're just graduating and so you graduate with these like credentials and anything it's like an inventory of things that you need to know in order to get in and or do your job well and I haven't seen that really bear out really well long queue both in the interview process and also long term what what most college students don't end up taking the time doing is like why should I know this why do I like this what why am i passionate about this and

it's it's important to know that alignment like you you you chose this in this particular profession and curricula intentional unintentionally and understand the why behind that except by the way when you're asked questions and you're passionate about it not only does it show up emotionally but your knowledge is right there as well right so so understand the why and behind it any other questions come on I am one over here what attributes do you like way heavier than others in terms of hiring an applicant like the ability to be a team player or high technical ability or what you I guess cherished the most so Megan than than Erica I would say passion like he decided it

shows through for sure and if you're passionate about it you come to things like this you do research on your own your it shows through your entire career and web so yeah you know it's 5050 with us I hire equally for skill set as I do for you know that god-awful word culture but what that really means is that in this and just to piggyback off of everybody what we've said is all passion but also passionate about the company that you're interviewing for you know not just the subject matter or the things that you studied or the certifications that you've received and worked really hard on it's more but it's also about the company saying why you

want to work at this firm why you're passionate about their product or what they've done bringing up some recent social media posts or news articles good pad or otherwise but bringing that up and saying hey I read this about you guys I really like this about this company here's my I am here and that will that passion will exude out of you seriously so I'm gonna give each one of you just a closing statement you can make something you wanted to say or something new so Megan then will go all the way down join blackberry silence [Laughter] [Applause] she took the words on Mac I also was gonna say join blackberry silence no look so two things for you guys are

going to not only be applicants and candidates but you'll also be hire managers as well don't fall into this trap of assuming that experience is a good proxy for good experience is not a good proxy forget it doesn't matter what school you went to it doesn't matter what companies you worked for it really matters about the core skill sets it's and and that you're aligned to the work and the mission of the company and you have that passion so don't don't fall into that trap because it's the out there connect with me on LinkedIn Erica Schneider Val Emile I might not be able to hire you personally at Valley mail but I will be able to help you in

some endeavor one way or another make an introduction to my network I've got over 10,000 of them so please I would invite you to connect with me thank you ma'am recruiters are known for throwing out a lot of messages on LinkedIn to connect or I have this you know hot opportunity or hot job or whatever it is I encourage all of you to really look at some of those messages because one day you're gonna be kind of that person that that's getting all those in males and and and in you know set in your job and I'm not really gonna look pay attention to who's sending them I I think there's a lot to be said about the quality of messages

you'll receive over your career from recruiters looking for for you to to connect tables turn when that happens you guys are sending us applications at some point in your career and then we're out there sending new invitations to apply for jobs have a very critical eye about who you're engaging with you can do a quick review of somebody's LinkedIn profile a recruiter statement dealing for about three months and before that they were like a server or bartender or something like that I'm not saying they're not good I'm just saying that there's probably somebody out there that you should be paying more attention to if they've been doing it for 10 years for 15 years or whatever that means they

have a lot of connections their quality so be on the lookout for who's sending those messages if it's not the right job today and usually I don't want to do that at least say hey I'm not interested you know like you know what you're doing you've been in this for a while when they have something fun on their profile just connect with them and say hey you look like you know what you're doing I'd like to just stay in touch maybe there's something else down the line so when you've made that that change in your career to where you're the sought-after person keeping out who's who sending you messages because it may be one of us up

here and be gentle on us please yeah so in summary here at hacker summer camp when you go before you go home before you get on the plane right a trip report what did you learn who did you connect with to make sure that you're connecting with all of the recruiters that are in the room and anyone else yes dear anyone else that is someone that just you had a really passionate clerk with because there's also this thing called the employee referral program so if you met someone who really loved where they worked and you understood what they were doing and you were really passionate about that be sure you're including that in you know the networking be sure to

ask at the beginning of an interview what is the overall interview process so that you know from A to Z what are the different steps and when you go through all these different steps please write a thank-you note to everyone that you have time to talk with realize that technical versus passion is going to be sort of a seesaw you know make sure that you're talking about the technical skills that you really know not just those that you googled about those that you really can bring value to the company and also being able to show the passion that you have for that kind of work you're doing and the cop that you're going to go work for let's

have a round of applause for our recruiters so this concludes the first day of higher ground it's been a great experience who the recruiters and participants and career coaches and resume reviewers will be closing up in about 20-25 minutes so taking the opportunity meeting with the career counselors we open up again tomorrow at 10 o'clock and resume review and career coaching starts at noon tomorrow thank you