[melbourne-pug] Question re job ads from recruiters

[javier at candeira.com]

On 2016-01-27 16:07, Andrew Stuart wrote:
> I’m curious to know why the limitations on job postings from 
> recruiters?

Hi, Andrew.

Thanks for asking. Also thanks for engaging the Python community as a 
member, not as an outsider. I liked your Pycon Au presentation last 
year, hope to see more from you in the future.

Since I wrote the policy, and it's a bit ambiguous despite many voices 
agreeing on its main thrust, here's my rationale for writing it:

The Python Users Group is for the benefit of its members. Traffic on the 
list has to have perceived benefits to them.

Others have already spoken to the frustration of mismatched expectations 
between posting and interview. But it's also true good recruiters can 
help in matching jobs to candidates, if the candidates feel they have 
control over their job search, by having enough information as they go 
in. Cloaked posts are almost information free.

Job postings that don't mention the employer nor the salary aren't 
useful to MPUG members on the list for the following reasons:

- people who are already looking for work can already find those same 
job postings on seek, monster, etc. [1]

- people who aren't already looking for work get no benefit, there's 
very little incentive to ask about it.

The only benefit of job postings with no stated employer/salary is to 
the recruiters that can get a leg over other recruiters if people apply 
through them instead of going through other people. If we said yes to 
this type of cloaked postings, we'd get more of them, without any 
benefit for the community.

So really, recruiters per se are not the target of this policy. Postings 
with no added value to our constituency are. Nobody has complained when 
Planet Innovation, the BOM, Biarri or Medibank (recent examples I 
remember) posted help wanted ads, not because they were not via 
recruiter, but because posting was informational.

These are useful help-wanted notices, both to those looking for work and 
to those who aren't. We welcome this kind of postings by anyone. In 
fact, these are the ones that stick enough that I have told people in my 
circles to go talk to these companies if they were looking for work. I 
don't do that with cloaked postings.

I understand this may not have been clear enough, so I will find a 
better redaction for the policy and link it to this email message for 
future reference.
> Perhaps if there was a jobs mailing list address then people could
> tune out of the noise by moving the job postings off the main list.

Anybody who wants to start a melbourne-python-jobs mailing list can do 
it. Many here might even subscribe to it, or send notices to it if they 
ever need someone. Someone has to take on the job.

Regards,
Javier

[1] To be fair, search engines are spammier than recruiter emails, which 
at least usually write to the mailing list for the programming language 
and city fitting the position, while job postings on search engines are 
often fishing expeditions mentioning languages that will never be used 
on the job, cities that they hope the candidate will move from, etc. 
Still, the consensus is that cloaked job postings are not good enough 
for a community mailing list. We expect better.