The Engineer's Guide to Getting Recruited (Without the Spam)
This one isn't for recruiters. This is for you, the engineer who gets 14 LinkedIn messages a week that all start with "Hi [FIRST_NAME], I came across your profile and was really impressed by your background..."
I worked for many startups. I've been on both sides of recruiting. Now I build a platform that indexes millions of profiles. Here's the honest truth about how recruiting works from the other side.
How Recruiters Actually Find You
When a recruiter is looking for a senior React engineer with fintech experience:
- They search a database using keywords and filters
- They get hundreds or thousands of profiles
- They scan each profile for approximately 6-8 seconds
- They decide "yes, reach out" or "no, skip"
- They send a templated message to the "yes" pile
What shows up in a quick scan matters enormously.
The Signals That Make You Visible
1. A headline that says what you do, not your title. "Software Engineer at Acme Corp" tells nothing. "Backend Engineer, Distributed Systems, Go/Python, Building payment infrastructure at scale" tells everything.
2. Quantified achievements. "Built event processing pipeline handling 3M transactions/day, reduced latency from 800ms to 120ms". Profiles with specific numbers get 3x more recruiter engagement.
3. Recent activity signals. GitHub commits, job changes, published articles. Zero activity signals look like a stale profile.
4. Current technologies. If you've been working with Kubernetes for 3 years but your profile still says "Docker", you're invisible to Kubernetes searches.
The Compensation Transparency Play
Your market value changes faster than your salary. We regularly see engineers at $145K whose skills are identical to engineers at $195K. Same city, same role, same stack. The difference? One changed jobs recently.
Know your market rate. If you're underpaid by more than 15%, it's almost always faster to change jobs than get an internal adjustment.
The GitHub Misconception
You don't need an impressive GitHub profile to get recruited. Only about 22% of senior engineers have meaningful public GitHub activity. Most good engineers write code at work, not in their free time.
Don't feel pressured to do unpaid work on nights and weekends to make yourself recruiterable. Your day job experience is more than enough.
How to Control Your Inbound
Be specific about what you want. "Open to senior backend roles at Series B-D startups, $180-220K base, remote-friendly, working on data infrastructure". A recruiter who reads this knows immediately whether their role matches.
Respond to good outreach, even if you're not interested. A quick "Not looking right now, but I'd hear about [specific role type] in the future" builds relationships for when you are looking.