My tips for recruiters (part 1)

It is no secret that IT people is on high demand of highly talented experienced professionals. It has been like that for several years as far as I remember. But with the introduction of LinkedIn as a place for exposing your professional profile to the world, we, computer geeks now feel as an elite group that can have the privilege of rejecting multiple job offers on daily basis. Sometimes (and I'm not saying it in a pretentious manner) you feel like you're writing back letters from fans. "Dear recruiter, thanks for your offering, but at this moment....".

This amount of job offers is one the explanations of why so many of us don't stay in a single company more than 5 years. There is so much competition out there, that the moment you start getting a little bored with your current project, you can just start paying more attention to the market place and let the recruiters tell you nice things about other places. But even though there is plenty jobs out there, it doesn't mean we feel safe accepting any offer. Not even listening to many of them. In the last years I have received a very big number of invitations from recruiters, that now my contacts in LinkedIn surpasses the amount of contacts I have combined in my other social networks. And of course I didn't swap jobs hundreds of times.

After receiving all these messages from recruiters, in which 90% of the ended in a template response of "Thanks, but no thanks" I decided that maybe I could give some advices from my experience to IT recruiters of the world on how to fish a little better. Or at least get the "fishes" more interested in the "bait".

I went to the list of messages I have on my inbox and came with these list of recommendations for IT recruiters. I know maybe there would be refutals from what I'm going to recommend. I will be glad to listen to different opinions. I have no recruitment experience, so from my perspective certain things are not efficient, but maybe they do get the job done in the ancient art of convincing people to move to other places. These are my first 5 tips for recruiters (this could be a multi-part post).

Get familiar with the technologies

I know HR people don't need to be an expert on the field. But I can assure you would be more effective if you have a grasp of certain technologies, so you do contact people with the right experience for the position. For example, I am a developer with a lot of experience in Java programming language. If you're looking for a Tech Lead for a .NET team, unless you do me a super offer that makes me betray my for years language of preference, I will skip immediately the offer. I'm a nice guy and always respond saying that the position doesn't fit my profile. But is everyone as nice as me?

Personalize your message

Recently, I received a job offers, that I was almost entirely convinced that I was not going to accept, but it was personalized in a way that I never saw before, that made me at least have an initial call from the recruiter. The message read something like this: "It looks like you are rocking in Ducky Inc. with your new position, but do you want to move your career further". The message showed that the recruiter took at least some time to read my profile and understand my experience. That simple detail is not common. Or maybe recruiters do read in detail our profiles, but it's not reflected in the initial message. Normally it's a repeated phrase like "your profile caught our attention" or "you look like a good fit for our position". Is it too much work to try to find a little detail from the candidate's profile and use it in the message? It could be that indeed is faster and simpler to send a templated message.

Give details about the employer

"A very important international company is looking for [INSERT_POSITION_HERE]". Many professionals are willing to consider an offer based on the potential employer. Someone might want to change from financial related work, to develop fitness applications to mention an example. Not everything is about money or promotions. The thing is that many messages from recruiters look like a secret message from a spy agency (this message will self-destroy after 5 seconds). I can guess that perhaps some recruitment companies don't like to mention their client because they feel that the candidate could contact it directly. I don't know. But not giving details about the future employer is a big deal break for me. 

Send links of the work environment

This is a very important aspect to consider. It may change a lot in this new normality where companies are subscribing more and more to remote work, but still a lot of them want their employees to see face to face with certain regularity. Showing videos and pictures of the work environment (this may sound weird) makes the offer a little more human/warmth. If you only have a brief description of the company with the benefits offered, you need to imagine how the job place looks or go and research on your own. Better to ease the job by showing candidates how cool could look their new second home.

Does it hurt to put salary ranges?

A job offer could sound very nice and interesting, but unfortunately, a lot of us have responsibilities and families to care for. That means that changing jobs with significant less salary is not very wise. That would make salary expectations almost 90-100% of the cases the first filter we put at from in order to decide if we proceed to start a process, or at least have the first call with the recruiter. So why not saving time for both and put salary ranges in the offer?

Now with all these years of experience I have learned to feel less embarrassed by asking high if no salary range is provided. It's a gamble! But if you are not really in any rush to change a job, then you're not really risking much. On the contrary, if a salary range is provided, I can ponder other aspects of the position. Maybe there is not big increase in salary compensation, but there is a strategic move in the career by the experience that would be gain.  

WFH 2.0

As part of the human specie living the events of the 2020 year,  you are probably very familiar with the top one cliche phrase of the year: "the new normal". This phrase is used to describe what apparently has become our continuous present, implying that there was an "old normal", and we need to accept the new reality. The phrase has a resignation emotional charge, a certain early nostalgia for what in appearance had been lost forever. Nothing is going to be the same... This of course it totally debatable, but I think most of us already consider that sooner or later we will start enjoying those precious things that this virus put on hold. In any case, I do think there are new normal things that came to our lives to stay, probably forever. One of them is what I call the WFH 2.0 (Working From Home 2.0).

 WFH is nothing revolutionary. If you are reading this, there is high chance that you were already enjoying certain level of this benefit that your workplace grants you. Maybe one day, maybe a couple, some were only required to go one day to the office, and some others were 100% from home. We know not all companies can afford this benefit, but for those that can, you could say that the amount of days given to work from home is somehow correlated with the level of trust the company has of its employees. The higher the flexibility to WFH, the higher the maturity a company has in its processes to keep things aligned with the vision, culture, quality, client satisfaction, etc.

Then COVID-19 came and suddenly many companies started to realized that perhaps office space is not a guarantee for work performance. During this pandemic almost every IT company was forced to a POC (Proof Of Concept) to let all employees work remotely for months. And surprise, surprise, nothing really has collapsed (AFAIK). This realization is starting to have great consequences (depending of your point of view). Many high profile companies like Microsoft has already announced measures to let employees work from home permanently And this is not a luxury only big companies can do. All size companies are considering the same. And why not? There is a win-win situation. Employees appreciate not rushing into traffic, spending more time with family, better balance with work and personal life. You name it. Companies in the other hand saves in office space, amenities, water, electricity and whatever other spend that was included to attract high talent.

But if fully remote is going to become the new normal, how can companies spend the money and efforts to create a better "virtual space" to work? I want to give five of my ideas in case it helps a few HR people. Feel free to comment if I'm going too nuts (I'm just a Software Developer with no studies in HR so take it with a grain of salt). 

Entrance bonus for home office improvements. Most of us will start requiring continuous improvements in our work space to make it a better spot. A place where you feel more productive and motivated to give your best. Why not a reimbursement to spend it in a better chair, desktop, extra monitors, keyboard, mouse, even decorations. Sky is the limit...

Team activities that YOU DON'T WANT TO MISS. Yeah, every company organizes team activities like the classics bowling, Go Karts, mini golf, etc. Before these were kind of optional, and let's be honest, who hasn't assisted to one of these just for the sake of not being the "party pooper", or even making excuses because you felt it was not worth to sacrifice family time or other activity for something you really won't enjoy. Having mandatory office days still provided the human in person contact you still need on some basis to keep the team spirit flowing. But now without them, these team activities become more important. Thus, let's make them cooler so people really want to participate. 

More Interactive Corporate Meetings. On the same line of team activities, if the company has recurrent corporate meeting every, like All Hands (or however is called in your workplace), let's please spend less time on executive reports, and leave more room for interacting/partying. A lot of employees really don't have a lot of time due to other responsibilities (mostly family), which often translates in not staying in the post executive reports parties. Yeah, yeah, we know it's important to know the status of the company, but I believe we can make them a little more executive summary.

Perks to release the stress. Free lunch was an ideal perk for anyone going to an office. It released you from the burden of preparing your lunch and warm it on the microwave. Now full remote opens a range of perks that employees can enjoy thinking in releasing the stress of being a little more isolated, and taking advantage of the additional time you get by not commuting, looking for appropriate attire, *cough* not showering *cough*. So how about paying gym, salsa classes, swimming lessons, anything that requires people to leave the house and put the body in motion.

  

Go crazy with the goodies! And with crazy I mean smart, creative and fun. Perhaps your company's t-shirt is a little old and needs a renew. A new edition of stickers to put on your laptop. Caps with a cool logo. Anything that is not a waste enters in this category. This may seem like a silly thing, but without being present physically in office space, little reminders of company's identity can help sustain the culture and pride to work in a place that became virtual.

What else would you suggest????

Java: Solving Anagrams with streams

I have been playing with code problems. Since I'm studying for Java 11 certification, I decided to resolve the Anagrams problem using streams. Here what I do is sort the two strings characters and then making a comparison.

public class Anagrams {
    static boolean isAnagram(String a, String b) {
        return sortStringChars(a).equals(sortStringChars(b));
    }

    static String sortStringChars(String str) {
        return str.toLowerCase().chars()
            .mapToObj(c -> (char) c)
            .sorted()
            .reduce("", (s,c) -> s.concat(String.valueOf(c)), String::concat);
    }

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String a = "anagram";
        String b = "margana";

        boolean ret = isAnagram(a, b);
        System.out.println( (ret) ? "Yes, Anagrams!" : "Not Anagrams" );
    }
}

Gradle: Exclude SpringBoot Application Class from Jacoco Coverage

 

Jacoco plugin is a must if you care about not just writing random unit tests, but to ensure you have the right coverage for your code base. The plugin also comes with a report that shows the coverage at package level.

One thing that has been bothering me with SpringBoot apps I work with is the low number that always appears for the main SpringBoot Application class. This is a boiler plate class with a simple main method to launch the SpringApplication:

@SpringBootApplication
public class Application {

	public static void main(String[] args) {
		SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);
	}
}

Almost in every application we won't need to add any other additional logic to this method which makes it kind of dumb to create a test just to cover this class and main method. Best thing is to exclude it from our coverage using this format (in this case for Gradle):

jacocoTestReport {

    afterEvaluate {
        classDirectories.from = files(classDirectories.files.collect {
            fileTree(dir: it, exclude: 'com/mycom/shoppingcart/ServiceShoppingCartApplication.class')
        })
    }
}

Spring REST Controller: Resolve conflicts between root controllers endpoints and swagger-ui.html

Our team had some issues setting up swagger. We've been adding swagger to multiple services and for a strange reason, one service was not loading the swagger-ui.html. After some testing, we realize there was a conflict with some endpoint that were mapping to the root of the site:

@RestController
public class ReportController {
    
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/{reportId}")
    public ResponseEntity getReport(@PathVariable String reportId) {
        ....
    }
}

As we can see, since controller class has no request mapping, and endpoint method is mapping with /{some_id}, when we try to hit /swagger-ui.html, the request is mapped to this method.

After googling a lot, we ended up just making our request mapping more specific to a certain type of ids. In our case we are using mongo ids for the reports. It means ids can only have number or letters in lowercase.

@RestController
public class ReportController {
    
    @RequestMapping(method = RequestMethod.GET, value = "/{reportId:^[0-9a-f]+$}")
    public ResponseEntity getReport(@PathVariable String reportId) {
        ....
    }
}

Now because swagger-ui.html contains a dot (.) and a dash (-), the request is not being caught by this endpoint anymore.