Contacted by Linkedin Recruiter

I was just contacted by a LinkedIn Recruiter for an ID position nearby.
Had no idea this position was available, even though I’ve been browsing all the job sites.

I’m curious if anyone knows why a studio would fill this position without using Coroflot, Indeed, or even LinkedIn Jobs?
Instead, a 3rd party recruiter (for various industries) is my 1st contact, and my 1st interview (she does not even want to see my portfolio).
I think if/when I get the second interview that’s when I’ll meet with the actual designers from the company, but why would they bother interviewing me before seeing my work?

Is this normal?

depends on the size of the company, who is the hiring manager - do they have ID people internal that could tell them about it. lots of reasons - i was contacted for my current role via linkedin for a opening that i never new about.
also make sure you know what the role truly is, the number of recruiters who contact me that have no clue… Also many of them want to do a “prescreen” for them to determine if you are “worthy” in their eyes - i had a recruiter once get frustrated with them when i told them i was not interested in pursing the manufacturing tooling lead role they thought i would be a fit for - they even told me i was small focused because i wasnt willing to explore other career opportunities,…

A lot of roles are never posted publicly, especially senior and above. As for not looking at your work, perhaps they saw your portfolio on line or someone recommended you? Both have happened for me where the first contact is straight to “lets set up a time to have you in” without ever looking at work and it turned out I came in on the strength of a recommendation or the hiring manager had seen my work online already.

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This is very common, I know quite a few people who this has happened to.

I have contacted like this many times. I always reply and so far I have always given a very polite no thank you. I’m happy with my current and potential opportunities, but you never know when that will change.

I landed my current job via a Linkedin Recruiter. And I’m still contacted by Linkedin recruiters usually at least once a month. Sometimes it’s worth listening to what they have to say even if I’m not interested, since my current job sounded super awful on paper but turned out to be a good gig (At least 1 year in, fingers crossed for the future).

Lots of people prefer recruiters over posting to job boards, because often times they lack the resources to skim through a massive pile of resumes & folios, or they are looking for people with specific backgrounds or industry expertise. This is especially common for companies that are already overworked and might be looking for multiple req’s at once.

Usually once you speak to the recruiter on the phone, they’ll ask you to provide an up to date resume or portfolio (unless you have one that is easily found online).

Sometimes recruiters will contact people very broadly just to try and fill their commission, so you need to feel it out and see if it sounds like it could be worthwhile.

Like Mike said, it never hurts to talk. I usually have a quick email interchange or phone call. Usually I’ll have a few people to recommend. I’m always happy to recommend people for several reasons, chief among them, it is just good karma. Help a friend out with a recommendation, you never know how that may or may not come back to you, but it doesn’t hurt. Help out a recruiter with a few names on a job you don’t want, when they do have that job you want who do you think they will push?

At first she wouldn’t reveal the name of the company hiring until we met so that seemed odd.
But I just interviewed with the recruiter, the opportunity seems pretty legit fortunately.

Found out I’m one of three prospects so I feel good about my chances on getting a second interview.
Handed off the resume with link to online portfolio so the balls in their court now!

nice! Congrats and good luck with the next step.

Probably because its simpler (and cheaper). Every different walled-ecosystem of job sites costs something to participate. If you can get 90% of the respondents with a single recruiting system, and hope/trust that the ones you want are part of that group, then you don’t need to branch out.

That said, this method does yield a lot of out-takes.

Except in very few rare cases 99 out of 100 headhunters do not know a thing about ID so there is a certain amount of patience you need to deal with them. They are matching words in a job description to profiles. I’ve found that many of them are on a quest to learn as much as they can about ID and for that they call the most experienced person they can find and pump them (me) for information.

I’ve had to end conversations when I was asked something like “Tell me why some products never make it to production ?” or the classic “How long have you been using Illustrator for CAD ?”

I don’t know if I’ve ever had a recruiter contact me about anything that turned out to be a bona fide Industrial Design opportunity, except for a job I had already interviewed for…or maybe one I’d already gotten?

I’m fairly cynical on recruiters in general, they’re usually as I said trying to fill jobs that are a poor fit for Industrial Design, or they don’t actually have any unique opportunities at all, they’re just copypasting the same job listings and clearly not actually “clients” of the employer, and some going as far as to post “fake” job listings to collect resumes to spam the employer with in the future.

In my experience there are less than a handful of recruiters that get most of the good design leadership positions and senior roles.

That’s awesome! Good luck.
The fact that they wouldn’t want to say who this is is pretty normal. In the past I had to also squeeze that out of recruiters and triangulate the information to the point where it really only could be one company and it was quite obvious to both of us.
Watching the gymnastics recruiters will go through to tell me about the opportunity while keeping the job secret is pretty entertaining.

What frustrates me a little is that I get a lot of postings and contacted for “Product” design jobs, meaning UX/UI positions and many recruiters do not now (or care) about the difference between UX/UI and ID.
It feels unnecessary to have to educate people on Linkedin who’s job it is to know these things.

Another thing I thought was misleading was one recruiter who was posting anonymous positions and using fancy images of famous designs in his postings.
I asked him if the images in the postings corresponded to the positions or if it’s simply click-bait to make the posting look more attractive. To know ones surprise, it was the latter. I explained that it would be as if I was using other peoples designs in my portfolio front page just to make my portfolio look more interesting.
He stopped.

Another measure of legitimacy is to check to see of they’ve even been to your web site. If you have your own domain you can check in cPanel and see the date, time and GPS coordinates of who’s been to your site. Make sure your site is a valid link in your Linkedin profile.

Its not worth your time on the phone with them if they havent seen your work. The overwhelming majority of in house and third party recruiters dont even look at your work which in a vusual field would seem to be a top priority.

I find this to be an excellent question. I’m in the camp of when developing a product, you should find the quickest way to kill it whereas most companies look for reasons to keep developing it. Zombie projects are a waste of resources.

Again, I don’t understand the problem here. If my recruiter started evaluating portfolios, I’d look for a new recruiter. Evaluating portfolios is entirely the responsibility of the hiring manager. The recruiter screens, nothing more. They only need to give me a link to the portfolio.

I don’t know about a handful, but there are recruiters who are not very good and others that are. I interview recruiters like I interview hires. That is why when I get the random message from linkedin or wherever, I always respond because you don’t know where you will find that next nugget.