Berlin Survey Results — Part 1: Tech Professionals vs. Recruiters

A short while ago, we asked people in tech some questions about their recruitment journeys. As 75.7% of our respondents were Berlin-based, we will focus on them and present our findings to you in a series of articles.

The first part is about communication with recruiters.

Our aim was to learn the following:

• how often people in tech are contacted by recruiters,
• whether it’s different from our last year’s findings,
• how likely people are to deal with agency recruiters (as opposed to in-house recruiters),
• what frustrates people the most about recruiters.

And this is what we are going to share with you in this article.

But first, let’s look at our respondents.

Who are our respondents?

We’ve got a very heterogeneous group here. Most of the survey participants are full-time employed, senior or mid-level, with 5 and more years of experience.

Job titles and tech stacks of our Berlin respondents vary. A significant part (29.8%) of them work as Backend Developers.

“Other”: System Administrator, Data Engineer, C-level Executive, Clinical Systems SAP, Consultant (RPA), Office Manager, Process Owner, QA.

The most populous groups by technology/language are JS and frameworks, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby.

“Others”: Scala, Go, C/C++, C#, Elixir, Kotlin, Agile methodologies, ERP/SAP, Groovy, Kubernetes, RPA, Swift, XML.

How often are people in tech contacted by recruiters?

The average number of messages from recruiters was 17.9/month. Which is quite similar to what we found out last year.

Turns out, tech professionals in Berlin are more popular than elsewhere. For example, the average number of reach-outs in our general sample was 15.8/month.

Now, what’s interesting, the majority of our respondents (57.1%) were contacted 10 times/month or less:

Still, the frequency of recruiters’ messages changes with a person’s seniority, experience, and main technology/language.

For example, seniors were contacted 20.1 times/month on average. Those with 10+ years of experience — 21.5 times/month. Among developers, those fluent in Python were approached the most (26.6 times/month).

Roughly speaking, every weekday, a senior developer gets an invitation to apply for a job.

People in tech are mostly contacted by third-party recruiters. On average, 74.79% individual reach-outs came from agency recruiters. It is also similar to our last year’s findings.

What frustrates people in tech about recruiters?

We asked people to name up to 3 most frustrating things about recruiters. The top 3 were:

1. They introduce non-relevant positions (67.1% respondents)
2. They don’t read your profile properly (57.3%)
3. Their messages are too generic (56.1%)

Other responses we got:

• “Mostly do not have the requisite knowledge for the field they are recruiting”
• “They waste my time with phone calls where they gather information that could easily be found on Linkedin”
• “They invent positions to get the CV”
• “Asking for salary expectations before getting proper impression of professional capabilities”
• “I want to stay in Berlin but keep getting offers from outside. They might be interesting for someone else but it is waste of their time and my time.”
• “No reply or generic answer”
• “They mostly don’t hear out what my wishes are”
• “I don’t like when recruiters calling me without prior agreement”

Conclusion

To sum it all up, let’s get back to what we wanted to learn with this Survey of ours.

How often are people in tech contacted by recruiters in Berlin?

• 17.9 times per month (as opposed to 15.8 within our general sample).

Is it different from our last year’s findings?

• Last year, our respondents reported an average of 16.4 approaches/month. It is very similar to what we got this year, especially since, last time, we didn’t differentiate between Berlin-based respondents and those based elsewhere.

Does the frequency of reach-outs from recruiters change with Years of experience, Seniority, and Technology/Language?

• Yes, it does. For instance, senior professionals get contacted 20.1 times/month, and those with 10+ years of experience are reached out to 21.5 times/month. That’s more often than on average. There’s even bigger discrepancy across technologies. For example, professionals who work with Python are approached 26.6 times/month, and Ruby developers 26 times/month.

How likely are people to deal with agency recruiters (as opposed to in-house recruiters)?

• On average, almost 75% of recruitment messages come from agency recruiters. (And people in tech should deal with that.)

What are people’s biggest frustrations regarding recruiters?

• Most respondents are frustrated with recruiters introducing non-relevant positions. Respondents were also very disappointed by the facts that recruiters don’t read candidate’s profiles and their messages are too generic.

That’s it for now. Next time, we’ll talk about interview types and how tech professionals rate them.

Stay tuned!