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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they
  leech off our industry.

I'm no fan of recruiters, but nothing stops you applying to the company directly, and nothing stops the company posting their own job ads.

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Actually your CV can be hijacked by a recruiter, effectively keeping you out of a job.

Imagine this scenario: You get a call from a recruiter. They seem to have an interesting position/client/network so you send over your CV. A couple of months later you are actively looking for a job, so you make a list of cool startups in your area and send your CV and a customized cover letter. They all answer that they got your CV from the recruiter and that they can't afford the recruiter's fee. They can't hire you for 6 months/2 years/indefinitely, depending on the recruiters terms.

Oops.

Maybe I'm exaggerating?

Sounds like a good lawsuit against the recruiter.

Try proving it...the evidence is stuck in some corporate recruiter system.

The firm that said they had already received the CV and couldn't contract has all the evidence that is needed. Surely a firm would unite with a potential candidate to bring down scum recruiters?

I think that's an exaggeration.

That scenario could easily play out. However, if the employer genuinely has no connection to the candidate (other than having received their CV a couple of times, in different incarnations) then I don't see why they wouldn't pursue the candidate without the recruiter being in the loop.

I can tell you why...at my Last firm, the "first submitting agency" was tied to your name on FieldGlass. You could not get around it. It was the only system you could hire thru firmwide.

How about you provide the recruiter with a fake name, and use your real name with a more accurate CV to contact the clients directly?

Every place I've ever worked where I had any visibility into hiring, at the start of the search the company makes a decision as to who they want to deal with: hire an inside recruiter, retain a single outside recruiter (or several), or accept referrals from all outside recruiters. Once they've made that decision, when a recruiter sends them a resume, either the recruiter they're willing to work with and whose fee they've already decided they're willing to pay, or it isn't. In the latter case, they respond saying "we've got our own recruiting arrangements, thanks" and toss the resume. In that case, if the same resume comes in through a different channel later, they're under no obligation to the recruiter, and they'd be perfectly happy to hire you.

I suppose if they were working with a recruiter, and later ended the relationship, that could cause the problem you describe, but I haven't seen it happen (as a job seeker, a member of many interview panels, and as a hiring manager a couple times).

In theory, the recruiter isn't supposed to send resumes without the job seeker's approval, which means that when they do so, they've probably broken any agreement they have with the hiring company, so the company probably isn't bound by that agreement any longer. Whether you'd be able to convince the hiring company to take the risk of a lawsuit (that they'd presumably win) is another question, of course.

No, I've seen this happen where someone's resume was spammed by unscrupulous recruiters and made them effectively persona-non-grata.

> They all answer that they got your CV from the recruiter

I've never known recruiter scum to send out a CV without my name, contact details, and references stripped out.

Why would the company agree to a rate they can't afford?

And how can this possibly be enforceable when you haven't given that recruiter any exclusivity?

The problem is in my experience is that:

1. Job advertised doesn't have the name of the company

2. Recruiter is CV harvesting with fake job ads - experienced that

3. Recruiter bait and switches - job is real but is an excuse to get you for something else

4. Recruiter gets wind of big company or gov organisation recruiting via competition, posts the same job spec then uses it to try and undercut while passing themselves off as the "official" recruiter. Had this with a NHS development role where the job I responded to turns out they had no business advertising for.

5. If the company is named then it's usually because said company only wants to use a recruiter. I've had this a couple of times where I've contacted a company directly but been asked to file my application with their official outsourced recruitment service.

6. Recruiter threatens "you'll never work in this town again" if you do somehow get to know who the company is simply because you ask.

Ninety nine percent of all recruiters I have dealt with have been the scum of the earth, even the so called reputable ones.

I truly hope Stackoverflow Careers destroys these businesses.

The same nothing that does not stop the companies actually seeking their own employees also does not stop 300 recruiters from copying their posted text, stripping out the original company-identifying information, and re-posting.

The noise added to the signal does make it significantly more difficult.

So rather than searching a central repository of job ads for opportunities specifically relevant to you, you have to visit individual company websites, find the "careers" or "jobs" section, and look for leads in a thousand different places.

I consider a no-recruiters policy to be absolutely essential for a job advertisements boards now. Everywhere else, you have to filter out key phrases like "recruiting", "our client", or "resume in Word format" just to find anything useful.

> "resume in Word format"

FYI, this will filter out a few companies as well. Qualcomm, for instance, insists on all resumes being Word or RTF for some reason.

From my perspective, that is Qualcomm's problem.

Actually if the company hired a recruiter there may indeed be reasons you can't apply directly and they can't post job ads themselves. I've seen companies make the mistake of accepting absurd NCAs giving recruiting agencies a quasi-exclusive right to applicants. It's not universally common but depending on the kind of contract you enter (and for some of them it's possible to do so informally just by giving them the go-ahead via e-mail) you can tie your hands.

None of that excuses their behavior.

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