Ask HN: Why do companies use recruiters to narrow down potential candidates? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why do companies use recruiters to narrow down potential candidates?

5 pointsbsvalley4 comments

I was wondering why software companies let recruiters decide which candidate is good or bad for a given role?

I'm talking about the very first selection. I've interviewed a lot of candidates and usually we (engineer/hiring manager) get a very narrowed list of 2-3 candidates max for a role.

Let's say I don't have a specific keyword in my Resume. Does a recruiter know I can do the job still based on my experience? For instance, I put "Oracle, XML, Data bases" and the hiring manager said to look for people who know SQL. Well, guess what, the d*mb recruiter don't know anything about Data bases so he/she will pass.

And that's the easy part, skills... it gets worse when it comes you professional experience. For example "I built a Web Server from scratch on top of Apache" and the recruiter said to look for someone who's familiar with the HTTP protocol.

If I never wrote "H T T P - P R O T O C O L E" in my Resume I'm screwed...

2 reasons

1. There are lots of people a given company considers unemployable(rightly or wrongly) and a recruiter helps weed out these candidates.(has a degree, has 4 years of experience, and has 2 years of java, etc...) This is probably low value but a lot of companies don't even want to bother with the hassle.

2. Lots of companies don't feel comfortable poaching from other companies. This is the best way to find new candidates, because the average employed developer is a better candidate than an average unemployed candidate. So they hire out this "dirty work" and relationship building to other companies that specialize in it.

But as a piece of related advice, it's easier to add "http protocol" to your resume than to fix the the very broken hiring system we have in tech.

Yes, about five 9's of recruiters don't understand the tech on the resume or the job description. That may prevent them from responding.

But in general, they rely on you to self-qualify. So they are far more likely to call you and run through the list of requirements verbally so you can tell them if you have them or not. That also gives them a chance to pitch other jobs. Of course, if you say no to something the hiring manager said was a must have, you disqualified yourself, but that's on the hiring manager, not the recruiter.

This comes from being in a tight labor market. Think of it this way: how often are you contacted for jobs you're totally unqualified for, but they think you are? In this market, I see that a lot more often than the opposite.

They believe recruiter X understands the role and company well enough to do the grunt work of reading through and filtering down candidates without disrupting everyone's work flow until it gets to the final set of candidates.

They are small enough that they cannot justify developing and maintaining internal recruiters who can do it better.

They believe the recruiter's pitch that they know the industry and have databases of people to search and reach out to and so can speed up the process to find a qualified and interested candidates.

Because apparently it is generally good enough for the executives that are making that outsourcing decision.

Some combination of all of the above

They're using recruiters wrong. We generally don't use recruiters to filter candidates, but rather to find them for jobs where network-based recruiting fails and candidate flow to public postings is poor in terms of volume or quality.

We give them top-level criteria ("mid-level iOS developer", "entry level data scientist"). Any further criteria are very unambiguous and easy to assess in a 5-minute discussion if not off a resume ("has used Python for at least a year in a professional capacity"; "has shipped at least one app to Apples App Store"). They send us a trickle of resumes. We decide which resumes suggest the candidates are qualified enough to phone screen (usually about a third to a half).

For the best of those, we phone screen and issue a simple technical assessment that gives us an idea of the candidate's baseline skills. Then we dive deeper if we need something specialized (e.g. deep knowledge of a specific protocol.)

We also give our recruiters feedback on why we decide not to hire a candidate (e.g. "he seems like he'd need an environment with more structure" or "she knows HTTP like the back of her hand, but we need someone who's used JavaScript since 2003".)

The recruiters use that feedback to inform what other positions they send the candidates resume to. And they use other clients' feedback to help decide who to send to us. Our best recruiter has few enough candidates that she can only send us a few per week for any given position.

But she knows them really well - what they're want for their careers and in terms of process and culture; what other companies have determined are their strengths and weaknesses; where they are in the interview process with other companies and what they think of those companies; and of course, what they think of us.

And she knows us well enough that (for instance) we're one of the first places she'll send a resume for someone who's self-taught and looking to leave the freelance life, and no longer bothers us with the resumes of people with CS PhDs who insist on having a project manager and Gantt charts for everything they do.

If your recruiters are using spray-and-pray and have so many candidates that they have to machine-filter their resumes by keyword instead of knowing their candidates personally, you need to find better recruiters. The ones who get a position description from you and then screen-scrape LinkedIn to "find" "candidates" are just wasting everyone's time.

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