Should tech recruiters learn to code? (2014)
rosario.io
rosario.io
Receuiters can be rude to you, they can miss meetings they schedule with you, they can reach out about a job and then ignore you, they can mislead you, they can waste your time on phone calls, they can send you spam email, and they do it all with impunity.
The real problem is that Recruiters have no accountability in the process aside from getting butts in seats.
HR tools keep getting developed to refine that filter candidates for skills and personality but never to bring in the much needed accountability missing from the process.
With the software recruiting industry the issue is somewhat made worse by the basic gender imbalance that exists... agencies try to capitalize on the environment of nerdy male engineers by having an unusually high number of attractive women to get a higher response. EDIT: unfortunately I'm not able to find any direct stats on the software recruitment industry itself please regard my comment as anecdotal.
This seems questionable. All the recruiters I've ever dealt with are over email and phone, and you might not even meet them when you interview on-site (because there may be an on-site recruiter for the interview). I don't see how physical attractiveness comes into it.
I also find that my chance of having a male recruiter or a female recruiter contacting me is about 50/50.
As far as actual statistics, I know I've seen a few over the years where it was shown that > 80% of tech recruiters are female but I'm having trouble finding much due to the influx of hits regarding recruiting female engineers. I did find this one for the recruitment industry in general in Israel:
http://staffingtalk.com/why-most-recruiters-female/
With particular interest to this update:
"*UPDATE: Bradley Ruffle recently noted via a comment on this post that they expanded their initial survey to 208 companies. 91% of these recruiters were female (with the majority still being single and under 30 years old)."
I don't have any data to back this up either, but I wonder if the companies contacting me might also have a certain pattern. Bigger companies, like Google & FB, I think I have had more recruiters with female names contact me (although I have had some male ones as well). Small startups it seems to be more males, or maybe even just direct employees if they have no recruiters.
As a developer, I feel like I'm the one who is rude and not the other way around. These days they're lucky if I even pick up the phone.
In the case I get an offer from either I will quit before I even start coming to work, and I take personal issue with that. Despite this I know I have to do it in my own self interest. Its infuriating to think I am having trouble with this morale quandary when I doubt any recruiter would care a fraction as much about me as a candidate.
One time, I kept telling the recruiter that I needed more time to consider her offer and then after 1 week she called me and blatantly told me "Sorry someone else took the contract, you had to be faster".
I knew she was lying so I came back to her 1 week later and told her that I would take her contract if it was still available (even though she had told me it wasn't the week before) and she offered it to me on the spot and made up some excuse as to why it was suddenly available again.
I don't blame them though. They serve the company first and you second.
I don't care what the product is if the tech stack is wrong, and with the right tech stack and other circumstances I can work on any product.
I'm not interested in working in a rapidly growing business or one where there is a single make or break product being created at an early stage.
Most of these are like "we make a product that compares car insurance so that [goes on to describe at lenght how awesome the product is]"
I mean it's cool if it's a great product (I guess) but again, tech matters (more).
Writing about tech, processes, team size etc doesn't necessarily exclude writing a long bit about the product either. My issue was that they are 100% product.
Learning just enough to be even more ineffective is more like it.
10 years ago just having a technology "system" to run pieces of your business was enough to say you were doing something.
The shift in the last 4-7 years of managers in HR, Payroll, Finance to be literate in not only using business software systems, but manage, administer, and even implement and integrate them is leading towards one eventuality.
HR and other managers today are rarely technical or detail/data driven, and the world is becomign a data driven world first consisting of business technology / software systems that manage the details of the business.
Mix the two together and a disconnect is forming.
I experienced a payroll and HRIS implementation recently where the managers are having a hard time keeping up vs people who are natively into using and building systems as power users. It was just boring and plain old Payroll, not anything remotely to do with technology hiring.
As someone who consults in this area, I see the technology/detailed gap widening and then being filled in with people who have either picked up, or transferred from technical skills.
This pattern exists with accountants, and other professions too. The wizards of Excel have a chance to grow towards systems and processed based thinking, where folks who can't organize and make excel productive for them will have a much harder time.
Managers today simply do not have technical experience of how systems are designed, implemented, or work in detail, let alone know how to build them, or hire for them.
There is nothing more entertaining than a recruiter looking for a .NET developer (which means someone who can use all 31 languages of .NET).
Lots of legacy apps are being refactored or cornering to be maintained in other .NET syntax, requiring capability beyond C#. One hopes the standardization continues :)
1. Manage the inflow of candidates.
2. Screen candidates to protect engineer time.
3. Sell the company to the candidate.
4. Manage the ongoing candidate/company relationship until an offer/no-hire decision.
The recruiters I (as a candidate) appreciate most absolutely excel at #4.
The screening happens at #2, and should be just enough to avoid inviting obvious no-hires to speak to your engineers. As a web programmer this involves questions on the order of "How many HTTP methods can you name?".
Honestly, a resource-constrained recruiting department just can't review the entire github/stackoverflow account of every potential candidate. The very best headhunter emails I've ever gotten came from CTOs/dev leads who managed to write a sentence or two about a project on my github. Nice when it happens, but I really don't think it scales.
Should I try to get into recruiting? Can I do this as a side gig? I'm sure that if I'm successful, it will do wonders to my social ability... Any thoughts anyone? How does one get started with this? Just talk to recruiters?
And recruiting is all about the long game. You may keep in touch with someone for years before you have the right opportunity at the right time for them.
I have no idea is this a good idea but nothing bad shouldn't happen if you try.
There's studies that show the biggest source of satisfaction with your boss is whether they're good at your job. It's also well known that people like others like themselves, and that smart people are much better at figuring out if the person they're talking to is also smart.
What does this point to? That your very best engineers should be the ones hiring more engineers. In the endless quest to save money many companies have relegated this task to corporate drones.
I have no proof... but I would gamble a large part of the reason that bigger corporations end up with mediocre engineers and management is because they forget how to hire good people.
At the startup stage you're far more likely to see star studded teams, small groups of people that are all absolutely brilliant. My belief is that this is largely to relegating hiring to cheaper labor once the company grows past a certain point.
I know of a lot of unicorns where the founding team has made a point to personally interview every engineer. Some of them until well past 1000 employees. You'll hear people say "I can't believe this billionaire is wasting his time interview janitors". What needs to be understood is that some of us, me included, believe that who you hire is the most important decision your company makes.
Why haven't they disappeared like other middlemen such as travel agents?
Is it just for protection against civil rights suits? I realize there's some highend headhunters that do real work, but the bulk of the industry seems worthless to me.
Companies can't afford to have their employees spending all their time doing the recruiting process so the key point of recruiters is to do as much of the work as possible to free the time of the employers.
Once the decision is established to use a recruiter, then which recruit4er an employer chooses to work with depends on corporate priorities. The larger the company, the more likely it is to have a human resources department and therefore the more likely to have a "recruiter selection process" that emphasises things like size of the recruiting company, global reach, breadth of services, time in business etc etc. These bigger recruiters yes, sometimes (but not always) have "tech recruiters" with no particular knowledge of tech. Smaller companies that have the discretion to choose to work with any recruiter are more likely to work with whatever recruiter they ,know through personal connections, or whichever recruiter last hassled them on the phone for work.
Although you're not explicit, it seems that your post is suggesting that the primary value-added function of tech recruiters is as a filter for companies. But be honest, what useful filtering can possibly be done by a tech recruiter that doesn't know the tech? The vast majority of tech recruiters aren't capable of anything beyond keyword matching and basic "are you presentable" filtering (which can have important legal implications in the US, of course).
Anyway, whenever this topic comes up, one of the top 2% recruiters who know their business well pops up and claims recruiters do all sorts of useful things. Well, yeah, maybe you're part of that top tier that does great work. But that's not the bulk of the industry, the bulk of the industry is the army of know-nothings at CyberCoders other large job mills. And they're very successful, but I honestly don't know why.
The hardest parts about looking for a job are knowing what's out there , knowing whether anyone is interested once you submit a resume, and what the salary range is. If a recruiter can do that for me, it's a win.
Yes, I know this is illogical: how could two phrases mean the same thing when their literal meanings are direct opposites?
But they are both idioms, and idioms do not follow that kind of strict logic.
Here are a number of articles that explain this better than I could:
No one is confused about what anyone means when they say "I could care less".
I do sympathize with how you feel about this. I've been in your shoes [1]: several years ago I went through Wikipedia and changed a bunch of templates that used the phrase "due to" to say "because of". You're probably aware of the rules around these, e.g. these were considered correct:
"The flight was late because of bad weather."
"The late flight was due to bad weather."
But never:
"The flight was late due to bad weather."
After I edited the templates, someone reverted my change and asked me, "Mike, have you looked at a dictionary lately?"
Sure enough, "due to" is now common usage and perfectly acceptable where "because of" used to be required by the rules of correct grammar.
You might say my thinking was out of date due to my not keeping up with changes in the English language. But then I realized I could care less which way anyone wrote it.
[1] Of course I have not literally been in your shoes! That's an idiom too, best expressed in the old joke:
"Don't criticize a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and you'll have his shoes."
You will probably like this:
(Be sure to hover the mouse to read the tooltip...)
* Yes I said jive instead of jibe just to irritate people.
Typos are know-better errors. The person committing the typo knows the right spelling, they just hit the wrong key. Pointing out the error wouldn't teach anyone anything new.
Malapropisms, on the other hand, are don't-know-better errors; the person committing the error doesn't know what they did wrong. In that case, pointing it out could be educational both for them and other readers.
scarface74 did not commit a malapropism, and it was hardly a case where "the person committing the error doesn't know what they did wrong."
It was simply the use of a common idiom. The author knew exactly what they were saying, and everyone reading the comment understood its meaning, yourself included.
A malapropism is like the Yogi Berra example in Wikipedia: "Texas has a lot of electrical votes." Few people make that particular mistake, and that's what made it funny.
Of course, Yogi Berra got a lot of attention for phrases like that. So you have to wonder if he really made a dumb mistake, or if he was being dumb like a fox.
But he couldn't be dumb like a fox, could he? No one thinks foxes are dumb, those sly little rascals! And that's what makes "dumb like a fox" a colorful and insightful idiom - just like "I could care less" or "I've been in your shoes." Obviously none of these is to be taken literally, and everyone knows that.
Language is much more fun when we allow ourselves to play with it, rather than insist that every word be taken at its most literal meaning.
In many cases I know more about the topic at hand than the job seeker.
My technical background is one of the key reasons my clients choose to work with me.
People hate on recruiters but truth is that it is incredibly hard to get people into jobs. Over the past ten years employers have become "better and better" at recruiting and constantly refined their selection process and raised their standards so high that it effectively becomes close to impossible to get people who can pass the selection process. Worse, these highly refined selection processes often IMO don't actually identify people who would make a great employee. In programming, all employers declare that they only hire "the best", but there's still no way in scientific terms to quantify who are "the best" developers - in the end it is always just a matter of opinion.
The typical aloof recruiter is a byproduct of the companies and hiring managers they represent and the incentive structure created by them. The best recruiters I know are just like the best sales people I know in that they exist in spite of the environment they work in.