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Comment by godzillabrennus | Hacker News Reader

The fact that recruiters lack an in depth understanding of the work the people they place are engaged in is a symptom of the larger problem.

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.

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I think this is by design - it's a commission based non-skilled sales position. The people who get into it are the same selling automobiles, real-estate, fire extinguishers, etc, and can easily move between these industries based on how hot they are. It's cheap for the agencies to recruit just about anyone, and those who are truly skilled will rise to the top while the rest are naturally culled.

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.

> 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

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.

My own experience is from Linked-In and at tech meetups. In the latter, I can't even recall ever seeing anyone other than an attractive 20-something female present, at least here in San Diego.

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)."

My experience is also from linkedin and just random emails - I don't really do the meetups, although I could see where that could come into play. Though I think most engineers are actually more excited to find an engineer wearing a shirt from a company they want to work for and talk about tech.

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.

Right - there is often representation from engineering in a recruitment capacity. To be clear, I'm talking only of people who are employed as recruiters.

I think you are misunderstanding the recruiter's role. Their job is simply to bring people into the funnel. Deciding whether it's a good fit is entirely up to the candidate and the company. If you let them waste your time with a job that's not good for you, then that's your fault for not asking enough questions up front.

They also filter, yet don't really know anything about what they are filtering.

I agree with the stuff about accountability but what kinds of recruiters have you been dealing with?

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.

I have had the same experience but I am a fresh graduate with a year of work while an undergraduate. Currently I am frustrated because I have to take an offer on the table before it expires while I wait for two others to get back to me.

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.

Ah yep, I've experienced the "hurry up before the it disappears" thing you mentioned - They're almost always bluffing though.

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.

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