Why are technical recruiters so clueless?
37signals.com
37signals.com
because technical recruiters, contrary to popular belief, are not hired to get the best candidates.
Technical recruiters (and agencies) are hired to give the middle manager denyability if a hiring mistake is made. I mean, if you hire your brother's friend and he turns out to be some kind of crack fiend who ebays your spare parts bin for more drugs, well, you've got a fairly good chance of getting fired in the fallout. Now, if a recruiter recommends the same guy and the same thing happens, well, now you can push some of the blame off on the recruiter. there's no question about nepotism, etc.. the professional recruiter recommended the guy.
There is a ridiculously small number of people who pay silly money to recruiters to cover nepotism but the reality is that employers hand over five figure sums to recruiters because they don't want to trawl through hundreds of CV's in the hope of finding the right candidate over the space of a few weeks.
Sit with me for an hour discussing a senior level role and I will have three incredible CV's sitting on your desk within a week. If the right person for the job is one of those three, great, now pay me ridiculous money, otherwise it hasn't cost you a penny.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761329
In this case, I just don't understand why they'd not take the person when I suggested them (I think they had reason to respect and trust my opinion; I had been working for them for a while, giving good advice. In fact, all this was in preparation for me leaving; after I had been at the new job for a year or so they spent considerable effort and money getting me to come back.)
I was trying to get them to hire someone who worked for me for some time (which is to say someone who's work habits and skills I knew well) to fill the position I was leaving vacant.
The agency in question had a long history of sending us people for mid to senior sysadmin positions who I wouldn't hire for $15/hr.
So yeah, I am missing something about how the industry works, and middle management covering it's ass fits the symptoms perfectly.
Obviously there could be something else going on that I don't understand.
My take on the whole recruiter industry is that the parasitic field of recruiters exists because of 2 factors:
1. Mismanagers don't know how to hire people. Is someone skilled? They don't know. Will someone make a good fit? They don't know. It is like Supreme Court Justice Potter's remark "I'll know it when I see it."
2. Companies don't like how references have devolved to "X worked here from Y to Z and is/is not eligible for rehire." This makes paying the 20-40% of the first year's salary for a new hire a cheap way to evade lawyers, courts and previous employer's HR departments. In short, recruiters get hired by HR departments to get around other HR departments (perhaps one should consider getting rid of one's HR dept?).
I think this is actually the right way to go about recruitment. Don't spam 100s of people on the off chance they're currently unhappy and looking to move. Just set up an environment which attracts the best people in the industry but also allows them to consider new opportunities. Not only that but as a recruiter you are immersed in the world you are recruiting for and cannot help learn and understand more about it (e.g. this morning I got an email on the list mentioning a possible talk about Jaskell - a language I hadn't even heard of but apparently, my recruiter has :)).
I have personally known a wonderful recruiter and despite my respect for her, I have very little respect for the average recruiter. The profession itself does provide value as it is truly difficult to find good people, but the low signal to noise among recruiters themselves can just as easily make it more difficult to find the right person.
Based on some of the emails I've gotten, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what some of them do.
It's easier and much cheaper in the short run to just spam everyone with a job opportunity and sort through responses versus actually doing the legwork to find qualified candidates.
Of course, in the long run it's going to make me skeptical of any future opportunities they send my way, and it certainly isn't going to make me want to hire them if I ever find myself on the other side of the table.
That's what I think I would do if I were a recruiter. I'd keep in touch with say 200 people I know are really good and keep placing them as they switched jobs. I'm guessing at least 10 or 20 of those people would be switching jobs every year.
The biggest issue is that an "agent" would need to not just maintain relationships with quality job candidates, but also quality employers. If all you're offering me is a crappy internal dev job doing .NET or Java for a health care giant, why should I work with you over any of the dice/careerbuilder/monster cattle calls?
Somebody was asking if he was reaching his pay limit here not long ago. One reason for that question is that it's very hard for one to know how they compare to other people. An agent/super-recruiter would know that and could do whatever is needed to fix it.
In a way, it reminds me of the idea of investing in people: instead of putting my money in a company I believe in, how could one put money on somebody who is talented and will more likely be successful? Well, such a recruiter could basically do that. Follow talented people around, know what they do and like doing, and advise them in terms of what salary they can expect, where they should be in their career...
The question is, of course: would I qualify to get a good agent? :)
Check it out at www.CareerElement.com!
I have a recruiter who placed me back in 1997, placed several excellent ex-co-workers into that same job, and whom I've continued to use (as a hiring manager) over the years and whose emails/calls I faithfully respond to when he's looking for help placing or sourcing (outside of my current company).
So, the model you're describing can definitely work, but if you try it with 200 "duds", you'll have a much harder row to hoe. The people who can't accurately identify talent may be far better served with their current one-shot shotgun methods.
If you place people into positions that they really fit with, odds are they would stay longer, ergo, less money for you.
What you would need to do is sell yourself as an agent that is constantly evaluating new gigs for a monthly fee. I think that might actually work really well for devs that consult as a primary business.
It's speculative sure, but all long-term investments are.
Having a recruiter "keep in touch with me" now feels awfully a lot like they're cold calling/emailing me. I'll now go to great lengths to take a job not offered by a recruiter.
I'd be an awesome recruiter :-) But I'm too introverted I think.
When it comes down to it, that's just an excuse. If you think being a recruiter would appeal to you, then do it. It's cheesy to say that you can do anything you can put your mind to, but there truly is no one holding you back other than yourself.
I think the whole recruiter/agent idea for young professionals makes a hell of a lot of sense, and I'd be happy to be one of your early clients :)
Many times candidates are also applying for several roles and may not follow up on their own. I think the worst blunder is when a candidate desires feedback and gets only silence. Note that people, in general, hate delivering bad news "You were too weak on core Java / bad breath" and so avoid the conversation.
The recruiters in the field for several years (5+) sometimes place a candidate 2-3 x in new positions. Recruiters keep up with the rock-star talent, which is always in high demand.
It gets difficult to remember who does / is what if they are middle/average when burning through 200 profiles a day or 50 calls / day. Though I tend to do 50 / 10 for quality head hunting.
You don't maintain constant contact, but you avoid burning bridges and keep the name in your contacts or linkedIn or whatever. When the right position comes up, you re-establish contact.
In my experience, that works well. As does, "I have N years left of graduate school and will not consider other opportunities until that is complete."
I mostly use it as a measure of how clued-in they are about me, but even some of the people who have mistaken me for a Davide (not the statue, unfortunately), have been very well-intentioned people with interesting things to say.
(I hope you don't consider this spam)
It beats trying to sell real-estate for those "in transition" because you can do it in your pajamas or pretend to be a career coach.
They're so clueless because most recruiters just search the web for jobs you could have found yourself, and then try to work their way into getting a cut. Therefore a typical recruiter reduces a person's chance for a job.
There are some good one's out there. But they're few and far between. Because they have done their research prior to contacting you, their emails will be short, to the point, and designed to screen for deal breakers, "Would you be interested in a job in St. Louis?"
There is something more to it than that. I've tried to become a recruiter several times, and I've gotten shot down every time I tried, even though I can demonstrate a history of hiring good people.
There's nothing preventing someone from hanging a shingle as a recruiter.
That's what I was getting at.
Edit: Recruiting is one of those "make your own jobs" Ehrenreich describes in Bait and Switch.
the company I was attempting to recruit for.
I've got at least one example where I offered a person I knew was good to a company that had hired me in the past. He was rejected without an interview. Being as I couldn't help the guy, I recommended him to an agency that worked with that company, and he got the job. Everyone seemed pretty happy with the deal, the guy stayed on for several years and finally left because the agency involved was incredibly sketchy.
Of course, I didn't get a commission out of the deal. I mean, I'm not complaining too much; when I recommended the guy to the agency, I knew from that point forward that I had zero chance of earning anything from the deal. Maybe that's how it should be? I don't know.
My point is that recruiting goes way beyond just finding good people. Honestly, I'm not sure exactly what the rest of the value you need to provide is, but I do know that I can provide good people, and that simply is not enough.
But, many times its just X number of candidates results in X number of interviews and X number of offers. Some companies are more interested in volume, and some are more interested in placements (results) only.
Breakdown of different types of recruiters: http://www.job-hunt.org/recruit.shtml
Examples of high-quality retained search firms: http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10553203/c_10676328
Most recruiters don't do either. They swing for the fences using spam as in the article. Some prey on desperation and slide towards 419 territory with career coaching and similar services.
On the other hand, there is a small (as mentioned above) 1-2% of recruiters who work in really high paying sectors that really know their industries. They're like the Outback Steakhouse of their profession. They still need to work with a lot of candidates, but it pays for them to go to conferences, read industry material and even (gasp) learn programming themselves (Thanks Zed!).
I am convinced there are still many ways for recruiting to be fixed by disruptive startups
The paid compensation on a part time basis would attract developers to get involved. It would be one or two interviews per day which would not steal time from their day job and put some extra dough into their pockets.
Win-Win for both.
Actually I want to trade interviewing skills with someone who knows how to hire a good mathematician. I've been worried about how to approach interviewing the statistician that I intend to hire eventually.
I couldn't agree more. I've been actively trying to tackle this problem, so far without success, for a while now.
I'm not in London at the moment but I should be shortly (i.e. as soon as I can find somewhere in London to live !)
Brand has huge influence when trying to hire the best, so unlike recruiters we don't hide your brand.
There are two reasons why recruiters don't advertise company names:
1) They don't want the competition muscling in.
2) A lot of companies don't want their brand advertised as they don't want the competition to know that they are hiring at certain levels and they also don't want to be pestered by other agencies who spotted the advert and are trying to pitch their services.
But from a candidates viewpoint they don't really care what reason the recruiter has for hiding the company name, it takes away valuable information from them when looking at job ads.
There are always going to be some companies who prefer not to be named (stealth hedge funds, etc.) but I think they're in a relatively small minority.
I suspect for the most part avoiding letting the competition know what you're hiring for is fairly pointless, as the first thing your recruiter is going to do is to call the best potential candidates and pitch them the job. And as it turns out the best potential candidates are often most likely to be working for your competitors.
When I was working in investment banking and got a call for a recruiter hiring for a rival trading desk I frequently pumped them for information which we could use for our own advantage. I'm pretty sure everyone else does that as well.
Because they are a little less clueless than most HR departments.
Are there any recruiters working in technology who get it?
Yes. The top 1 or 2%. The bell curve of competency for recruiters is a lot steeper at the high end, so finding one who "gets it" is difficult. So when you do, keep them. Whether you're hiring or looking, they can change your life.
The problem with this kind of hackery is that it has breed an outright animosity to recruiters in large parts of the tech world.
When you stop to think about it, this may not be such as bad thing for the top 1 or 2% of recruiters. Once the wheat is separated from the chaff, it becomes more straight forward for a competent recruiter to do their thing and gain your trust.
In this way, recruiters have a lot in common with real estate agents, car salesmen, lawyers, and even programmers. The masses of mediocre ones give the whole profession a bad name, but the best rise to the top and really do make a difference.
My background: 2.1 in Software Development from a leading Uni in Ireland. 2 years experience as a web developer for a medium sized Irish software firm and I've been in recruitment for just over 2 years now.
The amount of fellow recruiters I come across who believe java & javascript are one and the same for example is ridiculous.
The masses of mediocre ones give the whole profession a bad name
This is unequivocally my biggest hurdle, convincing candidates & clients alike that I know my Ruby from my Perl.
Good article, I approve! ;)
I loved working as a developer but there was a distinct lack of social and professional interaction that eventually led to me looking at other options.
It was satisfying completing a difficult project and seeing it implemented but I get infinitely more satisfaction from finding someone their perfect job as well as landing a juicy commission payment for the privilege of doing so!
Hardest part: The sales aspect. It is still a very sales orientated career and it can be difficult to not come across as the 'cheesy salesman' and hammer home the point that I am a developer by trade but a recruiter by choice.
I don't know if I would recommend it to other developers. It's quite hard to get established in the industry and start earning enough money to realise the potential of the career.
There is a line though that I need to be careful not to cross.
Someone elsewhere on this thread made the point that technical understanding doesn't automatically equate to an excellent technical recruiter as sales/communication ability is just as important.
As much as I want my clients to understand that I'm not a wannabe who drops in a few buzz words to sound knowledgeable I am also not just a code monkey dressed up in a suit.
However, it explains why I dealt with a couple of recruiters who touted their PhD in their email signature. I couldn't really understand why someone with a PhD would "end up" being a recruiter. But money can explain it I suppose. (they were still bad though)
There are a number of quants and C++ developers who made the move to recruiting, sometimes after talking to a recruiter and realizing that there is money to be made (usually more than they are making). I related to this: I did a lot of IT and web development work in my youth, and that always entailed being someone's bitch and not getting recognized for the work I did (Only the mess ups get noticed: Like being a goalie in soccer). In recruiting, you see the angles, work your relationships and make money. Its a one person job (mostly) and there is a lot of enjoyment in that aspect. At the end of the day you say "I did X placements, billed Y amount. Thats what I did", which isn't about the money as much as its about having a quantitative score that demonstrates your productivity.
I'll always love developing, but I long ago learned that my greatest strength is helping other people become better.
But "put off" might not have been the right word, maybe "disappointed" or "disinterested" would have been better. Basically, I saw swombat's question as a question from a developer interested in knowing if he might be missing something, if recruiting might be an interesting career path for hims. And the reply was like "the money, man!".
I could just imagine the real-life conversation, and know I'd think "oh ok... nevermind, I thought there was more to it".
Ask any recruiter why they do what they do and I can guarantee that every single person that makes more than £70k per annum will cite money as the primary reason they are in the game.
People become doctors to help cure sick people.
People become architects to design buildings.
People become teachers to educate children.
People become recruiters to make money.
It may seem like one would get into this business to help people find their perfect career and so on and to be honest with you, a lot of people have that exact intention when they start. Those that last more than a year in the industry will have lost sight of that original intention as the financial reward is far greater than the satisfaction gained through acting as a middleman between candidate and client.
Otherwise, just be mediocre and be happy to be getting what you're getting?
That makes absolutely zero sense.
To put it simply, though it is understood that one needs to make money and that it's natural to want to be paid as much as possible for whatever your work is, to a certain extent I value the work itself a bit above the pay. Meaning that I won't just do what I like if it doesn't pay anything, but above a certain level of pay, I'd rather maximize the fulfillment from the job itself.
In that specific conversation I (and I believe swombat as well) got interested in what being a recruiter means and how it could be a fulfilling job in a different way than programming can be. The same way one could look at public speaking as interesting because it's very different from programming. Thus the point of view of someone who was a developer turned recruiter interested me. (with the idea that a developer being usually paid well over decent living conditions, recruiting must be interesting in and of itself* )
However, the answer lost my interest for being primarily monetary, rather than the money being the icing on the cake.
But again, to each his own.
* I'm sure it is. It's just a reflection over that particular conversation.
Go into the english-lit / history section of a good bookstore in a university town and the odds are the people working there will have degrees / PhDs in the topic.
Go into the engineering section and the guy on the till is unlikely to be a pEng/CEng.
And I guess there are plenty of programmers who can't be bothered to even read this spam, much less considering whether it is worth actually reading.
Going by the definition given in court by the pirate bay founders, "undesired commercial messages".
At the same time, I haven't noticed that the few recruiters who understood the underlying technology did any better. In fact, I haven't any good experience with "tech savy" recruiters.
I think it's similar to management. A former-programmer can easily be a terrible manager - they don't know the discipline of project management AND they want to tell you how to do your job. A "tech savy" recruiter can't prove you know anything to the client but still presents you with tech quiz questions to prove their usefulness.
I'm confident that he wouldn't have said "sneaky Jews" or "naive Canadians" or "cheap Mexicans".
And is it just my bad luck with Russians (what are the odds?), that i do prefer Moscow-Paris flights when majority of passengers are French than the flights of Russian airlines with majority of passengers being Russians?
My country has an healthy measure against correctness. We have lots of terrible jokes exploiting stereotypes off all nations. We still delightfully tell jokes about Nazis (well we were the first they attacked during WWII and also a most deserted country afterwards), though the war ended so long ago. We have jokes on Russians (hundreds of years of conflicts with those people), Jews (yeah even on how Germans killed them in out land), Americans, Muslims and so on.
And you know what.. it turns out to be extremely healthy. The foreigners (esp Americans!) are frightened on how terrible and rude these jokes are, but in fact such jokes dissolve many tensions instead of accumulating them.
The trick is: we also laugh of ourselves. Intensively.
I've gotten my previous two jobs via "technical recruiters". If you expect them to hack on operating systems in their spare time you'll probably be disappointed, but IMO they are useful as market makers and are highly motivated to match you up w/ an employer that will be happy w/ you (since there is typically a 3-month probation before they're paid, and it can lead to repeat business). I wouldn't bash them for being technically ignorant since it's not as if internal HR recruiters are known for their technical proficiency either.
Of course, this may be a successful recruiting approach, as the hourly net pay for the entry-level contractors frequently worked out to more than the salary pay for mid-level folks, due to all of the overtime. No benefits, but if you're in a situation with a spouse with a decent comp. package, it could certainly be an alternative.
Although I am not a developer I do know my Perl from my Ruby, from my Haskel and that there are two types of javabeans. One drinkable one non-drinkable.
The primary challenge is that the people that are good aren't looking for work, in fact they probably never will have to as they transition naturally in a personal growth curve within their own social network.
So if you need to find good people you have to have your ears open and know where to look for them. This is the challenge but also interesting in more than one way.
If you know how to find the right people for the right job, you will gain insight into how to find the right customers for your product.
And that is a very interesting skill to get IMHO.
The position is based in Bucharest but
extensive international travelling is required.
Only if you can provide some ex-ante assurance to the good ones that your reputation system isn't going to be gamed by bad ones who focus on gaming rather than being good recruiters.
Hello Raghu,
Based on your resume, we are pleased to offer you the position of Mail Order Shipment Inspector( MOS Inspector) in our company. Your duties will include receipt and registration of packages, submission of detailed reports to our management and shipment of packages to end customers with postal labels we will send you. Depending on the number of packages you process, the monthly pay would be in the range of USD 1,500 - 2,500 Not sure if you are still looking for a job but let us know if so, so that I could get back to you with more details. Also, please add my address into your address book to prevent my messages from filtering into your junk mail folder.
Thank you, Victoria Premo
I've had recruiters ring me in the past with jobs that have a real tenuous connection with my skillset, yet they still think I'm suitable for the role.
The best one was when one rang me advertising for a £50k Senior Java Developer position. "Great!" someone might think, but at the time I had only just graduated from University and had 1 year of junior development experience under my belt. I told her this and THEN she read my CV/resume and realised.
Recruiters these days are nothing more than CV/resume pushers, chances are for every 100 or so they sent out, 1 or 2 will get an interview, 1 or 2 will get the job and they land themselves a healthy commission from the employer.
It's a lucrative business
As a tech recruiter, your job isn't to find the next DHH. It's to arbitrage technical talent to fill positions. I don't think that they're motivated by quality as much as they are by finding just the right quantity.
</end rant>
Anyhow, that's a pretty hilarious letter to send to DHH. I don't think it speaks to the general situation with technical recruiters, however.
With other unique items such as houses / ebay on the demand side you have various market entry costs: can the 'buyer' physically come over and see the house / can you get their paypal details? With jobs it's very easy (cheap) to apply, while for the employer it is costly to assess applications - making the pre-screening service offered by recruiters attractive.
Plus to disintermediate you'd need employers to directly deal with more of the HR process. That's open to them already, I suspect it's just not something people relish. Like you could save money washing your car but often it's just seen as a pain to be avoided.
Perhaps there are other improvements besides disintermediation: e.g. jobs sites with recruiter reputation/feedback. Seems pretty obvious but I actually haven't seen it around much. Can imagine there would be some bias (everyone who didn't get a post is peeved, plus some that did).
EDIT: Hey, seriously, that was an attempt at humor...