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I'm a technical recruiter and I agree with the majority of this post to be honest.

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! ;)

How are you liking it? Don't you prefer to do development yourself? What's the hardest thing about the job? Would you recommend it to other developers?

I love recruitment, I honestly do. Primarily because of the money I make!

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.

No offense, but the fact that the money aspect is what you like the most puts me off a bit... it feels too much like the stereotypical "sales guy".

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)

The money is nice, and it is a "Sales" job, but their is some creativity to it. You are trying to marry a candidate to a client. They are both moving targets. Its a skill game, more than a "bang the phones" game that a normal sales job is.

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.

This is exactly why I started doing training and writing, which led me to my current gig at the Pragmatic Bookshelf - I get to work with smart people who want my help. I get to see people succeed, and I get to share in the success instead of handling the late night support calls when the app is down cos the client's cruddy shared host went offline.

I'll always love developing, but I long ago learned that my greatest strength is helping other people become better.

really, it puts you off that people who exchange time for money would like to get the most money possible for their time?

I'm not put off by someone maximizing the money they're getting for what they do, but I am a little bit by people who do what they do to maximize the money they're getting. Of course, it's a matter of personal taste and point-of-view...

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".

So in your opinion, the idea of working is sort of like Pascal's Wager where you should only work hard, and build the best relationships you can just in case you get top dollar, and even then you didn't really deserve it-it was arbitarily given to you.

Otherwise, just be mediocre and be happy to be getting what you're getting?

That makes absolutely zero sense.

That's not what I said at all. (and I don't see how you interpreted it that way)

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.

It's a common argument - either you work for money or you work because you love the work itself. Besides what should be common sense, there have been plenty of studies denoting that working simply for money does not bring happiness (assuming you are above the poverty line and even then in many cases), especially long term.

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.

Do you have a github? I know that if a recruiter included a github link in their email, I would take a much more serious look.

Valid point.

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.

No offence to the above - but it's the same reason you don't find knowledgeable people working in the Software section of the bookstore.

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.

How do you convince companies and potential candidates that you know your stuff?

That's exactly it. The recruiters who "get it" are doing quant/C++ recruitment for investment banks, RoR/Flash guys doing marketing websites will never see them.

Actually I had some of those tell me to put the number of lines of code I've written on my resume "...because tech guys like that stuff." Honestly, it was a great ice-breaker when I said "The recruiters added that. I think it's a total shit metric." However, in hindsight, I wonder why. Was it just to get past HR or was it to impress the hiring managers. Over at the I-banks, the guys near the trading desks actually know quite a lot. The further you get away...

Maybe - but it can be though to be a recruiter if you can't even get your prospect to talk to you.

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".

I've laughed at how little technical recruiters know or understand the underlying technology.

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.