Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

72 pointsTamDenholm111 comments

I detest recruiters with the fiery incandescent white hot burning heat of a nova, but unfortunately I feel like i have to deal with them because I live in Edinburgh but work in London, i dont take part in the local community because i'm not there.

I applied for a 3 month contract position online. I have this recruiter call me and give me the usual bullshit and it gets to the usual "can i send over your CV to them?", I say sure as i always do after they've wasted 15 minutes of my time asking if i know PHP, if i then know LAMP, then asking my if i know Linux, apache and MySQL, then asking me if i know HTML, then CSS and you get the idea. They ask me all these questions even though 1) my CV they are looking at in front of them says so and 2) they got my CV by me sending it on an online ad asking for these specific skills.

So after i've given them permission to send my CV, the woman asks me for 2 technical references, i say to her that if the company likes the look of my CV then i'd be happy to provide references but i dont just hand out peoples details on a whim because i'd hate people to do that to me. She tells me that she cant send my CV without first getting the references. Normally i'd tell her to piss off politely at this point but the daily rate was going through the market rate ceiling and i'm a whore for money.

So i say sure, i'll give you references, i'll go and get permission from them and get back to you. I do this and email her the next day with contact details. She emails back and asks what companies they work for, i tell them they're freelancers that i've done work for. She says that colleagues arent good enough and will need managers i've worked under. I explain they're clients, not colleagues, and that i'm not an employee, i'm a self employed developer with my own company and clients, i dont and have never had a manager, i'm the guy people come to because they're not technical, i take care of everything for them. The position i'm looking for requires me to be the main technical guy there, surely she'd get where i'm coming from. She asked for technical references, thats what i gave her, people who understood and could articulate my technical ability.

But alas no, i've been penalised for not being a corporate drone, i avoid working for large corporations because its soul destroying and i hate bureaucracy. I like working for other freelancers and small agencies, its far more friendly and less political and i dont have to write screeds of bullshit documents when a quick email is good enough.

Anyway, sorry for the rant but this pissed me off today, i really wish i could totally avoid recruiters as when i have found work without them its been orders of magnitude easier and faster, but they know where the good paying gigs are. Someone please disrupt this industry.

tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit.

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...i say to her that if the company likes the look of my CV then i'd be happy to provide references but i dont just hand out peoples details on a whim because i'd hate people to do that to me.

You are right. She is wrong. It's that simple.

To you, TamDenholm, and anyone else here at hn:

Feel free to use me as a technical reference whenever you run into this illogical and ridiculous road block. Just email me one line of code to print "Hello World" to the screen. If it is correct, I will happily tell the recruiter that 100% of everything I've ever seen you program was perfect. My contact info is in my profile.

Now that's a generous and tempting offer, but how would it actually work? First, they usually want to know about the work relation you had with the reference. Just inventing something is dangerous and ethically questionable, recruiters or not. Then, what if the hiring company actually contacted you?

but how would it actually work?

Exactly as I propose in grandparent. Reread it if necessary.

they usually want to know about the work relation you had with the reference.

I will tell them that we are colleagues on-line. Although we have never met in real life, we participate in Hacker News together. Believe me, I know much more about lots of people here than many I know in real life. For example, I would heartily recommend patio11, kirubakaran, iamelgringo, or tptacek over some guy down the hall who I know nothing about except sports conversations at the coffee machine. It is 2010: in our industry, virtual relationships can easily carry as much weight as physical ones.

Just inventing something is dangerous and ethically questionable, recruiters or not.

There is nothing ethically questionable about my offer. I will tell the truth. I will also include this thread. Recruiters have created an artificial roadblock to keep people from working by protecting their turf. This is just a handy method to turn that roadblock into a speed bump. If they are required to collect professional references, this helps them satisfy their requirement.

I operate under the assumption that everyone is telling the truth until I find out that they aren't. Then I have nothing more to do with them. So, your CV and a phone interview should be more than enough for a recruiter to qualify you. It they can't (or won't), then one of two things must be true: either they are mining CVs or they are incompetent.

Then, what if the hiring company actually contacted you?

I fully expect them to and I will tell them the truth, including this thread. AFAIC, your CV, phone interview, and participation on Hacker News deserves at least a minimal amount of respect from hiring people. Requiring references prematurely is unnecessary and insulting.

I (obviously) feel very strongly about this and stand by my original offer to anyone here.

A few asides:

1. I never give references until after receiving a job offer (contingent upon acceptable references). If a company is incapable or unwilling to make a preliminary decision based upon the interaction between me and any number of their employees, then I don't want to work for them.

2. I have a great deal of respect for competent and professional recruiters. But then again, you're probably not reading this because you were able to do your jobs without references in the first place.

3. To recruiters who are mining CVs, representing jobs that don't exist, or misrepresenting jobs to protect your listings, please understand that I (and probably most of the competent professional programmers here) want nothing to do with you. Please become professional or just go away.

Thanks for your detailed response (and the original offer!).

I had understood your proposal just fine, and was wondering about the recruiters' side. I and surely most of us on HN agree with what you wrote on virtual relationships, fairly assessing a candidate based on the CV, and handling personal references with respect.

However, will such an HN reference pass the recruiter, and then the hiring person at the company? A technically clueless HR person won't be too impressed by "this guy on a web forum says my Hello World is fine". Again, I agree that in an ideal world, they would call the candidate and figure out his skills on their own, but they don't.

In any case, I'll bookmark your original post, one never knows :-)

What is the point of checking references only after providing an offer?

Is it an offer contingent on references? (Edit: re-reading your post, I see that is the case.) If so, that seems not much of an offer at all.

This is an unusual practice and I have never seen it in that sequence, but then again, I am more exposed to professional non-technical services, so perhaps things work differently.

I find good reference checking -- and it is hard to do it well -- is excellent to identify traits that are difficult to test for during interviews, such as timeliness and integrity.

Edit number two: I do understand however not providing references until the final stage, when only two or three candidates remain.

It is 2010: in our industry, virtual relationships can easily carry as much weight as physical ones - Bang on

Remind me to tell you of the time a recruiter at a very large bank attempted to place me as their VP of Technical Operations for the Tokyo branch office.

"If I might ask, what gave you the impression that I had sufficient leadership experience to be appropriate for this position?"

"Your CV says that you ran a multinational software company from Japan for four years."

"..."

To be fair, most people would properly assume that "a multinational software company" was a bit bigger than bingocardcreator.com.

So I wouldn't blame the recruiter.

Hundreds of thousands of elementary schoolteachers manage to find my website and read the about page. It's on the blue Googles and the green Googles, and the blue texty clicky thingy on my resume will take you to it, too. If reading that prior to contacting me about my desire for a job is not in the recruiter's job description, what do they do all day?

I have always, always wondered that. The answer seems to be "have lunch".

I think they surf linked-in after lunch too for what it's worth.

And also tell you they'll email you and then never do.

You should have responded in the affirmative, just to see how far the rabbit hole would go.

At least that's what I'd want to do, except I'd probably wimp out.

I have been freelancing in Europe for the last 10 years and I have learned to avoid recruiters as much as I can. In the last 4 years I have managed to get contracts through connections and skip middlemen all-together. It takes more time but it's rewarding.

Few rules I use when I deal with recruiters (in Europe):

1) There are really an handful of recruitment companies with a good reputation and history. By default, I distrust a recruiter calling from an unknown agency. There must be thousands of small recruitment agencies in Europe, I get a fairly high amount of emails/calls every week and I mostly ignore them.

2) Be suspicious when a recruiter knocks at your door or publish a job ad with an out-of-market rate. Rates are low these days. They just want to harvest CVs.

3) If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview.

4) Don't waste time talking technical stuff with a recruiter. They don't know shit. In 10+ years I have met maybe 2 recruiters with a real technical/dev background. Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.

5) Most of the time jobs coming from recruiters suck. A company with a decent vision on how to build software will never use zombie recruiters. Maybe they will contact one of the big player or, more likely, they will go on the market themselves. Recruiters jobs are mostly financial/telco crap where Java 1.4 is the standard.

6) Be aggressive when it comes to rates. Recruiters markup is around 20% (again in Europe). It may vary dramatically. So think about it: You are giving 20% of your salary to a guy who phoned you one day, sent you to an interview the next and disappeared. Also, some recruiters (very few) are transparent about the markup. They are normally worth your trust.

7) When you leave a contract, keep good relationship with everyone at every cost. It will pay back.

Complete agree with "If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview."

They're always fishing for people (a major alarm bell should be if they're asking for hiring managers or persons of authority) who they can then spam with offers of services.

Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.

Ouch. You cut me deep koevet.

In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here.

Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number).

If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency.

Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens.

TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.

Again, I may sound harsh here, but, given a couple of exceptions, my experiences with recruiters are nothing short that horrendous. That is why now I resort only to personal connections and on networks like Linkedin. I'm also noticing a worrying trend recently:

(caveat: I'm not an native English speaker but I have lived in the UK and I use English as my working language. I can recognize UK accents pretty well).

More often than not, I'm getting phone calls from recruiters with a very strong cockney accent that clearly have no idea of what they are talking about and they sounds like they just landed on that desk without any previous experience in the industry. These are particularly pesky. They go straight to the flag-raising questions and they make you feel like a complete idiot. Honestly, these cowboys are just damaging the image of an already deeply wounded industry. I don't know how your industry deals with dishonest or unprofessional behavior, but if you want to get the trust of people like the one hanging in this community you have to work on some mechanism to keeps the bad apples out of the basket. I can actually smell a business idea here, like a guild of super-hero recruiters, who never let you down and do actually find you your dream job.

That's the same trick as "you're not paying more for using a credit card, the SELLER is paying for it", except of course the seller will have higher prices because of this.

I accidentally upvoted instead of downvoted. It it of course nonsense that you are adding to the salary. If the employer is willing to pay £600, then you are taking X% of £600 and giving the employee (100-X)% of £600. The £500 figure that you are "adding" to is just an imaginary number that has no real significance.

Do recruiters really take as much as 20%? This seems ridiculously high to me. How much of their time are they investing compared to the employee?

An employer is willing to pay an extra 20% to save themselves the time and effort of having to source & interview the hundreds of applications themselves.

As for recruiters taking 20%, that's a comparitively low figure for such a high daily rate. If one of my clients was requesting a £500 a day calibre candidate I wouldn't touch it for anything less than 30% in reality.

We are providing a service, plain and simple. The service fee is calculated in relation to the calibre of candidate as the more senior the candidate, the more difficult they are to find.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 20%. If you get an employee for a year, do you get 20% of the yearly salary? So you have to find 5 people per year to get paid as much as the people you find? (on average)

If so, does that truly not sound ridiculous to you? If all people got employed through recruiters then the recruitment business would make up about one fifth of the total economy!

>An employer is willing to pay an extra 20%...

I'm sorry, but this is an accounting fiction. The cost of an employee to an employer is the total cost; dividing up the total cost and ascribing it to this or that is irrelevant from the perspective of the employer, and disingenuous from the perspective of the employee.

In the US we have social insurance taxes which are sold as having an "employee" portion and an "employer" portion, but this too is just accounting fiction:

    Perceived:
     Gross Salary:      $100,000
     Employee Tax Rate:     7.65%
     Employee Tax Amt:    $7,650
     Net Salary:         $92,350
     Employer Tax Rate:     7.65%
     Employer Tax Amt:    $7,650

    Actual:
     Gross Salary:      $107,650
     Net Salary:         $92,350
     Tax Amount:         $15,300
     Tax Rate:              14.2%

The employee is worth $107,650 to the employer; that part of the money goes to taxes, or to a recruiter, or to a gym membership is wholly irrelevant.

We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.

KoZeN, I also hate sounding harsh because I think I've read comments of yours in other places that sound very clueful -- but this very comment of yours is a perfect example of the rampant, rank slipperiness which seems to exude from every corner of your profession.

The bottom line is that recruiters make the transaction significantly more expensive for both parties -- without adding a heck of a lot value (other than an endless appetite for trolling job boards and screening emails) to either side.

For example, if the client says to you, a recruiter, that they're willing to pay £500, that already means that their real, true, internal budget real budget is £600. As in, they'd be happy to pay that £600 for someone they found for someone they found through their own channels.

Or if you look at it the other way: even I, as a developer, decide that it's fine (if not great) to take £500 per day, I still pay (through the nose) for it, in that I know I'm being billed at a significantly higher rate, and corresponding I have to walk an eggshells in every meeting with management knowing that they're paying through the nose more for each day of my time then they should have to, and with fellow developers also (resentful of the fact that their company is paying significantly more for a unit of my time than for theirs, also). Plus the additional, very substantial risk that I will get laid off sooner than I otherwise might, precisely because of the higher rate (and the fact that they have to walk on eggshells, or otherwise deal indirectly with me because I'm branded as coming from an agency).

All of this, aside from the fact that the 20% overhead you're quoting is a very low outlier, in my experience. In fact, in all cases when I've had direct knowledge of a recruiter's overhead, it's been 30% or higher - with 50% being not uncommon.

I know I'm fudging a bit: recruiters do provide some value (much of it psychological, in that they serve as proxies, or foils more like it, in various parts of the negotiation process); it does take time to sift through those job boards (and many employers just don't know where to post, or how to post effectively); and a very small portion (less than 10%) of recruiters -- it seems you may be one of them -- do seem to have natural talents, and are capable of adding substantial value to the negotiation process (in terms of knowing the market, sizing up candidates, etc).

But the vast majority do not (again, other than serving as a psychological buffer for a highly nerve-wracking process both ways). Many seem to add substantial negatives (either through obfuscations, outright cluelessness, general slipperiness and stuffiness, etc).

And either way, it's simply intellectually dishonest for you to claim that we, as contractors, don't pay for your hefty fees. Of course we do (and so do clients) -- we both pay through the nose. And we just don't seem to get all that much in return.

tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit.

This statement acurately describes 95% of my colleagues.

I will happily accept the challenge of changing your perception of our industry. I'm a technical recruiter that covers the London market. Feel free to send me your CV. My details are in my profile. Also, feel free to have a look through my comment history. I'm not on this site to pick up leads or push for business, I'm here because I have a legitimate interest in the industry and I find that HN is a fantastic gauge as to the pulse of the industry.

I have heard of you on HN before actually, a recruiter with moral integrity and a clue, i remembered it because its like finding a unicorn. My respect to you sir.

I was actually hoping to read a reply from a recruiter. Good to hear that there is someone in the IT European recruiting business with a genuine interest in doing the job properly.

How would you go regarding changing the current "95% of my colleagues suck" situation?

You can't. My industry is driven by one thing only, money.

Recruiters get paid incredible bonuses for placing candidates and are less interested in how you feel and more interested in ticking off keywords fed to them by their client.

Example: One role I have on my books right now is for a 3rd line support analyst. My colleague, a guy who makes about £50k to £60k, submitted a candidate who he listed out the tech requirements to and asked the candidate to answer 'Yes' or 'No' if he had exposure to those systems/languages. No probing questions, no challenge of his competencies, no understanding of what the various languages were but purely and simply ticked the boxes.

People like him are the norm so when I get on the phone and ask the same guy to explain the difference between powershell and the command prompt and why the powershell is more advanced, a straightforward question for a techie but not what you expect from a recruiter, it throws him for six and those who know what they are talking about stand out from that point forward.

How much do you guys make per placement in general?

Lets say you have someone with a salary of £60-70k. On average, how much do you earn when you place them and how long do you spend to fill a position? I know that there are extremes, but still.

Looking at the amount of spam I get on LinkedIn, I'm always under the impression that recruiters are looking for like 100 different positions at a time, but that's probably wrong.

That's so hard to quantify but I'll do my best.

Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:

Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.

From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.

Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.

A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.

As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.

Interesting, why not start your own firm then? Is it that hard to get the actual vacancies?

If you know what you're talking about in comparison to 90% of the other people, wouldn't it be a lot easier to place one candidate and get £15k from him rather than the £1k you're getting now.

You say that the general aim is to earn your salary in bonusses, so that means that an average recruiter has to place around 60 candidates per year. If they earn around £15k per person for the company, that makes +- £900k of which they take home £60k. Rough calculations of course, but seems like pretty good margins for people that know what they're doing.

Part of the reason agencies command such high fee's is because of the influence their brand & network has with candidates. There are thousands of self employed recruiters fighting over the scraps and a lot of highly successful self-employed recruiters earning a mint by utilising the personal network they have cultivated from being in the business for many years. I personally haven't been in the game long enough to be able to rely on my own contacts to build a business.

I think recruiters would do a better job if they spent more time reading HN. You probably understand your "product" better than most of your competition ever will.

As tempting as it is to think they just need a clue, maybe the reality is that HN readers tend to already have jobs or own their own businesses, and they aren't as good a target for recruitment which is more of a numbers game.

That is really decent of you. I am on the wrong side of the Atlantic to take advantages of your services or else I would ask permission to send on my CV.

All in all I have found my contact with recruiters to be helpful in a few ways. The short semi-technical phone interview is a low pressure way to practice one's spiel. It is a good exercise to explain the tech to someone who doesn't know much about it. Also good practice for the soft questions: "Tell me a little about yourself" "Strengths and Weaknesses...blah, blah" "So why are you looking to leave your current position?"

I have interviewed about 8 times in the last year and have gotten one offer. All but one came through recruiters. In my experience the recruiters put me in a position to get the job. My failures I associate with not quite selling myself - or lack of knowledge in a key area and also with the level of the competition.

It has been a learning process and recruiters have been helpful at points.

I wish sometimes I could get brutal honesty from recruiters/HR. After you have gone through 3 interviews and have the indication that they are considering you - you wonder what went wrong?

It would be great to get such input from the other side. How do recruiters see tech candidates? What are common pitfalls, etc?

I recently applied for a programming position with some knowledge of maths.

The recruiter phoned me up and asked me if I was good at maths. I explained that it depended on the subject area because, although I have just finished a PhD involving mathematical modelling (as stated in my CV and cover letter), I wasn't a mathematician by training and it would depend on what methods the company were using.

I learnt an important lesson that honesty doesn't work with these people. He cut me off and said I wasn't suitable because this position required somebody that was good at maths. My CV wasn't put forward.

That doesn't sound like an issue of honesty. Context is important. Questions must always be answered from the questioner's point of view.

If you've finished a PhD involving mathematical modelling, from the recruiter's perspective you are definitely good at maths.

So the correct answer to "Are you good at maths?" from a recruiter is simply "Yes". If he wants more details then he'll ask for it. The correct answer is not a really long winded answer which the person who asked the question will not be able to understand because he doesn't know what mathematical modelling is.

Most people give long winded answers when they're trying to weasel out of giving the straight answer that they don't want to give because it'll make them look bad. Listen to any politician, for example. I think it's perfectly reasonable for the recruiter to come to the conclusion he did given that he didn't understand your answer.

Whether you think that recruiters should be able to understand your answer is another matter. We all know that most don't have sufficient domain knowledge, so the best thing to do is to answer appropriately.

"Most people give long winded answers when they're trying to weasel out of giving the straight answer that they don't want to give because it'll make them look bad."

It's well-known that "geeks" generally try to answer questions literally, and as accurately as possible. It's also pretty well known that the better at a field you are, the less highly you think of yourself (the Dunning–Kruger effect.)

Put those two together, and you'll see that geeks who are very good in a field will tend to give long-winded answers explaining exactly what they know and don't, instead of a simple answer. I do this myself all the time.

The grandparent made a very good point - many thanks for answering it better than I could.

The fact is, after spending years in the company of postdoc level applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists, I would feel massively dishonest to say that I was good at maths. However, I do see the point of trying to put myself in the shoes of the person asking the question.

> It's well-known that "geeks" generally try to answer questions literally, and as accurately as possible.

Indeed. I do this too and have to work to stop myself. It's much easier in hindsight.

Your use of Dunning-Kruger isn't quite accurate. The better you are the less likely you are to overestimate yourself, unless you are in the very top, in which case you are likely to underestimate yourself in relation to others. Basically, because people have relatively little interaction with people that are very different from themselves, most people tend to rank themselves in the 3rd quartile, whether they are from the bottom two or from the top. That is very different from not knowing what you are capable of.

It's actually a great indication that someone has had little experience with a true master in any field if they think hesitance to claim expertise is earmarking a cover up.

Reminds me of the concept of enlightenment. If you think you're enlightened, you are nigh assuredly not.

"When someone asks if you're a god, you say YES"

Also, remember the old recruiter line: "The more money you make, the more money I make, so I'm going to do my best to get you the best salary possible!"

While it's true: the more you make the more they make (usually, its about 30% of your first years salary, which is huge), what is also true is that they're more determined to get you hired at any amount than the amount you want.

This is why you'll see recruiters offer jobs for $90k+, but then when you get to negotiations, suddenly you're being presented ate $60-$70k.

If you take the job at $90k, the recruiter would get $27,000. If you take the job at $70k, the recruiter would get $21,000. If you don't take the job, the recruiter would get $0.

While an extra $6k is nice, $21k is a lot better than $0. So be sure to watch out for this common misconception. When dealing with recruiters, get them to introduce you to the company, and then do everything on your own. Don't let them negotiate for you, don't let them tell you not to tell the company your salary requirements. It's your job and career, you do all the talking and negotiating.

This reminds me of the bit from freakonomics about real estate agents. Basically when they're getting 3% of the sale price of your house, holding out for 1 month to get you $20K (and them $600) isn't worth it to them.

http://www.wisebread.com/why-you-cant-trust-a-real-estate-ag...

You have failed to understand her job. Her clients are requiring these things.

I know this, because the company I work for has had to draw hard lines on recruiters. Before that, they would send us utter crap and waste our time. Now, we don't get many hits, but most of them are actually worth talking to.

She asked you all those questions because when she assumes things, her customers get really angry. Sending bad recruits can get her banned from that company altogether.

She asked for corporate drone references because you'll be doing corporate drone work and her clients want to make sure you can do it.

I'm with what you're saying, but what I find frustrating is that it seems then fair to say that the recruiter has a professional responsibility to their clients to know something about software in order to effectively screen candidates. But 99% of recruiters I've ever dealt with don't even pretend to make an effort.

Interestingly, most IT managers hate recruiters as much or more than I do, but - like me - they're at the mercy of their corporations' "preferred vendor lists".

If the recruiting company sends you utter crap and wastes your time, why put up with it? Would you do the same for a hosting company who had crappy servers and didn't know PHP from Python? Fire them, and hard.

Unfortunately, the people hiring the recruiting agencies are not the ones who have to do extra work because of their incompetence. It's a matter of differing incentives between the upper management and personnel.

I respectfully disagree. Every reputable company I've ever been offered a job at requires references after they've decided to hire you.

Any recruiter trying to harvest references of "managers and people in authority" is just a weasel trying to fill their sales contact database.

Bingo.

I agree the recruiter should be filtering candidates before submitting them; I disagree that it should be by using references.

There's an inherent conflict of interest for recruiters in handling references who are also potential leads, hence it's a situation that they should avoid placing themselves in. If they're going to do it at the very least it should be done by an outside agency.

Then perhaps she should have educated the clients on the desirability of her client, rather then just kowtow. That's what she's there for, after all.

I'm a contractor in the UK and I get the "references first" request very often. I always say no. As far as I can tell this only happens when the agency doesn't have a real job and is just looking for corporate contacts to add to their rolodex.

My real beef with agencies is that they are yet another lossy filter in the process that goes:

Manager with role <-> HR Department <-> Agency <-> Jobserve <-> Me.

Neither the HR department nor the agency knows that Sybase and SQL Server are profoundly similar databases. The manager doesn't care - he wants a Java dev with some basic DB skills. But the hiring spec says "Sybase" so Sybase it must be.

Her insistence on getting managers for references makes me wonder whether she wasn't mining you for new prospective customers (on the employer side).

That is exactly why she was asking for references and why you shouldn't give them to a recruiter, only to the employer.

She definetely was. It's the oldest trick in the book of recruitment. She first got herself 2 UK CVs and went for more.

There was probably no job, and she was doing "market research".

Therefore, TamDenholm should get back to those people and warn them that this recruiter is not likely to do a good job for them.

This is probable. If I ever give a reference to a recruiter, I will also warn the reference of this possibility, so as to make it harder for the recruiter to pull this trick.

Just yesterday I received an email from a recruiter saying that she had come across my resume and I looked like a great fit for a position she's hiring for. She asked me if I'd give her a call to chat about my experience and so she could tell me about the position. She obviously didn't remember that five weeks ago we talked for 30 minutes on the phone when I explained what I've done and exactly what I'm looking for. As I recall from that conversation, I kept telling her what type of company I was looking for, and she seemed to ignore me and ask me repeatedly if I knew .NET, which it clearly states on my resume that she liked so much that I do. Are recruiters incentivized to ignore everything you say?

Yes. Recruiters are incentivized only to listen to Managers. They are the ones with the money.

Oh I feel dirty... I really don't think incentivize is a word.

btw, Merriam Webster seems to disagree:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incentivize

I almost started to cry last week when I had to explain the difference between Java and javascript to a recruiter that had found my resume online and called me. She couldn't make up her mind about what the client was looking for. I tried explaining they were vastly different technologies but I still don't think she got it though :(

The safest thing is to just say "yes, yes, yes" and let the actual interviewer sort it out.

One recruiter once sent me an email for a position in "the Nordic countries". At the time, I was looking into working in either Finland, Denmark or Sweden so I replied the guy I was interested. He called me back straight away and when I have asked him in which city the position was, he replied "Brussels". After my initial silence of disbelief, he went on explaining that he had to write "nordic countries" because Brits don't want to go to Brussels, but they consider Nordic countries more attractive because girls are supposedly hot.

Here's my experience with HHs from the financial industry. There is a large batch of newbie HH's coming straight from college who are pushed hardly to overperform and 'make it'. I've found that the inexperienced recruiters can be quite pushy and aggressive and so frankly, in situations like you describe just say thank you and bye quickly.

The established and more senior recruiters will be much more professional and polished. They all have their quirks and little tricks, but just learn to deal with it and if you're senior enough, be patient to find appropriate recruiters.

Having spent a 3mth contract working on the IT systems for a decent sized IT recruiting company I can tell you that recruiters get rewarded for calling managers and nothing for calling and talking to candidates. And I find it hard to believe that that a recruiter would actually insist on seeing your references before putting a CV forward so I'd assume that it was a fishing exercise. Another clue is that if the rate is higher than market rate then why would the recruiters not be just taking a bigger cut.

Come along to the next Hacker News meetup in London - http://www.meetup.com/HNLondon/. The organiser Dmitri is inviting people to give talks. So, if you want to show off your work and make connections, this is a good chance.

Why are you going through recruiters?

You already know how to market yourself. You're just trying to market yourself to a different set of people.

Also, you can't at the same time say you're a whore for money and then complain that you have to prostitute yourself to make your money.

I can get work myself but its only about half as well paid as the jobs i can get from recruiters. I can live on what i make as a freelancer, but i get a much larger injection of cash if i take on an on-site contract. This is the only reason.

The reality of the situation is that if you want to work for a large corporation, then you're stuck playing their games. I've had a recruiter ask for references upfront. They don't always check them, but references are required for their software. Also, the other commenter noted that the recruiter is likely using your references to build a list of contacts. A list of line managers is more valuable to a recruiter than a list of technicians since the line managers make hiring decisions and serve as contacts for additional sales.

There are two reasons to involve recruiters. One, many companies only accept your resume if it comes from a recruiter. If you know someone personally (or online), then you can come in through the back door. But for 99% of companies you want to work for, you don't know anyone to vouch for you. So it's either deal with a recruiter, or leave some doors unopened.

Second, recruiters get paid as a percentage of the salary they get you, and aren't afraid to get you an amount that gets them a good amount. I always hate to play hardball (effective as it is) and talk about how much money I want, but recruiters love doing that it. It's their job. And, if they are a jackass about it, you just say (after you start work) "oh, sorry about him, recruiters, sigh" and keep whatever they negotiated for you. Then you are the good guy, but you get the benefits as if you were the bad guy. :)

FWIW, I doubled my salary by working with a recruiter. And I like the job better! Being a corporate sellout is highly underrated.

Oftentimes as an independent contractor you must deal with recruiters in one way or another, because they're on the dreaded "preferred vendor list", which is the only way you're getting work from any company bigger than a few hundred people. It's a total scam, but there's no easy way around it.

Except figuring out how to get on the preferred vendor list yourself.

True, but in most cases that's not worth the effort, unless you want to have a really long-term relationship with a particular client. Where I work, that's not usually the nature of the gigs, but ymmv.

Keep in mind that recruiters "get people for jobs, not jobs for people".

You, as a potential employee, are not their customer -- you're the commodity being sold. It doesn't change the way you feel about how you are treated, but awareness of that relationship may help keep your patience and a level head.

(Quote taken from this "What about your job do you wish other people understood?" Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e1dsi/what_about_... )

So many hoops to jump for. The last company I worked for demanded full references for the last five years (it was a bank so apparently this was a legal requirement), but later I found out that their company policy is to 'never give personal references.' (ie. the reference would just go to the HR department who would confirm your presence, your actual managers wouldn't get to say anything) I thought at first this must be something to do with liability, but then I wondered if it was merely another barrier to discourage employees from leaving their lowly jobs, to make it harder for rival banks to employ them, and to eliminate the man-hours cost of providing references. Either way, one minute they're requiring all these references, but when its their turn to provide, they opt out.

Some extra information to consider:

0) Many employers hate recruiters just as badly as most job seekers hate recruiters

1) Recruiters earn their money off of getting employers to sign with them, they lose money on trying to find employees (and pretending to screen them the way the lady did in this post).

2) Proportionally they spend a great deal of time being very courteous to employers, yet are very brisk and rude to employees

3) They feed your MS Word document through a program that scans it for key words, they never actually look at it

4) They just copy and paste your information into their resume template which removes any of your contact information but has their huge logo on top

5) I've been in 2 companies that went under and had to find a job fast, all 3 times I found a job it was _never_ through a recruiter.

So yeah, just avoid recruiters. Your time is too valuable for that.

My startup is working on fixing this problem :-)

However we're avoiding the contractor market at the moment, because for contractors the recruitment agency often acts as an employment agent as well as recruitment agent (i.e the company will pay the agency and the agency will pay the contractor). Companies prefer this model so they can just have a handful of agencies they can pay rather than having to deal with paying hundreds of contractors directly.

I'm currently playing around with a couple of ideas how to innovate in the contractor market, but essentially they involve minimizing the pain of dealing with recruiters rather than replacing them. Although as my focus is more on the permie market initially, it may take me a while to get around to turning those ideas into a reality !

When faced with such nonsense, hack the system.

Invent a couple "companies." Give them a web site and an important gloss of Serious Business. Have a couple friends or clients act as the contact point for the reference. Even more amusing: hire an offshore outsourcing company to act as the "human resources" department of your reference company. They should be under strict instructions to act very haughty with the recruiter, and tell them that "Mr. X" is far too busy to take their call, and to then sing your praises to the sky. Most recruiting drones will be quite satisfied with this encounter.

Recognize that they are only jumping through the hoops of their own corporate policy. Your hack is to grease this path for them and get that sweet, sweet money you desire.

Vandelay Industries!

Some advice: If you don't like dealing with recruiters, come up with your own marketing strategy that doesn't involve recruiters.

Easy to say, hard to do, no? If he could, wouldn't he already be doing it. Assuming that it would actually work better, of course, otherwise there wouldn't be any point.

In all probability, the job didn't exist, and she was just mining for information.

You have to understand one very important thing. Recruiters are the email advertisement newsletters of the real world. Someone (or yourself) places your email in a bucket and boom, you're getting this great offers, so yo go check one out. Then the offer is asking you to provide more info about yourself and then asks you to get other people involved. After a while of this process you start to get the impression that the offer is not worth it, and if you ever actually bought something you realize it was actually vastly overpriced (underpaid?). So you then click on the unsubscribe link, but alas they keep sending you stuff, and then you get emails of the people you placed in a similar position. Six months later you get emails from people you don't know asking you how you could be so stupid to start a chain reaction of people giving out other people's details, and then by chance you save a telemarketer from suicide and he then tells you the story of how he used to be in charge of a newsletter. He helps you unsubscribe and all, and then tells you: "Oh who cares about the offer (job?) it was no good anyways, we just wanted to get as many names and emails from you so we could tell our bosses that we deserve that 20 dollar bonus at the end of the month."

Conclusion: Don't deal with recruiters, you need to build yourself as a brand and create your own reputation wherever you want to work. No excuses.

To give you an idea of the completely unqualified recruiters I've dealt with: I'm a Systems Engineer/Architect. I do hardware, Linux, UNIX, etc. On my resume somewhere it says I have experience maintaining Java application servers, Tomcat, BEA Weblogic, etc.

To this day, I still get random emails from recruiters trying to post me in a position as a Java developer. I think the only qualification for a recruiter is the ability to type "java" into a Monster search field.

I'm not sure what you think your problem is. When someone asks you for reference you don't have, whether it's a landlord or a new employer, and you don't have the kind of references he wants, call up your best friends, and tell them that today, they're senior developers at this big company, they've worked with you and they love and respect you.

You're a freelancer. Nobody's gonna do this shit for you.

You say you can't engage with your local community because you're not there, but what about online? You're participating in the HN community, which a) takes time, and b) may very well include others in that area. Branching out from here to find more location specific outlets shouldn't be too difficult.

(A very cursory search reveals startupcafe.co.uk, for instance)

My favorite recruiter story:

In summer 2008, I was looking for work. At one point, I saw a job listing at The Hive [1], calling for Erlang. I don't have much Erlang experience (one proof-of-concept DNS server), but it's on my résumé. I applied, just in case.

Well. It turned out that, when you Googled "erlang resume", I was on the third page. Over the next month or so, I heard from about 20 bottom-feeder recruiters, with that same job. Most of them were trying to claim that the job was with a client of theirs, but none of them knew anything that wasn't in the listing on Dice. It got to the point where my wife could recognize a new one on the phone, even if they didn't say "Erlang" to her.

(Mind you, I've also had good experiences with recruiters. But "he wasn't a fool" doesn't make as good a story.)

[1] http://www.thehive.com/

"The glorious history of HR in software companies"- A footnote from one of PG's essays that I made into a blog post.

http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/glorious-history-of-hr...

Don't worry, it wasn't a real position. She's just looking for people to call up and sell to.

It really is unfair to paint all recruiters with such a wide swath. Don't get me wrong, I've considered becoming one because I have a technical background and feel like I could provide a real value to a client just to show the bad ones up.

However, you do find some gems. When I find them, I keep them updated at ALL times about where I'm at what my situation is. I even have a few friended on FB (which is a big deal for me) because they're friends now.

They will always call me when something I'm a really good fit for comes up just to see if anything has changed since the last time we talked. They trust you because you make them look good and in return you get "first dibs" on really good positions.

I've just started working with a recruiter a former manager introduced me to. While I appreciate what they are doing, as jrockway pointed out with playing hardball regarding salary, I often feel that they don't have any interest in me whatsoever. Communication is, at best, sporadic and every time I've been to their office, I hear a bunch of yelling, see paper airplanes flying and general lackadaisical attitudes.

This is my first experience with a recruiter and I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone. It's much better to market one's self than to rely on others, even if they can negotiate a better salary.

Recruiters work on commission, so they're in the same boat as real estate agents and used car salesmen. There are good ones out there, but they're all constantly looking for the next payday. It's like sharks - they have to keep swimming or they die. If you're not likely to get them cash in the immediate future, then you're exactly right - they don't care.

Recruiters are more like Doctors than used car salesmen. They are a necessary evil for some companies who have a problem that they can't solve on their own. People don't like going to the doctor and they don't like going to a recruiter, but sometimes you just have to do it to get on with things. You can self-medicate before going to the doctor and you can go to the online classifieds, but that isn't the answer for you every time. Just remember that recruiters are not all STAFFING AGENCY PEOPLE.

Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on this one. I've been working in the IT sector for more than 15 years and I haven't seen a recruiter yet (whether agency or in-house) that cared that much about any of their candidates ... unless they had a position open at the time and could cash in.

It's not much different from the employer's point of view either. Unless your vacancy is for something which is very low skilled, you're much better off making contacts through your existing programmers or reaching out to local user groups.

I've had recruiters berate me for asking for a resonable salary. One said I was being foolish and that I had "over-exaggerated self tendancies", whatever those might be.

Apparently wanting to be paid $10K more then I was getting working in a supermarket as a drone was rediculous.

It's not arbitrary bullshit to the recruiter, it's her bread and butter. She really wants managers because they are decision makers whom she can pitch her services to, nothing to do with the client.

Never give contact information for other people to recruiters, whether that person is a developer or employer, they will be spammed relentlessly because that is how recruiters make money. Some of them are so despicable they might claim you referred them.

Recruiters (with very few exceptions) are the lowest of the low, always keep that in mind when dealing with them and act accordingly.

Stop dealing with recruiters. Figure out a way to market yourself directly to clients.

Your geographic location should not be a barrier to this; you have the power of the intarwebs at your disposal.

Most recruiters really are terrible. What we need is some kind of peer-to-peer job-hunting site that will let you find out what jobs other people are doing in software engineering, and just go straight to other engineers who know what the job actually requires.

I call it wantmyjob.com, and I launched it a couple of days ago. The current (few) jobs on it are US-based, but you can be the first to change that if you like.

Is it normal for freelancers to pay recruiters a referal fee? I figure normally they have a set of contracts they're trying to fill and they're not going to submit me for anything else since they wouldn't get paid.

But what if I paid a 10 percent fee? Would they then be out there finding contracts for me? Is that something that's ever done?

Check out www.careerelement.com; our agents will find you a job for a 10% fee.

I agree. Recruiters suck. They never ask for references for your benefit, it's always to extend their sales reach. They tend to drag you out to their offices for a 'face-to-face', for no relevant reason whatsoever because all of that 'stuff' you had to do there could've been done online anyway.

Of course they don't. If the recruiter doesn't ask you for a reference then the hiring manager you are interviewing with will.

You are right about the face-to-face meetings though. A lot of staffing agencies require that their people do this. It is a core metric for many of them. If you are frustrated by this then find a good recruiter and don't bother with the others. You should want a good recruiter to know you are out there - they are going to be thinking about ways to help you. The flip side is that they only call you when you showed up in their search.

You have to ask yourself why the position of "recruiter" even exists in today's market.

Similarly job sites are filled with keyword-spamming agency offers ("Java/Javascript, LAMP, .Net, AJAX, PHP and Photoshop mobile developer required!")

I wonder if one could recruit and interview recruiters?

Recruitment pays well enough to fund any startup. All developers should consider it as a source of startup funding.

I thought techiferous made a good point - but in many cases the direct contact with the company might re-direct you to the recruiter. I am not sure how it is working in London area but it seems to me that many of the financial firms in NYC are only hiring through an outside agency. Techiferous's point works well if you take the Pareto principle and target that 20% of companies in your sector/ area and write targeted letters about what d you can do for them, etc. I am not sure if there are too may other alternatives at this point. If companies are using recruiters (and I am seeing this in the NYC-area) then they are a necessary evil. Precisely because you are in Edinburgh and your job search is in London

TamDenholm, I agree with your basic principle. But - in my experience you don't really want an adversarial relationship with the recruiter.

I have had recruiters misrepresent me and even send me to the wrong place for interviews. There is a real disconnect at times and often they completely misunderstand the technology they are trying to find someone for. When I deal with them I try to be as simple and 'transactional' as possible. Clearly in your case the recruiter had little or no idea as to why you were not complying with what looked like a simple request (ie to him/her). It might come across as simply being difficult. Don't misunderstand me - I think your point is completely valid. You are being very considerate of yout contacts. I would read your hesitation as coming from a place where you value privacy and where you do not see your contacts as instrumental.

When I was in high school I had what might end up being the best job of my entire life. I cleaned kennels at a veterinarian's office and held the dogs/cats/sometimes horses when the doctor treated them. Great fun everyday learned something new, worked with animals, etc. We had a simple filing system. When someone came in with their pet we would retieve the paper file and on the outside edge there would be a place for a colored sticker - a indicator of the animal's temperament. Red meant extreme caution, yellow meant the animal was fearful and might bite defensvely...

I guess I have internalized this in that I imagine, in this current job market, an absolute flood of applicants. The recruiters are making flash judgements on each person. Since they often do not understand the underlying technology they are basing alot on either simple metrics (number of certifications, etc) and soft skills. Something which comes across like evasion throws up a red flag and in my imaginary world merits a red sticker on the side of your folder. From his/her point of view this is a simple request that you did not comply with. What nefarious crimes are you hiding? I sincerily doubt that s/he thought for a second about privacy concerns.

For me this is where LinkedIn fills a need. My few references are people that are 'pre-approved' to provide this sort of need. The way references are done on LI is that they show the relationship and give the amount/type of contact the person is willing to grant. I am sure that other social networking sites may have a similar function - I only know LinkedIn... When I get asked for references, I have 'preapproved' ones

tl;dr - Use social networking sites (ie LinkedIn) to handle this in advance. Streamline interactions with recruiters.

Have you EVER encountered a bad software engineer? Maybe one who managed to over-write something you contributed to a project more than once? Better yet, someone who just annoys the hell out of you? There are probably some who you would never work with for a variety of reasons. Zed Shaw swore off the whole of the Ruby on Rails community. Now imagine that there were bad recruiters too. There are good and bad people in every category and for you to flame everyone in a community because you had a bad experience with one, several or even all of the recruiters you have ever encountered is flat out missing the problem. You should be looking for recruiters who get it just like any savvy person who is willing to hire you for whatever it is that you do right has to look for you. More importantly, you should direct your frustration at the company that hired the recruiter you are frustrated by. When I hire a programmer I do a paired programming session with them and take the time to get to know them and the other way around. Maybe you should spend some time recruiting some recruiters who are with-it by your standards.

Last, but not least, you have to realize that there are some companies that choose to use bad recruiters as a standard business practice. The prefer this. If they do then your recruiter pal isn't the problem.

You should know by now that if a job pays too well then there is a reason. If you are willing to take on jobs that others are most likely passing on then you might want to think about this.

A good recruiter, on the other hand, can create some really good conversations and teams that lead to some really successful companies. A good recruiter is not going to bother asking for references unless there is a reason to, unless they work for a big huge staffing agency and that company requires them to in much the same way that some programming jobs require CMMI. Contrary to britman's comments, recruiters ask for hiring managers because they do serve a role that is SUPERVISORY and that part of their job is to see the team as a big picture. They are often more reliable as a source than a peer. However, peers can be highly reliable too. Think of it as best of 3 - you might not get the truth on the first or even the second try.

Recruiters are a lot like detectives - they have to figure out of you are telling the truth or not, whether you can assess your own capabilities or not, and whether or not you can work well with others. In your case it sounds like the latter might be an issue. A good recruiter might find this post and not ask for a reference from you at all.

To leftnode's point, the "I make more, you make more" line is only true when there is no contract to hire or temp to hire in play. This ONLY applies when someone is doing a fee for placement that is straight up. NOT EVERY RECRUITER WORKS ANY OF THESE WAYS. Some work for the company, some freelance, etc. ASK!!! You are probably not going to get the particulars of how they are getting paid (e.g. the % if it is a fee for placement), but you should reasonably expect that they will tell you that they are getting a % of your hourly or a % of your first year's compensation, or if they are being paid for their time. If they don't want to give this to you then tell them to have a nice day.

If you, or anyone else here, want to talk about this in more detail feel free to email me - hackernewsrecruiter@jobmatchbox.com

I have the impression that the British recruiters are slimier than in other places?

At least, most of the horror stories I've read about European recruiters come from England?

(My limited experience from e.g. Sweden is bett... hrm, not as bad. An article written by me would use the word "clueless" often, but just a few "sleazy" and maybe one "evil". I'd even use some positive adjectives, like "human", "working hard to learn" and "serious".)

I don't know how to adequately compare, as I've never used a recruiter in Europe, but I can safely say that recruiters in the US are quite slimy as well. There are good ones, for sure, but as a whole the industry doesn't have a great reputation.

HN user should just start their own tech recruiting agency: Recruiting HackersBYHackers..

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