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From my experience there could be different reasons:

1. They want to learn something they are not legally allowed to ask. Most likely your salary (not legal in California), but also citizenship (required for export license jobs but still illegal to ask in the US) , guess your age, gender, race etc.

2. They think they are very good at persuasion and will manage to sell you their crappy job if only they can get your ear.

3. As you said, some agencies have metrics they need to meet every month and those include number of calls. I learned this is from reading recruiters rants on Linkedin.

> citizenship (required for export license jobs but still illegal to ask in the US)

Surely it cannot be illegal to ask about citizenship if it's a requirement for the job?

I am not a lawyer. Lawyers tell me that I cannot ask this. Citizenship is not a requirement for the job, having export license is. Obtaining it is correlated with being a national of certain countries and not being a national of other countries. Having a US citizenship, however, is a very high probability of success.

Well cautious legal advice against is not the same thing as being illegal to do.

Sure. I am obviously not qualified to judge legality of anything. IANAL etc etc etc

I'm not a lawyer, or involved in hiring, but I do work on an export controlled product. The training I recieved says that one form of "exporting" is conveying technical information to a non-citizen. The only reason export controls prevented us from from showing the material to an arbitrary citizen was our liability if they exported it.

It is not illegal to ask about citizenship. It is illegal to discriminate on it where it is not a bona fide qualification, which it is not outside of jobs with legal requirements around it.

It is legally ill-advised to ask about it when it is not legal to discriminate based on it, because you have no lawful use of the information and asking about it is an action from which discrimination can be inferred.

There is a persistent myth that it is unconditionally illegal to ask about things that are usually illegal to discriminate on, but this mistakes both what is illegal and when.

Citizenship isn't a protected class so I believe a company is in their right to discriminate if it chooses so. There are legal and timing issues associated with authorization to work.

Incorrect. This falls under “immigration status”, a protected class under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. Please consider reviewing your training material if you are involved in the hiring process.

It's no surprise that we have a spying problem. That law is exactly backwards of what is required to reduce espionage.

Kinda...

Assuming the person is allowed to work, you're not supposed to discriminate based on how they got that right: native-born, refugee, whatever. However, I can't imagine that you'd be forced to help someone keep or obtain that authorization.

"Are you authorized to work in the United States?"

This is good enough. Citizenship is sufficient but not necessary. And of course, you can ask for citizenship if it is a bona fide job qualification (e.g. ITAR).

> Citizenship isn't a protected class

Citizenship status discrimination, outside of situations where there is a legal requirement, is generally prohibited. This is actually a firmer line than applies to usual protected classes.

https://www.justice.gov/crt/types-discrimination

OTOH, national origin is also a protected class, and it is very hard to do citizenship discrimination without also doing indirect national origin discrimination, so it's problematic even if you only considered normal protected classes.

Thanks for sharing, looks like I was very wrong.

Thank you for being wrong--I learned things that I would not have learned otherwise.

AFAIK in California it is - I remember seeing citizenship status on those huge posters that every company has hanging somewhere in the dark corner because the law requires it. Not sure about other states.

I think in these cases it's simply a numbers game. I mean it's just spam but slightly more targeted. It's the same rules, though. The more of these they send out, the more likely that _someone_ is going to respond. And I don't think these types of recruiters care much about whether you are a good candidate for the position in question. They just want their commission.

And maybe you respond and tell them to remove you from whatever list they have you on because they clearly haven't done their research on you. Or maybe you figure "one phone call hurt just to see", and you chat with them. Well now you're in their database, only slightly more targeted for the next time around.

They don't want to tell you about the position details because they don't want you bypassing them and applying directly to the position yourself. They don't get paid that way.

It's no different than salespeople. They span the spectrum. Some salespeople are slimeballs who will tell you anything to make a sale. Some are actually good and will make sure you get a quality product and are happy. The vast majority are somewhere in between. It's just like any other type of business, frankly. These guys, though, are just playing a numbers game. They are basically the telemarketers of the recruiting business business. Or the shady car salesman. Or whatever parallel you prefer.

There ARE good recruiters. Particularly those that specialize in more higher-level positions. But unfortunately these crappy recruiters tend to drown everyone out, so it becomes hard to separate the good from the bad.

These people often call first and I insist on getting details in an email before talking. So mass-spam can’t always be the case. This is a recruiter who already committed to spend time calling me.

They can call 80-100 people / day, so it can still be a fairly scattershot process.

they probably feared that you may directly skip to the employer and they won't get paid for that.

Lots of recruiter I met are kind of these people, talking to them are pretty much waste of time. The best approach is to talk to them just by phone in a very short time, which won't cost too much if you eventually found it's waste of time.

Recruiters/agencies often try to keep the client information secret from competitors. The competitors may send fake emails/resumes and try to find more info about the clients and the billing rates for the position.. and use that information to contact the client directly and promise them better candidates with lower price.

Another reason is that more often, the recruiters don't add any value except connecting the client and the candidate (and take 30-50% cut for that service !!). Also, often there are multiple layers of sub-contractors (sub-vendors), who supply candidates and take their cut. There is nothing stopping candidate from walking directly to the client or the prime vendor and talk to them, and that's one of the reasons the smaller vendors hide as much info as possible and force you to sign various agreements before revealing the client name. I have seen this happening for 20 years and nothing much has changed. Smart guys learn to escape this in couple of years of contracting, but unfortunately, even some very tech savvy people may not be aware of all these shoddy business practices of recruiting industry. Many years ago, I helped a fellow programmer to raise his pay from around $75k to $160k (literally.. not exaggerating).

Often, I think about creating a service/product that changes this business model upside down. The reduced margins can be balanced by attracting more candidates who prefer simple, straight forward pricing for contract jobs.

I have the feeling, most projects/jobs are just bad...

Recruiters tell me what they know, but most of the time there isn't much to say, it's just some boring standard 9-5 stuff

It is so bad that is makes me suspect it's by design. Just like 419 scams evolved to be ridden with errors because that efficiently filters out non-scammable people and captures the prime slice of the most gullible, maybe these are designed to capture only the most desperate and unselective.

A second theory of mine: by being vague, the recruiter can hide the fact that they have maybe 10 different roles with nearly the same description. Get my ear and they can probe which I’m best for and try to sell me that.

This doesn’t explain why someone would use these recruiters though. As an employer I’d insist that even for a $1k recruitment fee, the contacts weren’t actively scaring off any reasonable devs. Remember I’m not asking for “personalized” - I’m just asking for “minimum job parameters up front”. To recruit a decent dev, this shouldn’t be a cost at all.

1) Crooting is, more or less, the same racket as a dating service. The job of the crooter is to introduce the desperate to the undesirable, hope that both sides decide there's a match, and if so skim a little profit off one side for their matchmaking services. For that reason they don't want to drop role specifics (company name, details about job) until they think they have your ear.

2) Crooters are afraid that if they tell you the company name in their initial contact email, you will attempt to snipe them by applying for the job yourself without their help. Once they have you on the horn, they can instruct you to only deal with the company through them. Most (especially young) developers will be good little do-bees and do just that.

> Why is it always some mumbling about “growth opportunities” and how I’m a “good match” and so on?

3) You think a crooter actually reads your résumé? Bahahahahaha... Oh, you sweet summer child. Crooters only ever come across your résumé. Translation: Their ATS snarfed it up while crawling the big tech job sites (Indeed, Dice, LinkedIn, etc.) and returned your name when they did a keyword search. When the crooter says "I think you might be a good fit for the role" that's all it means -- your name came up when they plugged keywords in for that role.

As others have pointed out, it's spam-o-nomics: do this enough times, and eventually there'll be a candidate who'll bite, be a match, and go on to work for the client netting a sweet fat commission for the crooter. All they have to do is keep farming the system.

Do older developers often go around the recruiters? What's in it for you to do that?

Older developers rely on their networks. What's in it for you is a better job, often working with people you already know.

Very much this. If I'm looking to know about a job somewhere, the first thing I do is check my network to see if anyone who knows me and has worked with me works there. Otherwise I'll see if people I'm close to know someone who works there.

Then I'll set up a chat with either an internal recruiter for that company or a hiring manager. The chat is to discover if the company would be a good fit for me, and on their side to see if I'd be a good fit for the company. If both of those things are true then interviews come very quickly afterward.

Having someone who works there means that you already have someone internally who can vouch for you. If it's already determined that you'd be a good fit from internal discussions then you generally have a leg up in the hiring process. And again it's also really great to figure out where you definitely don't want to be working.

That's a separate thing to sniping a recruiter once you find out the company name though. When I was hiring I don't think we'd have wanted candidates sniping our recruiters. They did a useful job and we paid them for it.

This doesn't explain why any firm would delegate their recruiting to a firm that does this. If they find a candidate it will be a terrible one (any decent candidate won't fall for it). I have a dev job. I do some recruiting. If I were to select a recruiting firm, my first question would be "how do you find candidates?" or "what do your first contacts look like"? If they wouldn't answer or I suspected they used the "I have a great opportunity I think you'd be a great fit for", then I wouldn't use that recruiter.

So there has to be more to it than that.

A theory of mine is that companies usually don't go to these firms, but other recruiters do.

My company goes to a good recruiter and offers $X to fill a role. They have a good track record and demonstrate a good network and good practices. We sign a contract. But what this HR firm does is start off by hedging their bets: they subcontract the recruitment to a lesser HR firm by offering $X/2 to fill the role. The firm below has less info about the position (because the top firm doesn't want or need to say, they just want leads) and because they get less pay, all they can do is spend a minimum of effort on candidates. This theory is at least plausible in the sense that it explains what we observe: that someone pays these firms money to do this.