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> Overall, I think that the "market" for jobs depends a bit too much on the middlemen lately.

Lately? This industry has been full of dudebro "recruiters" since I've became a part of it. These people shouldn't even be needed because they're completely inept at interviewing for technical skills, and they're pretty easy to game if you use the correct lingo. The vast majority of them are a waste of time; I've only ever met 2 that either actually got me a job or at least intended on actually getting me one.

I was applying for jobs last year at around this time and didn't notice the black hole that you're talking about, but I guess it'll be something for me to pay attention for next time.

Then again, I doubt I'm going to rely on traditional job searching techniques the next time. I've realized that bypassing the recruiter and HR, as well as networking at meetups and conferences, are much more effective than shotgunning dozens of online applications.

These people shouldn't even be needed because they're completely inept at interviewing for technical skills, and they're pretty easy to game if you use the correct lingo. The vast majority of them are a waste of time; I've only ever met 2 that either actually got me a job or at least intended on actually getting me one.

I’m betting close to 100 with recruiters over two decades. The external recruiter’s purpose is not to access your technical skills. Their purpose is to see if you are the product that their buyers want and to make you look as good to the buyer as possible. You are not “gaming the system” by making yourself an attractive candidate that they can present to their client.

If you are looking for the standard median, commodity job , you have kept your eye on the market, done the correct amount of resume driven development, and you live in a major market, with local recruiters, it usually isn’t hard in my experience to find a job.

I won’t fit that description when I’m looking for my next job - I’m not looking for either the commodity job or to be in the 3rd quintile of pay for my local market. Networking will be required.

One thing I've found helpful when I don't already know someone for a referral is to try and find an internal recruiter on LinkedIn and message them. If you are actually a fit for an specific open role, they will 100% answer.

Thank you, makes sense. Though this would require paying for a premium account on LI.

You get one free month trial. After that, it’s $30/mo for job seekers. You might stand on the principle that it shouldn’t be necessary, but the price doesn’t seem like a barrier.

(I have no connection to LinkedIn, other than being a free tier member.)

The one month free trial does not mean much. Linkedin flagged me as a recruiter, and refused to let me search for people at one of my previous companies. They insisted I had to be a premium member to search the way I was searching. I signed up for the free month of premium, and I was still flagged as a recruiter, and my searches denied. Linkedin support had difficulty explaining there were two levels of premium, but they finally confirmed I had to pay to be able to search. I paid. Then my searches sort of worked. Out of five specific people, only one was actually in Linkedin. I realize they need money to make their business work. I just did not like the way they extracted the money from me. My free advice: don't search like a recruiter. Whatever that means.

Agree with another comment here saying that it's worth it. I've had way better luck reaching out to recruiters over LI than doing applications, and even better luck with two sided marketplaces like AngelList's Alist, Hired, and TripleByte.

why? you can send a message with a connection invitation I believe? I've done this without paying for LI premium.

Interesting - I have been working with a recruiter but the results are very underwhelming. Fortunately, I am not paying for the service.

Do you mean that all of these positions were recommended to you by a recruiter?

You pay via reduced offers

Do you have a link/reference that explains this?

The gist is that the agency is going to demand a fee for bringing you in. A lot of times it’s a percentage of your offer. Thus, you get a smaller offer to offset or reduce the cost.

As a hiring manager for 15+ years, I’ve never nerfed someone’s offer because they came from an agency, nor have I ever caught a whiff of this happening.

I am conscious of which roles I offer to outside agencies, but once I do, I stop worrying about the cost and focus only on the value I can get from the candidate. Those agency roles are some of the most competitive positions; I don’t expect to be able to hire the best who happen to not realize that $0.75x is smaller than $1.00x for positive values of x.

I always thought it was because the recruiter only cares about whether you accept the offer, not really how much the offer is, and so will either negotiate based on that, or else pressure you to accept whatever offer they can muster. Plus, if the recruiter can bring in people who accept lower offers they're more likely to be used by the employer. Hence, if you accept an offer through a recruiter, it's likely that you're accepting a stunted offer.

Businesses always offer you the lowest offer they think you will accept. They can't offer you lower than you will accept, because then you won't accept it ;-) They will never offer you more than they have to just because they didn't pay a recruiter. Don't worry about that stuff, it doesn't factor into decision making.

Not true. The companies consider it a cost saving over in-housing the recruitment capability. Finders fees are paid on top of the offer.

Working from the other end with recruiters, I cannot confirm this. It feels to me, the recruiter I'm working with respects both parties and really tries to find a great fit.

All of the applicants he brought were better, than the ones that applied via an online job portal. Even tough some ask 20%-40% over our budget, we are still considering them.

This is really not true, except maybe in localized situations which you don’t want to work for (and recruiters are not going to want to do work for those companies so the overlap is minuscule). It’s a one time capitalized expense that reduces time (money) spent by on-staff employees.

One thing you do have to look out for is that recruiters get paid after a period of employment (3-6 months in my experience). So that can create a perverse incentive to fire someone you’re on the fence about. This really shouldn’t happen unless you’re working for an extremely cash-strapped place though.

This is completely untrue. A company can’t get away with paying 20% below market because they used a recruiter. No one would accept their offer.

You just explained why the industry depends on middlemen, especially for your bog standard commodity jobs. Any opening gets dozens of resumes and the people usually aren’t qualified. If you as a hiring manager are working with a recruiter, they can reach people who are “passively looking” and who already have a job.

The recruiter I used to get my last job reached out to me about 7 months before I was on the market. I told him that I wasn’t looking for a job until I closed on my house in October, even then I was so busy with life, I wasn’t about to go through all of the hassle of randomly blindly submitting resumes. I told the recruiter that in 6 months, my criteria as far as pay, responsibility, location and technology.

He called me 6 months later with a list of jobs and within two weeks I had a job that met all of my criteria and was the Dev lead of a medium size company with a small software development department.

On the other side, when I needed to ramp up the department fast with contractors, I worked with him to find qualified contractors.

* I want this _specific_ job. I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions. And yet, the seeming randomness of the process makes it unlikely, that I'll be even considered to be put into the interview loop.*

If the job is that specific, carpet bombing resumes isn’t the way to go, you’re right. At this point, my next job in two years, is also very specific. While my external recruiter network has been a godsend for the bog standard generic roles I’ve had in the past, I’ve got to start building a network now to get the job I want.

Of course if I walk up to the office tomorrow and the doors are closed and they go out of business (not likely), I can reach out to my long list of local recruiters and get the “right now” job or contract quickly that will pay more than enough to support us.

> I have pretty specific professional interests (in an area that I'm quite experienced in) and aiming high, so there is not a lot of vacancies, that I'd be willing to consider. After filtering for remote-friendliness, what I'm left with is just a few positions.

There's your conundrum. Having specific professional interests in an area you're experienced in is great...assuming that specialization has enough market demand liquidity for you to not be in this situation. If that's no longer the case, perhaps it's worth asking if you'd be willing to negotiate on what you're looking for?

I've done a variety of things so as far as what I have been looking for with my current search, it's really more a high growth company that places a premium on backfilling senior talent, which likely means I'll get (read: have already gotten) a very attractive offer. It's true that this means I am somewhat compromising on picking specific things that I want to do, but the reason I do it is because I'd rather bet on a company than a role, and if I do it this way, I only really have to find one company that has more to lose by not hiring me than hiring me.

I guess that's probably the advice (perhaps unsolicited) I'd give to you -- are you flexible with what you want to do but want to be well compensated and work with a company that has defensible growth? In that case, it might make more sense to take a position that might not be ideal today but is in a growing org where you can make it closer to something that would have the specifics you like. Do you want to do a very specific role? Well, unless it opens your pool of potential companies rather than closes it, you'll have to work within the diminished market demand for it, which leads the the sort of frustration you express.

I appreciate your advice, and it absolutely makes sense. But my complaint was not about jobs being absent, but about companies ignoring applications.

Ah, I see what you mean now.

> One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview.

This is kind of a poor analogy, but I think a lot about parallels between talent agencies and the entertainment industry. Prima facie, there shouldn't need to be middlemen involved, right? And yet, there are, and they vary in quality from being horrible to being stars that the talent absolutely prefers to have. Interestingly enough, plenty of companies that try to disintermediate them can end up getting reputations as being talent unfriendly (IE Spotify), to the extent that the disrupting competitor inevitably plays ball.

I guess what I think is fascinating is that your anecdote may reflect this. Frankly, I think the job application is not useful. Creating the equivalent of an effective "spam filter" or ranking for job applications is challenging, so there's no reason to expect it to always be clogged with poor match applications. Having been a hiring manager before, it's really, really time consuming to go through low quality applicant leads. It's time consuming enough that your job is nearly intractable unless you have an in house or contingent recruiter that does a good enough job at separating the wheat from the chaff. I've had to play recruiter and hiring manager at the same time before, and it was more than a full time job. Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold, and then some.

What you want as a hiring manager is a lead, not an "application" and in order to get that, you need some kind of a pre-qualification process. I've had some really awful experiences with recruiters, some of whom will join my LI network, have an intro with me about a position, never respond, and then re-post that same position on LI. Then again, I've had professional recruiters that are extremely well informed, shephard me through the process with very well defined expectations of timeframes, and timely communication at every step up to and including a potential rejection. What I'm trying to get at is that you seem to think that the problem is too many middlemen, but I think the problem is not enough -- that is, the middlemen have an important job to do, but there are too many incompetent ones that are costing both companies and candidates valuable missed opportunities.

> Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold, and then some.

Can't agree more. That said, there are so diminishingly few good recruiters, that it seems like we all would have been much better, if there weren't any recruiters at all.

I really understand and empathize with this sentiment, because for at least five years, I had pretty bad experiences with recruiters. But I'd caution you to not throw out the baby with the bathwater -- they're out there.

At the past few companies I've been at, I've had the chance to work with some really thoughtful, practical and productive recruiters. Secondly, at companies I've worked at with great recruiters, we overwhelmingly were able to build a great organization of engineers who I genuinely enjoyed collaborating with. I think getting to the root of there being so few good recruiters requires a bit of reframing -- why are there so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there?

If you think about it that way, there's so many shockingly subpar recruiters out there for the same reason there are so many shockingly subpar companies. The internal economics of a company allow it to "remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" -- but just as equally, it could force to company to hire in a savvy manner to arbitrage an edge in the talent market that bigger, more complacent actors are leaving untapped.

There can be a lot of problems with VC funded rocket-ship companies that can end up being pseudo-cult like entities that crash and burn like WeWork. And yet, I've consistently had great luck getting amazing opportunities at growth stage startups that would be very hard to get at established companies that could really care less about losing me (or anyone else) as a candidate -- with a recruitment process that belies that apathy in a very palpable manner. Conversely, these growth stage startups actually fought to hire me, as well as the organization that I saw develop around me. I know that not every such company is like this, but I guess what I'll say is that I've had better luck with them than with the big companies.

Are the positions you’re hiring for very dependent on experience or soft skills? If not, what is preventing you from using a coding challenge or quiz as a pre-screen?

As a new grad who recently completed a job search, I'm really feeling the "randomness" aspect now. There were so many things that could have changed along the way, with a drastic impact on my future. Some of them were within my control and some weren't, but overall it feels like a job search is akin to spinning the wheel of fortune.

> in some socio-economic sense, that I can't quite put my finger on.

Maybe I can - they're asking for the moon, and a pony?

I see job ads that as for advanced mssql with SSIS/SSRS/SSAS data analysis, good c# and/or python, some web framework, powershell, some visualisation tools, some no-sql db experience[0] and often big data frameworks (hadoop, spark) on top ("and some knowledge of statistics and data analysis would be helpful!"). And OO, and FP. And they often ask for domain knowledge on top.

(edit: and I forgot, they often want data warehousing as well).

I think some of these are just added by clueless HR drones to pad job ads out (some of HR really are clueless).

[0] why ask for SQL & no-sql?

  > why ask for SQL & no-sql?

It's not uncommon to have (even multiple variants of) both in a large org.

Have you tried reaching out to the recruiting agencies to find you opportunities which fit your desires? Gotta make the middlemen work for you.