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Comment by Der_Einzige | Hacker News Reader

Internal recruiters as they currently are should not exist. That's the hiring managers job, including negotiation of pay.

The only roles I've ever accepted were roles that involved a hiring manager reaching out directly to me. There's a reason for this, namely that the only recruiters worth a damn seem to be working in boutique firms and want to take a significant bite out of my future pay.

Really, just avoid them if possible.

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As a hiring manager I’ve worked with internal recruiters and a good one is invaluable.

- the transactional part of setting up interview loops, coordinating schedules, etc is extremely tedious for a field of 3-5 serious candidates for a given role. Internal recruiter takes all of this away from a hiring manager who has other duties.

- an internal recruiter can plow through LinkedIn to find solid candidates, identifying ones for the hiring manager to review and, if qualified, reach out to. Again, tedious work for a hiring manager with other responsibilities.

That should be your job. Even the "tedious" parts are too important to be left to a non technical person. Time of day for scheduling interviews really does matter and the initial communication of scheduling this can tell you an enormous amount about the candidate.

Your job should also include lots of time on LinkedIn searching, as many HMs do today. Letting a recruiter do this for you will give you many more bad interviews (expensive) than you'd get otherwise.

But apparently "tedious work" is above a HM. Have fun being on conference calls all day, pretending that you and not the engineers are the ones who do the work. Worker self management needs to become more of a thing in this field in general if we can't trust HMs to take an active role in candidate selection. Companies that disvow managers and empower their employees produce far more excellent work (e.g. valve) even if they don't always do it on the schedule that execs want - so this would be a net positive for the industry.

Strong nope on pretty much all points, and its rude and presumptuous to tell me what my job should be or what other work it entails. We’re going to just have to disagree here.

You are right, although there is a risk that internal recruitment teams become a bottleneck. Particularly when the requirement for new hires is more elastic than recruitment capacity. Something has to be given a lower priority.

Internal recruiters are kind of a necessity, though: hiring managers often don't have skills in sourcing candidates, have calendars filled with other responsibilities, and are generally more expensive per hour than recruiters, for the kinds of work that either could do (screening, communicating with candidates about progress, organizing interviews, etc.).

In most cases that I've seen the internal recruiters have strong relationships with the hiring managers and are incentivized to make sure the hires actually succeed.

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