Ask HN: How would you fix tech recruiting?

IMHO the biggest problem is the recruiters do not understand tech enough. If they did then they would not be recruiters, they would be techies.

How to fix? One of the big problems, and others have mentioned it. Employers with unrealistic expectations. I had a boss once create a laundry list of skills for a position, 3 years of each, that no one would have: Java, C, C++, C#, Ada, Java Script, and 2 different assembly languages, as well as a host of other techs. I complained it was a stupid list, as half of the languages listed we never used. Response: "Oh but wouldn't it be nice to have someone who could!" WTF, all they were doing was encouraging liars to apply.

So I believe they should be allowed to list 3 maybe 4 primary skills / experience. Then 3 or 4 'Would set you apart skills' (i.e. tie breakers). If you list more then you do not understand what your team does.

If you are thinking of making something, I would start by looking at Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ he has written a ton on the topic (click recruiter to see his articles). He also had a site for recruiting where he vetted the recruiters for a bunch of topics. I cannot find the site or I would put it here.

Are you planning to be a recruiter? Do you understand their problems?

Business X wants super ninja engineer for less then market rate because they're cheap and believe their mission statement should scream "come work for us like a slave". You, the tech recruiter now need to find this potential engineer, how do you do this?

As you already know, step 1 is spam people on linkedin hoping for low hanging fruit. Yea we get spammed, but like Nigerian scammers and robocallers, we're not the target audience, we are just unintentional victims in the recruiters process for finding a needle in a haystack.

No I'm considering making tools for recruiters and/or candidates.

I probably don't understand all their problems, but it certainly looks like a lot of them come their...how do i put this? either ignorance or stupidity.

I'm not just talking about the crappy companies with low budgets. On more than one occasion, it was for companies with big budgets(either unicorns, scale-ups or startups who just raised millions, and it really was the recruiter/headhunter who was screwing it up.

One of my first strategy would be to use a model to detect the candidates who are the most likely to quit their jobs(I was about to build that but I saw a startup launched something similar) (of course I shouldn't even mention "open to work" or out of work devs, that's obvious)

2nd, I would do scoring based on exact keywords matches(some of them don't even do that correctly), then on similar technologies, ie:angular/react/vue, java/c#, on which roles they used it at, for how long etc...

3rd target the employees of companies with low/declining glassdoor ratings

4th, I may scrape github accounts, to find people who just started learning a technology but may not have it mentioned on their job experience

What I don't get is, you can only contact 100 to a few hundreds people per week on linkedin, so why they do they target us so badly? Sometimes it looks like they just look for the word developer and send a message to the 100 first results

It's not like they even use fake accounts to have unlimited messages, I've rarely seen recruiters with even just 2 accounts, so they waste the small amount of messages they have on totally awful matches

I'm certain with a decent algorithm and 10-50 linkedin accounts I could do the job of 10-50 headhunters

It sounds like you're building a SAAS for Recruiters. Maybe a simpler tool then linkedin itself to find potential candidates. You'd probably want to talk to tech recruiters to see if giving candidate leads would be something they would be willing to pay for.

EDIT: As an engineer / IC, even though its nice to talk to a competent recruiter, at the end of the day its all about learning what the role is, how much it pays, and if the company seems interesting or not.

I'm not even building anything yet, just thinking. If what I described is "simpler" that linkedin tools, either their algos don't work or the recruiters are too incompetent to use them correctly.

also my post wasn't really "rate my thoughts" but "how would you fix tech recruiting?" i.e how would you build a better process than unqualified spam?

Also my theory on Linkedin, is that they have absolutely no incentive to make actually effective tools.

A recruiter have no other choices, Linkedin is basically a monopoly, if they build a tool that is actually effective at recruiting, you'd need less recruiters, so less linkedin memberships, and more engineering/processing power needed on Linkedin side, they have nothing to win by making good tools to find candidates, they just have to look good enough to purchase a membership since they have basically no competitors. It's kind of like Google Search, it's ineffective and infested by ads, by design, for money, they're just a monopoly and can get away with it.

Recruiting is essentially advertising / marketing for a company about a job opening. Email / spam is direct marketing, which can work sometimes for recruiters. You also can do web marketing, like hackernews does for its YC companies, but recruiters would need to advertise on say, Linkedin, Stackoverflow, etc. Beyond that, you have your organic marketing, which is word of mouth, or friends of friends, but then you usually bypass an actual recruiter if you go down that route.

To me "fixing" tech recruiting is trying to come up with new ways to advertise something, which I believe is an evolving process but not something that can ever truly be "fixed".

In general I would suggest starting with a design approach to the problem rather than an engineering one. Yes its frustrating, but maybe also some empathy would go a long way.

You have people who are tasked with - finding someone to do a job they personally dont understand - given requirements often by someone who doesnt understand the requirements and often not the best interview set-up - dealing with candidates who have limited time or interest in interaction and more knowledge than the person tasked with finding them (information asymmetry)

who then are working on commission and sometimes against other recruiters.

Yes, I am similarly annoyed but I find this mindset ^^^ leads to better tools then "you ignorant person, I'm going to replace you with a robot"

Look it's okay to not know what every language does, or which library is doing what.

But a lot of them are not even using the tools at their disposal correctly or are just being wildly dishonest and incompetent, a few examples:

-In the past 2 weeks I got contacted 3 times for expert JAVA/JEE jobs, java is NOT on my resume/linkedin/github, you don't have to know what it is to search for a keyword

-I got contacted for a Senior SRE role by a DECACORN, and actually invited to an interview, I'm neither a senior, nor doing SRE, none of these things are mentioned on my profile

-I get contacted for on-site jobs 1000miles away, when I'm basically mentioning everywhere that I only do full remote, even WORSE, sometimes they start by saying "open to remote/remote friendly" only to tell me after a few messages: "oh btw this requires moving to [FARAWAY_CITY], are you ok with that?"

-even worse than all that, yesterday I got contacted by a headhunter, after a terrible experience with him and a lot of time wasted, I guessed the name of the company and messaged the CEO, turns out they're not even one of their clients: they just message every dev possible then when someone say yes they message the CEO to TRY to sell them your profile for a public job posting

-they don't want to share information, we have to play a cat and mouse game to know basic stuff like what's the actual stuff I'm going to build, for what salary, using which technical stack, remotely or on the other side of the country, I feel like I'm playing a crappy game of "Guess Who?"

If this is not ignorance/incompetence or downright villainy, then what is it?

I think some industries are rotten to the core and this is one of them, there is nothing wrong with saying it. Do you have empathy for spammers?bankers?insurers?

To me, tech recruiting feels geared around people creating resumes that feature a lengthy laundry list of technologies that reward the best liars because that's the idiotic filtering process that's emerged.

What would make the job hunt better?

1) You need somebody technical involved in writing job ads. You also need to limit the technologies mentioned to a handful. If it's a frontend webdev job for example, list out a few necessities (HTML, CSS, JS) and a couple of nice-to-have bits of tech like experience with SVG, React, and Git, but don't declare those to be mandatory. A smart person who never used some tech you need will be able to pick it up faster than a middling liar who claims 5 years of experience with it.

2) You need a recruiter who understands the businesses they're representing as well as technology to figure out if the candidate is a potential match.

3) You need businesses who understand that smart people who know their shit are better for the business than a middling developer who has some experience with your particular tech. Outside of very specialized and niche stuff, any smart developer will pick up new libraries and technology very quickly. Solve for hiring smart people, not trying to find somebody who just listed every technology they ever heard of on their resume.

I think Toptal’s model is as ideal as it gets. Engineers are vetted and interviewed once, companies can hire without interviewing, if it doesn’t work out in the first week Toptal covers the cost. This incentivizes Toptal to do effective evaluation of engineers, engineers don’t have to repeat interviews over and over, and companies save time and money.

I don’t see how that model could be any better really. Referrals are also a good model, but the talent pool is limited.

I only heard negative feedback about toptal

I started the process and they ended up spamming me for days/weeks so I schedule an interview before a nonsense deadline or they'll lock my account, I didn't go further...

Turing.com seems better, but REALLY selective

> How do these people stay in business?

By finding enough candidates for enough businesses willing to pay the huge finders' fees that recruiting firms demand.

One of the things that amazes me is that companies will pay a recruiting firm tens of thousands of dollars to find a candidate that makes it through the interview process and stays there for at least 90 days but then they only offer $500 to their employees for referrals that get hired. I pointed out to HR at one company that I worked for that one of their recruiting partners pays $1000 for a referral that gets hired; given how much they would pay a recruiter, they should be offering at least $5,000 referral bonuses to someone recommends a candidate they hire, whether the person making the recommendation is an employee or not. They decided to increase the referral bonus to match the recruiting company (I kept feeding referrals for my employer through said recruiting agency -- my relationship with them started before and lasts long after being with that employer).

I guess what I meant is:why is no one doing better than them?

Most of the decent approaches I've seen were either coming from founders or once from an ex-engineer who became a recruiter, basically never from a typical recruiter, why is no one obliterating them?

It's a "soft-skills" job, which requires dealing with many, many, many liars and cheats, and trying to maintain a reputation. Not a job that can be easily solved by technology.

"many liars and cheats" I guess it takes one to know one?

A decent technical test would weed out any actual liar, no? or do we need people who thinks they're fbi interrogators?

There is no "one size fits all" technical test, and if there was, the answers would be for sale and you'd be back to square one. People are a hard problem.

I don't see how coding in front of someone(no matter the problem) can be worse than a random non technical guy trying to guess if you're lying or not

Not all technical jobs involve coding, and of those that do, it's not always the top priority.

Frankly, the only good third party recruiters are good because of the human relationships they have with hiring managers are good companies. Likewise they will try to establish good relationships with you the candidate.

It's a severely bifurcated group IMHO. There is a tiny pool of great third party recruiters. Then you have the vast unwashed masses of crappy ones. The ones that are at least decent seem to end up as internal recruiters at least.

Take it seriously. Get high IQ people to run this function.

Some of the job descriptions I've seen from recruiters are so bad it almost feels like a trap. Like if you respond you'll be blacklisted for being desperate and have a harder time finding a legitimate job.

I saw an email the other day that offered 50-60k/y in the Midwest. Remote would be "considered" after 6 months if you "behave." Masters required PHD preferred.

> I honestly feel like I could do the jobs of 10 tech recruiters with a few well designed bots.

Go ahead and do it. Neither tech recruiters, nor the tech recruitment process itself are cheap, so if you could figure out a way to make the whole process more efficient there is a ton of opportunity there.

I think most recruiters operate like email spammers - just throw out 1000's of solicitations and hope one of them connects with somebody.