Awful Recruiters

I first started writing software on contract in the mid-90's. It was a good time, full of C++ jobs and my skills and my market seemed to be in harmony. I put my resume out there on the still-so-new-it-shined internet and immediately got over a dozen calls, the vast majority being from 3rd-party recruiters.

I complained to my wife after the third call in a row and she explained to me that I should never be upset when someone called because they wanted to get me a job. She had endured a lot of unemployment in her family and a call from a recruiter was a cause for celebration, not complaint. From that point on, I've never complained about a call or email from a recruiter.

2002 and 2003 were some lean years for software jobs and those calls became few and far between. Now the phone is ringing again, and I don't even have my resume posted anywhere. Still, I won't complain and I haven't blocked emails from any recruiter.

I actually go out of my way to respond to recruiters that seem halfway decent or better. A couple have expressed grateful surprise and I've made new connections that may work out in the future. The awful ones aren't blocked (at least none have been so awful to merit blocking so far), but I don't respond to them either. I just keep the channel open in case times do get lean once again.

The third-party recruiter model may indeed be broken, and, with a few exceptions, isn't a fit for the startup world. It does however seem to work well enough for nearly every BigCo in existence and should I work for a BigCo on contract once again, I'll likely work through a third-party recruiter.

> All third-party recruiters are awful and need to find a real profession.

Wow, I'm not the biggest recruiter fan but this makes the site pretty hard to take seriously.

It would be great to see an example of the bad recruiter e-mails received from each domain. I think this would give the list some more authority.

I'd love to see a RateMyProfessor-style site for recruiters. Among other things, it might provide some reward for the few who try to behave well towards developers and employers.

I'm going to take issue with one of the companies on his list, Riviera Partners. I worked with this company for several months last summer (Hey Matt!) and, in my dealings with them, they were utterly professional. I hate recruiters in general, but the guys at Riviera were the definite exception.

First, their list of clients were very top-notch. I did a number of phone screens and on-site interviews with companies I was introduced to via them. Never found exactly what I was looking for, but met lots of cool people and companies.

Matt was my main contact after I asked to only deal with one of their people. Was always professional and helpful. I've had good interactions with some of their other employees too.

We recruit directly. Our ads are clearly marked at top and bottom with 'We do not use, and never have used, a recruitment agency. Please do not contact us if you are a recruitment agent'

Despite this, we receive multiple calls a day from agencies.

Exasperating!

You can add cybercoders to that list.

Until someone changes the payment model for 3rd party recruiters especially, I'll always cheer lists like this on. No matter what a recruiter may tell you, they'll never have your interest at heart if there's a commission to be made. The incentives are wrong for you, wrong for companies too.

There's a disclaimer to this effect, but just to reiterate: there are real companies on this list. Good and Lumos Labs are two that I recognize off the bat.

There's another list here:

http://www.rogerbinns.com/blocked_recruiters.txt

Looking at that list, the thing that occurred to me is how one bad individual can harm the reputation of an otherwise OK firm. The OP obviously had bad anecdotal experiences with every firm on that list. Also anecdotal is the fact that there are recruiters worth talking to one or two of those firms (I've talked to them.) I don't know if my experience makes that firm good or bad - but I also don't know if the OP's experience makes any of those firms good or bad.

What I have done with my "awful" anecdotes was email back the abusive recruiter, and track down the person's boss (usually there's somebody on the web site whose email address you can at least derive.) In the email I say I'm going to start filtering all messages from their domain to deleted items. If the person doesn't respond, the boss usually does, and more often than not the experience is positive - and if not, I'll follow through and send 'em to the trash. It has worked for me.

A week or two ago I got a LinkedIn friend request from a recruiter who used the message to tell me about how I should get in touch with him.

He clearly used the friend request mechanism to skirt around the LinkedIn rules about having to pay to send recruiter mails. I can't imagine how else he would try to cut corners or sell people out to save himself a buck.

Wouldn't it be easier to produce a list of good recruiters?

Friendly suggestion ... alphabetize the lists.

A better idea would be a site dedicated to rating recruiters and recruiting agencies. That way you can democratize the process and get a feel for the average experience.

ugh, yeah the jobspringpartners one I saw in there.. I actually met with them at their office once as I was in town from out of state for another interview so figured why not (I didn't know much about them and figured I should squeeze an extra interview in even if it was going to be a dud)... it was definitely a weird experience, they had me meet with this one girl first, then they send me out in the waiting room to have five different people each come out to meet with me individually and they each asked basically the same stupid questions... and these were really basic questions that were all answered on my resume. Its just odd that companies like this can stay in business. There was no succession of meeting with different levels of managers, etc, they were all just basic recruiters (salespeople), its as if they were either so inept at communicating that they couldn't share information among one another (or take the time to actually read my resume) or that they were so ultra competitive that they couldn't trust one employee to meet with me, they had to add go directly to the source.

I was contacted by a recruiter from Riviera Partners recently. Stupidly, I thought that it might be beneficial to respond to them.

After not receiving a call from him at our scheduled time, I emailed him. He responded three days later telling me that he had called in sick the day he was supposed to call me and asked for my availability in the next few days. I gave him my availability, and never heard back until he just called me out of the blue. It was fine that time, but would have been very annoying if my availability had changed.

We talked for a bit and he said that he wanted to get me in touch with a startup company that he thought had a position that would be a good fit for me - same deal, I gave him my times and received no confirmation until the company called me one afternoon.

A little bit into the phone call it became apparent that he had told them I was open to permanent positions despite me making it very clear to him I was only looking for internships.

Great.

Nice list. I was surprised how none of the ones who email me are on it, so I'm assuming recruiters are mostly by area.

One question, though: why are you archiving these in GMail instead of trashing them? If you trash them, you still have 30 days to correct your mistake, and no recruiter email is worthwhile after 30 days anyway.

A terrible recruiter from flex-associates.com found me on linkedin, I came "highly recommended", from a super secret sauce. Next day they tried it on with my junior. Same person, same conversation tactic, same lack of knowledge about the industries I work in and the systems I work with and develop for.

What's the metric for "purely crap"?

I expected this to be a Coding Horror for bad recruiters. Now that would be interesting :)

I happen to work for one of the firms that is listed in this post. It is so funny how people like to talk smack when they are anon. I think that is ironic that is I were to rate Soffes on his track record, he'd get a C+ maybe...hasn't held a job for more than a year and even when he worked for himself, he lasted less than 2 years...I am not saying that there aren't some Awful recruiters on this list, but obvious Sam has a axe to grind, because that are obvious some well respected firms on the list. I will be sure to add Sam Soffes to our internal list of AwfulCandidates!

Sounds like this person has put himself up on some/many job sites and is wondering why every recruiter on the planet is sending him referrals. Besides, if a particular company sends you a bunch spam, it's usually a 1-3 click process to add them to your spam filter.

As for the list he provided, I don't agree with the top entry. I got a great referral from WorkBridgeAssociates, and our company has found several good people through them as well. (Note: I do not work for or get any kind of recompense from them.)

I got my current job from LinkedIn, so it's not all crap from there. A lot of it is, though, so I would understand if a person wasn't patient enough...

I once had a job that depressed the hell out of me. I had thought the company would be good because the job ad said they'd never, ever lost an engineer in more than 10 years of operation.

2 months after I'd left, the same job ad was on the recruiter's website.

Don't know if the author is reading, but would be nice if the main domain list was sorted.

Have dealt with a few of those mentioned and agree, and was going to forward the site to our internal recruiter to make sure don't use them. :)

Add Techlink to the list. Not only do their recruiters lie about the positions they are looking to fill but they get the hiring managers to lie about the positions as well.

Ok. But thebackplane.com is not a "3rd party recruiter" .. they're not even a recruiter. :)

Isn't @good.com just an email service like gmail but used by BlackBerry or corporate users?

I really wanted to read user-submitted emails they've received from recruiters.

A couple of friends and I got this idea a few years ago. We've accumulated over 340 companies their recruiters who are less than desirable. Inflated salaries lead the pack of the tactics used. Posting misleading information about the job description and benefits follow closely.

Wouldn't mind some VC-$ to launch.

From experience - most of the job boards are junk, including the ones on that site.