Comment by ItsBob | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ItsBob | Hacker News Reader

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I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion.

I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.

I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.

The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such).

My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.

The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.

I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.

One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.

I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).

Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.

as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email gets spammed with offers.

I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

Recruiters usually just pay lip service and pretend to send your CV through. They data mine and will have already put people forward at jobs you think you're applying to. About 30-50% of the time your CV won't be sent immediately, if at all, until their other candidate is rejected and I have (personal) evidence of this.

The reason for this is 2 fold:

1. They directly stop you competing with their current candidate, who is probably the highest % cut.

2. They indirectly stop you being put forward by other recruiters when you say "oh another recruiter has put me forward" (which they haven't, but you have a verbal contract with).

So the number of jobs you think you're applying to is actually less .

If you suspect this is happening (and make sure genuinely it's not just a delay in the HR dept first by asking probing questions) call the company and ask them directly, state that the recruiter is being a little slow corresponding and you'd like to confirm the status of your application. If they haven't heard of you, terminate your verbal contract with the recruiter and send your CV directly to the company. This happened for my current job, and now I'm earning a substantial amount of money (think tech arch, top end salary).

My boss said during hiring "I don't know why they wouldn't pass on your CV, you were clearly the better candidate".

I forgot to add, I rarely use recruiters now unless they seem genuine and want to talk at length including giving you contact names at the company "the manager Fred Bloggs is usually...". I wait for companies' in-house HR on LinkedIn to contact me or contact them directly if they advertise.

> 2. They indirectly stop you being put forward by other recruiters when you say "oh another recruiter has put me forward" (which they haven't, but you have a verbal contract with).

They usually send you a confirmation email to say that you're their bitch now but I reply to the confirmation email saying that if I hear nothing for 7 days, then I can go with another recruitment firm.

Same. Sooo many Norwegian companies for some reason use UK recruiters. I'm boycotting each and every company doing that.

They're nothing but noise. Shotgunning messages to everyone. Calling me out of the blue while I'm at work. Just straight up spam and annoyances. We don't get much robo-calls here, so UK recruiters is the sole reason why I no longer pick up the phone from unknown numbers. It can sometimes be multiple a day. And blocking UK numbers doesn't work. If you don't answer, they call you a minute later routed through a Norwegian number.

F*ck every Norwegian company outsourcing their recruiting to these agencies. I don't think they understand how poorly it reflects on them..

its not just Norway, a lot of recruitment companies based in the UK are focused on european mainland market, germany, switzerland, denmark, etc.. a lot of cowboys over there who figured out putting people into chairs is very profitable and scalable. some of them act as middle men and take a cut out of your salary. its really the new wild west over here.

My experience echos yours too... lost count of the number of times I've been ghosted.

I've learned not to trust agents. At all.

If I get a call I assume that I'll be ghosted or that they're lying about the role.

If I manage to get an interview, I usually get the role (I'd say about 70%+) but getting to the interview stage is always a pain with the agencies.

That being said, the market is most definitely different at the moment: I'd hate to be applying for entry-level (or even mid-level) roles at the moment!

I have a friend who is looking and he's struggling to get anywhere at the moment and he has more experience than me (I'm more senior than him but his CV has extensive experience on it).

> I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

How do you find out which companies are hiring, please? It's like a catch-22 situation: in order to know that a company is hiring, you need to know that the company is hiring. If I search for open positions for my role on Google, all I am seeing is the endless stream of recruiting agencies with no visibility into what companies they are actually recruiting for... Are there any places left where companies advertise directly?

I dont really go for big tech, usually I target small to medium sized companies.

So for me when I want to work for a company with embedded / audio etc I just google who is providing such services in the location I wanna work at.

Once I found the target company and their website, a lot of them have "career" or "job" postings on there. If they don't I just send an email with an inquiry about currently open positions with my cv attached, sort of an electronic cold call :)

I don't like to deal with the middlemen I go straight to the source, Frank Lucas style of the software era if you will...

Have you tried Indeed, Monster, etc.? Or failing that, contact the companies you're interested in directly?

I am sure I must have checked out Indeed; but when I look at it now, it is not as full of posts from recruiting companies as I remember. Still a lot though: "Senior X Developer required for one of the leading FinTech companies...", "We’re working alongside a leading scale-up... in order to to find a Full Stack X Engineer..." and so on. I wish there were a simple way to filter all those middlemen out.

In my experience from both sides of the table, agents have always been the route to market in the UK whereas applications through HR have been a black hole.

Not saying you are wrong, but my (London, mainly BigCo) experience and read is that 90%+ of tech jobs are filled through agents.

To the contrary, it took about six years until the most persistent UK recruiter stopped calling me back. There is certainly a function of how well does your CV match their clients in there.

I won't resort to naming and shaming here but if you ever get contacted by a UK agency that 'resources vividly', immediately request a removal of your contact info per GDPR or you will get phoned daily for months on end.

If you're referring to Vivid Resourcing, they're truly horrible, I got interrogated by them for 30+ mins and they disappear, happened twice so it can't be a one off!

when I finish one of these calls with these UK recruitment agencies I feel so sick to my stomach. they really are hustlers and grifters in the worst sense of the word. never again...

BTW what is it with recruiters being overwhelmingly British also outside of Britain (say, German speaking tech space)?

France here (not Paris). I’m a small startup, I spent 1 year going beyond 2 employees, and I needed to be 9. I had the income for 9, so I’m not a flimsy startup, wages are cool, tech stack is state-of-the-art.

- Indeed easily costs 500$ per month without result,

- Employees know it so they slack around. Not only they performed bad work during this period, but I also had to deal with firing one to show the other that bad work in unacceptable.

- Took recruiters at 7-10k€ per recruitee, for 1 year, didn’t work out, their candidates kept failing the basic Java tests (like they can’t align 2-for 1-if),

- Took an inhouse recruiter, 3000€ per month for 8 months, he overhauled the communication, wording style, videos, blogging, LinkedIn news, and did those 30-minutes calls before our 2 rounds of interviews.

Now we’re 8 and employees are actually pumped up motivated at work. And thanks to this, work is also more interesting than when we were few, because we have time to innovate, we’re not struggling under support workload or having to run around keeping the servers hot.

—-

I attribute the new fashion of 30-minutes calls to 1. scarcity due to Covid disorganization, 2. radios and media, even business shows, blasting out that the newnormal is 32hrs a week, 100% remote, and that if you haven’t been promoted to management in the last year you are wasting your life with your employer, 3. Students have been incredibly badly taught during Covid, so they suck at programming during interviews, 4. Therefore, employees are not worth spending the money on, and we’re better off spending the money on recruiters. So those 30-minutes call are a redistribution between who provides the value; the employee provides less value, the recruiter does.

I've had similar experiences with UK recruiters, and heard the same from colleagues and friends in the industry. Recruiters there seem to gather a lot of applicants for a role, promise the world, then drop most of them.

I have had good recruiters in the UK but they're few and far between.

Best to treat them like company contacts. Let them apply for a role or two for you, and contact somebody else for another role. I used a dozen recruiters at any one time when I was last applying in the UK.

>not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff

These still exist for large companies (especially US companies) and those with internal recruiters. It's a shame that the latter get tarred with the general term - they have very different motivations and methods.

The UK job market, particularly London is pretty good for this. I had a bunch of recruiters doing this end of last year when I started looking for a new role. They are incentivised to put the work in.

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