Ask HN: Do you prefer to search for a job in a job board or trough a recruiter?
With the actual competitive market and so many layoffs, do you think is better to go to a recruitment agency or doing yourself searching and applying via a job board?
Usually I don't look for "jobs" but for companies I would like to work for. If there is not a job offer, you can still apply spontaneously. I also keep a list of these companies after applying successfully, because after a few years, this list might get interesting again.
Some possibilities to find interesting companies are:
- Look through job offering sites and the according company profiles (even if the offered job is not that interesting, the company can still be)
- Look through the job history of my contacts in social media (linkedin, etc.)
- Company rating sites (by employees, like glassdoor.com)
- Using google maps to look for interesting tech companies in your area
- Keeping an eye on local advertising boards
- Talking to people
The problem with recruiters is, that the company often has to pay an extra fee to THEM, if YOU get the job. These fees are extra expensive and offer no guarantees which often leads to a denial whereas you may have gotten the job if there had been no extra fee.
An example: We had an interesting candidate provided by a recruiter. He seemed promising, was a perfect match for the team and showed potential, but we were not quite sure about his skills in detail and how he would develop. Paying a fee of > 10000 bucks (!) for the recruiter was too risky for our company, where otherwise hey would have gotten the job. We took someone else, who had way less potential but applied manually...
Maybe I was not told about it, I was not the person who denied the application - but at most it was a "6 months at work" guarantee, where the fee has to be paid as soon as the person has been 6 months employed at the company.
> There’s also the option to do contract to hire. If the fee to hire someone is a deterrent, it doesn’t feel like a great sign of the company’s financial situation or how they view money. $10k extra for someone who may work out is not gonna break the bank when hiring employees that are paid well north of 100k.
I agree (I'm no longer working for the company), but I made this experience more than once. In edge cases or cases where the application is about < 60k, > 10k (!) can be pretty much for a smaller company / startup, when the person is a "job hopper" that is only looking for a time filler job and leaves after a year.
> Employees typically cost the company around 1.5-2x the salary for all other overhead, so 10k is a drop in the bucket.
The fee was actually higher than 10k (I wrote >10k), but 10k was the fee, that would have been acceptable for the new applicant, that was denied.
All in all I think recruiters are maybe an option for jobs >60k, but in most cases it is better to look for a job yourself. In my experience Recruiters are intrusive (I got nonsense emails all the time), don't provide jobs that aren't already there, don't do much research about the company, they have no "early access", they don't do much "work" you couldn't do yourself besides souping up your curriculum vitae. They are PAID for pleasing the companies, so they mostly don't care about your needs or if you fit the company. Pretty often they call you after a year in the new job they offered and tell you about this new absolutely unique application they now have for you... So NO, I don't like recruiters :-)
- My home address (here I look in a broader radius to not miss anything) - Areas with high IT company concentration (often I already see this high concentrated areas in the nearby home search) - Areas near tech universities (where the experts are)
This should give you a brief overview but unfortunately this list is pretty unqualified. After this I tend to visit the homepages to get an impression of the company.
It's a lot of work but mostly, you have to do this once and only give the list a refresh after a few years.
* Third party recruiters are expensive for everyone. Yet, they can bypass the stupidity of the prior bullet point.
* Developers, in most cases, are a commodity. A meaningless replaceable gear in a larger machine. Talent and skills are largely irrelevant in many areas of software now, but years of experience still appear to be tie breakers. You resume should account for these considerations if you want to achieve employment.
* I am noticing lately hiring is walking back from that prior bullet point because commoditization of candidate selection does not work for more senior positions. For example you cannot substitute competence for a framework and cheaply achieve security, accessibility, test automation, architecture, and so forth. Eventually making decisions becomes more important than putting text on screen. In this case your only goal is to land an interview by any means possible so that your experience can do the talking.
Oh man but will they try anyway...
"Network! Go to coffee with people you worked with, offer to help people for free with their projects, and go to many founder and social events! I never used a recruiter in my life and I'm a bazillionaire founder over in the Bay Area!"
In contrast, never in my 20 yr career have I ever found a job like that. As charming as I am, it seems I'm always going to use recruiters (and today I'm a senior manager).
Recruiters and the interview process blow, but they're unavoidable in my experience. No books or startups to my name, however.
Any time I've 'applied', it feels like just sending information into the void, and never hearing anything back.
Second is to find growing companies I find interesting and contact then directly.
I’ve worked with multiple and they always strike me as uninformed, minimum wage, right-out-of-school, and flakey as fuck. I’ve been ghosted by recruiters, had them miss meetings then come up with absurd excuses, and generally fail to do the bare minimum. At one point I contacted a company directly after the recruiter made multiple mistakes and/or just lied (I think they lied at least) as the go between and I ended up getting the job.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t attempt to leverage one if I needed a job but they will never be my first pick.
I got my last job from a “who wants to be hired” thread here on HN and I couldn’t have asked for a better fit. I don’t know if that’s rare since I only did it once but I think I’d try it again if I was looking. That and looking through the “who’s hiring” thread. I’ve also been approached a few times about interviewing due to comments I’ve made on this site (about certain technologies or frameworks) so overall I see HN as a great resource on this front.
Ironically I love the _idea_ of recruiters and every time I go job hunting (and inevitable see if they have gotten any better) I think about how maybe my next job should be as a competent job recruiter since they are in such short, or non-existent, supply.
Cons: All things equal, companies will favor the candidate who isn't tied to the recruiter.
I'll take one if I don't know the company, but if I know someone working there (and by now, I've met most people), I'd rather opt for someone on the inside. Most of the bigger companies also offer referral bonuses and highly advantage those with an internal recommendation.
Really, why limit yourself? Last time I was looking (January-February), I went on Indeed, Monster, and maybe one or two others. I also reached out to a few recruiters. I don't remember which one led to the new job.
Note, however, that I already had a list of recruiters that I respected. I had slowly built that list over a couple of decades. When I needed a recruiter, I wasn't just randomly calling them.