All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

There's a great three part series[1][2] (well, parts one and two are great) at the Kernel magazine on recruiters as well as an expose on the top recruiting scams[3].

[1] - http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2401/tech-recruiter...

[2] - http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2403/tech-recruiter...

[3] - http://www.kernelmag.com/features/report/2404/the-10-sleazie...

As a front-end developer who recently just went through the job-hunting process I can say that, for the most part, my biggest complaint on the US side for recruiters is that they have no idea what I do for a living. Never mind the fact that most of the job postings are seemingly written by people who have no idea what the job actually is. I really got tired of explaining that Java is in fact not the cool nickname for JavaScript.

I found my new job through a recruiter. He approached me and I found him to be quite good at his job. He talked with me first to get a feeling for my competency level and then suggested two positions with clients he has worked with before. One of them turned out to be my new job.

I think I talked to around ten recruiters total and only two of them knew what they were doing. The others really, really needed to find a new line of work.

I won't go into details of the oddities of my job hunt because I'm sure many here have similar stories. I just wanted to say there are recruiters out there worth knowing, if you can find them or if they find you.

"The reality is that passive racism and ageism is still extremely active within the recruitment industry."

I agree this is an issue in the industry, but I believe this point is a serious issue at the companies end rather than the responsibility of the recruiters. Surely the reason it is easier to "sell" white European candidates is that is what the companies want, and the people they end up hiring, this is completely unethical clearly, but recruiters are reacting to this. I am sure if recruiters could submit any C.V. regardless of age and race and still make the money they would.

The most elegant way to "fix" a market is to change the incentives. There is a contract between employer and recruiter. The employer does not want to be pestered all day about useless candidates. Just subtract some percentage from the recruiters fee for each wasted call.

Let's say the employer gets on average 20 calls until a candidate qualifies and the third of those gets the job. This means 60 wasted calls for 3 candidates. If you subtract 1% per wasted call from the recruiters fee, he should make sure to reduce the number of wasted calls. Of course, the original fee must be a little bit larger than the mentioned £5k-£15k, since some waste is expected. Start with £18k, reduce wasted calls to 20, which results in a £14k fee and more time for the employer.

The rewards are all wrong in this market.

(1) Most companies are bad at recruitment. It's just very far from whatever their core business is.

(2) Since the value of a better employee is huge companies are willing to pay for it. In most markets, when people are willing to pay for quality, firms are able to take that money and turn it into a higher quality product. If a market appears for $100k cars, car makers will spend that money making Ferraris. The value of that may be questionable given that 10k can do most of the stuff you'd be doing with the Ferrari but that's besides the point. The point is that the manufacturer found some way of spending your money on the product.

The problem with recruiting is that they have no way of spending your money in any decent way. They can spend to get volume up, to a degree, but there isn't really of reliably spending your way into getting better candidates. Instead of doing something useful (to the employer or candidate), everything goes into a zero sum game of fighting each-other for openings and candidates.

Another issue is that open jobs become protected secrets to the extent that it becomes hard to find positions without a recruiter. It's some type of strange cyclic dependency where companies turn to recruiters because the employees have given up looking for openings on their own--which leads to job opening info residing only with recruiters (and, yes, an about us -> jobs page buried on the corporate web site), which in turn fuels the employees turning to recruiters.

I feel the glut of job boards hurts this as well. Everyone is so eager to start a site to get their own $20 job posting fee that employees are overwhelmed over where to spend their money. Postings are broadly scattered across dozens of sites, and as a result job postings get worse results than recruiters. So, companies turn to recruiters, which helps start the whole cycle up.

Then there's a different form of blacklisting--if you get hired via a recruitment agency, sometimes you can't get access to their exclusive jobs if you go looking again, for fear that the hiring company will fire them. Of course the agency will choose a portfolio of jobs over one hiring fee if the land the right company.

I was shocked to find out that in other industries, the workers pay the recruiters to find them a job.

I agree - having recently been through tech recruitment processes its pretty painful - at the end of the day recruiters are just sales people, their single goal is to sell you and the roles, regardless of what your goals or skills are.

As a result, with a few friends I have been working as part of a team working on a product to try and disrupt the recruitment industry (was actually going to do a Show HN, as we have just launched two days ago!) - Its a online resume building site, that lets developers plug in to GitHub, stackoverflow, etc, to demonstrate their projects and experiences.

As well as this though, we are working on the companies section, where companies can register and effectively create their resumes pitching to developers why they should work for them (developer hardware setup, training agenda, oss contribs etc) - so making more incentives for companies to register themselves (and less so for agencies), and hopefully reduce that burden of recruiting on companies as they can easily see github contributions, stack answers etc and get a better indication of potential candidates skills.

Feel free to check out the site (in beta) http://nerdability.com

"I've come across many employers complaining that recruiters have actually copied their job postings word for word despite not engaging said recruiters to represent them."

I have been hit by this, and I believe I may have lost one or two opportunities because of this. My first hint of this practice was during a phone interview when the hiring manager said something to the effect of, "your recruiter will get in contact with you". Not "our recruiter", not $NAME. I got the distinct impression that I had been put in front of this company unsolicited.

From then on I started Googling for reqs that recruiters sent me that I was interested in. I soon discovered a pattern of recruiters copying open reqs, sticking a contract period on them [0], and posting them on job boards. I have seen multiple recruiters do this for the same position, sometimes with the actual company posting the same position on the same boards. A few even manage to leave the company's name in the posting. This more than anything drove me away from job boards, except SO Careers and the HN threads).

[0] These are all full-time regular positions.

My Key Recruiter Indicators, based on my experiences in the US:

Good: Working with a founder of a company that's more than a few years old.

Bad: Talking to someone different each time a company contacts you.

Toxic: Talking to someone new each time, and them making you go through the same "getting to know you" interview questions each time.

Good: The recruiter sends you job opportunities that match what you've told them to look for, and what they send you gets progressively better with more feedback.

Bad: Repeatedly send you jobs that don't match your skills or interests.

Toxic: Send you jobs that don't even match your location requirements.

Good: Gives you "behind the scenes" details about postings - what skills are really required and what they're willing to train, what the work environment is like, etc.

Bad: Only knows what's on the job listing, and, if you match the requirements, will tell you whatever you need to hear to get you to agree to the interview.

Toxic: Won't even tell you the name of the company they're submitting you to.

Good: Talking openly with you about their "cut", or at least open to ideas for increasing your take-home pay. (US contracting example: how much will they increase your rate if you switch from W-2 to 1099?)

Bad: Asking you for your rate/salary range to begin with, and using your bottom-of-range number as the starting point to negotiate you down from.

Toxic: Negotiating you down on your rate repeatedly, practically at every step of the recruiting process.

What really sucks about working with recruiters is, an average-to-bad recruiter can still get you a good job. Since it's a numbers game for everyone involved, there's at least some incentive to put up with assholes, as long as there's a chance that they will find you something good.

Recruitment agents work particularly well for contract developers, the ethics notwithstanding. Permanent is a whole different ball game that I'm not going to touch on.

TLDR: The model isn't broken, it could use some optimization.

Everyone likes to bash a recruiter. And, some guy who takes 80 quid a day out of your pocket for months should be an object of derision, no?

Look at the flip side: agents act as stimulus for the market, pushing through deals quickly and raising the ceiling on rates.

Sales is dirty and hard work (I've done it). Agents need to be like bulldogs as roles go fast, within days or hours. Without an agent in the mix contracts take longer to get signed.

They are far from the best judges of quality candidates. The closest they get is keyword matching and telephone screening if you're able to string a sentence together. But often this is a good 'low bar'.

Agent fees are expensive. As a contractor it's never good to find out what the client is actually paying for you vs. what you get. That said, the rates here in London are good compared to what I found in Vancouver and elsewhere in the UK. The difference I observed was the aggressive and competitive agencies here, where if they can squeeze more money out of a client they'll pocket a good chunk of it.

London's well-established and healthy contracting market is due in part to the agencies that have grown up around the candidates and companies here.

Yep! Dead on target. A very impressive article. But, Cheese and Peas, Steve, the recruitment mafia has probably put a contract out on you - so cool.

The only thing you didn’t say directly though clearly indicate throughout is that no one (employers nor recruiters) cares about the candidates or their careers. Great article - it’s about time someone said it out loud. Congratulations on your website and business, it looks great and certainly has the right idea.

I've been thinking of a new recruitment model: guaranteed employment. Suppose a recruiting agency guaranteed their recruits, as in, "We'll pay their salary for the [six months | year | whatever]. If they are acceptable, at the end of that period, you pay us back double. If they don't work out, let us know ASAP and we'll eat the cost."

The incentives are all right here. The employers essentially get a year long job interview. Qualified candidates are basically guaranteed a job. And the recruiters are rewarded for successfully meeting their clients' needs, and punished if they get it wrong. The current situation rewards harassment and puffing up their candidates' resumes.

Once I had more than about 4-5 years of experience, I never saw the need for working with a recruiter. I tried a few and they always sent me to those kind of shops where you can just smell in the air that everyone hates their jobs and the devs are just code monkeys churning out whatever garbage some product guy pitched. If I want a job at a company, I apply. There's enough demand (and I'm confident enough in my skill set) that I don't see how a recruiter could help me.

Frankly in my mind, if I hear about a company through a recruiter, I figure it must suck to work there, or else they'd be able to find people on their own.

> Job boards are not doing anything even remotely innovative enough to disrupt the recruitment industry and the primary reason for that is purely because no-one wants to upset their cash cow. Except us that is. We don't pander to the recruitment industry. Quite the opposite in fact. We've sent a number of warning shots into the air to make them aware that we intend on impacting the need for reliance on their industry. It's very early days but in my view at least, the demise of the industry is only just beginning.

What are you doing different? Would be interested to read about it.

I am a technology recruiter and I have to say that I can't disagree with 90% of the post. Unfortunately agencies have been started by people with little class on only desire money. I have always known that I will leave the business and I care more about my reputation than anything else. Like an infection, I am trying to espouse my style and philosophy, one built on trust, understanding of technology and LOBs and transparency. I don't want to chase I want to become a hub that people seek.

The easiest way to kill this is to use stackoverflow jobs or emptylemon or something like that.

The moment you involve humans in the process, you're going to get asshat middlemen. Other equally bad forms of asshat middlemen: car sales, estate agents and letting agents and buyers - they are all the same.

The whole point of computing is to automate, solve problems and get rid of middlemen but we seem to have failed to solve our own problems.

The only positive with recruitment agents (at least in the UK), is that you can treat them like shit and they always come crawling back.

(we're working on the same problem, so thanks for bringing this up).I think it is a real and HUGE problem.

There are various startups who are trying to attack it from different angles. E.g. checkout Path.to, geekli.st, branchout.

We think the solution is make matching process more efficient, with software. Instead of people recruiters trying to make a match through "numbers game" we match with algorithm and user feedback to make it better.

Check it out at monday52.com and let me know what d'you think.

Discrimination is far too common. I'm deaf. As soon as they ask me for my number to call me and I tell them to use email instead... I never ever hear from them again. It's very rare for one to respond to emails unless it's a new "client".

Personally I've found recruiters people who would excel at being used car salesmen or attorneys, except for the morals part - they're lower.

Here in DC they'll get $20-30K per person they refer that gets hired. Meanwhile the worker-bee is left trying to get $60-$65K as a developer because the company overpays the recruiter. So you try to change companys hoping for a $2.50/hr raise, only to meet up with a recruiter who'll get $30K off you if you do.

F*ck them and everything about them.

What's wrong with the recruitment industry - recruiters.

Great post, but I'm not sure how a jobs board solves this problem.. where is the innovation? We're going to shaking up the creative recruiting industry here in Australia with Dragonfly. Our beta goes live next week, keen for feedback. http://dragonflylist.com