Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

On the competence question I find my own experience frustrating. I can be very competent in certain areas, and barely functional in others.

I've also thought about taking on technical recruiting because it's done so poorly (at least in Sydney, the author is in Melbourne). I think one of the limitations is that it's an industry issue rather than specifically a recruiter issue. I remember patio11 had a summary of his StockFighter (StarFighter?) platform in an old podcast and the issue he ran against was that he'd present pre-vetted, high quality candidates, who would then be put on the normal HR-driven hiring track.

Edit: Best summary I could find was from his co-founder here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37988758

I've managed to recruit in Perth, which is probably as cursed as it gets. The two things are:

1. I don't bother recruiting on the public market. They're genuinely too incompetent, and you'd have the issue you raised over and over. We sent exactly one candidate to a "normal" company and it was a total waste of time

2. For the remaining companies, I basically consult for free to help them smooth out their process. Places that are already very good but candidate-starved don't need this, but most of them could use a small hand. This is maybe non-trivial to replicate but I have a reasonable psychology background and that has given me some aptitude for feeling out cultural fits. Recruiters have set their rates so absurdly high for no service that I can do this, AND run two hour tech interviews personally with candidates AND undercut competitors and still hit that $1K per hour rate. It's just nuts

Interesting! I suppose my thought is that once you scale up to running a team of recruiters you end up incentivising behaviours like 'build a list of CVs', 'pattern-match on keywords' and other pointless nonsense. I have run in to a couple of decent recruiters and their behaviour was much closer to 'have a coffee and chat'. I hope you'll talk about your experience because I'm keen to hear about it.

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