Note to recruiters | Hacker News Reader

Note to recruiters

github.com

63 pointsreinhardt66 comments

> When sending us a CV, please include the candidate's salary expectations and availability

Sorry, this is just arrogant. If a company is offering a job they should be open about how much it is worth to them and not try to haggle on developer salaries. Based on this alone I would struggle to work for this company.

You want someone to work with you? We all know you have a budget and a range. Put it down in writing from day zero.

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Edit: apparently they do publish the range. I still feel they should mention that they do so as a policy in that statement.

This is fairly standard practice, esp in the UK. Sometimes a candidate might be asking more than you are offering, but if the candidate is good enough you may increase your budget. It happens.

Yes this is true, I've been in that situation. Got an extra 20% increase.

In any negotiation, the party that first throws out a number gets to "frame" the value in their favor. I.e. you should take advantage of the opportunity.

That's more of a misconception propagated by half-educated HRs. It originates from old-time stock trader "sharks" where you only do single transactions between two parties that will never see each-other again or two equally equipped parties who have access to the same information. When you hire somebody for the long term on your own team, you are putting them in a position not to trust you and to feel stupid. You can't just later claim "Oh we didn't know you want more money". LOL, everybody wants more money at all times. It would be stupid not to take the more money as opposed to less.

> That's more of a misconception propagated by half-educated HRs.

No it isn't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anchoring

I know it works. See what I said. The problem is the technique completely ignores motivation and the value of good faith. It works for commodity trades or non-recurring business transactions. But if you pull this off against anybody for the long term, sooner or later it will come back to bite you. And it will be sooner. "Hey Joe, I saw this awesome trick on Suits yesterday, wanna try it on the new hire's salary discussion?" It's just not gonna work.

Where is the range?

Very confusing reading this on a github page. Took a moment to realize this was not github's own terms for dealing with recruiters. It is actually linked on github directly from http://vzaar.com/jobs - rather than being used to generate a page on their site. So why the github hosting? Are they accepting pull requests from enterprising recruiters who disagree with their terms?

I can imagine doing it the same way - it's a single, common document repository for the company; it's shared instead of stuck on someone's computer, with version control, and the same place as their other docs - so you learn and maintain only a single place/tool/useraccounts instead of having a separate system for everything.

Seems a bit wierd to link them to a new site though. I (In typical programmer over-engneering fashion) would be pulling the text from github via the API for display on my own domain.

I cannot believe that in our age, and in a field like ours where everyone has a computer and is internet savvy we are still using recruitment agencies to find jobs and employees.

Paying 15% of my salary for the privilege of being a self-proclaimed hub between employers and employees? Well, thank you very much, but I'll skip.

I too cannot believe it.

Often companies trying to recruit have jobs pages on their website that add extra barriers for a direct candidate - registration, cover letter, extra forms, contract roles not listed.

This is tantamount to encouraging candidates who were smart enough to find your company and be interested in it to use a recruiter - after all, you only need send them a CV.

Everyone has an incentive to lie. The recruiter, to place people who may be unsuitable. The job-seeker, to get a job that pays more than they're worth (and then get themselves poached). The employer, to cut out the middleman and underpay the employee. And most of the people the recruiter is dealing with (including themselves) are non-technical people who can't use any program but Word or Excel, and are out of their depth trying to understand the requirements or what a CV indicates.

You try and design a decentralized protocol to handle that amount of Byzantine failure, or a centralized protocol that doesn't pay the hub to lie, cheat, and flounder.

"Recruiting should be easy" is like "huh, why is search hard? I would just build an inverted index". Yeah, you and Altavista.

The recruiter who places unsuitable people is not going to get repeat business.

A recruiter develops a sustainable business by making placements that please both the job seeker and the employer.

Of course, this is true in general for business. Creating win-win agreements is a lot more profitable in the long run than ones where one party is the loser.

That's only true if your business is crudely comparable to the iterated prisoner's dilemma. But any given recruiter can expect to fall off the end of the mental space you've allocated to $BAD_RECRUITERS by the time they contact you again, if they ever do contact you again.

I'm sorry I don't see it the same way. The contract between job-seeker and employer is necessary and is already influenced by several external factors that are difficult to account for (such as lies, poaching, money).

I don't think that introducing an unnecessary third party with a whole new set of objectives and factors is going to simplify the process.

I'm not saying that search is easy, but every one of us is ABLE to search, aren't we? And people built search engines, or improved searching even if it's not that easy.

I would like to think that the same can be done for recruitment, I have an idea, and ideas are a dime a dozen, and I'm probably too lazy or not smart enough to do it myself, but it doesn't mean it can't be done.

Maybe in the future we'll see a new post on HN about a startup titled "How we revolutionized recruitment".

15% is low for the bay area. I believe it's more around 25%, sometimes higher. Some firms will negotiate.

You are not paying it. The company is.

I don't understand why anyone uses recruiting agencies, honestly. When I was starting out I went to the agencies and they couldn't help me because I didn't have "5+ years in .Net" (the year it was released) and I wasn't willing to lie because I didn't feel comfortable with it. THEN, once I was a little more established, I've had in-company recruiters coming to me with offerings pretty much daily. My LinkedIn profile specifically says to please not contact me with job offerings due to the fact that I'm happy where I am and I STILL get 6-8 offerings a week through that vector alone. I'm not famous, I don't market myself, I'm not an avid open sourcer... I'm simply competent and can show it.

Is this not standard?

I feel like this notice is out of touch with reality. First of all-- what hustling recruiter is going to take their time to read this notice, and remember that X company has those conditions?

I'm a software developer, and I agree that recruiters don't add nearly as much value as they claim to. But I did a college summer internship at a recruiting firm and I understand their angle.

Not all hiring managers are honest enough not to just contact a candidate directly. The anonymous resume is not meant to be a formal application, it's meant to be a teaser to enter into a recruiting agreement and it's a way of protecting themselves.

15% is pretty low for the industry. You're just encouraging even lower quality candidate-finding with that method.

You specified how to contact them (on a job-per-job basis) but recruiters can work at a higher level than that. Sometimes a candid call about their general talent needs helps a ton. Like: You're advertising for a mid-level employee, but you'd be okay with a senior-level.

As a hiring manager, part of your job is to recruiter-wrangle. A stubborn and neckbeary document like this does not make you inviting to work with.

The whole article reads that they're getting more recruiters than they want/need - so, it's a buyers market, and they believe that they can be picky about recruiters, and if some of the most hustling recruiters will think that they're not inviting to work with - excellent, mission accomplished.

But it's not a buyers market, right now. That would imply that there's a ton more technical talent than there are jobs. It's the reverse. It's a sellers market, whether your a candidate, represented by an agency, or whatever....(at least here in U.S., maybe the U.K. is different?)

There's a lack of technical talent, but there's an overabundance of eager middlemen/recruiters - and even if you desperately want talent, you really don't need (or want) all the world's recruiters shoveling shit towards your HR, it won't help you in getting more (or better) talent.

Recruiters aren't 'exclusive agents' like for, maybe, star athletes. Blacklisting a specific aggressive recruiter doesn't mean that you're blacklisting a part of your target employees - actually the good employees also want to avoid the same scummy recruiters, so it even helps.

I agree that it's the reverse if you look at candidates as the "seller". If you look at the recruiters as "sellers", then there are way too many useless recruiters out there. I think they look at the second.

> Not all hiring managers are honest enough not to just contact a candidate directly. The anonymous resume is not meant to be a formal application, it's meant to be a teaser to enter into a recruiting agreement and it's a way of protecting themselves.

I'd be curious to know what kind of candidate actually goes through an HR agent nowadays. If you visit the LinkedIn profiles of the agents, you'll frequently find a large list of companies to check out, and a name for each one.

Plus, depending on their commission, you're 10-30% more expensive than the direct candidate who asks for the same salary as you do.

Some people are fairly content in their jobs, but would like to just test the waters - they may contact a recruiter do their legwork.

And some companies like to go the contract-to-perm route, rather than do a direct hire; they can't/don't want to do the screening themselves or the hiring company is willing to pay a premium to let the recruiter assume the risk during the "probationary period" or. . .

Has anyone checked this company's website job section? They have a 'Ninja' position advertised as '(Note: this isn't a development ninja, coding ninja, design ninja. This is a role for an actual Ninja)' :)

Hostile takeovers would take on a whole new meaning if you could legitimately employ Corporate Ninjas.

…suddenly, two black-clothed men burst down from the drop ceiling, strangle the CFO, and disappear into The Cloud!

I was thinking more along the lines of..

"And therefore I want to announce a policy of investing back into the business to phht" New CEO stands up "My policy, lay everyone off and pay massive dividends and worry about the next quarter next quarter".

Honeypot? They say each job posting has its own email address. Email the ninja address, and either you comply with their requirements, or at least enter into the spirit of the joke, or they blacklist you. It's a good way to compile a list of recruiters who simply spam any job listing they can find.

"3 Ounces of gold per month" That's nearly 2.5k Pounds by current prices. That's a lot of money! :P so who here happens to know ninjutsu?

Would REALLY love to prank these guys by actually infiltrating their office and greeting them in the morning in the lotus position, wearing a ninja suit :P

Interestingly enough:

http://www.thumbtack.com/ut/sandy/handyman/ninja-for-hire

wish he was in UK :P would be fun

If you actually want to get good candidates from recruiters then 15% is low, recruiters are naturally going to send candidates to the companies that will pay them more first. At 15% you're basically going to get the dregs that other companies don't want.

It's the UK, 15% is standard finders fee there.

Not in London it isn't; I've seen what a lot of startups are paying and 15% is definitely low for permie devs.

Could you share how much these startups were paying recruiters?

20%-25% is the norm depending on skill set, generally if you go lower than that you need to throw something else into the offer if you want to get good candidates (for example exclusivity periods, super-fast turn-arounds, recommendations, etc.)

Everywhere I've worked for in London it has been 15% for devs. If you're paying more then you need to negotiate better. The rates may of course differ for bigger companies, where recruiters are more likely to place more candidates.

It's nothing to do with negotiation, if you offer recruiters a lower rate than other companies you're simply not going to be their top priority.

That said if you're offering recruiters 15% and you're getting candidates of the calibre you need then that's fine. But you should be aware that you're not even getting a look in at the best candidates that are on your recruiters books.

I've only worked for fairly large companies, that recruit 10s if not 100s of people each year. I guess they get an "economies of scale" discount, and we've always had good candidates. If a recruiter was not to offer a good candidate then there will be 10 more in their place that would send the CV of that same candidate. In a digital marketplace I put my CV out once and I have 20 recruiters looking for me. It's a tough marketplace, and to the candidate they don't care what the recruiters fee is.

Generally the value in recruiters is in passive candidates and not active ones so in those cases it's unlikely that the candidate is working with a significant number of recruiters.

Even in the case that a candidate works with multiple recruiters they'll generally all have "preferred clients" who get first look at candidates. And at 15% you're unlikely to be a preferred client for any recruiter except the bottom-feeders who spam every CV to every client.

And you don't want any bottom-feeder recruiter to have your CV because many companies have a policy of instantly rejecting any candidate that comes in through multiple recruiters because they don't want to get into a legal dispute over priority.

The recruitment market is a fairly complex one (I had a startup in the space so I've been neck deep in understanding how the different players interact).

(You're right that if you're recruiting for lots of roles you can get a discount, but it's a tricky path, you really need to exchange information with industry competitors to get a good idea if you're being passed over for good candidates. In some industries like banking this does happen albeit on a semi-informal basis)

Fair enough, and thanks for all the info. I've never directly recruited, but I've heard the 15% touted by my ex-employers. Certainly for headhunters 30% is more normal. To me as a employee though I don't care what the rate is, it's a negotiation between the recruiter and the employer.

The problem with posting a "list of rules for working with me" is that the only people who will read it are more diligent and thoughtful recruiters. It will only filter out people who a) bother to read it and b) have enough sense to read and consider your terms. The logical result is that your overall number of high quality recruiters might decrease, while the number of low quality recruiters will remain the same.

Not really. If they execute their rules faithfully and efficiently, the bad ones will be blacklisted and filtered out. That might be doable if they can program their VOIP phones and automatically block whoever violate their rules.

"Do not try poach our staff" hmm sounds a lovely place to work NOT

Gives a very entitled vibe if your to buzy/lazy to recruit your self you have to take whats on offer.

You may not have meant this way but that doesn't give a good vibe for those who might want to come and work for you.

Why do you feel that way? I didn't get that impression at all. It even explained how uncomfortable that makes the employee. An employee can easily search for a job on their own time.

Perception is everything.

And why should it make the employee uncomfortable its just business as unusual. Unless the employer has been known to retaliate in some way.

Here's the full quote: "Do not try poach our staff. The whole team/office can hear when there is a recruiter on the line trying to do this. This makes both the person you’re speaking to uncomfortable, as well as the team around him. Do not do this."

I guess this means that it is impossible for a developer to have a conversation on the phone that is not announced to and/or overheard by everyone in the office? I can see how that would make a developer uncomfortable, but it's not really a selling point for working at that company.

I also have to wonder - do managers at this company have private offices where they can have private phone conversations?

> your to buzy

Grammar... rage... rising...

I raise you years of putting up with snide remarks from non dyslexics.

Terms seem pretty fair. Any recruiter that can live by those, is being unreasonable.

The startup I joined, Hired, just started offering 1% per month instead of 15% upfront. It better ties our output (you having an employee that is successful) to our fee, which I think is a win for all.

Should make it a little easier on startups where there isn't cash flow and other tech companies that just don't do contingency fees.

Just went live today - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jjcolao/2013/10/30/hired-com-has...

Pretty cool! Any plans to expand into other cities such as Denver/Boulder?

The whole recruitment industry has been poisoned. So many liars and fraudsters that anyone left trying to do things right is surely overshadowed.

I've never actually met or dealt with a non-sleazy recruitment agent, so I don't actually know what they would actually do for me (either as a company or a candidate).

My note to recruiters is: go away and leave us alone. It's worth our time doing our own job advertising and candidate selection!

I've come across only a couple legitimately good recruiters in my career. I've realized that a good recruiter can be valuable to a company, but I'm not sure I'd work with one as a candidate.

I've been lucky to work in Australia, east & west coast USA and the UK. In that time I have witnessed the similarities and differences between hiring practices and to be honest I feel that a lot of what we experience is deserved. We as problem solvers have just not bothered with solving the one problem we as an industry ubiquitously hate the most: IT recruitment agents.

We continue to buy into an antiquated paradigm of job descriptions and CV's. In my opinion these artefacts hurt our industry more than help us. We are so much better than this (and I don't think that answer is portfolio work as not all programmers work with public facing products - which is a cohort i think HN can sometimes overrepresent).

I've been working on a startup to hopefully change the way all this works. Modelling how to address how different types of developers seek opportunities, whether we are in work or out and tying that into how different types of hiring manager (and their teams) meet us. If we do it right it won't be too long before the era of 15-30% 'placement fees' are back to being a much more manageable cost.

Sorry for ranting; I don't speak on HN much.

When sending us a CV, please include the candidate's salary expectations and availability

This kind of thing is only fair if the company specifies a salary range in advance. At least OP's company is practicing what they preach.

http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/2013-January/0...

I find a lot of this somewhat objectionable, but find one piece particularly objectionable:

> Do not send PHP developers for a Rails position.

Possibly this company is placing the engineer on-site at a client location, or something like that. But generally, I think a label like "PHP developer" and "Rails position" really silos the talent/job market and is not good for our industry.

I wrote a post about the different services popping up (aimed at designers mostly, some at devs too) trying to solve the recruiter problem. Might be useful to some

http://www.mobileinc.co.uk/2013/04/designers-making-moves-to...

Step 1: Stop using recruiters.

And start using ... ?

Step 3: PROFIT!!!

In my impression, the solution would be to create a marketplace website, in which employers and recruiters register/join, and which will automatically enforce the rules desired. From there, you can insist that all recruitment communication must go through the marketplace site. My experience is that marketplace software is tremendously efficient at social engineering ;-)

exactly

Why the fk is this on the front page of HN?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com