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Comment by BitMastro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

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.

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?

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.

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