Ask HN: Tech recruiters what are your biggest pain points? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Tech recruiters what are your biggest pain points?

10 pointsashishb12 comments

A shout out to all the tech/engineering recruiters, what are your biggest pain points?

Former agency recruiter, currently an in-house recruiter for a large dev team.

The biggest pain point by a very long way is attracting what we call 'passive candidates'. Passive candidates are skilled and experienced people who would be a great fit for your company but are not actively looking for work. There's no silver bullet when it comes to passive candidates.

Solve the issue of attracting passive candidates and you'll become very wealthy, very quickly.

How much are you willing to pay per passive candidate for the opportunity to contact them?

This is from a UK Tech Recruiters point of view working from an agency perspective on Developer and Infrastructure recruitment.

We recruiters sometimes get a bad rep for not looking at CVs without certain words or phrases on them, and candidates can get frustrated when because they don't have a very specific skill-set then they're overlooked, even if they know (and WE know) that they'd be able to pick it up in a very short time period. Its not always our fault - with some of the companies I've personally worked with unless they have everything in their CV listed on a job specification sent from a lead developer then they won't be passed through to them to review the CV, even if they have a lot of other skills that we think could mesh in well with the development team and company culture.

Yes, there are recruiters that don't know what they're talking about but not all of us are like that! One of the downsides to what we do is that a small minority of recruiters manage to get most of us a bad name, which is a shame.

I've worked for a CV/resume parsing company and had to talk to a lot of UK consultants (they would have stabbed me in the face if I called them the r-word). The vast majority are simply looking to fill positions as quickly and easily as possible, and don't give a jot about the candidates.

A couple of times, when I've been on the job markets, I've gotten calls and been told to change my CV to better match the massively-underpaid position they're looking to fill.

Completely agree that there are people out there that are just in it for the sales side of things and to fill roles as quick as possible. It can be hard to find ones that are good and take pride in what they do, and it is a problem for the industry.

...unless they have everything in their CV listed on a job specification sent from a lead developer then they won't be passed through to them to review the CV...

Your job as a recruiter is to overcome that pretty basic obstacle. If the person you're dealing with is a HR paper pusher with no clue about tech then it's your job to convince them that the CV is something the lead dev would be interested in.

One of the downsides to what we do is that a small minority of recruiters manage to get most of us a bad name, which is a shame.

I'd argue it's the majority that give the industry a bad name and a minority that are doing things right.

Bad recruiters are a stereotypical joke for good reason, but ones who pay attention are gold. Keep it up :-)

So, you believe most recruiters actually think they really understand and do not just do keyowrd matching on resumes?

Serious question: I have been a professional developer for about 14 years now, and have intimate knowledge of a ton of technologies. The number of keywords I'd have to put on my resume if I had to list them all would run longer than a page. What is the most professional way to format a resume of this sort? Should I fill the last page with the names of technologies and word to represent my experience with it?

What type of technical recruiters are you trying to reach?

I've had decent luck with recruiters, and landed my last two jobs through recruiters, both first party - first party recruiters work directly with a company, who have a nice incentive to maintain good relations with the company and sometimes get a retainer rather than being fully commission based. 3rd party recruiters(overwhelming majority) are basically just getting a bounty if they manage to place someone, and have no direct relationship with the company - Think mechanical turk for job placements.

If you're interested in the latter kind:

- resume parsing and candidate sourcing - skill matching. I cannot overstate the lack of technical knowledge of the median recruiter(based off of the experiences of my friend/longtime roommate who just left working as one), most people are doing straight word mafching between the job listing and the resume, no knowledge of hierarchies (Angular includes javascript, is a front end framework similar to backbone and ember) - to pick an example at random, my friends company routinely passed over dozens of candidates for not listing JSON experience, or not highlighting it prominently enough, regardless of other qualifications given.

I'd be happy to put you in touch with him, it's an industry that's nonstop pain points and inefficiencies, email is in profile.

What if there is a solution which can teach recruiters about some tech trends (like node.js is Javascript used for backend application development)?

I do not remember that I've ever found a competent recruiter. They are always mixing technical terms during email and phone calls hoping that some of them could catch your attention.

I feel that in tech/engineering, we need more "talent agents" that can follow the candidates during all the process for getting great jobs. They would/should care more for getting them the dream job, then getting a commission from a company.

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