Ask HN: Hiring managers want apples, but recruiters are giving them oranges | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Hiring managers want apples, but recruiters are giving them oranges

9 pointskedargj4 comments

I run a startup that's trying to make hiring managers and recruiters collaborate better to making hiring more efficient. But it's proving to be harder than we initially thought.

Hiring managers generally say that recruiters have, at best, a low/ moderate understanding of the jobs they're recruiting for.

While most recruiters think that they have a very high understanding of the jobs they recruit for.

Do you also find this disparity in perception from your experiences?

With the common objective being to get an A player on the engineering/ product/ design team, what are some ways they can be more collaborative and innovative in their approach to find the apples they need?

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In my experience recruiters try to provide what the market, via hiring managers, wants, but the hiring manager, collectively, is a fickle entity.

"Ninja," "Rockstar," "A-player." You can't expect to interest those people in middling jobs from mediocre employers.

Fix hiring expectations and you will have gone a long way toward solving the hiring "problem."

Some initial thoughts:

A good recruiter (is that an oxymoron?) will not have much expertise in the field they are recruiting for. Their experience is in their field. However, a good recruiter should have an excellent relationship with the company they represent. Build on that.

Recruiters are akin to realtors. They make their money by putting potential buyers and sellers together and "working their magic" until there is an agreement. They work in qantity, not quality. If you really want to have an impact, fix that.

My experience between recruiters and hiring managers has been that hiring managers don't have a strong ability to convey to the recruiter what's really important and instead toss information at the recruiter that - while technically accurate - isn't beneficial long-term. For example, they may list things like...

- B.S. or 2-year equiv experience

- Be an expert in Python and Django

- Understand how to build REST APIs

- Willing to move to the Bay area

- Excellent communication skills

None of these things actually help the recruiter much. A recruiter will see this and have 4 keys to filter off of in a resume search (BS, Python, Django, REST). And if a prospective candidate is capable of spelling correctly in an email that will be an indication of "excellent communication skills". None of these things will be talked about after the first 10 minutes in an on-site interview. So the recruiter ends up being nothing more than a human-version of a LinkedIn search + initial email.

I like to think that hiring managers are smart, good people who would be much happier with a great Ruby programmer who's never even seen Python, but can identify problems, be pro-active in fixing them, is capable of learning new things and isn't afraid to dive into large, in-place systems, debug, etc. over the candidates that a recruiter would bring them for the above requirements list. But they don't know what list to give the recruiter. Fix this.

Hope this helps.

I am trying an open approach to the problem: http://siscia.github.io/open-hire/

Test candidate via open source; as engineer I would love that, as hiring manager I would get a lot of nice information about the candidate, information that I won't get with an code challenge or a white board.

If you are interested just send me an email

My address is all over the linked page :)

This is a huge problem indeed! The product I'm building is trying to solve this problem as well, by giving more tools for the recruiters to identify potentially great candidates.

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