Ask HN: Fixing the recruiter industry | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Fixing the recruiter industry

18 pointsd4ft43 comments

I hate recruiters, a lot. Inane emails, phone calls, and messages on your social network of choice seem to be common modus operandi.

Has anyone considered this problem/Are there solutions out there? If so, are they decent? And if not, does anyone have any suggestions? I'm not very familiar with the industry, but HATE HATE HATE when they bug me. There must be a better way. I was thinking about some sort of bidding system based solution, but haven't had a chance to really flesh out the idea. Would anyone be interested in working on it?

About me: Completed CS undergrad at a top 10 school, about to complete a JD/Business School combined degree at another top 10 US university. Some startup experience. Comfortable with Java, Ruby, and Scala.

Thanks for reading. If you are interested feel free to contact me at ihaterecruiters [at] gmail

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Funny thing about recruiters, is going through a recruiter I've generally wound up with higher pay than doing things the other way around. They'll be their typical aggressive recruiter selves, sell me, bid me up and insist that I can't possibly work for less than X without making me seem like the prima donna.. I still get to be the mild mannered guy who's primarily motivated by the quality of work. They've also gotten me into places faster.. last couple of times I was looking for work, the companies with a recruiter had me into final interview stage before other companies (some of whom I was actually interested enough in to seek out and contact) even got back to me from my first "here's my resume" email.

So.. they actually do work. You'd think that if the company wasn't forking over 25% of my salary to a recruiter, they'd be more enthusiastic to speak to me and would be willing to pay me more, but it hasn't worked out that way in practice. YMMV.

That sounds more like having an agent (like pro athletes) then being recruited. That model might work.

Recruiters and agents are very much alike, except there's no exclusivity -- and since employees don't get contracts, their payment schedule is different. (Typically a percentage of the employee's annual salary for FTEs, or X dollars an hour for contract work.)

I disagree. Outside of similar incentive alignments (agents and recruiters get paid more if you get paid more), the two are worlds apart. An agent is often much more than just someone who shops around a resume looking for the best deal. Agents are often responsible for everything from transportation to financial management to legal advice. These are two VERY different jobs imo, especially when considering, as stated above, that recruiters almost never act as your advocate after the initial interview process has begun and may even give misleading information to try to close a deal.

Except most candidates don't have the (perceived) star power they need for this model to work.

E.g., if the Yankees thought all first basemen were pretty much the same, there's no way Scott Boras could have convinced them to spend so much on Mark Teixeira last winter.

No recruiter is going to do the work of an agent (which requires a totally different focus & commitment to the candidate) for Joe Average programmer.

You don't need "star power" to have an agent, just marketable skills. Almost all pro athletes (with a few notable exceptions like Daunte Culpepper) have agents, from Texeira's backup all the way down to the guys in double and single-A. (Okay, not sure about how far down it goes.)

And your point about recruiters not doing the work of agents is correct. Recruiters recruit, ergo they work for the hiring company.

Agents represent the talent. In this case, I'm guessing an agent would pound the pavement looking for programming jobs while the programmer sits at home waiting for a phone call.

At this point of the analogy, it's starting to sound a little ridiculous, but who know.

It wouldn't be ridiculous if the programmer is working full time with constant work coming in while the agent is out pounding the pavement. There's no reason the two tasks of "finding work" and "doing work" need to be done serially.

And what you've just described is what consulting firms do. The sales people are out pounding the pavement hitting up prospective customers to bring in work for the programmers (or whatever positions the sales people have claimed they have bodies for). This obviously isn't an ideal situation, for the customer or the programmer, but it seems to be reasonably successful, at least with large consulting firms. It could work better with a customer centric salesman and a small team of developers -- I'm sure there's small 4 or 5 people firms that work like this, with a "sales agent" in house.

I agree that recruiters do actually find good placements. Like I said, I don't want to cut recruiting out of the picture, but instead, make it more palatable. I think you are arguing the ends justify the means, and I think that's fine, but I really believe there must be a better way to achieve the same ends with less annoying means.

Definitely. I see your point, and I'm not even arguing so much as marvelling, you'd think saving 25% of my annual salary would be motivation for companies to be a little more flexible in the negotiation.. but no, turns out to be a total wash and having the 'agent' helps me.

Folks at Hacker Dojo have been discussing holding a reverse job fair, where hackers who are in the job market come in with their craft (live demo, code samples and whatnot) and interact with other engineers or hiring managers who can recognize their mad skills and refer internally, decide who to bring in for further interview or hire someone on the spot!

It's not scalable, but as I see more and more co-working spaces sprout up in many places, this could be ONE way of solving the hiring/recruiting problem for hackers.

like hackers-got-talent or x-codemonkeys

Bidding system? Hmm...

Like if I put my resume on a site, someone has to bid to contact me? Perhaps as an applicant, you can set a base price and a frequency of contact. Maybe you only allow one recruiter to contact you per week or day. If you want to be that recruiter, it'll cost you minimum $1. If more than one recruiter wants to contact you, they bid up the price.

Applicants could regulate the minimum price based on their current status. If they are employed happily, the price is $1000. If they are unemployed, perhaps it's zero with unlimited contacts until they get flooded and then the price goes up.

The economics of such an idea is interesting. It assumes a shift in power from the employer to the applicant. The best of the best will rise to the top and a natural ranking of applicants will evolve based on the bid. Great applicants could sustain themselves on employer interest for a while until recruiters give up trying to gain their interest.

Could something like this work? I suppose it depends on supply and demand of both applicants and jobs.

fnid-

I think you hit the nail on the head. As far as profitability for the site itself, taking some cut of the actual payments seems reasonable, no?

People would inflate their minimum bid prices to increase their status, and so everyone would be expensive to contact. So no one would use the site for recruiting.

What if there was no status per se or what if status was based on "tests" of some sort and independent of pricing?

Elance does the testing method, but it isn't too successful.

The ranking wouldn't be based on the minimum bid, it'd be based on the amount recruiters actually pay. If the min bid is $1000 but no recruiters pay it, then the applicant would be at the bottom of the rankings.

I think that programmers often encounter a culture clash with recruiters. A recruiter has a client (and it's not you) and has to fill a large number of positions. I have had some awful experiences. Once, the recruiter sent a modified version of my CV to a company and exaggerated my experience in certain areas. I guess she thought she was doing me a favour, but I ended up looking like an idiot in the interview.

Guys & Dolls,

Recruitment is sales. 95% of your time is wasted calling clients and candidates for the one time you get a match. This is unless you manage a number of clients where you are fed requirements, and then it's just the candidate part.

There is no way to escape it; the best thing to do is to shield yourself from the continuous onslaught.

• Insist all communication is sent to a "jobs" email and have GMail filter it or poll it • Delete your phone number off CV's when sending them in or posting on the web. • Make your most recent employer anonymous • You can also use an initial instead of your first name incase they have your details already, it may fool them ;-) • Make sure your CV is well written and updated • Insist on seeing a job spec before giving them your number, if you’re the perfect match they will take the time. • Do tell them your current status and salary

DO NOT tell them info on current company, manager until you trust them.

Remember they want to close candidates, clients, deals – it’s a sales job

Every call is a sales call; they will try to strip you for information, about colleagues, workplace, inside info, references for managers’ names

We would often misplace the truth or withhold information to close deals; this is common practice in the UK/Europe. The most common one telling people we had sent their CV to an employer when we hadn’t just to ensure they wouldn’t let other recruiters send it to the client and increasing the likeliness that our current candidates had a better chance.

I think Recruiters have a place in society, some are upstanding and honest, other aren’t. As I mentioned, it’s about distancing yourself from them until they have the ideal job for you.

P.S. Sorry for the ramblings, trying to watch TV and take care of my 4 day old daughter.

I’m a mature student studying CS but worked as an IT recruiter before deciding I wanted to turn to the other side.

"Do tell them your current status and salary"

I could not disagree more.

If you're switching jobs, one of your goals should be to get the most salary you can (many reasons for this, best described in detail by Jeffrey J. Fox in his "How to Become CEO" book).

Telling the recruiter (and thus the hiring firm) how much you make now is a mistake b/c they'll use that to make an incremental increase over your current salary (say 10 to 20 percent), whereas they might have been willing to offer you much more.

I think a service product is a much better option. What is recruiting after all? It's a) contacts and b) a filter.

Programmers deal with recruiters because they have the "exclusives" and companies deal with recruiters because they can filter out the first interview stage.

So create a service, that will let companies find out the quality of the programmer, without shelling out $20,000.

I imagine it as a "testing company" you create a few thousand tests, programmers take them, get their rank, then they add it to their resumes.

Employers see the ranking link, go to your site, find out about your testing methods, see aha, 90% percentile on this tough test, good guy to interview.

Eventually offer programmers the ability to list their rates + languages, and let employers contact them for a small fee. i.e. Search for all programmers under $50/hr in California with Java rank of 90th percentile.

Make one of the questionnaires the usual questions asked in the first interview, you know the script all recruiters follow to weed out people.

Too easy to cheat the test. Next.

fine, make it a real test, where you have to take a test in front of a representative

Instead of tests or more likely as an augment to tests. I could see something more project Euler like only more language and skill level focused. You would have to invest in anti-plagiarism tools as well.

www.brainbench.com

You're kidding, right? We used to laugh when people put BrainBench test results on their resumes.

Or, you could ask for his/her university transcripts and get a fairly good summary of a whole lot of tests. :-)

Also, this may not be a popular comment on this board (which I have been lurking for quite a while), but there is more to a good hire than someone who can get a high mark on a tough programming test. Granted, it is a good place to start, but at the end of the day, you have to be able to work with the person and they have to be able to work with the rest of the team.

I have hired many programmers over the life of our startup, and about 5 months ago I fired the guy who would have easily got the highest mark on such a test. I should have done it years ago

I used to have a canned email that I used to reply to recruiters.

It basically explained (in better words) that I needed the name, website and physical address of the company, because I was very picky about culture and location, and it would save us both a ton of time.

It also said I had no incentive to screw them and go directly to the company, if I was indeed interested.

Worked 50% of the time. Some people wanted me to call them first before telling me the info (I wonder why), and others plain told me "that's not how this works, I've been burned before", but even when it did work, it seems like it caused said recruiter to not send any more leads my way.

So I went back to playing their game. Which I hate as much as you do.

I ignore all recruiters, except two who know:

1. My requirements for a potential employer (location, size, culture, etc) 2. My preferred method of communication (email) 3. When I might be actively looking.

I think there are good recruiters out there who are willing to work with both employers and job seekers. They are, however, few and far between.

Dude, that's a pretty sweet problem to have. "Shoot!! all these people keep calling me about how awesome I am and how many job offers they can get me. The nerve..."

Not the kind of problem to be upset about IMHO. If I were you I'd send them all Christmas cards and be glad that you're so sought after.

:-) cheers!

It'd be sweet if they actually got you an appropriate job - if all they do is mangle and falsify your resume and send you on inappropriate interviews, then they're a bother.

Recruiters exists because of two problems:

1) Programmers can't find all the jobs that are available 2) Companies aren't generally able to evaluate programmers

But #1 is less and less true, and the recruitment industry doesn't do a good job of addressing #2.

Hey fellas/ladies - one of my developer cronies sent this post my way and I'd LOVE to chat with some of y'all. I AM a recruiter and have been for the last 12+ years..in addition I share the exact sentiment that you have written on the pages below. Any of you wanna chat off line? If so, I'd welcome it and would enjoy your contribution on my blog TheAntiPimp.com. Might also help to check out this post I did about the things I hate about recruiters...rock on.

http://theantipimp.com/?p=1082

Scott scott@theantipimp.com

Awaiting the.. "and I have some great opportunities that you might be interested in". Case and point imo.

blah blah blah. If you are waiting on that, you'll be waiting a long time. Dude..I've done this for too long to even attempt to come to a forum like this and do sh*t like that. I'm just offering an honest view from the other side of the table. Honestly..I don't like recruiters either. Which is why I started my site. Have a great weekend.

Be original. If you want something unconventional, you'll have to make it happen. Here is some inspiration: http://www.socialmediajobs.com.au/blog/wp-content/uploads/20...

I don't get it. I'm not looking for a job here, just voicing my distress at the recruiting industry.

Your last two paragraphs don't look so innocent to me.

Yes but if you read carefully, instead of just "look"ing, you would see that 1) I am a student with a semester left and therefore don't need a job and 2) I am soliciting offers to work with someone on solving this problem i.e. creating a solution. I am NOT asking for hints on job searches or tips on how to create a "creative" resume. Sorry if this sounds condescending, but it is frustrating when people don't read the post and respond to some other issue altogether.

You're in the right. My apologies.

I had a women ask me once if I was interested in a position writing C Pound.

don't have much to add here except: yeah, who hasn't had bad recruiter experiences? i wish i was l33t enough that i could ignore them altogether, but i'm not.

i have had a few good experiences, but even then, i've never met even one who had a good grasp of the technical skills that they are trying to sell to potential employers. that's always struck me as kind of odd.

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