
Ask HN: Why are there still recruiters? - meri_dian
Not only this, but why has the recruiting profession exploded with the growth of the internet?<p>You would think that recruiting would have been made obsolete by a system where anyone can browse for jobs and apply from anywhere provided they have an internet connection.<p>Is there some underlying economic reasoning that explains why the middlemen persist?
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seem_2211
I am a recruiter (albeit for salespeople), and I think there are a few big
value points that we provide, when we do our jobs right.

1: Filtering. The downside of the internet making it easy to apply for jobs is
that the candidates that do apply, don't tend to be the candidates you want.
If you put a job up on Monster / Indeed etc, you're going to get a lot of
candidates who aren't remotely qualified for what you're looking for. There's
a lot of sifting that needs to happen. If you're a hiring manager you don't
want to spend 20 hours initially qualifying and disqualifying candidates, when
you can spend 2-3 hours talking to the most qualified people.

2: Talent attraction. A good recruiter finds out what someone wants in their
career and then matches them with an opportunity. This sort of discovery
doesn't happen that well on the internet.

3: Candidate pipeline management: A lot of companies have stupid complicated
interview processes and end up losing a lot of talent that way. If you aren't
Google, you can't put people through that sort of thing (and even Google lose
a lot of candidates like that).

By and large HN doesn't understand sales particularly well. Selling companies
things for $XX,XXX - $XXX,XXX is that you aren't doing the greasy used car /
insurance sell. A lot of enterprise is project management with multiple
stakeholders. Permanent recruiting is a similar situation.

~~~
gt_
Reading these comments has made me feel very stupid for treating recruiter
messages like spam. Better late than never! I have been off the job market for
almost a decade and things appear to have changed a lot.

Do you have any advice for working with recruiters, beyond basically doing the
opposite of what I have been doing?

~~~
vfulco
A bit oblique but don't lose sight of a really well done LI Profile. I admit
this is self-serving since I run a firm editing resumes, performing LI Profile
enhancement and interview coaching in Shanghai, China. I am not selling here.
However, I have had numerous clients with de-minimus LIPs and a bit stuck in
their careers. They hired me to spruce theirs to "all-star" status. After
turning on the "want to hear from interested parties setting", reaching out to
old colleagues for referrals and building a broader network, they started
hearing from HHers and HR who they would not have otherwise. And some found
new work within the month.

It does work if you pull all the levers. You can CERTAINLY do your own LIP if
you are willing to put the time in and have an acute eye for detail. It is an
excellent investment to get it presentable.

~~~
matt_the_bass
I think it is valuable to keep a decent profile _before_ you need/want to use
it. That is _if_ you hope to use it in the future.

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rpeden
Think of them as FaaS - filtering as a service.

If you post an ad for a software dev position, you're going to get dozens to
thousands of applications, and most of them won't even be close to what you're
looking for.

Recruiters aren't perfect, but many of them are quite good. And from the
perspective of a hiring manager, having a recruiter find you candidates is
much less time consuming than posting an ad and then trying to read through
and filter the applications that come in.

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kemiller2002
Development Manager here. I will tell you exactly why. It is a LOT of work to
find people. I'm not shy in the community either. I go to user groups and job
fairs. I have always been the "You find people by pounding the pavement" sort
of person, but it takes an immense amount of time. Between all my other
responsibilities, it just becomes too difficult to manage at times. I try to
get people without using them, because they are extremely expensive, but it
probably frees up another 10 hours a week of my time that I can spend on other
things that are as equally (or more) important.

This is on top of the fact that it is emotionally draining. Every person you
talk to as a manager that you try and get to work for you is a sales pitch. To
get people that you really want, you need to be engaged and energetic and
positive about the workplace, even if you feel down. On top of this, reading
resume after resume is actually draining. There are many, many that are poorly
written, and you have to slog through them, because 1. you want to see if that
person really is any good, 2. sometimes you don't have a large enough pool
that you can just immediately discount someone. Having someone clear out the
first round of all of that saves quite a bit energy.

~~~
JamesBarney
One thing I did at my company recently was ask to see all of our currently
employees resumes. One thing really stood.

Some of our best employees had resumes better used for wiping one's own bottom
than persuading hiring managers to call them.

This combined with all the wasted interviews on people with stellar resumes,
and I decided to do a short 10-15 min interview with everyone.

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scarface74
That's the problem. _Anyone_ can apply for a job from anywhere. I find
recruiters extremely valuable and I have about 10 companies that I work with
regularly.

For context, I keep a spreadsheet everytime I look for a job, so any stats
below are accurate.

1\. My resume never goes into a black hole. I always know the status of my
resume.

2\. I always know the salary they are willing to pay before I start the
process.

3\. Recruiters generally get me to the top of the pile because I have a a
track record of doing well in interviews with them.

4\. I know more about the interviewing process because they debrief candidates
after their interviews so they can warn me what to look out for.

5\. I know what technologies are a must have and what technologies are a nice
to have.

Recently, I've seen both sides of the coin from the same recruiter. I got my
current job from going through him. Now I work with him to hire developers.

So the stats from my last job search in 2016 using recruiters. All of this was
in a two week span.

jobs applied for: 16

recruiting agencies: 8

phone screens: 11

Hiring suspended/Req Closed: 4

offers: 2

in person interviews: 3

rejections: 1 (I took myself out of the running for all the others)

I would have never had that success rate randomly applying for jobs on a job
board.

I had 6 phone screens in one day all with different companies.

~~~
huevosabio
Would you mind sharing the contact of some of these recruiters? Or at least
pointers on how to find and approach competent recruiters?

Thanks!

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Also location (unless the good recruiters are national operations).

~~~
scarface74
I'm based in Atlanta. Check the websites to see other offices that the
recruiters have. Also, I'm listing companies. Recruiters come and go but all
of the recruiters at a company usual share jobs.

I've met recruiters from all of these companies either for lunch, at their
office or at least over video chat.

I also wouldn't trust national recruiters. A good recruiter forms
relationships with the company. The one that I went through for my current
position is always meeting the hiring managers for lunch, giving us swag etc.

[https://prestigestaffing.jobs.net/](https://prestigestaffing.jobs.net/)

[http://www.hays.com/index.htm](http://www.hays.com/index.htm)

[http://www.chaseprofessionals.com/](http://www.chaseprofessionals.com/)

[http://www.htrjobs.com/](http://www.htrjobs.com/)

[https://www.matrixres.com/](https://www.matrixres.com/)

[http://www.elev8staffing.com/](http://www.elev8staffing.com/)

[http://www.jdc-group.com/](http://www.jdc-group.com/)

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codegeek
Recruiters are there because they are useful. Yes, not all recruiters are scum
and low life bottom feeders that we love to hate.

To answer your question, systems are just systems. They can never replace the
human element which is required when dealing with people. Hiring is a friggin
tough job and I can totally see the value of "good" recruiters now that I have
been looking to hire people even though I am too small to hire recruiters yet.

Good recruiters can do the initial "human" filtering of connecting the hiring
team/manager with better candidates. Online Systems cannot yet do that. Most
online systems can be rigged with Bullshit Resumes and there is no way to tell
unless you talk to the candidate. Good recruiters can separate the wheat from
chaff before it gets to the hiring manager.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Not had any use for recruiters at all. Neither have my Engineering progeny.
Sure they contact us all the time, but have yet to produce anything of value.
I imagine they can; I see they continue to be paid. But as experienced
Engineers, we get only bottom-feeding job spam from them.

~~~
codegeek
I hear you. The issue is that those "Recruiters" who just spam you are not the
ones I am talking about. I actually have worked with recruiters who are well
connected in the industry and hire only for positions that are a good fit for
the candidate. I have found at least 3 jobs in my past using those "good"
recruiters. So I know that they work but are very hard to find. Needle in a
Haystack.

~~~
dat66
How do we find good recruiters? I've worked with a few recruiters but never
left with a good impression.

~~~
aeling
I had extremely positive experiences with Triplebyte, FWIW.

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bsvalley
I agree with you only for places like Silicon Valley. It can totally be
automated. You'd hear the exact same speech if you were to apply at 5
different companies at the same time. You would go through the exact same
process, you would be treated exactly like any other candidate, forget about
customized experience, your past projects are completely obsolete here it's
all about the pen, a whiteboard and a lot of repetitive immature college-like
questions. So, simply replace the name of the company, rinse and repeat.

On top of that, from my linkedin I see the same recruiters moving around from
one company to another every 1-2 years. You may find yourself talking to the
same recruiter from company A now that you're applying at company B.

I don't know outside of SV if recruiters sound like a broken record too...

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ChrisRR
Filtering is the main reason. I've experienced this twice especially. The
first is that I'm an embedded software developer, and quite often devs don't
know what that is so they'll just send blindly off an application without
reading the description.

The second was when we were looking for an EE graduate and specified that
applicants must have an engineering degree. We got hundreds of graduates with
every kind of degree under the sun who were just blanket sending their CV to
every listing with the word "graduate" in the title. With that many CVs we had
no choice but to use a recruiter to sort through everything.

~~~
sharemywin
I was in EE switched to CSE. You blow up one fake city on a test and everyone
gets all huffy....Now I just say ahh they'll fix it in QA...the prototype
works....lol...not really but... it makes a good stereotype.

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bobbby
Most companies understandably don't like publishing a salary so the recruiter
acts a filter on both sides.

I'm a hiring manager and having a firehose of applicants would fill me with
dread. My company has tried various "hacker" recruitment sites and they are
all terrible - in terms of candidates and the supposed tests they use to rank
applicants.

Recruiters are expensive but so is my time, they are very much a necessary
evil for the foreseeable future.

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samk3nny
tboyd47 hit the nail on the head - filtering is the value add. Recruiters are
expensive though. And as codegeek says, hiring is tough. I work at untapt and
our AI ensures that we send hiring managers quality not quantity -
dramatically streamlining the process for a fraction of the cost of a
traditional recruiter. For niche roles (specific skill sets, senior positions)
I envision recruiters will continue to play an important role. But for the
masses, platforms like ours will become more and more prevalent.

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tboyd47
The internet makes recruiters more valuable because it allows more people to
apply. Filtering is the value add.

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mankash666
Recruiters offer a lot of value outside tech hiring. For instance my wife is a
doctor, and both employers & employees in medicine aren't as active on
LinkedIn as techies are. Recruiters do the hard job of matching the two

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dat66
To answer your last question - they persist because they can make money.

I understand that recruiters who work directly for the hiring manager/firm
provide value by filtering candidates. Unfortunately, jobs often get posted to
multiple job sites by multiple secondary recruiters, exacerbating the need for
filtering. Candidates can waste time dealing with multiple recruiters for what
they think are different positions, only to learn that they are the same spot.

The industry could streamline this problem - and make the experience better
for candidates - by eliminating paid referrals from secondary recruiters.

~~~
codegeek
As a candidate, the first question to ask a recruiter is: Are you a direct
vendor/working directly with the client ? If the answer is No, I don't deal
with them anymore. I only want direct vendors i.e. no extra layers.

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aprdm
I think you're simplifying too much the role of a recruiter.

I've had some very good coffees with recruiters that gave me a lot of insight
in the tech industry, some roles that were a match, weren't. They asked a lot
of questions about myself and from there could find roles that would match
where I wanted to be.

Recently I sent a CV to a company for an open role I saw because I wanted to
work in that company. The internal recruiters of this company saw that my CV
was a better match for a role that I hadn't seen announced. They sent it to
another department / followed through.

Recruiters that only match buzzwords provide very low value but good
recruiters can be career changing.

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bcheung
For me, as a tech worker, I've found recruiters to be extremely convenient.
They have found me opportunities I have not otherwise come across and have
helped me negotiate for the highest pay. They also can get your foot in the
door more so than individually. Whenever I contact a company directly it
usually never goes anywhere. Recruiters keep me posted on what the status is
throughout the process instead of me wondering if the company even read my
email.

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gesman
Middleman (or any other occupation) exists while it solves the problem.

In recruiting - it is cleaning and filtering effort that saves lots of time
and effort for both parties.

Having said that - there are lots of recruiters acting like spammers.

Most of them are getting zero replies from otherwise perfect potential
candidates is because they are missing the most important point when crafting
their request.

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JSeymourATL
> Is there some underlying economic reasoning that explains why the middlemen
> persist?

Laws of Supply & Demand intersect with basic human needs and wants. Good
Talent is in short supply, always.

Good Talent craves purpose, significance, meaning, growth, certainty, variety,
contribution, love, and respect.

Until Skynet can start engineering that match between employers and Good
Talent -- recruiters are safe.

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RantyDave
I have no problem with it. Someone wants to be my marketing department? Bring
it on.

