

Black Hat Recruiter Tactics - nathanh
http://blog.nahurst.com/black-hat-recruiter-tactics

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stcredzero

         - Posting misleading job descriptions
         - Posting bait-and-switch job descriptions
    

Tactics once used to recruit for porn. Still used to recruit for prostitution.

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jrockway
Citation needed.

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stcredzero
I got that from the last one I hired. (The last one I'm ever going to. I've
reformed for my SO.)

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rjurney
Pimp or John?

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stcredzero
The probable answer is obvious if you think about it for a moment.

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tptacek
Has anyone here ever had a _good_ experience hiring with a recruiter? This is
a recurring topic where I am, and it always seems like a debacle waiting to
happen.

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jrockway
I have been on both sides of a recruiter, and don't really see the point. On
the employee side, a recruiter placed me at a job that I already knew about
and would have applied for myself if it were allowed. All this achieved was
costing my employer a ton of money -- I probably cost them about 2x as much as
I would have if they didn't have to pay the recruiting agency. Everyone seems
happy, and it's not _my_ money, so whatever.

On the other side, the thing about recruiters editing your resume is true. We
have interviewed candidates that claim they have some buzzword we are looking
for, like TDD, but can't write a simple unit test on the whiteboard. It's nice
that you know what TDD is, but not so nice that you don't actually know it. No
hire.

(FWIW, my resume was similarly embellished. I intentionally omit things I know
so that nobody expects me to do them; TDD is one of those. Lying is in the
recruiter's best interest, since they get a lot of money if their candidate is
hired. If the candidate's reputation is damaged by their lies, well, oh well,
they can just get another candidate.)

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vaksel
recruiters are a filter, if you are a company hiring, you'll get hundreds of
resumes most of which don't even apply to the position being listed. By using
a recruiter, you only have to deal with the cream of the crop.

Sure some people can bypass a recruiter with bullshit, but you'd still have to
deal with those if you were doing the recruiting yourself.

There are also some benefits as an employee. If you have a good recruiter, you
can tell them exactly what you are looking for, and they'll be on the lookout
for those types of jobs for you.

But as it is with all things, for every good recruiter, there are thousands of
shitty ones, who'll send to companies anyone who is stupid enough to give them
a resume, and who'll tell you to apply to jobs that aren't even on the same
level as what you can actually do.

Every good recruiter experience that people have told me about...involved them
finding the recruiter through word of mouth...I don't remember a single
positive recruiter story that involved being cold called out of the blue.

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sandofsky
I suspect recruiters are comforting when companies don't know enough about the
technology to judge qualification. Of course, rarely do recruiters know much
more.

Does anyone know if there are services for performing due diligence on
candidates? I know at a CTO level they exist, but what about hiring that one
guy who knows iPhone development when the rest of your shop is Java?

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jeff18
_Nothing's worse than getting to an interview and finding out that you know
COBOL from the hiring manager reading it off your resume._

The rest of the tips seem to be really sleazy, but are pretty surreptitious.
However, wouldn't this be extremely obvious to both parties and be so
blatantly unethical to end the recruiter's career?

