

Ask HN: Why are you using recruiters for recruitment? - JazCE

I&#x27;m trying to understand why companies seem to use recruiters exclusively.  I&#x27;ve worked for small to medium sized global companies, that have always offered a way around using recruiters (careers page etc), or not used them at all.<p>Looking through LinkedIn and various other job sites, there appears to be little way to apply for some of the jobs there, but through a recruiter.  Do technical recruiters really offer value for money over a standard HR department filtering applications?
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fsk
One advantage of recruiters is that it allows "illegal filtering". You can
give the recruiter instructions "No candidates over 40 years old!", and then
it's almost impossible to prove that you did something illegal.

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vijucat
Aha!

BTW, are you the FSK of "FSK's Guide to Reality"? If so, please count me in as
a huge fan.

~~~
fsk
Yes. My blog moved to "realfreemarket.org" now. I've been falling behind on
posting lately, but getting back into it.

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jmalicki
A lot of the best people a company wants to hire are the people who are
happily employed, whose employer wants to keep them, and need to be talked
into applying - especially if a candidate might be in a different city and
would need to relocate, etc.

Even if someone is already applying for jobs, if your resume goes through a
recruiter, they can talk you into at least interviewing at a place you
otherwise might not, which gives the company a chance to sell themselves to
you (for instance, there are a lot of extremely talented and exciting teams
and projects in otherwise boring companies that you might not be aware of).

A recruiter can often do some level of assessing candidates before their
resume gets to an engineering manager, saving a LOT of time for someone who's
already very busy.

On some level, it's the idea of outsourcing things that someone else can do
better. If you find someone who can bring in great candidates for interviews
better than you can, why wouldn't you hire them, so you get better results and
can focus on what you do better?

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twunde
One reason not mentioned already is that HR does not have the technical
expertise to understand if someone is a good candidate. Also HR may be busy
with other responsibilities.

Finally, many positions are difficult to fill especially if the company isn't
well-known in technical circles. The easiest way to get candidates is to go
through recruiters

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mcv
> One reason not mentioned already is that HR does not have the technical
> expertise to understand if someone is a good candidate

This may be true, but it's often doubly true for recruiters. The best
recruiters I've spoken to admit that they know very little about the subject.

No matter what, the candidate always has to be judged by someone who does have
the required expertise, which means someone who's not HR or a recruiter.

I'm no fan of recruiters, but the good news here is that recruiters who have
the exclusive right to offer candidates to a company, tend to be the better
ones: not too expensive, not getting in the way too much, contracts without
non-compete clause (because they have this exclusive deal anyway), and they
really try to add some real value, because otherwise they might lose this
exclusivity deal.

The real problem are the recruiters who try to get in front of those exclusive
recruiters: they take the job descriptions from the exclusive recruiters and
spread those all over the place, including in our mailbox. They have a much
higher rate, often taking $10 off our hourly rate (for freelancers at least),
insist on non-compete clauses that limit your job opportunities later, and try
to make as much money with as little work as possible by simply shoveling
piles of CVs towards anyone who might be looking. And they get in the way of
communication between candidate and company, though that effect is
unintentional.

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atom-morgan
> The best recruiters I've spoken to admit that they know very little about
> the subject.

From my own experiences, this is very true. Some didn't know the difference
between JavaScript and Eclipse which made me very skeptical about their
ability to assess my skillset.

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hcho
The jobs on the job boards are the ones that cannot be filled by referrals,
career pages, etc...It's really a last resort.

If you post a job to a semi popular job board, you get a glut of CVs, most of
which are completely irrelevant. You hire a recruiter to protect you from
that.

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JazCE
I can understand the case for hiring a recruiter for a small business (what I
would consider less than 50 employees), where a HR department might not be a
permanent fixture. But when I see recruiters for Fortune 500/50 etc companies,
I do wonder what's going on there.

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hcho
It is not any less of an issue for bigger companies. They have proportionally
more positions open.

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xivzgrev
network. their whole value is they (and their contacts) know more talented
people than you (and your contacts). if they don't, then you're paying for a
glorified scheduler / Linkedin message sender.

