
Never Trust what Recruiters Say - smartial_arts
http://blog.nimblegecko.com/never-trust-what-recruiters-say/
======
nagrom
While it is down, the summary of the post is something like:

Don't give recruiters access to your reference contacts before an interview.
If they are looking for them, there's a high chance that they are simply
looking to use them for leads; in fact the job advert that you looked at is
most likely a fake. If asked for reference information, politely tell the
recruiter that it would be best to follow up on references after the interview
process; if you feel awkward about being pressured, explain that you don't
want to exhaust your contacts until there's a high probability that you take
the job.

~~~
heynow
you can just put "cache:" in front of the web address.

~~~
zwass
How have I gone so long without knowing this? It's great to have an easy way
to see the original content.

------
hakaaaaak
Site is down, but as for the title from the OP, I agree to some extent.

I think recruiters are a decent way to find some of the jobs that aren't found
via indeed.com alerts, fog creek's careers 2.0, top*jobs.com, dice (nasty),
execunet, HN, etc.

But on the bad side:

Once you are on the list, they will look up your work number and call you if
you just put your employer's name on your resume. The only way to get them not
to do this is to remove employer names from linkedin.com experience, which you
shouldn't do, so it is inevitable. They will not pay attention to requests not
to do this.

They equate pay rate without benefits for short-term contract to salary rate
full-time with lots of benefits. If you decide to give them pay rate
expectation (not always a good idea), give them both your salary expectation
and a much higher contract rate that assumes a 3-6 month contract- divide your
annual salary expectation by 1000 and that is your per hour, in general.

Why they are what they are:

Average larger sized recruiting companies take almost anymore to get on the
phones, and those companies burn them up and move to the next, so it isn't the
actual person's fault in many cases. They are given visions of dollar signs
when hired and see us like an untapped oil field, and they don't know what
they are doing. They want to make the "sale", so they are going to fudge it,
and when they later feel used and like the scum of the earth because they got
stepped on by us, they quit and someone takes their place. The ones that can
justify running through us like we are numbers to be manipulated stay, so it
is natural evolution that is not in our best interest.

Advice for those really serious about using a recruiter:

Don't treat them like scum and spend the time with them, even though it might
take 10x or more of your time. Let them take you to free lunches and
breakfasts. Don't lie to them, but don't tell them everything. They will
remember and appreciate the love and will at least maybe write good notes on
you and keep you on the hot list so when something comes up, they might call
you first.

What I do:

I am an introvert, so I push all conversation to email that I can and don't
take calls, ever, until there is an opp I'm interested in that I know is in
the right salary range, right location (not just city), and right job
description. They still email positions that don't match all the time, but I
don't like the idea of lunches, etc. with someone I don't know about positions
I might never want.

~~~
Nursie
I really don't get the divide-salary-by-1000 thing. Is this a US rule?

In the UK I'm taking home enough from a contractor rate that I would need to
nearly double the salary part of calculation to have the same income.

~~~
swalberg
There are roughly 2000 working hours in a year, so annual_salary / 2000 =
hourly rate of a salaried employee. And as a rule of thumb, contractors need
to make about twice the hourly rate of a salaried employee in order to come
out even. So annual_salary / 1000 is roughly the equivalent contractor rate.

~~~
Timothee
I just wanted to add that the difference of 1000 hours come from time spent
looking for and dealing with contracts and other overhead like that (as well
as downtime), which you don't have as a salaried employee.

~~~
Nursie
I'm pretty sure that overhead and downtime don't count for half the working
year!!

At least not for any contractor I know.

~~~
moron4hire
Depends on your market and industry.

------
robdoherty2
Another trick that recruiters use:

Ask you where else you have interviewed, and even get names/contact info from
you if they can. Then they call that place and tell them that they have a
stack of resumes of way more qualified people than you.

You may never hear back from that place for two reasons: 1) they think you
sold them out to a recruiter, 2) they believe the recruiter and start
interviewing new people.

Bottom line is that recruiters will sell you out any chance that they can get.
As much as they may seem like your friend, you are not their client, you are
the product they are selling.

~~~
smartial_arts
Or they think that you were a recruiter who applied for the job with a fake CV
(yes, that happens as well) and ignore you from now on.

------
fecak
Speaking in absolutes about recruiters is never useful (see what I did
there?). Recruiter here with 15 years in the biz, and I've written lots on my
jobtipsforgeeks.com blog about the perils of working with recruiters. I'm also
working on a book with a similar theme that will expose some of what
recruiters do, in order to help tech pros to at least be aware of things
recruiting concepts such as 'candidate control' or why recruiters ask certain
questions certain ways, or the differences between retained and pure
contingency recruiters. Knowing a recruiter's motivations is key, and there is
not enough transparency in the market today.

I personally don't use references as a source of candidates and only call a
reference when clients request them (most of my candidate pool comes through
past candidates that I trust).

Regarding compensation, what the comments here seem to be forgetting is that
you as a candidate have every right to turn down a job, and in almost all
cases the recruiter makes more money by getting you a higher salary. In
contract situations this is usually reversed, where every dollar they can
negotiate you down is another in the recruiter's pocket.

Some posting of fake job ads certainly happens by lower end firms, just as
hiring companies keep ads up all the time to grow their network of candidates.
It's somewhat dishonest, but not sure how it hurts job seekers (not advocating
it, but seems a somewhat victimless crime).

Recruiters are trained to ask everyone for referrals, and early in my career I
probably did. Now I realize that if you treat candidates well, with honesty
and respect, and if you provide candidates with something for free, they will
refer their friends (with the friend's permission) without me aging to ask.
The free service I choose is information - my blog, a monthly newsletter of
tech articles, discounts to conferences and events that I negotiate for my
network, inside information on companies, etc.

Many recruiters are simply not good at their job, but every industry has some
of that. Find a good one that doesn't ask you for things, and that actually
provides you with good information and service, and avoid the bad ones. It
really is that simple. Use recruiters that your friends recommend and set
parameters and boundaries (don't send my résumé anywhere without permission,
only contact me in this way, don't call references until x, etc). If they
don't respect your wishes, drop them and don't recommend them to your friends.

~~~
missedpoint
> It's somewhat dishonest, but not sure how it hurts job seekers (not
> advocating it, but seems a somewhat victimless crime).

You see an advert for tasty doughnuts. Oh boy! You jump in your car / catch
the bus etc, and head over to the purveyors of tasty doughnuts to find that
instead there are no doughnuts, but you're assured that if you're interested
in tasty doughnuts you must have friends that are too, so take some flyers and
spread the word. You've wasted your time, effort and money to become an
uncompensated advertising agent for purveyors of mythical doughnuts, and you
might reasonably reserve a new circle of hell for these people before
shredding their flyers with particular zeal.

Similarly, to have answered an advert for a job that doesn't exist, spent time
considering what compromises in your life might be necessary to take the
position, followed sound advice to tailor your CV to the position, crafted a
covering letter, and then found that your time and effort is used to stripmine
you of your contacts with no compensation for any time and effort put in on
your part before moving onto the next mark, once again you might reserve a new
circle of hell for these people. It's clearly fraud and exploitation, hand in
hand.

~~~
fecak
Good points. I was under the impression that this was referring to a scenario
where you send a résumé to a recruiter ad, and you either get a reply that the
job was filled (a lie here) or no reply at all (impolite if you were
qualified). No time wasted with dialogue or advertising. This may be a uk
thing, as I don't think firms here in the US tell you that you need to bring
your friends if you want to deal. Never heard of that.

~~~
ZachPruckowski
The friends thing he's talking about is taking your reference contacts and
then using them as future leads.

And there is a fixed cost to sending a resume and cover letter. Sure, the
first one isn't such a pain, but if you're unemployed and sending out 30
resumes, it's sort of a pain if 10 of them are fake, and another 5-10 are
duplicates of different recruiters trying to fill the same position. It
increases the work I have to do, and provides an awful lot of false hope.

Again - one recruiter doing that amid a sea of legit openings isn't all that
bad, but in larger markets it's not just one recruiter misbehaving.

------
orangethirty
I've had recruiters pull fast ones on me back when I started programming
professionally. There is a special place in hell for these people. Such jerks!
This just drove me to create my own mailing list for job offers. The aim is to
keep it clear of recruiters. If you want to check it out and receive job
offers directly to your inbox (where you can look at them without logging on
and dealing with the BS of most site out there) click
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5150829>) to see the HN thread. Not
spamming, just giving back to the community.

------
noarchy
Once a recruiter decides that you're of no use to them, they'll stop answering
your emails and phone calls. I've seen this happen to others with astonishing
regularity, and had it happen to me some years ago.

The initial contact is cordial, there is even some hopeful talk about a
position that allegedly exists. And then suddenly, contact is cut off.

Just as bad is the common practice of advertising a phoney job position just
to get a pile of resumes and contacts. I suspect that this might even be some
kind of fraud, legally-speaking, but I don't know if these people are ever
pursued for it.

------
lifeguard
Two important points of context for my comment: I am talking about software
jobs for a skill set below 'mastery'.

Recruiters are a waste of time because:

1\. They do not know anything relevant about the technologies you are skilled
in or the technologies required by the employer.

2\. Part of the 'value' they add for employers is to vet candidates before
they are interviewed by the employer. This consists of doing a web page
background search, calling your references, and giving you a pee test. Also
see #1 for why this is a waste of time.

3\. You will be legally bound to a three way relationship between the
recruiter co. and your new employer. There are no benefits to you in this
binding agreement.

4\. You may actually be paid by the recruiting agency's payroll department
(contracting). Faxing time sheets to a fax machine no one bothers to fill with
paper at the agency office is a waste of time and energy. To put it another
way, you won't be able to talk to the payroll department directly if you have
any issues.

5\. You add another layer of useless management and bureaucratic complexity
via the recruiting agency. Rarely do recruiters stay up to date on a
project/position's projected end date. Once this resulted in a key card being
disabled because the original end date had been reached -- but the project was
still active.

I have seen that the recruiters for staff positions are a little better and
you get paid direct.

I have also known gifted programmers who just hate to deal with people and
negotiate, so recruiters are useful there. But to advance in your career, you
are going to need people skills so you might as well start developing them
now.

To sum up, there are a lot of bad recruiters who ruin it for everyone.

~~~
lsc
>1\. They do not know anything relevant about the technologies you are skilled
in or the technologies required by the employer.

This... this shocks me, every time. I mean, in my experience, it's usually
true, but damn.

What, then, is the value the recruiter brings the client?

I mean, sometimes they function as body shops, where the company pays them and
they pay you, and the company then doesn't have to worry about labor laws and
stuff, that becomes the body shop's problems, but I fail to see how that would
justify the huge markup (and, generally speaking, but not always, lower
quality) - Labor laws really aren't that bad. Do the standard things you do
when dealing with programmers that get paid $90K+ per year, and you are in
compliance with most of it.

I mean, besides that, they are keyword matchers; personally, I don't think
keyword matchers are particularly useful, and in any case, they are not
particularly difficult to implement.

But then, in defense of the recruiters (or, at least a reason for a developer
to use recruiters):

>3\. You will be legally bound to a three way relationship between the
recruiter co. and your new employer. There are no benefits to you in this
binding agreement.

Generally speaking, recruiters bring in a bunch of sub-par recruits. Way worse
than if you had asked the people around the office to bring in friends (and
worse than having someone in the office go over the resume slush pile.)

What does this mean? this means that if you are a sub-par programmer, and you
failed that google interview your buddy got you, or if you are a good
programmer who, for whatever reason, looks like a sub-par programmer (say, for
instance, that you had a [mental] health issue impacting your performance for
the previous year, or just had a run of bad luck and have been unemployed for
a while and don't know anyone to get you interviews) then recruiters can be a
godsend.

Recruiters are a fairly sure sign that the standards for the job will be low.
The competition will be weak. And sometimes? well, comeon, most of us have
needed to hit the bunny slope at least once in our career.

~~~
lifeguard
>>1\. They do not know anything relevant about the technologies you are
skilled in or the technologies required by the employer.

>>This... this shocks me, every time.

To be fair, few people are expert on all technologies and few recruiting firms
can afford a diverse, expert staff.

~~~
lsc
Sure, but my theory is that the legal cover they provide is also not worth as
much as what they charge; so if the legal cover isn't good, and they aren't
any good at picking people, then nobody would use them. But many companies use
them, which means one (or both) of my assumptions are wrong.

One theory is that at some companies, the hiring managers/screening process
they have is even worse than what most recruiters use. That would be
consistent with my observation that standards seem to be lower when I get a
job through a recruiter than through a contact.

But yeah, uh, I guess my continued shock is more a product of incorrect
assumptions, then. But man.

~~~
lifeguard
I think contracting is driving it by virtue of the corp. tax loophole for 1099
workers. By definition a 3rd party must handle the "temporary" 1099 workers.

------
eksith
HN seems to have killed it :/ Google doesn't seem to have a cache either,
since the post is brand new.

Edit: Very old nginx/1.0.5... methinks it's time to upgrade. There were a lot
of improvements to this version even in 1.1.0/1, including performance

<http://nginx.org/en/CHANGES>

~~~
smartial_arts
Sorry folks! Desperately trying to fix it now...

~~~
runarb
Tried WP Super Cache?

~~~
smartial_arts
No, I haven't. Had no reason, really, just trying to fix it on nginx/php-fpm
level at the moment.

~~~
grandpa
If it's an interesting fix, please consider doing a post like "What I learned
from getting slashdotted by Hacker News".

~~~
smartial_arts
I am by no means a devops guy, and this is just a quickly whipped together
t1.micro instance with haproxy/nginx/php-fpm/wp/whatever, that's been built
using tutorials of questionable quality (as it turned out now) that I found
online.

So there probably won't be too much value in a post like that. All I did was
setting some sane parameters for Fast CGI stuff in nginx, some for php-fpm and
the db.

------
teapartyJim
I am a technical recruiter with almost two decades of experience. I have
literally placed thousands of IT professionals. People with bad experiences
with recruiters are usually the bottom 80% of candidates - those we cannot
help (employers only pay us for the top 10%, MAYBE the top 20%).

Of course, no one thinks they are in the bottom 80%...

Like every industry, 80% of the recruiters are lousy, and give the rest of us
a bad name, so there is great truth in what is written here. HOWEVER, ask
yourself, why is this happening to me? Why are agencies in business if we
offer no value? The basic laws of capitalism would have forced us out of
business if we did not create value. So if recruiters won't work with you, why
is that?

Remember, as a candidate, YOU are getting our work FOR FREE. You invest
nothing but your time, and perhaps, some of your knowledge. We are taking a
risk on you, risking our ability to earn a living, risking our relationships
with our clients in the desparate hope you are not a lousy candidate, all by
exposing you to the network of professionals we have invested large quantities
of time and money in developing, so yeah, we expect you to give something back
in the form of leads or references. What is wrong with that? Perhaps you would
prefer to pay for our service? Believe me, we are expensive.

Finding a good recruiter is easy - trust your gut, and find one who has been
doing it for at least a year. The lousy ones are generally weeded out by then.
Only trust those you are referred to, or are willing to meet you in person,
and only those recruiters that partner with you.

Also, help the recruiter help you. If you are confrontational, unprofessional,
or otherwise difficult to work with, no good recruiter will invest any effort
in you. Why would we take the risk?

~~~
pandaman
Do you really have any people genuinely looking for your services and not
cold-called or lured with the false job ads?

I agree that somebody who is seeking your services for free has to be grateful
and accommodating your requests. But as somebody who is being offered a
service I have not requested I don't care how much you invested.

~~~
teapartyJim
Yes, we do. Every day.

------
pooriaazimi
[OT] Page is down.

It's incredible how many people (even on HN) don't know it! You can get
Google's cached version of a page fairly easily.

Just type

    
    
        cache:[url]
    

in Google search bar and press enter. e.g.,

    
    
        cache:http://blog.nimblegecko.com/never-trust-what-recruiters-say/
    

redirects to
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&output=search&sclient=psy-
ab&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fblog.nimblegecko.com%2Fnever-trust-what-recruiters-
say%2F&btnK=)

------
rcakirerk
The guy never trusted an old version of nginx -> <http://d.pr/i/U2UP>

~~~
smartial_arts
I should've updated that long ago, but everything was working - I never had
anything like that happening, so there was no pressing reason to upgrade, I
guess.

It should be better now, well, I hope.

~~~
smartial_arts
Now it dies at ~80 users instead of ~50 before upgrade. Oh well.

------
known
Unlike in Capitalism, Globalization demands you to be an "Highly Skilled Wage
Slave" to get a job.

