
Should tech recruiters learn to code? (2014) - gk1
http://rosario.io/2014/01/07/should-tech-recruiters-learn-to-code
======
godzillabrennus
The fact that recruiters lack an in depth understanding of the work the people
they place are engaged in is a symptom of the larger problem.

Receuiters can be rude to you, they can miss meetings they schedule with you,
they can reach out about a job and then ignore you, they can mislead you, they
can waste your time on phone calls, they can send you spam email, and they do
it all with impunity.

The real problem is that Recruiters have no accountability in the process
aside from getting butts in seats.

HR tools keep getting developed to refine that filter candidates for skills
and personality but never to bring in the much needed accountability missing
from the process.

~~~
brandall10
I think this is by design - it's a commission based non-skilled sales
position. The people who get into it are the same selling automobiles, real-
estate, fire extinguishers, etc, and can easily move between these industries
based on how hot they are. It's cheap for the agencies to recruit just about
anyone, and those who are truly skilled will rise to the top while the rest
are naturally culled.

With the software recruiting industry the issue is somewhat made worse by the
basic gender imbalance that exists... agencies try to capitalize on the
environment of nerdy male engineers by having an unusually high number of
attractive women to get a higher response. EDIT: unfortunately I'm not able to
find any direct stats on the software recruitment industry itself please
regard my comment as anecdotal.

~~~
cbanek
> agencies try to capitalize on the environment of nerdy male engineers by
> having an unusually high number of attractive women to get a higher response

This seems questionable. All the recruiters I've ever dealt with are over
email and phone, and you might not even meet them when you interview on-site
(because there may be an on-site recruiter for the interview). I don't see how
physical attractiveness comes into it.

I also find that my chance of having a male recruiter or a female recruiter
contacting me is about 50/50.

~~~
brandall10
My own experience is from Linked-In and at tech meetups. In the latter, I
can't even recall ever seeing anyone other than an attractive 20-something
female present, at least here in San Diego.

As far as actual statistics, I know I've seen a few over the years where it
was shown that > 80% of tech recruiters are female but I'm having trouble
finding much due to the influx of hits regarding recruiting female engineers.
I did find this one for the recruitment industry in general in Israel:

[http://staffingtalk.com/why-most-recruiters-
female/](http://staffingtalk.com/why-most-recruiters-female/)

With particular interest to this update:

" __ __*UPDATE: Bradley Ruffle recently noted via a comment on this post that
they expanded their initial survey to 208 companies. 91% of these recruiters
were female (with the majority still being single and under 30 years old). "

~~~
cbanek
My experience is also from linkedin and just random emails - I don't really do
the meetups, although I could see where that could come into play. Though I
think most engineers are actually more excited to find an engineer wearing a
shirt from a company they want to work for and talk about tech.

I don't have any data to back this up either, but I wonder if the companies
contacting me might also have a certain pattern. Bigger companies, like Google
& FB, I think I have had more recruiters with female names contact me
(although I have had some male ones as well). Small startups it seems to be
more males, or maybe even just direct employees if they have no recruiters.

~~~
brandall10
Right - there is often representation from engineering in a recruitment
capacity. To be clear, I'm talking only of people who are employed as
recruiters.

------
alkonaut
Recruiters could at least ask coders what coders are interested in. I get a
few emails per month from recruiters/CEO's and they are invariably doing the
same mistake: they enthusiastically describe their _product_ but not what I'm
interested in: tech stack, new/old code, office location, team size,
role/responsibilities...

I don't care what the product is if the tech stack is wrong, and with the
right tech stack and other circumstances I can work on _any_ product.

~~~
tejasmanohar
Maybe it's telling of what they want to recruit for. If the CEO is emailing
you, I presume it's an early-stage startup. When I join a startup, I care more
about the product and growth than tech stack, but the tech is a factor once I
have multiple companies that are a product fit. I suppose everyone has
different priorities... I wonder if there's a good survey on this from a lot
of engineers (divided by title, region, etc.).

~~~
alkonaut
No, zero early startups as far as I know. Some young-ish companies though.

I'm not interested in working in a rapidly growing business or one where there
is a single make or break product being created at an early stage.

Most of these are like "we make a product that compares car insurance so that
[goes on to describe at lenght how awesome the product is]"

I mean it's cool if it's a great product (I guess) but again, tech matters
(more).

Writing about tech, processes, team size etc doesn't necessarily exclude
writing a long bit about the product either. My issue was that they are 100%
product.

------
danschumann
I think everyone should learn to code, but dancers probably think everyone
should learn to dance. Dancing is fun, coding is fun.

~~~
manmal
You made me smirk, but actually OP just wants ballet bookers to know the
difference between a Cabriole and a Cambré, and not everyone.

------
mailslot
It's not as if someone can just learn to code casually. There's years and
years of vital knowledge only attainable with experience. Learning JavaScript
won't help them recruit for C++. Learning SQL won't let them know MSSQL is a
fork of Sybase.

Learning just enough to be even more ineffective is more like it.

------
j45
It seems likely that many existing positions are moving quicker than planned
to need a tech-experienced person in that role.

10 years ago just having a technology "system" to run pieces of your business
was enough to say you were doing something.

The shift in the last 4-7 years of managers in HR, Payroll, Finance to be
literate in not only using business software systems, but manage, administer,
and even implement and integrate them is leading towards one eventuality.

HR and other managers today are rarely technical or detail/data driven, and
the world is becomign a data driven world first consisting of business
technology / software systems that manage the details of the business.

Mix the two together and a disconnect is forming.

I experienced a payroll and HRIS implementation recently where the managers
are having a hard time keeping up vs people who are natively into using and
building systems as power users. It was just boring and plain old Payroll, not
anything remotely to do with technology hiring.

As someone who consults in this area, I see the technology/detailed gap
widening and then being filled in with people who have either picked up, or
transferred from technical skills.

This pattern exists with accountants, and other professions too. The wizards
of Excel have a chance to grow towards systems and processed based thinking,
where folks who can't organize and make excel productive for them will have a
much harder time.

Managers today simply do not have technical experience of how systems are
designed, implemented, or work in detail, let alone know how to build them, or
hire for them.

There is nothing more entertaining than a recruiter looking for a .NET
developer (which means someone who can use all 31 languages of .NET).

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Well ".Net developer" is almost always synonymous with "C# web/desktop dev".

~~~
j45
Maybe lately, or in your neck of the woods.

Lots of legacy apps are being refactored or cornering to be maintained in
other .NET syntax, requiring capability beyond C#. One hopes the
standardization continues :)

------
djtriptych
Recruiters are there to:

1\. Manage the inflow of candidates.

2\. Screen candidates to protect engineer time.

3\. Sell the company to the candidate.

4\. Manage the ongoing candidate/company relationship until an offer/no-hire
decision.

The recruiters I (as a candidate) appreciate most absolutely excel at #4.

The screening happens at #2, and should be just enough to avoid inviting
obvious no-hires to speak to your engineers. As a web programmer this involves
questions on the order of "How many HTTP methods can you name?".

Honestly, a resource-constrained recruiting department just can't review the
entire github/stackoverflow account of every potential candidate. The very
best headhunter emails I've ever gotten came from CTOs/dev leads who managed
to write a sentence or two about a project on my github. Nice when it happens,
but I really don't think it scales.

------
leed25d
One of the best headhunters I ever worked with had been a programmer before he
found his way into the world of recruiting. That was back in the 1980s and I
have no idea what became of him but I wish that he could be cloned.

~~~
mcny
> One of the best headhunters I ever worked with had been a programmer before
> he found his way into the world of recruiting. That was back in the 1980s
> and I have no idea what became of him but I wish that he could be cloned.

Should I try to get into recruiting? Can I do this as a side gig? I'm sure
that if I'm successful, it will do wonders to my social ability... Any
thoughts anyone? How does one get started with this? Just talk to recruiters?

~~~
scarface74
I don't see any possible way that you can do recruiting as a side gig. The
good recruiters I know are all about building relationships on both sides --
companies and potential employees. I've met some for lunch or in their office.
They go out to meet with their clients -- the prospective hiring manager.

And recruiting is all about the long game. You may keep in touch with someone
for years before you have the right opportunity at the right time for them.

~~~
Risord
On the other hand is this recruiting work all about being lonely wolf? I could
imagine that as programmer & side gig you could work for recruiter(s). Prepare
to convince why your skill is important not just their customer but themselves
and go talk to them.

I have no idea is this a good idea but nothing bad shouldn't happen if you
try.

------
slackingoff2017
Whenever I see an article titled "should (insert non-engineering position) at
an engineering company learn engineering" the answer is yes.

There's studies that show the biggest source of satisfaction with your boss is
whether they're good at your job. It's also well known that people like others
like themselves, and that smart people are much better at figuring out if the
person they're talking to is also smart.

What does this point to? That your very best engineers should be the ones
hiring more engineers. In the endless quest to save money many companies have
relegated this task to corporate drones.

I have no proof... but I would gamble a large part of the reason that bigger
corporations end up with mediocre engineers and management is because they
forget how to hire good people.

At the startup stage you're far more likely to see star studded teams, small
groups of people that are all absolutely brilliant. My belief is that this is
largely to relegating hiring to cheaper labor once the company grows past a
certain point.

I know of a lot of unicorns where the founding team has made a point to
personally interview every engineer. Some of them until well past 1000
employees. You'll hear people say "I can't believe this billionaire is wasting
his time interview janitors". What needs to be understood is that some of us,
me included, believe that who you hire is the most important decision your
company makes.

------
DavidWoof
Honestly, what is the point of tech recruiters? The tiny filtering they do for
employers could be automated or done by a minimum wage worker. I don't see
they have any value for candidates. Most of them just cruise the job boards
doing keyword matches between applicants and jobs.

Why haven't they disappeared like other middlemen such as travel agents?

Is it just for protection against civil rights suits? I realize there's some
highend headhunters that do real work, but the bulk of the industry seems
worthless to me.

~~~
andrewstuart
Have you ever done recruiting? It's incredibly time consuming, and in the vast
majority of cases the recruiter executes a process that ends up with a "no
hire" decision.

Companies can't afford to have their employees spending all their time doing
the recruiting process so the key point of recruiters is to do as much of the
work as possible to free the time of the employers.

Once the decision is established to use a recruiter, then _which_ recruit4er
an employer chooses to work with depends on corporate priorities. The larger
the company, the more likely it is to have a human resources department and
therefore the more likely to have a "recruiter selection process" that
emphasises things like size of the recruiting company, global reach, breadth
of services, time in business etc etc. These bigger recruiters yes, sometimes
(but not always) have "tech recruiters" with no particular knowledge of tech.
Smaller companies that have the discretion to choose to work with any
recruiter are more likely to work with whatever recruiter they ,know through
personal connections, or whichever recruiter last hassled them on the phone
for work.

~~~
DavidWoof
I'd note that all of the above also applied to travel agents and other
middleman jobs. The job was time-consuming, companies couldn't afford to have
their employees spend a lot of time on it, the majority of cases wound up with
no sale, etc. And technology largely supplanted it.

Although you're not explicit, it seems that your post is suggesting that the
primary value-added function of tech recruiters is as a filter for companies.
But be honest, what useful filtering can possibly be done by a tech recruiter
that doesn't know the tech? The vast majority of tech recruiters aren't
capable of anything beyond keyword matching and basic "are you presentable"
filtering (which can have important legal implications in the US, of course).

Anyway, whenever this topic comes up, one of the top 2% recruiters who know
their business well pops up and claims recruiters do all sorts of useful
things. Well, yeah, maybe you're part of that top tier that does great work.
But that's not the bulk of the industry, the bulk of the industry is the army
of know-nothings at CyberCoders other large job mills. And they're very
successful, but I honestly don't know why.

------
scarface74
I could care less whether the recruiter knows the tech stack, all they need to
know is what is available, the salary the potential compsby is willing to pay,
and where I am in the process. If they can match keywords it's good enough for
me.

The hardest parts about looking for a job are knowing what's out there ,
knowing whether anyone is interested once you submit a resume, and what the
salary range is. If a recruiter can do that for me, it's a win.

~~~
gk1
The phrase is "I couldn't care less." As in: You already care the minimum
amount.

~~~
Stratoscope
"I could care less" is just as correct as "I couldn't care less". They mean
exactly the same thing.

Yes, I know this is illogical: how could two phrases mean the same thing when
their literal meanings are direct opposites?

But they are both idioms, and idioms do not follow that kind of strict logic.

Here are a number of articles that explain this better than I could:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=i+could+care+less](https://www.google.com/search?q=i+could+care+less)

~~~
gk1
The first result of that search confirms that it's "I couldn't care less."

~~~
Stratoscope
As the other search results explain, both forms of the idiom are in common use
in English today. It does little good to "correct" people for using a widely
understood idiom.

No one is confused about what anyone means when they say "I could care less".

I do sympathize with how you feel about this. I've been in your shoes [1]:
several years ago I went through Wikipedia and changed a bunch of templates
that used the phrase "due to" to say "because of". You're probably aware of
the rules around these, e.g. these were considered correct:

"The flight was late because of bad weather."

"The late flight was due to bad weather."

But never:

"The flight was late due to bad weather."

After I edited the templates, someone reverted my change and asked me, "Mike,
have you looked at a dictionary lately?"

Sure enough, "due to" is now common usage and perfectly acceptable where
"because of" used to be required by the rules of correct grammar.

You might say my thinking was out of date due to my not keeping up with
changes in the English language. But then I realized I could care less which
way anyone wrote it.

[1] Of course I have not literally been in your shoes! That's an idiom too,
best expressed in the old joke:

"Don't criticize a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. That way,
when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and you'll have his shoes."

------
andrewstuart
I pay my bills with recruiting and I write alot of software. For example I
wrote Bootrino:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJhxmVlR46c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJhxmVlR46c)

In many cases I know more about the topic at hand than the job seeker.

My technical background is one of the key reasons my clients choose to work
with me.

People hate on recruiters but truth is that it is _incredibly_ hard to get
people into jobs. Over the past ten years employers have become "better and
better" at recruiting and constantly refined their selection process and
raised their standards so high that it effectively becomes close to impossible
to get people who can pass the selection process. Worse, these highly refined
selection processes often IMO don't actually identify people who would make a
great employee. In programming, all employers declare that they only hire "the
best", but there's still no way in scientific terms to quantify who are "the
best" developers - in the end it is always just a matter of opinion.

------
scandox
They're salesmen. Knowledge of the product is handy but also can be a deficit.
They generally know what they have to know to sell.

------
alexanderstears
They should. But I'd like to see recruiters understand the difference between
timezones and web development / software development / data science & excel
macros first.

------
ryanmarsh
I've worked with some incredible recruiters who aren't programmers so, no.

The typical aloof recruiter is a byproduct of the companies and hiring
managers they represent and the incentive structure created by them. The best
recruiters I know are just like the best sales people I know in that they
exist _in spite_ of the environment they work in.

------
uptownhr
I don't think they should learn, it would take too much time. But hire tech
recruiters that are already programmers.

~~~
LordHumungous
No offense to recruiters but who would be a recruiter when they can be a
programmer?

~~~
NoCoastCoder
People who don't like money I guess.

------
gaetanrickter
Why would you teach someone how to code when they like talking on the phone
all the time?

------
id122015
I dont even allow recruiters to interview me. I never met a male recruiter and
that is another symptom of the problem.

