

Why do IT companies use Recruitment Agencies? - panjaro

I know hiring is not an easy task but why do companies use recruitment agencies where these guys have no idea about programming&#x2F;IT?
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leap_ahead
Companies use recruiters mostly because they feel they have no skills to
perform hiring themselves, when they have no HR staff etc. Most of them are
unaware that recruiters actually make quality hiring nearly impossible,
through ignorance, misrepresentation of facts or open lies.

Companies seem not to know that developers generally avoid recruiters and seek
a direct contact. I had it many times that recruiters ruined potential
opportunities for me as a candidate, that is why I said them goodbye a long
time ago.

With the way recruiters approach their work today, I'm convinced they have no
place in the IT hiring process and actually do more harm than good. They have
no qualifications to perform their job well and none seem to be even remotely
interested in obtaining the necessary knowledge. Recruiting seems to be a
short term job - today they hire programmers, tomorrow they end up in the
sales department of a manufacturing company and will be selling tires, the day
after that they'll be doing something else. It probably makes no sense to them
to be wasting time learning something weird when they can spend this time
cold-calling and selling whatever stuff they're on today.

Update. Almost forgot. Sometimes people go to recruiters to relieve themselves
of the responsibilities for a potential bad hire. Employing the services of a
staffing company will make the person look like acting in the best interests
of the company, and if a bad hire happens here, it can easily be attributed to
the failure of the staffing company, not to the mistakes of the person who
hired recruiters.

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agjmills
This will sound facetious, but maybe it's because IT companies know nothing
about recruitment?

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dragonwriter
> I know hiring is not an easy task but why do companies use recruitment
> agencies where these guys have no idea about programming/IT?

Because most view the time of people who _do_ know something about
programming/IT as too valuable to use on the early phase of hiring, so if they
weren't doing that, they'd be using in-house HR staff that _also_ have no idea
about programming/IT for the role for which they use recruiting companies.

Also, because the recruiters know enough about _management_ of programming/IT
companies to be able to sell themselves as knowledgeable about the industry to
management.

~~~
leap_ahead
Actually, hiring new colleagues is part of the job. Developers MUST
participate in it somehow, otherwise you get a team composed from totally
random people who have nothing in common. You don't want to work in such a
place.

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liquidcool
Full disclosure: I do staffing, but I'm also a 20-year software developer and
15 year manager, so I'm an outlier. Assuming you're talking about regular
staffing companies, but here are some general reasons.

When you're hiring, you're often too busy do recruit yourself. What can hinder
your chances further is believing you don't have time to educate the
recruiters you've hired, and I've seen that, too. Of course, you may believe
that spending time with a typical recruiter will not help your cause.

You may not have a good network, either. Whether the typical recruiter has a
meaningful network depends on them, but it doesn't happen overnight. Most
recruiters are very friendly and extroverted, so at least face to face it's a
pleasant interaction.

You may be poor at marketing your company/open position to developers. This I
see a lot, in the same way I see great developers who don't market themselves
well. I recently came across a job description where the first three
paragraphs were about the company and the parent company - a very big name!
Even at the hiring company, there can be a disconnect about what developers
care about.

Finally, there are a lot of good developers who have no problem with
recruiters. What prompted me to enter staffing was the number and quality of
developers who came to me for help with their job searches, but I wasn't in a
great position to help. Truth is, job searches suck and if you can find
someone trustworthy to help with that, it's a relief.

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icc97
You can get specialised recruitment agencies and I came across a few in London
who focus on one area. Head hunters will use all means necessary to get
details from a department of the type of people working there. They then do
build up a network of people outside LinkedIn or Monster that do have relevant
experience inside a specific sector. Then by employing that agency you are
more likely to get the kind of candidate you're searching for.

But this only works for specialised agencies all the rest is an absolute
nonsense.

One of the companies I worked for went through various agencies but also put
their own ad in the Guardian UK newspaper just because the CTO happened read
that newspaper. That's where I came across their job through internet
searches.

I guess it's just a way of getting 'some' candidates in the hope that you'll
find a polished turd in the cess pool. Or perhaps it's to make the good
candidates feel like they're not the only one being interviewed.

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twunde
Recruiters can give you a pipeline of candidates, pretty much immediately. As
head of your team you can then spend your time sifting through resumes and
interviewing instead of trying to do everything yourself. This works best when
you can write a good description, and discuss your needs with the recruiter.
Most companies will use a few different agencies as they find which ones bring
in better candidates.

Recruiting companies vary in competency. There are senior-level recruiters
that are former engineers. If you get one, keep him or her. There are
experienced recruiters that can roughly gauge whether you would be a good fit.
Then there are pure sales types where you're just a product. All can be
successful. All will have different types of networks and work with different
companies.

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JSeymourATL
Sometimes you need an outside Hired Gun--

Whether it's an Attorney, Accountant, Advertising/PR, Management Consulting,
or some moron Recruiter. All of these experts will undoubtedly claim to have
specific industry experience in the clients space. "Hey we get you!"

As with any 'profession' the good ones know just enough to be dangerous,
deliver a modicum of value, and some even make a nice living.

~~~
panjaro
"good ones know just enough to be dangerous and some even make a nice living",
liked that !

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bitcuration
Because these days joining a IT startup is like joining a gang, this gang or
that gang, they all require you to believe them, breathe them, live with them.

Recruitment agencies dilute that bad influence as the firm's boss knows after
all this is a corporation not a church.

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Avalaxy
Because it's hard to find developers and recruiters have the network?

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leap_ahead
>> recruiters have the network?

They do not. Their "network" comes from scraping resumes from Monster and
similar sites.

They store this database of resumes and addresses then send out a wave of
emails for every next position they get, then process the replies from whoever
replied to those mails and there you have your candidates.

I found that unsubscribing from those staffing firm mailing lists doesn't work
but in some cases. In that regard UK agencies seem to be the worst of the
bunch. Eventually I had to report those emails as spam and after a while the
spam filter learned to catch those email automatically saving me the trouble.

