
Ask HN: Why do companies use recruiters to narrow down potential candidates? - bsvalley
I was wondering why software companies let recruiters decide which candidate is good or bad for a given role?<p>I&#x27;m talking about the very first selection. I&#x27;ve interviewed a lot of candidates and usually we (engineer&#x2F;hiring manager) get a very narrowed list of 2-3 candidates max for a role.<p>Let&#x27;s say I don&#x27;t have a specific keyword in my Resume. Does a recruiter know I can do the job still based on my experience? For instance, I put &quot;Oracle, XML, Data bases&quot; and the hiring manager said to look for people who know SQL. Well, guess what, the d*mb recruiter don&#x27;t know anything about Data bases so he&#x2F;she will pass.<p>And that&#x27;s the easy part, skills... it gets worse when it comes you professional experience. For example &quot;I built a Web Server from scratch on top of Apache&quot; and the recruiter said to look for someone who&#x27;s familiar with the HTTP protocol.<p>If I never wrote &quot;H T T P - P R O T O C O L E&quot; in my Resume I&#x27;m screwed...
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JamesBarney
2 reasons

1\. There are lots of people a given company considers unemployable(rightly or
wrongly) and a recruiter helps weed out these candidates.(has a degree, has 4
years of experience, and has 2 years of java, etc...) This is probably low
value but a lot of companies don't even want to bother with the hassle.

2\. Lots of companies don't feel comfortable poaching from other companies.
This is the best way to find new candidates, because the average employed
developer is a better candidate than an average unemployed candidate. So they
hire out this "dirty work" and relationship building to other companies that
specialize in it.

But as a piece of related advice, it's easier to add "http protocol" to your
resume than to fix the the very broken hiring system we have in tech.

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liquidcool
Yes, about five 9's of recruiters don't understand the tech on the resume or
the job description. That _may_ prevent them from responding.

But in general, they rely on you to self-qualify. So they are far more likely
to call you and run through the list of requirements verbally so you can tell
them if you have them or not. That also gives them a chance to pitch other
jobs. Of course, if you say no to something the hiring manager said was a must
have, you disqualified yourself, but that's on the hiring manager, not the
recruiter.

This comes from being in a tight labor market. Think of it this way: how often
are you contacted for jobs you're totally unqualified for, but they think you
are? In this market, I see that a lot more often than the opposite.

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mswen
They believe recruiter X understands the role and company well enough to do
the grunt work of reading through and filtering down candidates without
disrupting everyone's work flow until it gets to the final set of candidates.

They are small enough that they cannot justify developing and maintaining
internal recruiters who can do it better.

They believe the recruiter's pitch that they know the industry and have
databases of people to search and reach out to and so can speed up the process
to find a qualified and interested candidates.

Because apparently it is generally good enough for the executives that are
making that outsourcing decision.

Some combination of all of the above

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cauterized
They're using recruiters wrong. We generally don't use recruiters to _filter_
candidates, but rather to _find_ them for jobs where network-based recruiting
fails and candidate flow to public postings is poor in terms of volume or
quality.

We give them top-level criteria ("mid-level iOS developer", "entry level data
scientist"). Any further criteria are very unambiguous and easy to assess in a
5-minute discussion if not off a resume ("has used Python for at least a year
in a professional capacity"; "has shipped at least one app to Apples App
Store"). They send us a trickle of resumes. _We_ decide which resumes suggest
the candidates are qualified enough to phone screen (usually about a third to
a half).

For the best of those, we phone screen and issue a simple technical assessment
that gives us an idea of the candidate's baseline skills. Then we dive deeper
if we need something specialized (e.g. deep knowledge of a specific protocol.)

We also give our recruiters feedback on why we decide not to hire a candidate
(e.g. "he seems like he'd need an environment with more structure" or "she
knows HTTP like the back of her hand, but we need someone who's used
JavaScript since 2003".)

The recruiters use that feedback to inform what other positions they send the
candidates resume to. And they use other clients' feedback to help decide who
to send to us. Our best recruiter has few enough candidates that she can only
send us a few per week for any given position.

But she knows them really well - what they're want for their careers and in
terms of process and culture; what other companies have determined are their
strengths and weaknesses; where they are in the interview process with other
companies and what they think of those companies; and of course, what they
think of us.

And she knows us well enough that (for instance) we're one of the first places
she'll send a resume for someone who's self-taught and looking to leave the
freelance life, and no longer bothers us with the resumes of people with CS
PhDs who insist on having a project manager and Gantt charts for everything
they do.

If your recruiters are using spray-and-pray and have so many candidates that
they have to machine-filter their resumes by keyword instead of knowing their
candidates personally, you need to find better recruiters. The ones who get a
position description from you and then screen-scrape LinkedIn to "find"
"candidates" are just wasting everyone's time.

