I'm a former tech recruiter. A few of you know that already. I hear these recruiter rants more than most. Most of it is justified however it's all noise and no feasible solutions.
That great little spiel the author mentioned at the end? The one where he said he would shout my name from the rooftops if I took that approach? How, exactly, does that fit in with I certainly don't want cold-calls or cold emails, ever. If I can't introduce myself to the guy, how am I ever meant to prove I'm not one of the many useless bottom-feeders he deals with on a daily basis?
The facts are simple, regardless of the fact that most recruiters can't even spell PHP, the industry is worth hundreds of billions globally and isn't going anywhere fast and it's certainly not innovating any time soon. Sure their marketing methods are improving and their sales pitches becoming sleaker but ultimately, you are paying a ridiculous sum of money to get a guy with no clue about tech to spend a week or two on the phone harassing every developer that comes even close to some of the tricky but cool sounding words on your job spec.
My prediction: more and more tech companies adopt internal recruitment teams and someone will actually create a useful, multipurpose, recruiter free (cough print: http://hackerjobs.co.ukcough) job site or web service that eliminates, crowd sources or automates the leg work that you are paying an incompetent human thousands of dollars to do on your behalf.
Absolutely right however that process takes forever. I gained most of my clients through those methods but some potential clients aren't always available through those methods.
Bottom line: Recruiters will piss of a lot of people in the process of cold-calling but the absolute reality is that they will place more candidates in 1 month of cold-calling than they would in 6 months of networking. Unfortunately, it really is a numbers game.
You can build a decent business through better methods such as networking and building a reputation for yourself (my chosen method when I was in the business) however some of my colleagues who wouldn't know a tech meet-up if it slapped them in the face were making twice the bonus I made exclusively through cold calling.
I get that part. I think mostly everyone here is familiar with the how and the why of recruiter behavior.
The question is why we should be expected to put up with it.
419 scams also get a tremendous amount of traction, and selling things via spam is also surprisingly profitable.
How are recruiters different, and why should they be not be treated as cancerous perversions of the system, and why should we adopt any stance other than complete hostility towards these cold-calling, spammy recruiters?
The question is why we should be expected to put up with it.
You shouldn't and I'll never say otherwise. My original point is that moaning about it is pointless. This is one of the most innovative communities I'm aware of and despite the fact that HN constantly bemoans the recruitment industry (and rightfully so) these discussions rarely, if ever focus on potential solutions to the problem.
If I can't introduce myself to the guy, how am I ever meant to prove I'm not one of the many useless bottom-feeders he deals with on a daily basis?
If you're not going to show me qualified applicants without me signing a contract then you can't. Thats the point. There's no way for you to distinguish yourself within the current system of cold calls. I hate these calls, I get a few a week and in the 20-30 I've gotten in the last few months not one has convinced me they're worth putting paper in place with.
If you're not going to show me qualified applicants without me signing a contract then you can't. Thats the point.
A perfectly valid point. If it helps (it probably doesn't) the reasoning for this is generally straightforward:
1. Every rec COMPANY I've seen has a blanket ban on revealing candidate details prior to a signed contract.
2. If I send you someone amazing prior to getting a signed contract and someone else comes along a few days later and sends the same guy, you get the problem of agencies fighting over legal ownership. Happens all the time and I know quite a few companies that have a regular income from claiming ownership of other agencies candidates.
3. Recruiters are perpetually afraid of you cutting us out of the loop. They are absolutely aware of the fact that they are purely an introduction service. If they provide the introduction without having any guarantee of payment for that service they assume you'll go to the candidate directly and a lot of companies go out of their way to cut the recruiter out of the equation.
And this response, for me at least, captures the problem perfectly.
#1 - that ban won't exist on the disruptive company. The point is that if you are willing to trust the hiring company that will partner with you, then you don't need that ban.
#2 - "claiming ownership" is really sad, it shows the mindset of "owning" the candidate like the slave trade not introductions. If you can let go of the notion of "owning" you can say "Oh, did xyy bring them to your attention first, ok thanks." and move on.
#3 - Crappy recruiters should be afraid, a good recruiter should not. Yes there are companies that go out of their way to screw recruiters, choose not to work with them. You know if the second or third candidate they hire that you introduce them to was mysteriously introduced by someone else, just stop talking to them. There are other fish.
You're living the prisoner's dilemma in real time and it sucks, been there done that. Have a frank conversation with the company, make a relationship (you can start that with #1 and disclosing details early rather than later) and trust.
May be that it is completely naive to think one could partner with a recruiter, I hope not.
Optics are a big part of the problem. We have job boards all over; here, SO, 37signals, etc...
Everyone makes their own job board and wants $500 for employers to post there. So instead of giving gobs of money to the individual who successfully gets you a candidate, employers have to hand over gobs of money to feature their job on these boards (NumBoards x $500).
Seems more like a human problem where fixing the optics of payment on successful completion changes to something that better gauges quality.
Yep. Valid point. Our site is 100% free for now and the topic of monetisation is one we are hammering to death on a daily basis. We have multiple concepts of what we feel might work and we're edging closer to a system that will make us an obvious first choice for employers... we think.
I'm just going by what he says here: "How, exactly, does that fit in with I certainly don't want cold-calls or cold emails, ever. If I can't introduce myself to the guy, how am I ever meant to prove I'm not one of the many useless bottom-feeders he deals with on a daily basis?"
Correct. I'm also one of the co-organisers of HN London, an event I attended religiously as a recruiter (mainly because of the free beer & pizza). I address the networking V cold calling approach in another comment above.
Job listings are the MVP. Take a look at any of the major job boards. They are used by millions daily and turn over a very real profit. Problem the majority of them have is that they primarily cater to recruiters. We're taking a slightly different approach by eliminating recruiter listings, blogging about relevant topics and interviewing people who hire developers on a regular basis to help job seekers get an insight into what does and does not work.
It'd be interesting to know if those profitable job boards are profitable because of recruiters paying and re-posting the same jobs (changing few words here and there) in order to gather CVs.
I was looking for some statistics about the ratio of a real (as posted by a company) vs recruiter job post on those job boards, but I couldn't find anything.
Recruiter (and blogger of jobtipsforgeeks.com where I advise engineers on career/interview/resume) here, and that is pretty interesting that you take recruiter listings out of the job postings. Although you might think otherwise, I like that idea quite a bit from a pure biz standpoint. I'd think candidates would be more willing to go to a site where they knew recruiters weren't posting, as there is some 'danger' when going to sites where you could potentially apply to the same job (via recruiter listings) multiple times. Good luck with that!
I'd think candidates would be more willing to go to a site where they knew recruiters weren't posting
We completely agree (obviously) and our analytics tend to confirm our theory. So far so good. As we roll out more features it will be interesting to see how sustainable it is.
Manually. It's pretty obvious if you read our blog posts but occasionally a recruiter will slip in a listing. We get emailed every time there is a new post and if it's a recruiter post we manually remove them ASAP. The longest a recruiter job has ever appeared on the site is 23 minutes. That was a bad day.
Seriously? I worked for two different recruitment companies during my time as a recruiter. One had an operating revenue of just under $4billion dollars and the other over $6billion. That's 2 companies and they aren't even the largest. A quick google search will provide any proof you deem necessary.
The fundamental problem is that scammy tactics is the value most recruiters add. You as a company can't cold call developers at your competitor and convince them to work for you, you can however pay a recruiter who does it at an arms length.
At any point of time the vast majority of good developers are off the market, they need to be cold-sold on a job before they even consider looking.
Unless you've got an alternative that has a proven track record of reaching developers who aren't actively job hunting, you're not going to replace recruiters.
I ran a job board that did go after this group by heavily targeting through passive ads (i.e. display ads, facebook, dating sites), and even though it was successful in reaching that group once I'd convinced a developer that job hunting was a good idea they'd often go and use other job boards, recruiters, etc. in addition to my own one.
So not only do you have to capture non-active job seekers, once you've got them you've got to close them almost immediately otherwise they'll convert to becoming an "active job seeker" and using other options for job hunting destroying your advantage.
Hence "capture-and-close" are the dynamics of the market, and recruiters are perfectly suited to those dynamics. I've yet to see a truly viable alternative.
Almost all recruitment startups focus on active job seekers, but that's not where most of the value in the market is.
>You as a company can't cold call developers at your competitor and convince them to work for you, you can however pay a recruiter who does it at an arms length.
Aside from just getting a bad reputation, is there some legal reason why you couldn't do precisely that? If this question seems a little naive, it's because I absolutely am (naive, and asking is how I learn).
There is nothing illegal about poaching talent from your competitors, either directly or through a recruiter. I've had clients (recruiter here) tell me what companies have the talent they are seeking. I wouldn't say it is even unethical to try and get talent from other companies directly - it's just business, the same way you want to attract your competitor's customers.
A few companies do it. A lot of companies have internal recruiting. I don't think it's necessarily bad form if the offer is tasteful and customized (eg I find it fun to talk to a CTO who has actually read my LinkedIn page and wants my specific skillset). But if you're just spamming people (like a lot of recruiters do), you can damage your reputation pretty quickly.
There's a variety of reasons, for example recruiters can engage in activity of legal dubiousness such as buying employee lists off disgruntled employees or using phishing techniques to get the same.
It's also much cheaper for the recruiter because they're representing a range of different businesses. If the person they're calling isn't interested in a particular role they're pitching, they can pitch another role hence the ROI of each call is much higher for the recruiter than for an individual business.
Forgive me if I'm being naive, but what is legally dubious about purchasing employee lists off of former (or current) employees? I'm in an industry where the "employee list" is published regularly (game development, employees listed via product credits) hence my curiosity.
I think there is a insight hanging around here. This thread reminded me of the thread on 99designs, and the attitude of (some) designers towards a fairly "robust" contest format.
The idea that a recruiter will "get to know you" and "deeply understand your needs" whilst still being on commission at another company is foolish.
I think the OP is a bit confused - he seems to want things both ways - the faceless contest approach (where he sees the Twitter feeds and linkediN pages early) and some how also have the deep and meaningful (where the recruiter says you should meet this guy, and without looking at a twitter feed you trust the recrtuiter and set up the interview
Either bring recruitment in house, and see it as long term nuturing of talent, or turn on a beauty parade and expect to do a lot of the weeding out of bad candidates yourself.
Now, if I was paying a few hundred a month for the beauty parade, I suspect that would be fine. If I am paying 20K / hire I want the recrutier to send over Mr and Mrs right.
Its that fact that recruiters are lining up beauty parades but charging for deep and meaningful that gets the ire of the OP up
For many of these staffing firms, it's really a numbers game for them. They throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. On perm roles, when you are getting $15-20,000 just for making an "introduction", there is heavy competition and incentive to try to "win" as many placements as possible.
In the contract IT space, fake resumes are the norm. There are some firms that just train up people in a technology, build them a fake resume with 4 years experience, then hope they perform on a phone interview and last past the first week or two of the contract and have learned enough to fulfill the contract.
For disruption, I like what Developer Auction[1] is doing. Where the companies bid on each person they wish to employ and drive up the salary / signing bonus. Seems to be a better model than what is currently out there.
Certainly a useful alternative but I can't imagine it will make a dent on the industry. Ultimately there are a huge number of companies that require average developers and can't be bothered to invest their own time into finding them so instead they pay a recruiter a lump sum to do it on their behalf.
I agree, but I think developer auction could make a dent in less average, "higher-end recruiting", like in highly competitive companies and locations who snipe talent from each other in SV.
I like the idea - except I don't care for the short list of companies they have devs from. From my personal experience I wouldn't hire anyone from Facebook, Twitter or Zynga unless they could really show me something. But the overall concept is interesting.
We're a bit more open than the homepage of DeveloperAuction suggestion - for example, we'll accept select senior developers from Yahoo, Microsoft, Yelp, LinkedIn, Apple, Intuit, Groupon, Salesforce, Etsy, Gilte Groupe, Meetup, Amazon, etc.
It's just a rudimentary filter for the time being.
15 years recruiting software engineers, and I agree that the industry needs some major changes. The problem you mention about candidates being used unknowingly to bait potential new customers has been around for a while, and many recruiters are not providing the proper value for the price.
I've started using a different model with my clients. I don't want to go into too much detail, but my clients pay me a smaller up front fee to initiate a search, and then a fee upon hire. The combined fees (front and back end) per candidate end up being much lower than the industry standards, perhaps even half what others are charging.
Why would I provide my service at approximately half the cost of other companies? For one, when a client pays me up front, it guarantees my fee and reduces my risk. Contingency recruiters take on 100% of the risk, whereas in a retained relationship the hiring entity assumes 100% of the risk. My model spreads that risk. I'm willing to take a lower fee, so long as my fee is guaranteed.
My model will surely not be popular with contingency firms that have hundreds of recruiters that they can burn through (pay them peanuts + commission until they burn out), but I think if more small boutique firms used this model regionally, many small software firms would jump at the chance to work with one small firm that is going to produce with a minimal number of candidates (usually 2-3 per search for my clients). Having the up front payment allows me to be more selective to find the right fit, instead of just trying to find ANY fit.
"Twitter and Facebook pages full of photos from barbaric rituals and poems about killing penguins?"
Right, because that's so relevant compared to photos indicating that the candidate is pregnant, black, or of a religion the CTO hates passionately. This sort of thing is either an irrational fear or a cover for excluding the sort of person he's not allowed to say he doesn't want.
It's not that I want to force him to hire penguin murderers; it's that I find myself wondering how likely it is that some crazy will find their way into a technical interview process.
The fact he's being so flippant about what it is he exactly wants with the details of someone's internet social life has me thinking he could not actually admit what his real agenda and biases are. That should be worrying.
Hello, I'm Paul the author of the original piece. Pleased to meet you.
Thanks for taking a few hundred words I wrote over a lunch break and extracting from them a warped inference that I must be a racist, misogynistic bigot.
I actually have no such biases. I'm a leftist-liberal who reads The Guardian, I've worked in the public sector for many years which in the UK means having to know employment law inside out, and have specifically worked out of my recruitment process anything that could impede somebody getting a job in my team that other employers would secretly harbour as an excuse.
My hiring strategy is a bit like Valve software's: T-shaped skillsets are gold, and I ask the three questions: What would happen if this person were to become my boss? Would I learn a significant amount from them? How would I feel if they went to work for a competitor?
I just like to understand candidate's beyond a single sheet CV before they come into interview. They might spend 10 hours a day playing Minecraft. Cool, let's talk about that, and how they like to hack around with it a little. They might spend their weekends canoeing. I hate physical exertion, but cool, let's talk about the challenges canoeing provides and how they deal with them. They might be a devout Scientologist. OK, I don't get Scientology personally, but I know employment law well enough to know that's no barrier to you getting the job - I've heard Scientology is really big on clarity of communication through "auditing", so let's talk about how that's helped the candidate in the workplace, 'k?
I am not a white male bigot who hires people like me. I work with women, non-white, non-atheist, non-Christian, non-liberal, non-leftist, non-English (I'm British), people all day, every day and have done so for many years.
The fact you assume a potential employer who is betting a substantial amount of money on you is interested in your personal life for any other reason than to understand you better and to make sure you're going to be a great fit, is cynical, naive and misguided.
It might be rooted in a truth with some employers, but I don't think those employers live in the world of technology - particularly startups. Perhaps that's naive of me. Perhaps that is a problem. So let's talk about the wider issuer of "worst-case scenario" - if somebody on discovering who you really are is prejudiced against you, wouldn't you rather they hadn't hired you - especially in a start-up environment where your legal recourse is highly limited - than for them to find out a week into employment when you've moved across a continent and now you're fucked?
If somebody is a penguin-murderer, why would I want to know that as an employer other than to rule them out immediately? Because somebody who enjoys torturing animals probably has an interesting approach to teamwork that isn't going to fit into the way I like to run my teams. I'd want to spend some time in interview understanding that a little more, precisely because I don't want them turning up on day one and it being a disaster.
Yes, I was being flippant, but there's an important point there, somewhere.
Asserting that my "real agenda and biases" are hidden from view is wrong, and the assertion that this is therefore worrying is flawed.
I don't doubt that you are a nice person, within your own culture.
However, when you refer to someone else's most deeply held beliefs as "barbaric rituals", perhaps we can be forgiven for jumping to conclusions about whether you are bigoted toward them. I am not a religious man, but for this conclusion I don't have to practice mass, or auditing, or wearing temple garments, or kosher meat production. We can't be sure which of these (or whatever other religious ceremony) you mean when you say "barbaric ritual", but it really doesn't matter which one, does it? Essentially every religious practice is someone else's barbarism.
Is there any other meaning to "barbaric ritual" than "religious ceremony I find distasteful"?
Had it occurred to you it might be an off-the-cuff flippant example used as a bit of a joke? did 'penguin murdering' not give you a clue that this might not be a serious example intended to refer to someone's religion?
British sense of humour lost in translation I think.
Yes, I meant it in a flippant and off-the-cuff manner.
I have no interest in a person's religion. In fact if anything, I find religious diversity in the workplace a bonus. I've worked with Catholics, Protestants, Pagans, Muslims, Jews, Satanists (they're fun!), Atheists, Agnostics and I think one Scientologist/Freezoner who didn't want it widely known. So be it. Diversity and different viewpoints on the World and different ways of thinking are good.
So yes, there are other meanings. Plenty of other meanings, especially in a sentence that is clearly flippant.
I am not a white male bigot who hires people like me. I
work with women, non-white, non-atheist, non-Christian,
non-liberal, non-leftist, non-English (I'm British),
people all day, every day and have done so for many years.
A lot of what candidates expect and interviewers ask comes from what other people do/report having done. Think of how often different companies ask the same brain teasers - and how common it is for companies to ask brain teasers!
I'm sure you don't discriminate - you just want to see my holiday snaps on facebook out of general interest. The problem is it makes looking at people's facebook profiles the norm; today you're doing it, tomorrow every employer is - and they're not all as open-minded as you.
The fact you assume a potential employer who is betting a
substantial amount of money on you is interested in your
personal life for any other reason than to understand you
better and to make sure you're going to be a great fit, is
cynical, naive and misguided.
According to "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" by Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan [1] when identical resumes are sent out with traditionally black or white names, resumes with white names get 50% more call backs, across all industries.
I don't think it's naive or misguided to worry about employers subconsciously discriminating.
You aren't going to fix that problem by hiding their real names, because the moment they turn up for interview the bigoted response is still going to be there.
So let's have some transparency, and deal with the actual root cause of the problem: racism, anti-Christian or anti-atheist sentiments, and wholesale bigotry in general.
Obfuscating names and past-times and religions might allow people to game it as far as first interview, but how does that help anybody, compared to actually dealing with the root cause issues?
I honestly couldn't think of many things worse than discussing Scientology at a job interview.
It's not necessarily that you are racist or misogynistic or whatever, it's that there are undoubtedly people out there who are and making something like this standard practice would make it a lot easier for them to discriminate.
Saying "you wouldn't want to work for anyone who discriminates anyway" is almost as bad as discrimination because you are essentially encouraging people to accept prejudice.
Besides discrimination is not necessarily the person's own prejudices but perhaps they are worried that their clients may be prejudice. For example maybe you have a company that goes into people's homes and installs equipment or whatever and you know that at least some of your customers are BNP members who wouldn't let a muslim cross their threshold.
I don't know about penguin murdering or whatever, but it's probably difficult to draw conclusions from stuff like that without some kind of evidence.
That's exactly what I had in mind, but this person seems to feel he's outright entitled to this information because the first notion he showed up to defend is that he only has 'non-racist' intentions with the contents of someone's private life. That's great dude, why not try not being a creeper with no sense of professional boundaries while you're at it?
I shrug my shoulders and decide they've decided to lead life a little differently to most working in the startup scene. Good for them, means they might not spend an hour a day updating SN profiles.
I'd ask in the interview "do you enjoy social networking?" and if they said "No", I'd want to explore what aspects of tech startups they do enjoy. If they said "Yes", I'd just accept that they'd locked it down and move on. I've actually done this.
I think too many people are flipping the fuck out about the Facebook aspect.
I would actually prefer github profiles and mailing list contributions. They're much better evidence of ability, mindset and "cultural fit" within a work team, but there are actually very few devs who have anything to show on that front.
I once asked for a github profile, received the username and... it was empty. Not one project. They hadn't even forked anything. I don't think they quite got the point. :-) I interviewed them anyway, they were pretty solid but they had an air of "programming is just a job" compared to other candidates who were more "I absolutely love coding" - it's easier to get the latter group more fired up about building something cool than it is the former, and so they edged him out. Github was a good early flag for that, and I will no doubt use it in future as a barometer of engagement.
However, it is not the sole arbitrator, and not everybody can commit to coding in their downtime because they have other commitments. So fine, show me what you do have.
I do not want to see "private" information. I want to see public information. I am not going to ask to sift through all their holiday photos. I just want to see what they've put out into the public domain, and get a taste of how they think professionally.
No, it is not 'professional' just because you feel entitled to that information and have labeled it so.
The lives of your potential employees are their own, their time spent outside of work belongs to them. That time does not belong to you, it's not on the table, it's not up for discussion. It is, in fact, fucking creepy that you feel like that because you're offering a pittance of a salary you should be able to rummage through the contents of someone's life looking for things 'you don't like'.
You have no respect for the lives of your employees, else you wouldn't expect their social network profiles all lined up and waiting for you to hold judgement over, looking for 'barbaric rituals' and other unfunny comments. It's that simple.
It's not that people don't trust your intentions, it's that it's psychologically impossible to be objective when you're not doing blind evaluations. Anyone who's not a member of $regional_cultural_majority is relatively better off having you evaluate their work history and skillset than they are in trusting you to pore over their Facebook feed.
If I'm about to give somebody £50k a year and spend 40-60 hours a week basically living and working with them, putting my job on the line on the promise they can deliver, I don't want to be blind. I want to see everything I can.
It's not because I want to be nosey, it's because I want to know it's going to work.
Certainly the cultural compatibility will need to be evaluated eventually, it's just not in a minority candidate's best interest for that to be involved in the first-pass filter. If you'd like to know about my non-work interests we can talk about weight lifting and camping during an onsite interview.
I want to be firmly cemented in your mind as a competent developer before you find out what I wore to last year's Halloween party or who I favor in the upcoming election.
So fine, don't show me Facebook - it's just that's the one source of info everybody has.
I'm going to be much, much more interested in your github profile, posts to mailing lists, etc.
First thing I do when I get a CV is not go to Facebook - I google the email address. If there's contributions to tech mailing lists there, the rest of what I see is going to have to be pretty shit for me to rule you out for interview, to be honest.
Your stance falls into the classic case of "understandable, but unacceptable".
What you are describing here is a situation that implicitly guarantees prejudice. You are looking for a near-guarantee that "it's going to work" - which is to say, you're going to implicitly exclude people who are unfamiliar to you.
This can play out in any direction - race, culture, religion, orientation, lifestyle.
To be blunt, it all comes to this: as a society we value inclusiveness and equality more than your right to a bit more peace of mind.
I don't doubt that you approach this with the best of intentions, Mr. Robinson, but FWIW I would never work for you so long as you demand the private details of your employees' lives.
Too many people have put too much stock in the fact Facebook was mentioned.
Let me rephrase it: I want to see HN, github, blogs, twitter feeds where they talk about tech and work and so on.
I'm not going to demand access to Facebook. I'm going to look at their public profile. If they add me on Google+ I'd expect to be in a circle for bosses/peers, and to see stuff that's pertinent, not pictures of their goldfish or what they had for dinner last night.
Is that still open to prejudice? Sure. Am I going to exclude people who are competent but I might not get on with? Possibly. But isn't that actually a good idea? Would it not be crueller for me to hire a waterfall tech who hates agile and who really wants to work in Enterprise IT rather than startup development, and for both us to be really miserable than for me to just realise early on that despite his CV scoring high on the startup development bullshit-bingo cards, they are simply not going to be a great fit?
I have never - and will never - hire/fire or select interview candidates based on religion, creed, gender or even necessarily experience. It's about ability, mindset and evidence of performance. Every time.
I can go onto LinkedIn myself and harvest profiles (as agency recs have to). I can "touch base" with 100+ developers myself if I need to.
I doubt you can. Not easily, anyway. Think about the social implications for a minute.
If you do this in the most efficient way - grab profiles with a simple algorithm, then send the same pitch email to everyone using blind-carbon-copy - you're cold-calling. The problem with cold-calling is that it doesn't enhance your reputation. Do you really want your name and email address filed in the spam filter along with the clumsiest of recruiters? Do you really want to experience the indignity of being unfriended on LinkedIn?
Just wait until your amateur spam-o-rama accidentally hits four employees and a hiring manager at another company. They will talk to each other, and figure out that you're attempting to "poach" their employees in the clumsiest possible way, and now your name is mud, twice over.
Cold-calling does work, though. (There's no shortage of evidence.) Most of the best candidates don't surf job listings for entertainment, and those few who do are window-shoppers, who have trained themselves to read but not to act. But they might respond to a little poke, when it happens to arrive at the right time. But: You can't be doing that nagging yourself. Frankly, you need a scapegoat. A third party. Perhaps someone whose job description protects their reputation a bit: Everyone knows that recruiters gotta recruit, or be fired.
Alternatively, to be kind to your colleagues, you can screen profiles more carefully, making sure not to email people who are obviously not a fit, and making sure not to target the employees of companies run by your friends, and making sure to write lovingly personalized emails to each person, asking about their dog and their kids and then oh-so-discreetly suggesting, as if by accident, that maybe they'd like a new job? This strategy works to some degree - it is, in fact, what most of us do as we wander down the hall at a conference - but it doesn't scale. We call it networking, but when you have to do it with 100+ developers it is a full-time job called recruiting. Perhaps you should consider outsourcing it? And now we're back to square one.
OP here. I've done the LinkedIn and Facebook approach, and it works, but I don't do it algorithmically. I send them personal emails. "I see you've been working a lot recently with JRuby, that's kinda interesting to me. Want to schedule a chat some time" kind of material, etc.
One angle on the idea of disrupting the industry; It seems like a lot of programmers would be in a good position to do recruiting on the side for a few hours a week. They already know a lot of other people in the field. And they obviously are able to recognize technical skills and filter people.
Could a startup make a setup where anyone can sign up and become a part time recruiter? Maybe you set up a real recruiting company to handle the paper work and billing, and let programmers sign on to be your staff. Then give them a big cut of any fees they make.
Anyone interested in helping me flush out this idea? It might be a viable startup, no?
Another twist on this is that many big companies will pay their employees say a free ipod if they recruit someone to join the company, but will pay a recruiter 20K or more.
That never seemed fair to me. I wonder if a twist on this is that the employee can refer his friend to the recruiter and then go to his employer and say I have a friend perfect for this job. He's represented by recruiter X. Then recruiter X splits the fee with the employee.
One possible (but not great) excuse is that there is a perverse incentive going on if the employee has any say over potential hires. If I get 20k every time one of my friends gets hired (and "lose" 20k each time a normal candidate gets hired) I have a huge incentive to not give a fully honest opinion about how good someone was during an interview.
Big companies can use their size as a workaround (ie, only let you refer candidates to other departments), but in startup land this incentive will probably be very real.
That always seemed a bit odd to me as well, though I had a client a few years ago that had a points system where different referrals had points value (director = 10, sr engineer = 7, etc.) which they could use to get cars, cash, etc. It seemed to work well but didn't distract employees.
There are laws and liabilities to consider. Also, recruiters are essentially sales people. They need to have a degree of sales ability. You need to be able to sell the benefits of a job to a candidate and the benefits of a candidate to a hiring manager. Also, decent recruiters spend a huge amount of time on the phone. Not just calling every and any candidate that looks remotely decent but simply trying to get through to a select few people takes a crazy amount of time.
hard to say if the ctos/dev managers would "elevate" a potential candidate if the recruiter was a programmer, or if the cv would be in the pile with the rest of them.
It's interesting he starts with the claim he needs to find talented people with technical skills and then immediately starts talking about his need to cyberstalk the personal lives of candidates in order to disqualify those whose beliefs and hobbies he disagrees with.
I don't want to cyberstalk anybody. I want to see what projects they're interested in, what technologies they're loving, what they're hating.
My twitter feed has large amounts of swearing at Jenkins. Says a lot about me and my attitude to code (I love CI, I hate configuring Tomcat, etc.).
If there's nothing there of tech interest, and there's lots of poems to the candidate's other half, that tells me something far more interesting than a CV can.
And my point is that the recruiters will never let me see that. They'll never let me get an understanding beyond one side of A4 with all personal information removed.
How do you connect to an individual in 2012 without some inkling of them online? What value is the recruiter really adding by deliberately blocking my access to that info?
How would the recruiter be deliberately blocking this?
Out of people I know most of them keep their privacy settings pretty tight on things like facebook and twitter so that only their friends can see. So unless the recruiter has befriended them on these networks the recruiter wouldn't know anyway. If someone is using social networking sites to write poems to their other half I can understand they might find it somewhat creepy to give a recruiter or employer access to that.
The type of content they have on their twitter/FB is going to depend on what they use it for primarily and who their friends are.
I don't use FB but if I did I would mainly to communicate with people I know in real life, most of whom are not technical. So I wouldn't see any point in subjecting them to rants about Tomcat6 or whatever because they wouldn't understand or care.
Maybe if I lived in SV and all of my friends were developers at startups then I would post about this stuff, but I don't know what exactly that would signal?
If I want to discuss technical stuff I post on HN, if I wanted to write more thought out longform stuff I would create a blog which I would then add to my CV.
Great, so I'd love to see your HN profile, your github profile, etc.
I don't want to see stuff for the sake of being nosey. I want to understand you better, and to have a better place to start the interview other than "how was your journey here today?"
I think maybe you are reading too much into what people post online. Some people simply share more than others or share different stuff.
For example, here on HN some people link their profiles to their real life identities and talk about stuff that they are working on with their startups or side projects or whatever.
You also get a lot of people like me who post under pseudonyms and just use HN as a platform for ranting about mostly trivial pedantic stuff as a bit of fun.
That doesn't mean I'm not working on stuff, it just means that the stuff I'm working on I don't really feel like talking about them on here. And I don't want some silly comment I write on here affect the stuff I am working on.
The way I write HN comments is completely different to the way I would write a publicity piece for something I was working from for example.
Of course if I was applying for a job I would provide as much info as possible on what I am working on, on my CV.
Basically a CV is a way of saying "here is everything I think is relevant". Perhaps that does give you a one sided view of somebody. On the other hand if your potential employer has access to everything you write online to your friends, then there is a strong incentive not to write anything online to them at all, lest some stupid comment you wrote at 3AM whilst drunk get taken out of context.
There is also the question of which profiles of somebodies you want to see? Maybe you want to see their HN profile, but what about their 4Chan or Reddit account? What about their online dating profile? What about the profile they set up some gay cruising website? Where do you draw the line?
Most developers can't write a CV for shit. Part of the problem is that because they know recruiters are so heavily involved in the process, they cram it with technology acronyms that they barely touched once, just to get through the filters.
A github profile is far more useful to me than a CV.
I've seen CVs that were absolutely dire, and so I was about to pass before I saw the github URL, I checked out their work and it was solid, so I wanted to talk to them.
If you don't want to share what you're doing, that's fine. You're just not going to get a job with me. You're not going to get a job at a lot of startups, as it happens.
That's your choice. I'm not forcing you into it, but I think you and your career would benefit if we moved as an industry to CV-less employment - github, HN, Twitter, whatever, are all far more helpful than knowing what grades you got at University, and 4 bullet-points covering several years of what you did working for a previous employer, for example.
Developers do generally write bad resumes/CVs, and the tech acronyms and buzzwords are probably more intended to get the attention of both human drone scanners and applicant tracking systems that score resumes based on keywords. I think the software industry is moving away from resumes/CVs as we currently know them, and will soon be at a point where someone will list some companies, a brief narrative profile, links to a couple accounts, and access to various code.
You also get a lot of people like me who post under pseudonyms and just use HN as a platform for ranting about mostly trivial pedantic stuff as a bit of fun.
It actually does sound like you are trying to cyberstalk people and pass judgement on their work ethic based on what they do outside of work, in their personal lives. I find it distasteful that this is increasingly considered acceptable during the hiring process, and it's partially for this reason that I keep almost no online record of my day-to-day life.
I have a barebones facebook page, which I primarily use for privately messaging old friends who prefer facebook over normal e-mail. I do not use twitter or involve myself in any publicly identifiable way with message boards or mailing lists. This may be 2012, but I know quite a few people who do not even have facebook accounts.
So I'm curious - how does someone like you react when an applicant tells you he has no online presence for you to stalk? Would you say that speaks volumes about his competency for your job as well, or would you try to make do with the information in their CV? Just curious.
Often by modifying the candidates resume without asking.
[edit]
Example: I have a friend with lots of industry experience, who also happens to have a PhD. A recruiter removed the PhD info from his resume and submitted it to a company. After flying out and going through a half-day interview process a certain topic came up and he said "Oh, my Thesis topic was related to that" To which the manager said "Oh, we don't hire people with PhDs" and the interview was over.
Obviously there is plenty of stupidity to go around here, but recruiters regularly remove (or move to a 2nd page) things from resumes that they know would immediately disqualify a candidate and they do so without the candidates knowledge.
We know that when you mention stalking up their "barbaric rituals" you don't mean that you want this sort of employee because of the way you have phrased "barbaric rituals". You want to eliminate them from consideration. What are barbaric rituals? It is a well known phrase used to describe religious practices one doesn't like. So we are left to guess which ones you might mean. Possibly it could be photos of the Day of Ashua, the Shia islam festival where they cut their children's heads with swords. This seems a long shot though since most developers don't post this sort of thing to their Facebook page. I also don't see photos of the Bulgarian dog spinning ritual on pages, which is the #3 google hit for "barbaric ritual". I do though see the occasional photo of brit ceremonies (jewish circumcision) on people's facebook accounts, and it's also the #1 google hit for "barbaric ritual" because this phrase is very often used to describe it on various web forums by anti-circumcision advocates, nearly all of whom for which their anti-circumcision stance is just a veiled attempt to justify their deep seated hatred of muslims and jews.
Reading what you wrote, it in essence says "Jews and Muslims need not apply". You'll of course insist that is not the case since that would look bad, but that is why you wrote "barbaric rituals" rather than specify what you were really getting at explicitly.
On to Facebook stalking in general. As far as candidate's Facebook pages where they communicate private things with friends and families, you as employer are neither friend nor family, and their Facebook account is none of your damn business. That you think it is your business shows that you are a control freak who can't mind his own business, and that your company is a hellhole to work at.
I am speaking here as someone with hiring authority who has hired hundreds of very talented people. I do not need to know their religion, their barbaric practices, their baby photos, their friends list, or their poetry in order to evaluate their technical ability. And you know what? I have no problems recruiting the best, and I don't use recruiters.
Companies that have problems finding talent always have attitude problems and deep systematic problems within their firms.
How to find talent? It's easy. Here are some tips I have used, which are not comprehensive, they are just a starting point for how to wise up to the right attitude.
* Make sure one's firm is not a lousy place to work. If you are not sure, it is probably a lousy place. If you ever say "why do I work with idiots" then it definitely is.
* Make sure one's firm pays at least at the 75th percentile and above for one's area for talent because the fact is that the average talent is quite poor.
* Be upfront about compensation. If there is a job ad somewhere, state clearly the salary range and benefits including if full relocation is paid.
* Pay full relocation after a hire and interview expenses before a hire, that is just common sense. If the employee would have to sell his house at a loss in a down market to move because the market is underwater, the company buys the house from the employee to cover the difference so he doesn't lose money selling, which can make it impossible to move. When the employee is moving from a cheap housing area to an expensive one, signing bonuses can be used to cover the difference in housing prices between the two areas so the employee can move into a house comparable to the one he left.
Lousy places to work will go haywire when reading these sorts of tips and start making excuses about why some or all of the above are impossible policies.
Yowch. That's a pretty extreme interpretation of the guy's words. Especially as you refuse to let him deny it by stating in advance that a denial would be false.
You're talking shit. As another poster has pointed out, you will refuse to let me deny what I actually meant, because you will insist I had no reason to obfuscate unless my intention was perverse and bigoted, but I needed to disguise the fact.
"barbaric rituals" was a flippant and throw-away comment inspired by the fact that quite a few developers really, really like emacs. That's enough barbaric ritual for me.
I had no thought or concept of religion in mind when using either that phrase, or penguin-murdering. I was being deliberately dramatic in an attempt at humour. I was pointing out the irony of how there's actually nothing to be ashamed of by talking to your potential employer in terms of who you actually are, so why do recruiters try and hide it?
You have cynically twisted my words, in as insulting and degrading a manner as possible. You're wrong, you know nothing about me, and the Jews and Muslims I've hired in the past would happily correct your interpretation of my character if given the chance.
You're also within a whisker of libelling me, so, you know, please turn it down a bit.
On a related subject, the only recruiter I've ever interacted with that I thought was earning her paycheck (she cold-emailed me) was from Facebook. Her email showed that she had done some research on my startups and read through my (public) Facebook profile, discussing some of my favorite hobbies (motorcycles and travel).
I still declined, but I actually wrote a nice response instead of dustbinning it as spam.
I suspect a lot of what differentiates a good recruiter from a bad recruiter is the ability to connect on a personal level. Even though it's obvious what the motivations are, it's still better to [pretend to] be human. Perhaps the recruiting field needs to draw some lessons from online dating.
Recruiting is like dating. The problem is still not solved - but I also think it will never be solved. The nature of process requires involvement on both parties and that can be outsourced only to a very small extend.
So in dating you have guys saying: "I want to date supermodel. Lets go this dating site ... after a couple of months... oh online dating sucks it needs disruption".
agree, except that with recruiting anyone you want to date is almost always in an existing relationship so you have to first convince them to break up before you can start dating, thus making it even more complicated.
We actually took many principles from online dating services to form betacave.com and think we have a solution that can suffice the needs of both parties (the site is up and functional but not quite ready for primetime; I'll do a formal Show HN next week, but was too relevant to this thread to not share).
A good recruiter is good on both sides - people want to have their resume in the recruiter's portfolio, and companies want that recruiter's card on their hiring manager's desk. Because of this, technology has only made recruiting more empowering for good recruiters - they can manage more clients on both ends, can schedule easier, and are more agile.
I've got two particular recruiters in mind, but I know that with either of them, if I quit my job on a Friday both my employer (who works with one of them) and myself would have interviews lined up on Monday if that's what we were looking for.
Just because there are a lot of bad recruiters out there (for the same reason there are a lot of bad realtors, or marketers, or hair stylists), doesn't mean there isn't immense value in the good recruiters.
This rant is just a rant, probably the result of one too many recruiter emails in the inbox on a Friday morning.
From my experience (financial technology, very hard to find finance jobs in London without going through recruiters), the main qualities that a good recruiter has is that they're willing to take time to get to know you, they're willing to admit when they don't understand something in the spec they've got and will ask you about it rather than trying to bluf, and that they still take your calls and take time to talk to you when interviews they've set up haven't panned out.
A good recruiter is interested in a long term relationship - they know that people tend to change jobs every 18 months to 2 years (in my industry at least) and they want to be the first person you'll call each time you get itchy feet and because they know you, you're easy for them to sell to your next employer and they know what type of company you'll be happy working for.
The three best recruiter's I've used have all done one simple thing that got the relationship off to a good start - spending a solid hour or so sitting down and getting to know me over a coffee or drink within a week or two of first contacting me. This is a far cry from the recruiters who call me on an almost daily basis who 'chat' for five minutes and then I never hear from again.
The problem is not that recruiting as an industry is obsolete.
The problem is that you can't find a good recruiter based on your needs (price, specialty, experience level, etc).
The quality of recruiters is variable, but the need for them is constant. I appreciate more systems to post jobs and review candidates directly, but after LinkedIn and Craigslist, the value diminishes. I've also worked with recruiters who are highly qualified and present good candidates.
A solution would be a system to help you find a better recruiter and create more transparency in that industry.
I can envision a system whereby you can rate your interactions with recruiters (ie., Yelp for recruiting).
"I used [recruiter] and they found me [x] candidates in [y] days. The quality of the candidates was [z] and I [hired/didnt hire] someone that they presented. I [would/wouldn't] work with them again. They charged [x] per [candidate/hour/placement]"
When a recruiter contacts you, and knows nothing about your [Technology/Industry/Company], you can look them up on a site and rate them. You would rate them on these vectors, and then you could build a search tool that helps you find the right recruiter. ("Find me a BioTech Recruiter in Seattle who works with Genentech on a flat fee" etc)
This would also have a benefit keep recruiters more honest. The good recruiters would rise to the top, and potentially get more leads. You wouldn't have to waste as much time with poor recruiters since they would be outed pretty quickly. Frustration levels (as evinced by this thread) are pretty high when incompetent recruiters waste your time.
"I can go onto LinkedIn myself and harvest profiles (as agency recs have to). I can "touch base" with 100+ developers myself if I need to. If that's all the agency recs are doing, they're not adding value"
Exactly. I still don't understand (after 9 years of being in industry and consulting the last 5) why it is too much for a hiring manager to spend some time himeself to vet a candidate esepcially if they will be critical to the team,project and company's success. As much as I hate to work with thetse agency recruiters, the underlying issue is not them. The issue is the employers who depend on these recruiters even though they rant about how bad the quality is etc.
Employers: it is simple. To hire the best, you need to do a lot more than asking agency/vendors to send u resumes/cvs. Interview your recruiter first. Test them if they know and understand what and who you really need. Just saying "PHP developer" doesn't cut it. Provide more specifics. Any good candidate will be more inclined to talk to you.
"I want to see the candidate's twitter feeds, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, activity on mailing lists and github, etc."
This is the very reason I keep all my social network to myself and not under my name. Unless I tell you what my Twitter page and Facebook page are, you'll never find them and I do this on purpose.
I agree this industry needs some help. A company I was recently working for developed an application for the pharmaceutical sales industry which assigns a score to each sales person based on various criteria, which is then tracked by employers looking hire the best talent. As soon as I saw it, I thought it could just as easily be used in tech field for developers or any other technical position.
This is just a start, but at least its something that's gaining traction in a industry that is similar in size and revenue generation.
I sometimes think I could eventually go into recruiting. As a freelancer I have met many many developers, I try to stay in touch with many of them, and I know what they can do, what they dislike to do, and so forth. And I know the technology. But so far the engineering itself is making me happy. However, one day perhaps..
I think it is interesting that the author mentions, "I want to see the candidate's twitter feeds, Facebook pages, LinkedIn profiles, activity on mailing lists and github, etc."
I found TalentBin.com comes the closest to solving this need. This is a screenshot that shows all the profile information accessible on a TB profile- http://screencast.com/t/DgePgGRj
Not only do you get access to what they are tweeting about, but you also can see their personal blogs, google+, Meetup, and Stackoverflow? http://screencast.com/t/SfFqIMXWIzlg
So far nothing comes close to Talentbin in terms of information quantity and quality.
And if that isn't enough- TalentBin.com recently added the entire patent database. Soon will come the day where we hire by looking at only implicit web information and resumes are long forgotten.
I recruit technical people. Our clients seem to like working with us. We try to treat job seekers with respect. We take an ethical approach to everything we do. But like any business, we do of course go to market to sell our services directly to the target clients, and we go directly to the people we wish to sell. No apologies to anyone for that. The reason recruitment exists is because employers pay money for it. If anyone has an issue with recruiters then stop whining about it and instead make sure your company stops using them. People who whine about recruiters but still get jobs through them or work for a company that hires from recruiters are like people who criticise the oil industry but are happy to drive a car and consume the thousands of oil derived products. Hypocrites.
In the two decades I have been consulting, I notice that in the past few years, many of the job shop calls I receive sound as though they come from offshore call centers (I am attempting to put this delicately). I invariably ignore these, for several reasons. The first is that they tend to act put upon if one asks for a job description that goes beyond a few acronyms or "Mathematica and Ph.D. required," as if I were being uncooperative to ask for something more informative than the few matching keywords they have in front of them. They seem to be interested in receiving the goahead to send a resume somewhere on the basis of a keyword search. Asking for details eats into their time. Secondly, they tend to offer lowball rates and seem as if they go in and out of business.
Curation, Transparency, Quality & NO CONTACTS. 100% agree, I think this rant perfectly sums up how this industry could work. A great user experience and reasonable rates for finding quality people, that's a service people will happily pay for... and they are. Which is why we build Dragonfly (http://dragonflylist.com) but we're not the only ones that have realised this. Its a big market, plenty of room for other niche/geo specific recruitment solutions.
If I were you, I'd drop the "Dragonfly IS $YOURCOUNTRY Freelancers." It's fairly confusing, given that your firm is in Melbourne and almost inevitably will not find freelancing clients outside the Anglosphere.
as i've been talking more and more to developers, i keep hearing these same complaints about recruiters. I'm finally trying to make a difference by launching matchist.com, which will be a different kind of recruiting. we'll be catering to freelance developers by vetting projects they want to work on. we think the process is simple: tell us what projects you want to work on, what kinds of clients you'd like, and we'll send them your way.
What you're expecting from a recruiter who are trying to catch good writers by checking their spelling, punctuation and knowledge (but not the meaning) of long words?)
Writer could be measured only by (the value of) his texts. It is not about the knowledge of grammar, even if it is a relevant knowledge.
And, of course, appearance and manners of a potential writer have almost nothing to do with his talent.
I feel your pain, which is why I wanted to address it to some extent, and why I wrote that post.
I hope that thread dies, and the discussion moves here.
Can you not see however, that the recruiters are all over the list, hitting reply-all, and not really helping the list at all, and it's because of that, that we need to make it clear why they're not wanted, why they shouldn't be on the list in the first place, and why we want our list back?
Don't be part of the problem (leaving the list so making the recruiter/coder ratio even worse), be part of the solution. Re-join the list, and let's start some interesting tech discussions. I'll start. Check the list in 20 minutes.
I wrote a response to this at my blog jobtipsforgeeks.com. For all of you that want to see what actions can be taken to disrupt recruiting, (hiring an agent, flat fees, etc.) check it out. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535547
I'm a former tech recruiter. A few of you know that already. I hear these recruiter rants more than most. Most of it is justified however it's all noise and no feasible solutions.
That great little spiel the author mentioned at the end? The one where he said he would shout my name from the rooftops if I took that approach? How, exactly, does that fit in with I certainly don't want cold-calls or cold emails, ever. If I can't introduce myself to the guy, how am I ever meant to prove I'm not one of the many useless bottom-feeders he deals with on a daily basis?
I've blogged extensively about the problem: http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/6/15/all-that-is-wrong-wit...
The facts are simple, regardless of the fact that most recruiters can't even spell PHP, the industry is worth hundreds of billions globally and isn't going anywhere fast and it's certainly not innovating any time soon. Sure their marketing methods are improving and their sales pitches becoming sleaker but ultimately, you are paying a ridiculous sum of money to get a guy with no clue about tech to spend a week or two on the phone harassing every developer that comes even close to some of the tricky but cool sounding words on your job spec.
My prediction: more and more tech companies adopt internal recruitment teams and someone will actually create a useful, multipurpose, recruiter free (cough print: http://hackerjobs.co.uk cough) job site or web service that eliminates, crowd sources or automates the leg work that you are paying an incompetent human thousands of dollars to do on your behalf.