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Recruiter here: I challenge you to look at what the demands are of each tech company today. Everyone from Google, Facebook, and little consulting firms don't ca

by qaad 10y ago

Recruiter here: I challenge you to look at what the demands are of each tech company today. Everyone from Google, Facebook, and little consulting firms don't care about people either. The reason why so many recruiters suck is because so many of the organizations do not get recruiting and have put "top of the funnel" sales metrics to help solve their problems. If you want your recruiter to care about long term relationships and reputation maybe tech companies need to do the same.

busterarm 10y ago
While on the one hand I agree with you, Google, Facebook and most consulting firms (I doubt they're that little) don't need you to fill their recruiting pipeline. You know they pay well, so obviously you're more likely to want to place with them. When my small team went for our last engineering hire (a senior), we had to actually seek out a recruiter on our own to find someone for us. We posted in all of the usual places and went to meetups to network -- recruiters just didn't bother to connect with us until we cold-called them going "we're offering this much money". Only two of the ten or so we spoke to would we consider using again. I'm sorry, but your profession is generally lazy.
- deleted 10y ago
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- mathattack 10y ago
  Not as much lazy as following incentives. They would rather invest their time (and network) on higher paying jobs that are likely to close. Scenario 1: A larger company can pay 20% * 120K on a hire, that's $24,000. Let's say that there's a 1/3 chance that the headhunter can fill it. Expected value is $8K. Let's say it takes 100 hours of work, then it's $80/hour. Scenario 2: A smaller company won't pay as much, will take more work finding people interested, and they may not agree to take the job. Then it could be 20% * 100K = 20K. Perhaps a 1/4 chance of closing the deal = 5K expected value. 200 hours to find someone = $25/hour. The recruiter would rather do the first rather than the second.
kafkaesq 10y ago
Everyone from Google, Facebook, and little consulting firms don't care about people either. Agreed - internal recruiters are about 99.99% as bad (and useless, and often counterproductive) as the external kind. Just there's a huge bubble going on right now, whereby many companies (particularly startups) are completely oblivious t this fact.
jackson23 10y ago
You are right about the long term relationship needs to be a two way street. Tangentially, not all recruiters are as good as you. Over 90% of the recruiter calls I get are from middle eastern/Indian/Pakistan native-speaking people that work for recruiting companies that are basically spam calling every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Minor issues with that, but more importantly they are another [unnecessary] layer. For instance, Tata Consulting, a very large Indian-based company, is looking for a SharePoint consultant to work full-time FTE for them...I got a call from a recruiter that was basically the fourth middleman in the transaction...his company was to be paid $x%, the company that brought his company in was supposed to get $x%, and so forth...all promised to be paid from my work. Fee-splitting should be banned if it is more than two layers between hiring company and contractor. Further, these types of companies have no direct relationship with the end client so there are multiple translation layers (opportunities for mistakes) before my resume gets in front of the client, if it does at all. Also, I typically don't contract with out-of-state third party recruiters due to laws and jurisdiction (company must/should have nexus in the state the work is performed in). In my humble experience, the real issue is some/most internal HR folks need to be trained on technology and how not to pass on a resume that doesn't have a keyword they don't understand even though it is included in another keyword they don't understand (looking for someone that has javascript experience but passed because Node.js and jQuery were listed more times than javascript). Hiring/finding contractors is broken, but it doesn't have to be.

by qaad 10y ago

busterarm 10y ago

While on the one hand I agree with you, Google, Facebook and most consulting firms (I doubt they're that little) don't need you to fill their recruiting pipeline. You know they pay well, so obviously you're more likely to want to place with them. When my small team went for our last engineering hire (a senior), we had to actually seek out a recruiter on our own to find someone for us. We posted in all of the usual places and went to meetups to network -- recruiters just didn't bother to connect with us until we cold-called them going "we're offering this much money". Only two of the ten or so we spoke to would we consider using again. I'm sorry, but your profession is generally lazy.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mathattack 10y ago
Not as much lazy as following incentives. They would rather invest their time (and network) on higher paying jobs that are likely to close. Scenario 1: A larger company can pay 20% * 120K on a hire, that's $24,000. Let's say that there's a 1/3 chance that the headhunter can fill it. Expected value is $8K. Let's say it takes 100 hours of work, then it's $80/hour. Scenario 2: A smaller company won't pay as much, will take more work finding people interested, and they may not agree to take the job. Then it could be 20% * 100K = 20K. Perhaps a 1/4 chance of closing the deal = 5K expected value. 200 hours to find someone = $25/hour. The recruiter would rather do the first rather than the second.

kafkaesq 10y ago

Everyone from Google, Facebook, and little consulting firms don't care about people either. Agreed - internal recruiters are about 99.99% as bad (and useless, and often counterproductive) as the external kind. Just there's a huge bubble going on right now, whereby many companies (particularly startups) are completely oblivious t this fact.

jackson23 10y ago

You are right about the long term relationship needs to be a two way street. Tangentially, not all recruiters are as good as you. Over 90% of the recruiter calls I get are from middle eastern/Indian/Pakistan native-speaking people that work for recruiting companies that are basically spam calling every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Minor issues with that, but more importantly they are another [unnecessary] layer. For instance, Tata Consulting, a very large Indian-based company, is looking for a SharePoint consultant to work full-time FTE for them...I got a call from a recruiter that was basically the fourth middleman in the transaction...his company was to be paid $x%, the company that brought his company in was supposed to get $x%, and so forth...all promised to be paid from my work. Fee-splitting should be banned if it is more than two layers between hiring company and contractor. Further, these types of companies have no direct relationship with the end client so there are multiple translation layers (opportunities for mistakes) before my resume gets in front of the client, if it does at all. Also, I typically don't contract with out-of-state third party recruiters due to laws and jurisdiction (company must/should have nexus in the state the work is performed in). In my humble experience, the real issue is some/most internal HR folks need to be trained on technology and how not to pass on a resume that doesn't have a keyword they don't understand even though it is included in another keyword they don't understand (looking for someone that has javascript experience but passed because Node.js and jQuery were listed more times than javascript). Hiring/finding contractors is broken, but it doesn't have to be.