9 ms·

Should tech recruiters learn to code? (2014)

31 points by gk1 9y ago

leed25d 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    Being a recruiter requires pretty much the same skills as sales. If sales sounds attract I've to you go into recruiting
mailslot 9y ago
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.
alkonaut 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
scarface74 9y ago
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 9y ago
  The phrase is "I couldn't care less." As in: You already care the minimum amount.
  - Stratoscope 9y ago
    "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 9y ago
      The first result of that search confirms that it's "I couldn't care less."
      - Stratoscope 9y ago
        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."
j45 9y ago
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 9y ago
  Well ".Net developer" is almost always synonymous with "C# web/desktop dev".
  - j45 9y ago
    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 :)
gaetanrickter 9y ago
Why would you teach someone how to code when they like talking on the phone all the time?
godzillabrennus 9y ago
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.
- LordHumungous 9y ago
  I think you are misunderstanding the recruiter's role. Their job is simply to bring people into the funnel. Deciding whether it's a good fit is entirely up to the candidate and the company. If you let them waste your time with a job that's not good for you, then that's your fault for not asking enough questions up front.
  - Clubber 9y ago
    They also filter, yet don't really know anything about what they are filtering.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- brandall10 9y ago
  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.
uptownhr 9y ago
I don't think they should learn, it would take too much time. But hire tech recruiters that are already programmers.
- uptownhr 9y ago
  They can research more into the position and understand better what a qualified candidate is.
- LordHumungous 9y ago
  No offense to recruiters but who would be a recruiter when they can be a programmer?
  - NoCoastCoder 9y ago
    People who don't like money I guess.
danschumann 9y ago
I think everyone should learn to code, but dancers probably think everyone should learn to dance. Dancing is fun, coding is fun.
- manmal 9y ago
  You made me smirk, but actually OP just wants ballet bookers to know the difference between a Cabriole and a Cambré, and not everyone.
id122015 9y ago
I dont even allow recruiters to interview me. I never met a male recruiter and that is another symptom of the problem.
scandox 9y ago
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.
djtriptych 9y ago
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.
andrewstuart 9y ago
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.
ryanmarsh 9y ago
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.
DavidWoof 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
alexanderstears 9y ago
They should. But I'd like to see recruiters understand the difference between timezones and web development / software development / data science & excel macros first.
slackingoff2017 9y ago
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.

31 points by gk1 9y ago

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 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  Being a recruiter requires pretty much the same skills as sales. If sales sounds attract I've to you go into recruiting

mailslot 9y ago

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.

alkonaut 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

scarface74 9y ago

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 9y ago
The phrase is "I couldn't care less." As in: You already care the minimum amount.
- Stratoscope 9y ago
  "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 9y ago
    The first result of that search confirms that it's "I couldn't care less."
    - Stratoscope 9y ago
      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."

j45 9y ago

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 9y ago
Well ".Net developer" is almost always synonymous with "C# web/desktop dev".
- j45 9y ago
  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 :)

gaetanrickter 9y ago

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

godzillabrennus 9y ago

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.

LordHumungous 9y ago
I think you are misunderstanding the recruiter's role. Their job is simply to bring people into the funnel. Deciding whether it's a good fit is entirely up to the candidate and the company. If you let them waste your time with a job that's not good for you, then that's your fault for not asking enough questions up front.
- Clubber 9y ago
  They also filter, yet don't really know anything about what they are filtering.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
brandall10 9y ago
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.

uptownhr 9y ago

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

uptownhr 9y ago
They can research more into the position and understand better what a qualified candidate is.
LordHumungous 9y ago
No offense to recruiters but who would be a recruiter when they can be a programmer?
- NoCoastCoder 9y ago
  People who don't like money I guess.

danschumann 9y ago

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

manmal 9y ago
You made me smirk, but actually OP just wants ballet bookers to know the difference between a Cabriole and a Cambré, and not everyone.

id122015 9y ago

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

scandox 9y ago

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.

djtriptych 9y ago

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.

andrewstuart 9y ago

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.

ryanmarsh 9y ago

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.

DavidWoof 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

alexanderstears 9y ago

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

slackingoff2017 9y ago

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.