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> Truly, in over a decade of working with all types of recruiters, I have never seen a recruiter add value for any party at any time. It’s pure loss to engage w

> Truly, in over a decade of working with all types of recruiters, I have never seen a recruiter add value for any party at any time. It’s pure loss to engage with recruiters. Strong disagree. Good recruiters work for employers by maintaining a strong network of candidates across a number of fields, and also by finding candidates for roles that are cheaper/better than others because they come from recruitment pools outside those traditionally used for the role. Example: a company might be looking for a Sales Engineering role - typically pretty difficult positions to recruit because there's a small pool of candidates. But, if you can find someone in consulting or traditional development/engineering that has the right skills, they can be brought on relatively cheaply. Good recruiters know this, and they know how to find and evaluate those candidates so the company doesn't have to. By the same token, recruiters that I maintain a relationship with have made my last three job searches significantly quicker and easier - I know them, they know me and they know who is looking for what. They've added significant value for me, and for the employers that I work with.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
Your comment reads like buzzwordy double-speak. Private recruiters _absolutely_ do not know sophisticated nuances of the skill set for different organizational sales engineering needs. Hardly any of the managers or executives in that company would even know the skills or experience they need for sales engineering, let alone how to recognize them in someone not already working in that position. It’s frankly crazy to hear this, just knowing how incompetent even the most prestige-dripping boutique recruitment firms are, how many totally inappropriate candidates they foist onto firms (I used to run all recruitment for my team at an asset management company and know very well how unhelpful recruiting pipelines are). The other thing is that these types of recruiting pipelines are exactly the well-worn, used-by-everyone pipelines. You mention various times that this approach somehow draws up unusual or untapped recruits, but it’s exactly the opposite. You’re just playing musical chairs with the same pipe of recruits that everyone else is looking at. As a final note, I appreciate how you blow right past the idea that recruiters are supposed to be negotiating in good faith on behalf of the candidate, even going as far as to suggest the recruiter would disingenuously represent a job to someone who shades outside that skill area just for the sake of “getting them cheaply” and not getting them a salary that would more fairly reflect the actual labor value they would be adding. You’ve pretty much made a great case for exactly why nobody should be working with these recruiters. The employer’s going to end up with a wrong-skills / wrong-experience candidate who is sold on one job but walks into the real job and quickly sees they didn’t want it, while earning below market compensation, and everyone’s unhappy in a year.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

Your comment reads like buzzwordy double-speak. Private recruiters _absolutely_ do not know sophisticated nuances of the skill set for different organizational sales engineering needs. Hardly any of the managers or executives in that company would even know the skills or experience they need for sales engineering, let alone how to recognize them in someone not already working in that position. It’s frankly crazy to hear this, just knowing how incompetent even the most prestige-dripping boutique recruitment firms are, how many totally inappropriate candidates they foist onto firms (I used to run all recruitment for my team at an asset management company and know very well how unhelpful recruiting pipelines are). The other thing is that these types of recruiting pipelines are exactly the well-worn, used-by-everyone pipelines. You mention various times that this approach somehow draws up unusual or untapped recruits, but it’s exactly the opposite. You’re just playing musical chairs with the same pipe of recruits that everyone else is looking at. As a final note, I appreciate how you blow right past the idea that recruiters are supposed to be negotiating in good faith on behalf of the candidate, even going as far as to suggest the recruiter would disingenuously represent a job to someone who shades outside that skill area just for the sake of “getting them cheaply” and not getting them a salary that would more fairly reflect the actual labor value they would be adding. You’ve pretty much made a great case for exactly why nobody should be working with these recruiters. The employer’s going to end up with a wrong-skills / wrong-experience candidate who is sold on one job but walks into the real job and quickly sees they didn’t want it, while earning below market compensation, and everyone’s unhappy in a year.