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Hiring Without Agencies - Lessons Learned

78 points by ig1 16y ago

bostonpete 16y ago
This has been going on for a quite some time. There's another side-effect of this strategy that the author doesn't explicitly mention. Even if you're willing to pay the recruiter's fee, you'll sometimes get to the point of making an offer to a candidate and they'll essentially be offended by the offer, since it's lower than the amount listed in the recruiter-overhauled job description that they saw. I had one candidate ask me point-blank if I was low-balling him because I thought he was under-qualified in some way. It turns out that perception was based on the job description he saw and after I explained that the number he saw wasn't ours, he accepted the offer. But I refuse to work with that recruiter any more.
- Silhouette 16y ago
  That cuts both ways, though. A certain company around here was, at least for several months, advertising a large number of job vacancies with far above-market salaries quoted that got them to the top of the various agency lists. However, it became clear during the interview process that they had no intention of offering anything close to that level of salary under normal circumstances. They were also the kind of place that got very stressed if you declined to disclose your current compensation arrangements (as opposed to discussing what sort of compensation you might consider accepting if they offered the job). I'm not sure what happened with that round of recruitment; they were still advertising for a lot of similarly generic positions last time I looked, but all the specifics about salary etc. seemed to have disappeared. An agency that cut through that level of deception and advertised with a more realistic salary indicator might not have attracted as many initial candidates, but would probably have been more efficient for finding candidates who might actually accept a position if an offer was made, and it would have avoided degrading the employer's reputation in a "small world" employment market, too.
- bugsy 16y ago
  Seems pretty clear that the recruiter provided you with a very valuable service, that the qualified candidates you really wanted to make offers to weren't willing to respond to ads citing the insulting salary range you thought you could get away with. The simple fact is that if you can not afford to hire qualified developers, you should not be in business. Please leave software development to the professionals who are able to make money at it.
  - bostonpete 16y ago
    Are you a recruiter or something...? This seems like a pretty hostile comment which is based on a number of assumptions by you. Why do you assume that we can't afford to hire developers or that we offered an insulting salary? The developer accepted the offer -- he was initially disappointed because of the unrealistic range that the recruiter advertised. Also, the fact that the candidate responded to the recruiter's ad is indicative of nothing. If I post an interesting job description and 3 recruiters repost it with the details tweaked, many candidates (I know some avoid recruiters) are apt to respond to the first one of the four that they come across. Your comment about making money seems completely out of left-field. We do make money (been in the black for a decade or so) and if we didn't, your comment seems unnecessarily harsh. So with that comment you ran the risk of being wrong, a jerk, or both.
jasonkester 16y ago
Is it possible that this experience was influenced in any way by the fact that they're trying to find a "Senior iPhone Developer" for under £40k? That's ~$65k, and thus roughly $100k shy of what you'd need to offer before you started to pique the interest of any good iPhone Developers in the current market.
- patio11 16y ago
  This is the same thing I think every time someone says "Why is it so danged hard to find a developer that knows SEO or an SEO who can program their way out of a paper bag. It's like nobody has even heard of any, when we'd gladly reward any with $80k and all the soda they could drink!" If you think you are paying market, and you can't find a candidate despite using all the normal channels, you by definition are not paying market.
  - mgkimsal 16y ago
    Spot on. I've been in this field for too long, and can bring too much value, to sell my services at way under value, even if it includes a lot of free drinks. It's hard for companies to recognize extra value they could possibly be getting from senior/older developers, but also requires a commitment that they actually try to get extra value from them. Whether that's proactively, or just reacting positively to observations/input, and I've not found many companies interested in doing that. It's cheaper/easier/faster to hire the younger kids looking for their first or second job. That used to be me, and I understand those advantages, but I also see the problems associated with those sorts of hires. An ideal org would have a nice balance of all experience levels, but few that I run in to have that balance.
- ido 16y ago
  I don't know about the UK in particular, but salaries in Europe are in general lower than in the US. 40k gbp is almost 46k eur, which is not a bad salary in Vienna.
  - tomjen3 16y ago
    Yeah, but thats still more than 11000 pound less than the starting salary for a Danish computer programmer. For a senior programmer, thats a joke.
mgkimsal 16y ago
I've had numerous interesting interactions with recruiters over the years, as well as directly with hiring companies. The biggest benefit agencies seem to offer is initial screening, but it's also where they seem to fall down the most. When a recruiter can't tell me anything more than "MySQL, PHP, JavaScript", they don't really understand the client's needs or the position involved. I find that perhaps 1 in 10 or 15 calls I get from a recruiter involves someone with a clue. Sometimes they know the tech and can talk about the client's architecture and needs, other times they will admit they're not technical, but they have had some dealings with the company directly (often for extended periods) and have a good idea about the type of person who would be a good fit. But it's still rare that I'm talking to a recruiter who, imo, is actually providing some degree of service to the hiring company (let alone my side of the equation). More companies might be able to 'go direct' without needing a recruiter, but many don't know how to sell their own company to a potential employee. Money helps, certainly, and they'd be able to offer more if they weren't involving a recruiting agency, but it typically takes a committed involvement from the company to do the initial screening. I used to think recruiters had no place, and that companies should always go direct. I've found that strategically, it makes sense in a few cases if they need a specific skill and don't want to broadcast to the wider market (their competition) about upcoming plans. However, those instances are pretty rare.
shawnee_ 16y ago
I’ve got Google alerts setup for our ad, and I’m seeing it being cloned all over the place by different recruitment agencies. Basically, they copy your ad, remove all your details so candidates don’t know who you are, and then post it up all over the place. This happens for people who post resumes, too. My experience was so bad that I ended up removing my entire profile from LinkedIn after one-too-many harassing phone calls from agencies. They are evil, but I haven't found a way around them yet. My current employment gig is one where an agency is marking up my hourly rate 100 percent; they indeed charge the company double what they pay me. It infuriates me, but there is very little I can do. Agencies specialize in one thing only and that is: information distortion. Doesn't matter if it's a recruitment agency, real estate agency, or "talent scout" for one of the glam professions like music or acting. The wider the distortions become between buyer and seller, the more the agency can leech. They're good at it too: flooding job boards, cloning candidate resumes or company job descriptions and twisting them however they wish. And it works! Good for them, crappy for us. Agencies are very good at convincing one party that a "Senior iPhone developer" or an "MBA who knows Linux and is an accounting whiz" is an elusive and rare creature, while simultaneously shaking their heads at "this job market" where any job offer is a good offer, and by golly -- stick with the agency, and they'll find you something better; once they're done sucking you dry for an hourly rate, they find you something "permanent" for 30-40 percent of your yearly salary offer, of course. P.S. I think the agency doesn't know I know how much they're robbing me: they're big on "keep this [hourly rate] confidential" which I am, technically . . . the number is; the percent is not. The only party that confidentiality benefits, though, is the agency. Makes no sense.
- gcb 16y ago
  I've seen contractors come and go working at a fortune 500 and just recently I've learned of those practices...
blacksmythe 16y ago
Changing the salary is obviously wrong. Other than that, finding developers for you that didn't see your ad and bringing them to your attention for a fee seems like an honest business (if not one I would be interesting in being in).
- ig1 16y ago
  Claiming you represent a company when you don't isn't honest.
dr_ 16y ago
The idea of agencies copying and pasting your ads is a bit shady of course, but the takeaway from this is pretty simple - you need to pay more.
- tobinator 16y ago
  Agree. The take-aways are: - Recruitment agencies that play dirty do so because they are unable to add real value. Avoid at all costs. - Offer the right salary for the job, and you might have more luck.
sjtgraham 16y ago
This is how I would have dealt with this situation: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346729 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346729
- biot 16y ago
  Exactly. Take the time and small expense to officially register the copyright. When they clone it and slap their name on it you can sue for damages and you'll win. It might even be a profitable business on its own if you act as intermediary for those actually posting jobs... a "job dilution protection service" that costs them nothing but makes you money. edit: at the very least, in the US you can issue a DMCA takedown notice.
vanessa 16y ago
Thanks for posting this - I think regardless of market rate you've identified a key problem in the hiring industry, especially in software. The incentives for recruitment agencies/headhunters to do ridiculously shady things like copy your ad and then sell you candidates (without even necessarily telling you they promised the candidates more money) are high because companies feel so lost in the hiring process, sometimes they are willing to pay. And they usually get burned/waste a lot more time and money (in my experience). Good for you for calling them out when they're clearly not providing a respectable service to you OR the jobseeker.
bugsy 16y ago
Your salary is absurdly ridiculously pathetically low given the things you were asking for. It almost seems like a joke or onion article. That's obviously why you had a problem and all the rest of the insights you are having about this don't really count since the ad would not be considered serious by any qualified candidate. Sorry.
tobinator 16y ago
I'm the one who posted up the job ad, and the who wrote the blog. As @ig1 said (from coderstack.co.uk), the salary is not that far off; £38K goes a lot further in Leeds than in London. Maybe "Middle-Weight iPhone Developer" would have been better.
Stormbringer 16y ago
For salary comparison, in 2001 a TRAINEE manager at McDonalds in London could earn £21,000 Now, back in 2001 when the tech bubble popped it was like one of those games where the music stops and there are too few chairs. All the people who'd been riding the contracting gravy train suddenly realised there were no more contracts† and they panicked. At that stage you would see the computer programmers who had a wife, girlfriend and a mortgage to support leap at a £25k job. On the other hand, Leeds (where I have also lived and worked) was enormously much cheaper than London in a couple of respects, such as real estate. One of the places I worked had an intern, great young guy, real go-getter, would do any dirty task you set before him (like network admin ick :D ) ... and he was on £10k. When I found that out, I was amazed. I asked him how he could afford that. turns out he lived in a shared house with lots of other students or recently ex-students, and they couldn't afford to turn the heating on in winter††. †They say that when New York sneezes, London catches a cold. They're right. All the big institutions slapped down an immediate ban on new hiring and no new contracts except for critical projects. Then after a couple of weeks it got upgraded to at least a six month ban on all hiring, even for critical projects (presumably for those they could fill them from people they already had). As contracts ended, they weren't renewed. It was brutal. ††For reference Leeds is one of those places where they get snow on the ground during winter
tobinator 16y ago
On a similar vein, amusing stories from another UK company http://recruitmental.com/ http://recruitmental.com/
MrDunham 16y ago
This is fantastic. You just delivered another selling point I hadn't even considered yet for our app (I'd say more about it, but I'd like it to be a little more done for a 'Show HN'). Much thanks!

78 points by ig1 16y ago

This has been going on for a quite some time. There's another side-effect of this strategy that the author doesn't explicitly mention. Even if you're willing to pay the recruiter's fee, you'll sometimes get to the point of making an offer to a candidate and they'll essentially be offended by the offer, since it's lower than the amount listed in the recruiter-overhauled job description that they saw. I had one candidate ask me point-blank if I was low-balling him because I thought he was under-qualified in some way. It turns out that perception was based on the job description he saw and after I explained that the number he saw wasn't ours, he accepted the offer. But I refuse to work with that recruiter any more.

Silhouette 16y ago
That cuts both ways, though. A certain company around here was, at least for several months, advertising a large number of job vacancies with far above-market salaries quoted that got them to the top of the various agency lists. However, it became clear during the interview process that they had no intention of offering anything close to that level of salary under normal circumstances. They were also the kind of place that got very stressed if you declined to disclose your current compensation arrangements (as opposed to discussing what sort of compensation you might consider accepting if they offered the job). I'm not sure what happened with that round of recruitment; they were still advertising for a lot of similarly generic positions last time I looked, but all the specifics about salary etc. seemed to have disappeared. An agency that cut through that level of deception and advertised with a more realistic salary indicator might not have attracted as many initial candidates, but would probably have been more efficient for finding candidates who might actually accept a position if an offer was made, and it would have avoided degrading the employer's reputation in a "small world" employment market, too.
bugsy 16y ago
Seems pretty clear that the recruiter provided you with a very valuable service, that the qualified candidates you really wanted to make offers to weren't willing to respond to ads citing the insulting salary range you thought you could get away with. The simple fact is that if you can not afford to hire qualified developers, you should not be in business. Please leave software development to the professionals who are able to make money at it.
- bostonpete 16y ago
  Are you a recruiter or something...? This seems like a pretty hostile comment which is based on a number of assumptions by you. Why do you assume that we can't afford to hire developers or that we offered an insulting salary? The developer accepted the offer -- he was initially disappointed because of the unrealistic range that the recruiter advertised. Also, the fact that the candidate responded to the recruiter's ad is indicative of nothing. If I post an interesting job description and 3 recruiters repost it with the details tweaked, many candidates (I know some avoid recruiters) are apt to respond to the first one of the four that they come across. Your comment about making money seems completely out of left-field. We do make money (been in the black for a decade or so) and if we didn't, your comment seems unnecessarily harsh. So with that comment you ran the risk of being wrong, a jerk, or both.

jasonkester 16y ago

Is it possible that this experience was influenced in any way by the fact that they're trying to find a "Senior iPhone Developer" for under £40k? That's ~$65k, and thus roughly $100k shy of what you'd need to offer before you started to pique the interest of any good iPhone Developers in the current market.

patio11 16y ago
This is the same thing I think every time someone says "Why is it so danged hard to find a developer that knows SEO or an SEO who can program their way out of a paper bag. It's like nobody has even heard of any, when we'd gladly reward any with $80k and all the soda they could drink!" If you think you are paying market, and you can't find a candidate despite using all the normal channels, you by definition are not paying market.
- mgkimsal 16y ago
  Spot on. I've been in this field for too long, and can bring too much value, to sell my services at way under value, even if it includes a lot of free drinks. It's hard for companies to recognize extra value they could possibly be getting from senior/older developers, but also requires a commitment that they actually try to get extra value from them. Whether that's proactively, or just reacting positively to observations/input, and I've not found many companies interested in doing that. It's cheaper/easier/faster to hire the younger kids looking for their first or second job. That used to be me, and I understand those advantages, but I also see the problems associated with those sorts of hires. An ideal org would have a nice balance of all experience levels, but few that I run in to have that balance.
ido 16y ago
I don't know about the UK in particular, but salaries in Europe are in general lower than in the US. 40k gbp is almost 46k eur, which is not a bad salary in Vienna.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  Yeah, but thats still more than 11000 pound less than the starting salary for a Danish computer programmer. For a senior programmer, thats a joke.

mgkimsal 16y ago

I've had numerous interesting interactions with recruiters over the years, as well as directly with hiring companies. The biggest benefit agencies seem to offer is initial screening, but it's also where they seem to fall down the most. When a recruiter can't tell me anything more than "MySQL, PHP, JavaScript", they don't really understand the client's needs or the position involved. I find that perhaps 1 in 10 or 15 calls I get from a recruiter involves someone with a clue. Sometimes they know the tech and can talk about the client's architecture and needs, other times they will admit they're not technical, but they have had some dealings with the company directly (often for extended periods) and have a good idea about the type of person who would be a good fit. But it's still rare that I'm talking to a recruiter who, imo, is actually providing some degree of service to the hiring company (let alone my side of the equation). More companies might be able to 'go direct' without needing a recruiter, but many don't know how to sell their own company to a potential employee. Money helps, certainly, and they'd be able to offer more if they weren't involving a recruiting agency, but it typically takes a committed involvement from the company to do the initial screening. I used to think recruiters had no place, and that companies should always go direct. I've found that strategically, it makes sense in a few cases if they need a specific skill and don't want to broadcast to the wider market (their competition) about upcoming plans. However, those instances are pretty rare.

shawnee_ 16y ago

I’ve got Google alerts setup for our ad, and I’m seeing it being cloned all over the place by different recruitment agencies. Basically, they copy your ad, remove all your details so candidates don’t know who you are, and then post it up all over the place. This happens for people who post resumes, too. My experience was so bad that I ended up removing my entire profile from LinkedIn after one-too-many harassing phone calls from agencies. They are evil, but I haven't found a way around them yet. My current employment gig is one where an agency is marking up my hourly rate 100 percent; they indeed charge the company double what they pay me. It infuriates me, but there is very little I can do. Agencies specialize in one thing only and that is: information distortion. Doesn't matter if it's a recruitment agency, real estate agency, or "talent scout" for one of the glam professions like music or acting. The wider the distortions become between buyer and seller, the more the agency can leech. They're good at it too: flooding job boards, cloning candidate resumes or company job descriptions and twisting them however they wish. And it works! Good for them, crappy for us. Agencies are very good at convincing one party that a "Senior iPhone developer" or an "MBA who knows Linux and is an accounting whiz" is an elusive and rare creature, while simultaneously shaking their heads at "this job market" where any job offer is a good offer, and by golly -- stick with the agency, and they'll find you something better; once they're done sucking you dry for an hourly rate, they find you something "permanent" for 30-40 percent of your yearly salary offer, of course. P.S. I think the agency doesn't know I know how much they're robbing me: they're big on "keep this [hourly rate] confidential" which I am, technically . . . the number is; the percent is not. The only party that confidentiality benefits, though, is the agency. Makes no sense.

gcb 16y ago
I've seen contractors come and go working at a fortune 500 and just recently I've learned of those practices...

blacksmythe 16y ago

Changing the salary is obviously wrong. Other than that, finding developers for you that didn't see your ad and bringing them to your attention for a fee seems like an honest business (if not one I would be interesting in being in).

ig1 16y ago
Claiming you represent a company when you don't isn't honest.

dr_ 16y ago

The idea of agencies copying and pasting your ads is a bit shady of course, but the takeaway from this is pretty simple - you need to pay more.

tobinator 16y ago
Agree. The take-aways are: - Recruitment agencies that play dirty do so because they are unable to add real value. Avoid at all costs. - Offer the right salary for the job, and you might have more luck.

sjtgraham 16y ago

This is how I would have dealt with this situation: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346729 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2346729

biot 16y ago
Exactly. Take the time and small expense to officially register the copyright. When they clone it and slap their name on it you can sue for damages and you'll win. It might even be a profitable business on its own if you act as intermediary for those actually posting jobs... a "job dilution protection service" that costs them nothing but makes you money. edit: at the very least, in the US you can issue a DMCA takedown notice.

vanessa 16y ago

Thanks for posting this - I think regardless of market rate you've identified a key problem in the hiring industry, especially in software. The incentives for recruitment agencies/headhunters to do ridiculously shady things like copy your ad and then sell you candidates (without even necessarily telling you they promised the candidates more money) are high because companies feel so lost in the hiring process, sometimes they are willing to pay. And they usually get burned/waste a lot more time and money (in my experience). Good for you for calling them out when they're clearly not providing a respectable service to you OR the jobseeker.

bugsy 16y ago

Your salary is absurdly ridiculously pathetically low given the things you were asking for. It almost seems like a joke or onion article. That's obviously why you had a problem and all the rest of the insights you are having about this don't really count since the ad would not be considered serious by any qualified candidate. Sorry.

tobinator 16y ago

I'm the one who posted up the job ad, and the who wrote the blog. As @ig1 said (from coderstack.co.uk), the salary is not that far off; £38K goes a lot further in Leeds than in London. Maybe "Middle-Weight iPhone Developer" would have been better.

Stormbringer 16y ago

For salary comparison, in 2001 a TRAINEE manager at McDonalds in London could earn £21,000 Now, back in 2001 when the tech bubble popped it was like one of those games where the music stops and there are too few chairs. All the people who'd been riding the contracting gravy train suddenly realised there were no more contracts† and they panicked. At that stage you would see the computer programmers who had a wife, girlfriend and a mortgage to support leap at a £25k job. On the other hand, Leeds (where I have also lived and worked) was enormously much cheaper than London in a couple of respects, such as real estate. One of the places I worked had an intern, great young guy, real go-getter, would do any dirty task you set before him (like network admin ick :D ) ... and he was on £10k. When I found that out, I was amazed. I asked him how he could afford that. turns out he lived in a shared house with lots of other students or recently ex-students, and they couldn't afford to turn the heating on in winter††. †They say that when New York sneezes, London catches a cold. They're right. All the big institutions slapped down an immediate ban on new hiring and no new contracts except for critical projects. Then after a couple of weeks it got upgraded to at least a six month ban on all hiring, even for critical projects (presumably for those they could fill them from people they already had). As contracts ended, they weren't renewed. It was brutal. ††For reference Leeds is one of those places where they get snow on the ground during winter

tobinator 16y ago

On a similar vein, amusing stories from another UK company http://recruitmental.com/ http://recruitmental.com/

MrDunham 16y ago

This is fantastic. You just delivered another selling point I hadn't even considered yet for our app (I'd say more about it, but I'd like it to be a little more done for a 'Show HN'). Much thanks!