> staffing firms often hire young and attractive reps to distract. LOL, what? "The only reason we used staffing firms was cuz them reps be dummy thicc". I wo

> staffing firms often hire young and attractive reps to distract. LOL, what? "The only reason we used staffing firms was cuz them reps be dummy thicc". I worked for a small/medium ISP for a while and did a lot of hiring for entry-level and mid-level roles. If we threw an ad up on Craigslist for DC, NYC, or Baltimore we would get back, easily, 500+ responses. The signal-to-noise ration was insane. A huge chunk of the responses would be spam or automated-resume-slinging-bots, and like 30-40% would be immediately disqualified for being in different states/countries or being wildly unqualified. Even after adding a few homemade filters and a basic online tech quiz, we'd still end up with like 40 candidates to screen further. The viability of these candidates was... not great... and a lot of them tended to split after a couple years, and several didn't last 6 months. Then we started using a headhunting firm and they did all of the sorting, vetting, and gave us a great 3-to-6-month hiring window. We could ask them for 3 decent clients -- "decent" was relative sometimes -- and have them in a couple weeks, get them hired comparatively quick, and turn them to full-timers in 6 months if they were good; usually we did. Some of the hires were for very specialized roles (frame relay/fiber optic types) that often took a while to source or had to be lured out of other places, and they were generally good at doing that too. I'd never want to be one of the contract-to-hire candidates again (once was enough) but I'd be hard pressed dissuade others from using them.