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Ask HN: How would you fix tech recruiting?

• ejb999 5y ago
  I think most recruiters operate like email spammers - just throw out 1000's of solicitations and hope one of them connects with somebody.
• pinephoneguy 5y ago
  Some of the job descriptions I've seen from recruiters are so bad it almost feels like a trap. Like if you respond you'll be blacklisted for being desperate and have a harder time finding a legitimate job. I saw an email the other day that offered 50-60k/y in the Midwest. Remote would be "considered" after 6 months if you "behave." Masters required PHD preferred.
• mikece 5y ago
  > How do these people stay in business? By finding enough candidates for enough businesses willing to pay the huge finders' fees that recruiting firms demand. One of the things that amazes me is that companies will pay a recruiting firm tens of thousands of dollars to find a candidate that makes it through the interview process and stays there for at least 90 days but then they only offer $500 to their employees for referrals that get hired. I pointed out to HR at one company that I worked for that one of their recruiting partners pays $1000 for a referral that gets hired; given how much they would pay a recruiter, they should be offering at least $5,000 referral bonuses to someone recommends a candidate they hire, whether the person making the recommendation is an employee or not. They decided to increase the referral bonus to match the recruiting company (I kept feeding referrals for my employer through said recruiting agency -- my relationship with them started before and lasts long after being with that employer).
  • throwawaynay 5y ago
    I guess what I meant is:why is no one doing better than them? Most of the decent approaches I've seen were either coming from founders or once from an ex-engineer who became a recruiter, basically never from a typical recruiter, why is no one obliterating them?
    • t-3 5y ago
      It's a "soft-skills" job, which requires dealing with many, many, many liars and cheats, and trying to maintain a reputation. Not a job that can be easily solved by technology.
      • throwawaynay 5y ago
        "many liars and cheats" I guess it takes one to know one? A decent technical test would weed out any actual liar, no? or do we need people who thinks they're fbi interrogators?
        • t-3 5y ago
          There is no "one size fits all" technical test, and if there was, the answers would be for sale and you'd be back to square one. People are a hard problem.
          • throwawaynay 5y ago
            I don't see how coding in front of someone(no matter the problem) can be worse than a random non technical guy trying to guess if you're lying or not
            • t-3 5y ago
              Not all technical jobs involve coding, and of those that do, it's not always the top priority.
• hitsurume 5y ago
  Are you planning to be a recruiter? Do you understand their problems? Business X wants super ninja engineer for less then market rate because they're cheap and believe their mission statement should scream "come work for us like a slave". You, the tech recruiter now need to find this potential engineer, how do you do this? As you already know, step 1 is spam people on linkedin hoping for low hanging fruit. Yea we get spammed, but like Nigerian scammers and robocallers, we're not the target audience, we are just unintentional victims in the recruiters process for finding a needle in a haystack.
  • throwawaynay 5y ago
    No I'm considering making tools for recruiters and/or candidates. I probably don't understand all their problems, but it certainly looks like a lot of them come their...how do i put this? either ignorance or stupidity. I'm not just talking about the crappy companies with low budgets. On more than one occasion, it was for companies with big budgets(either unicorns, scale-ups or startups who just raised millions, and it really was the recruiter/headhunter who was screwing it up. One of my first strategy would be to use a model to detect the candidates who are the most likely to quit their jobs(I was about to build that but I saw a startup launched something similar) (of course I shouldn't even mention "open to work" or out of work devs, that's obvious) 2nd, I would do scoring based on exact keywords matches(some of them don't even do that correctly), then on similar technologies, ie:angular/react/vue, java/c#, on which roles they used it at, for how long etc... 3rd target the employees of companies with low/declining glassdoor ratings 4th, I may scrape github accounts, to find people who just started learning a technology but may not have it mentioned on their job experience What I don't get is, you can only contact 100 to a few hundreds people per week on linkedin, so why they do they target us so badly? Sometimes it looks like they just look for the word developer and send a message to the 100 first results It's not like they even use fake accounts to have unlimited messages, I've rarely seen recruiters with even just 2 accounts, so they waste the small amount of messages they have on totally awful matches I'm certain with a decent algorithm and 10-50 linkedin accounts I could do the job of 10-50 headhunters
    • hitsurume 5y ago
• sloaken 5y ago
  IMHO the biggest problem is the recruiters do not understand tech enough. If they did then they would not be recruiters, they would be techies. How to fix? One of the big problems, and others have mentioned it. Employers with unrealistic expectations. I had a boss once create a laundry list of skills for a position, 3 years of each, that no one would have: Java, C, C++, C#, Ada, Java Script, and 2 different assembly languages, as well as a host of other techs. I complained it was a stupid list, as half of the languages listed we never used. Response: "Oh but wouldn't it be nice to have someone who could!" WTF, all they were doing was encouraging liars to apply. So I believe they should be allowed to list 3 maybe 4 primary skills / experience. Then 3 or 4 'Would set you apart skills' (i.e. tie breakers). If you list more then you do not understand what your team does. If you are thinking of making something, I would start by looking at Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ he has written a ton on the topic (click recruiter to see his articles). He also had a site for recruiting where he vetted the recruiters for a bunch of topics. I cannot find the site or I would put it here.
• yen223 5y ago
  > I honestly feel like I could do the jobs of 10 tech recruiters with a few well designed bots. Go ahead and do it. Neither tech recruiters, nor the tech recruitment process itself are cheap, so if you could figure out a way to make the whole process more efficient there is a ton of opportunity there.
• faangiq 5y ago
  Take it seriously. Get high IQ people to run this function.
• logicalmonster 5y ago
  To me, tech recruiting feels geared around people creating resumes that feature a lengthy laundry list of technologies that reward the best liars because that's the idiotic filtering process that's emerged. What would make the job hunt better? 1) You need somebody technical involved in writing job ads. You also need to limit the technologies mentioned to a handful. If it's a frontend webdev job for example, list out a few necessities (HTML, CSS, JS) and a couple of nice-to-have bits of tech like experience with SVG, React, and Git, but don't declare those to be mandatory. A smart person who never used some tech you need will be able to pick it up faster than a middling liar who claims 5 years of experience with it. 2) You need a recruiter who understands the businesses they're representing as well as technology to figure out if the candidate is a potential match. 3) You need businesses who understand that smart people who know their shit are better for the business than a middling developer who has some experience with your particular tech. Outside of very specialized and niche stuff, any smart developer will pick up new libraries and technology very quickly. Solve for hiring smart people, not trying to find somebody who just listed every technology they ever heard of on their resume.
• alexmingoia 5y ago
  I think Toptal’s model is as ideal as it gets. Engineers are vetted and interviewed once, companies can hire without interviewing, if it doesn’t work out in the first week Toptal covers the cost. This incentivizes Toptal to do effective evaluation of engineers, engineers don’t have to repeat interviews over and over, and companies save time and money. I don’t see how that model could be any better really. Referrals are also a good model, but the talent pool is limited.
  • throwawaynay 5y ago
    I only heard negative feedback about toptal I started the process and they ended up spamming me for days/weeks so I schedule an interview before a nonsense deadline or they'll lock my account, I didn't go further... Turing.com seems better, but REALLY selective
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• decafninja 5y ago
  Frankly, the only good third party recruiters are good because of the human relationships they have with hiring managers are good companies. Likewise they will try to establish good relationships with you the candidate. It's a severely bifurcated group IMHO. There is a tiny pool of great third party recruiters. Then you have the vast unwashed masses of crappy ones. The ones that are at least decent seem to end up as internal recruiters at least.