11 ms·

Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

245 points by akharris 15y ago

9085 15y ago
I think if you use a recruiter to help find new people to put through your interview process then they can be highly effective. It doesn't make sense to trust in a recruiter to bring you the perfect fit. They bring you people and then you must determine if they are the proper fit. I see no harm in recruiters. You don't have to hire anyone they bring you.
gchucky 15y ago
I think the title needs to be changed to reflect the gist of the post: that for _startups_, recruiters are probably a waste of time. For a more established organizations, recruiters tend to work, I think.
- davidhansen 15y ago
  Except large, established organizations usually have HR departments that perform the functions of recruiters anyway. Or at least they do in my idealized fantasy world, where the role of HR is to acquire, foster, encourage, and compensate talent.
  - davedx 15y ago
    Large, established organizations typically use both their own HR department and external recruiters. It's particularly useful to use recruiters to find freelancers (mileage varies a lot of course).
  - gujk 15y ago
    That's crazy talk. A hiring manager's job is to acquire talent. HR's job is to smooth the details of the process and keep it legal.
dpritchett 15y ago
Quote: You need incredible good engineers who are not already in golden handcuffs, are crazy enough to join a risky early stage company, do not want to found their own company right now, want to work at all hours, and are aligned with the culture you are trying to build. That really is asking for everything. I hope you have figured out a way to explain your value proposition to these dream candidates.
- bloggergirl 15y ago
  The line you quoted stood out for me most. It does seem like a tall order. Does networking work better (than hiring a recruiter) when recruiting for startups? Do you come to places like HN to build relationships? It seems you'd have to win people over 1-to-1 -- get them to believe in your vision and culture enough that they'd join you, in spite of all the risk -- which takes time and energy (both worth it) as well as a keen understanding of where to go to find dream talent (tough).
  - philco 15y ago
    Data suggests that close to 60% of all skilled $90k+ jobs are found through networking. (Sources: http://meeteor.posterous.com/why-job-postings-are-useless-for-your-startup http://meeteor.posterous.com/why-job-postings-are-useless-fo...) Shameless Plug which is why we built Meeteor.com - our aim is to get you warm introductions into the companies you're interested in, through your friends.
- umjames 15y ago
  Agreed. Are there people who really want to work at all hours? Maybe eager students right out of college. Personally, I'm at the point where if I'm going to be working at all hours, I'd better be one of the primary beneficiaries of that work.
  - phillmv 15y ago
    Basically, you want that rarest of birds - shy sparks who aren't nestled in a large company yet. Too introverted to be really aware of their market value and have a life and smart enough that they're going to be obsessed with the work and work at it all the time. Considering I'm having a hard time finding "reasonably competent" Rails devs, I can't imagine how you might hire for that kind of position.
csel 15y ago
There is a big difference between agency recruiters and recruiters within a company. I have not had any bad experiences with recruiters who work for a company (that is not an agency). In fact, even agency recruiters, there are definitely some bad apples but a lot of them generally are fairly good to deal with. If I were you, I might change the title of your post to be more specific on the type of recruiters you are referring to.
- larrik 15y ago
  If you actually read the article, that distinction is completely irrelevant, since the proper title is more like "Recruiters are a waste of time for start-ups."
ticks 15y ago
As far as I can tell, it's like choosing between paying for display advertising or affiliate marketing. Two different mindsets and neither are a bad thing. You either do the recruitment in-house and absorb all the risk to your business, which means lots of extra interviews, staff looking through high volumes of paperwork, etc. Or you hand it over to a third party, pay them nothing for the process (i.e. they take on the risk) but then pay highly for results.
- wpietri 15y ago
  Except that, most 3rd-party recruiters being clueless, you still have to do all the work. The only sensible way I've seen to use them is as a pure resume source. The folks at Wealthfront explain how: http://eng.wealthfront.com/2011/07/hire-best-forget-rest.html http://eng.wealthfront.com/2011/07/hire-best-forget-rest.htm...
BiWinning 15y ago
So where do you search for engineers if you're a startup?
- Nate75Sanders 15y ago
  Go to various tech meetups/meetings that seem relevant and then try to identify smart people by what they say in meetings. Then approach them. Maybe sponsor a relevant meeting by buying the pizza/beer for it. This buys you the opportunity to give a company introduction and let people know you're hiring. Very cheap advertising. meetup.com is probably the generic place to look for these types of meetings, but every city probably has its own, better site. In Seattle, among others, we have http://www.seattletechcalendar.com/ http://www.seattletechcalendar.com/ and http://www.seattle20.com/ http://www.seattle20.com/ among probably others. Sitting in your office waiting for resumes/cover letters is the absolute worst way to try to get people. It also leaves you with only an interview to get to know the potential hire, while at the meeting you may find out all sorts of desirable or undesirable characteristics about them. Additionally you may get input from that person's peers.
  - gujk 15y ago
    Yes. An onsite interview is 4-hour sell meeting: sell your coworkers on the candidate, and sell the candidate on the coworkers and office and etc. If you aren't pretty confident in a hire before the onsite, the onsite won't help.
- getsat 15y ago
  You can post in the monthly "Who's Hiring?" threads on Hacker News and let them come to you.
- mikeleeorg 15y ago
  I totally agree with Nate75Sanders. And to build on that, when creating your marketing plan, think about allocating a portion of that effort into recruiting and building a brand that's attractive to the people you seek. Zappos has built a great brand that attracts candidates. I've known people who've read Tony Hsieh's book, then wanted to join them. There are lots of startups that not only have some good buzz in the press, but also have outspoken founders & employees that - whether they've consciously thought about this or not - have crafted a desirable impression of their company. What attracts you doesn't necessary attract someone else, but I've heard colleagues saying they'd love to work for Justin.tv, Hipmunk, AirBnB, Quora, Codecademy, DuckDuckGo, etc. Some of that is because they personally love & use those products. And some of that is because they love & follow the cofounders. Share with the world your thoughts, your culture, and how your product is making the world (or at least, your industry) a better place, and you'll have a better shot at attracting great people.
tonyedgecombe 15y ago
There is a bigger problem with recruiters and that is there is a whole group of candidates who don't need them and won't use them. The best candidates are falling over opportunities, they find positions through their own network, not agencies. If you only use recruiters you will never find these people.
fooboy 15y ago
This cuts both ways: looking for work takes a substantial, non-zero amount of time, and it's extremely frustrating when startups decide to speak with you even though they know hiring you is "a long shot." Searching for work at a startup has been a protracted, fruitless process. They have no problem conversing with you and checking out your background over coffee, lunch, whatever. After a few conversations and a technical interview, you find out there isn't a good fit. Rinse and repeat for any number of tech startups, and you'll be waving goodbye to a month or two of your life. Has anyone else had this experience? To me, the whole recruiting process is f'kd on both sides.
- ajross 15y ago
  It's time for some tough love: If you're getting shot down repeatedly after technical interviews, then maybe you need to expand your search to other areas. That's not a process problem: you're not getting the jobs you want because they don't think you can do them. So the solution to avoid wasting time is not to apply to jobs for which you aren't qualified.
  - fooboy 15y ago
    I wish someone had told me this sooner, because after going through the above scenario again and hearing "we'd love to hire you if you had a bit more experience" for the umpteenth time, I realized you're right. Thanks for the tough love--I'm going to focus on getting that experience.
- tomcreighton 15y ago
  My opinion: if startups aren't serious about hiring you, they shouldn't go through the dance. Why are they wasting everybody's time?
  - pyoung 15y ago
    Interviewing is a tricky thing. I have been on both sides of the court, and it is very difficult to get a good idea about a candidate's potential simply from the resume/cover letter. If you keep getting contacted by companies for interviews, but fail to get past that stage, I would recommend two things. 1. Make absolutely sure that your resume is accurate. If, in the interview, it looks like you 'embellished' your qualifications on your resume a bit too much, it is guaranteed to get you tossed into the 'no' pile. 2. Work on your interview skills. It is surprising how bad some people interview. It took me a couple practice tries before I really became comfortable with the process.
danilocampos 15y ago
I need to write a post to discuss this at greater depth, but... I am fucking astonished at how inept most recruiters are. I mean, just awful and useless at their "jobs." If we concede the point that, especially in the Valley, technical talent is in high demand, it stands to reason that any overture to such talent needs to be persuasive, informative and intriguing. It should explain the role in reasonable detail, while making a sane case for how cool the company and opportunity will be. Ideally, it should demonstrate that the recruiter has a basic understanding of a given prospect's skills and career trajectory. Super bonus points if it doesn't seem like a form letter. Instead, what I get is stuff like "Hey, I'm looking for developers for a role I'm filling. You need to be this, this, and this. Oh, and this is a plus. Mmkay, lemme know!" Well. Congratulations? Hey, I have a job. And it doesn't involve proving to a random recruiter that I'm skilled at it. And from such pitches, how would I know that I'd even care? I know nothing about the company and only have the vaguest notion of what I'd be wanted for. Recruiters are a waste of time, though mostly their own. A founder out being social has a much better chance, I think, at successfully recruiting limited talent. Not that they have time, I know. And don't get me started on the pitch that opened with "I'm looking for some iOS studs!" I had a friend at the company they were pitching. They weren't impressed when they heard about this one, especially since they had no formal relationship with the bozo.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  Maybe you're not looking, but don't you have some iOS dev friends who are less comfortable in their current positions? I take unsolicited recruitment approaches with a grain of salt, but I make an honest effort to go through my mental Rolodex to see if there's anyone I know who might benefit from making the connection. When I respond to a cold call it's either politely or not at all. Just tracking the volume and content of these approaches is valuable information that I can use to better manage my own career in the years ahead, not to mention the goodwill I can engender by making the occasional introduction.
  - danilocampos 15y ago
    > don't you have some iOS dev friends who are less comfortable in their current positions? Gave this some thought for awhile. But no. Everyone I know worth their salt in iOS has solid gigs – way better than a lot of the turds recruiters are offering, anyway.
w33ble 15y ago
I had expected this to be related to using recruiters to find jobs. I've found that to be primarily a complete waste of time as well, but I suspect the reasons are the same. To most recruiters, it's just a numbers game, as the article points out; they simply "throw engineers at companies in the hopes that one or two will stick and they’ll get their commission". In my experience, it's quite rare to find a recruiter that will spend even a little bit of time actually matching candidates to the position in a meaningful way. It's also possible that, like the author, I've only ever dealt with really bad recruiters before.
- prophetjohn 15y ago
  I'll often get calls from recruiters telling me they've found a position for which I'm a perfect match. And then they explain it's a senior developer position requiring 5 years of experience, when it's very clearly stated on my resume that I'm a college student looking for an internship. They just keyword search resumes.
  - ajross 15y ago
    Sort of. Remember they have two sides of the database: positions need filling and candidates available. If you reply to whatever they send you, they can drop you into the second bucket. So there's benefit to them (maybe even to you) even if the position isn't a fit.
  - lotharbot 15y ago
    I've gotten similar e-mails and calls recently, based on a resume I posted to a job site 5 years ago, trying to match me to positions with requirements I don't remotely match. Further, I'm now a full time stay-at-home parent, which is my dream career. What's sad is, when I tell recruiters this, on occasion they'll still try to convince me of what a great fit their position would be.
- ericdykstra 15y ago
  One recruiter reached out to me when I was fresh out of college, and brought me in for a meeting. He then suddenly stopped responding in an email thread and I never heard from him again. Then again, that's a one-time experience. But my time with the recruiter was as wasteful as time spent posting my resume on Monster and other job sites.
lanstein 15y ago
cue Peroni...
- Peroni 15y ago
  Typical. The one day I chose to ignore HN in order to make a dent in my mountain of work and this article gets posted. For what it's worth, I agree wholeheartedly with the majority of the article. Recruiters who focus on start-ups are wasting their own time as well as the start-up's time. Yes there are a huge number of start-ups hiring and yes some will engage recruiters but the vast majority don't have the budget. I would happily wager a months salary on the fact that 99.9% of recruiters don't understand how a tech start-up works and even if they make the effort to learn, every start-up is different with their own individual challenges and quirks and it requires an immense amount of time and effort to truly understand what these companies need. No recruiter will invest that level of time. Instead they will throw a few CV's at the role and hope something sticks. I'm giving a talk at Hacker News London tomorrow night and the topic is 'Recruiting for start-ups'. It's a brief talk on how to improve your chances of finding the right people for your start-up and how to keep them. At no point do I even attempt to suggest they engage a recruiter, in fact I strongly encourage them not to.
z5h 15y ago
I had an idea of making recruiters put their money where their mouths are. Want to represent me? That'll cost you $2000/year. If you find me a great job in the next few years you you get many times your money back.
- snorkel 15y ago
  Recruiters would not consider such an arrangement unless you're a celebrity of the industry with a stellar resume. The candidate pool is too large to spend time and effort trying to place a single candidate in a great job.
  - mrgoldenbrown 15y ago
    At least this might force the recruiter to admit what his true assessment of your chances are - if you don't call their bluff, they will forever tell you that you are a perfect fit, and that the job is the best ever.
  - polymatter 15y ago
    maybe something universities could do to differentiate themselves. or individuals? I'm horrendous at selling myself and (now that I've been unemployed for >6 months) would gladly pay a ridiculous amount for someone to coach me through getting a job. I keep telling people that I'd like an agent. Everyone takes it as a joke :/
- salem 15y ago
  Whatever happened to that startup that would pay you to go to job interviews?
motters 15y ago
I've had very mixed experiences with recruiters. At best they ask reasonable questions and provide informative information about companies. At worst they're rude, condescending, unprofessional and openly confess that "I know nothing about software". I think that the probability distribution is skewed more towards the latter than the former.
pg 15y ago
A few days ago I moderated a panel discussion at the Computer History Museum with the founders of Dropbox, Evernote, and Wildfire. I asked whether it was worth dealing with outside recruiters, and they all said no. They all had recruiters working for them in house. In fact between 3% and 5% of their employees were recruiters. They said the best source of people initially were the friends of the founders and the first employees (which is one reason it's helpful to have gone to a good CS school) and that as soon as you've exhausted this source you should start hiring recruiters.
- dpritchett 15y ago
  pg, I'm curious about the advice you give to YC founders on identifying and recruiting early employees. Based on tutorspree's job posting they need roughly the same level of technical skills as a founder but they're getting a maximum of 3% equity and a below-market NYC salary. I'd guess the founders are getting 5-10x the equity and a salary that's not too far off from the one offered above. Is this package consistent with your advice? Does it generally work out well for the companies in question?
  - tptacek 15y ago
    Equity grants are based on risk, not ability. Sometimes, very talented technical people are assuming extra risk due to opportunity cost; perhaps some other startup is offering comparable equity but has a longer runway and/or more traction. If those people are good at negotiating, they get better equity grants. A few factors play in to the gulf between founder and early employee equity: * Founders have by definition committed to the idea before it had any traction at all. More risk. * Founders have spent more time at the company than employees. Each day spent at the startup, in addition to accruing compensable effort, carries opportunity cost (not to hop ship to some other company) and thus more risk. * Founders have often worked, at least for a time, at zero salary. More risk. * Founders that can get their companies funded, accepted into YC, or bootstrapped to market traction can presumably do that again somewhere else --- again implying they're accepting the opportunity cost of committing to one startup instead of starting another. Most employees, regardless of ability, can't say that. It's important to remember that founding teams have drastically different compensation packages than employees do; it's almost an apples/oranges comparison. You want to remember this not to empathize with the founders but to keep in mind how different their incentives are from yours.
sgdesign 15y ago
If it's a designer you're looking for, skip recruiters and check out my project: http://folyo.me http://folyo.me It'll cost far less than a recruiter, and I'll refund you if you don't find someone.
- oneplusone 15y ago
  Are you using the same model as dibbble, or why are you not accepting signups?
  - sgdesign 15y ago
    It's not the same model, every application has to be accepted by me personally. I've got enough designers (about 250) compared to the number of job offers currently on the site, so I've decided to close sign-ups for now.
jamiequint 15y ago
This is basically an argument that contingency recruiters are bad. You should differentiate this in the title from in-house or contract recruiters (retained search). Contingency recruiters, as you've noticed, have no incentive to filter out junk because they can just take a throw it at the wall and see what sticks approach. Also, there are a ton of bad recruiters, just like there are a ton of bad engineers. There are awesome recruiters out there and the sample of those who have cold called you rather than going through trusted channels is likely strongly biased towards the bad.
gujk 15y ago
Recruiters are marketplace makers, not matchmakers. A recruiter is completely incapable of determining who is a good fit or of asssessing talent, and traditional compensation models (x% of annual salary, paid on hire) are not aligned with succession outcomes for business. Recruiters are superior to staff at one thing: maintaineding a Rolodex. They have no ability to choose competently from that Rolodex, though. If you have good PR and a good jobs page, you don't need a generic recruiter.
johnnygleeson 15y ago
LinkedIn both relies on recruiters for revenue and reduces their necessity in the market. I would like to know how they think that will play out.
car 15y ago
It seems that the author is confusing placement agencies with recruiters working directly for a company (also see pg's comment). I've had great experiences with experienced recruiters at a startup, to help us find candidates, while at the same time getting pounded by unethical, moronic agencies. The recruiter helped us wade through hundreds of CV's, and eventually found an awesome Stanford CS MS that we ended up hiring. And this was while the recruiter worked for us as a contractor, so no 30% salary fee. So a great recruiter is worth their weight in gold, because they can potentially find that perfectly fitting candidate, giving a boost to a fledgling startup. Unfortunately, such recruiters a far and few between. Opposed to that, I got daily calls from agencies, that weaseled their way past our operators to talk to me directly, being super aggressive and downright rude when I politely told them to stop calling. This all, of course, because of the 30% fee salary fee when they place someone.
- joshu 15y ago
  The problem is that placement agencies also call themselves recruiters.
car 15y ago
It seems that the author is confusing placement agencies with recruiters working directly for a company (also see pg's comment). I've had great experiences with experienced recruiters, to help us find candidates, while at the same time getting pounded by unethical, moronic agencies. The recruiter helped us wade through hundreds of CV's, and eventually found an awesome Stanford CS MS that we ended up hiring. And this was while the recruiter worked for us as a contractor, so no 30% salary fee. Opposed to that, I got daily calls from agencies, that weaseled their way past our operators to talk to me directly, being super aggressive and downright rude when I politely told them to stop calling. This all, of course, because of the 30% fee salary fee when they place someone.
kabrummett 15y ago
As a technical recruiter I am not shocked by this post but I am a little frustrated with the large brush that is painted on the industry as a whole. I mean, I have worked with some BAD Developers, everything they write breaks the minute it is in production, you can never pry them away from the foosball table or lunch room, they smell and can’t speak in complete sentences BUT I still recruit for technical talent because not everyone is alike. Just like every industry there are rock stars and other guys just trying to put food on the table. I have been honored to survive this tough economical climate in the confines of a corporate recruiting gig for a technically forward high frequency trading firm in my hometown of Houston. Over the last few years I know more recruiters who have lost their jobs than I can count, some have lost their homes and their families. Does this sound familiar to anyone, maybe say the days of 2001 for the tech set? If the stories I have heard our true (I got into the biz in '04) developers making 150/hr one day are banging on recruiters doors begging for interviews the next. So ya, I get it, some recruiters have zero technical skills, know little to nothing about the job/client but at their core they are human beings. And just maybe, the client doesn't have a lot to sell at the moment, maybe they are still working out the kinks to their "value proposition" but they know they are onto something. So ignore the calls, politely say you aren't interested but remember, the tides can turn…quickly. The recruiter who doesn't know squat about server level architectural may be next door neighbors to someone who has enough funding to throw you a bone.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- Shengster 15y ago
  Good developers are hardly ever on the market. The majority of them are happy at their current jobs, and they know they could go anywhere else they wanted because their skills are highly valued. I'm sure it gets annoying when they frequently receive emails about "Technically Forward High Frequency Trading Firms" from recruiters who happened to find them through playing buzzword bingo. These recruiters tout that this new "opportunity" will give more money, benefits, responsibility, good looks, and sexual prowess, but never do the due diligence to make sure that their client is actually a good fit. It's the shotgun approach that most recruiters use that turns good developers off. Maybe once these recruiters treat developers with more respect, so will they.
datadon 15y ago
I had a call from a recruiter once, asking if I would be interested in a Ruby on Rails position. I said no, that's not what I'm looking for. She then asked me to explain what Ruby on Rails was, how it related to other technologies and was it popular because a lot of people seemed to be asking for it. Of course I explained the best I could, to make the world a better place and all that, but it seems (as other commenters have pointed out) that there could be a real niche for techies to run a recruiting firm that know what they're talking about.
- simon 15y ago
  "but it seems (as other commenters have pointed out) that there could be a real niche for techies to run a recruiting firm that know what they're talking about." I'd love to do that. What would such a company look like?
chollida1 15y ago
Mabye the title is a little off, but from my experience we have an inhouse recruiter and she is worth her salary and more. I'd be interested in wow do other companies hire without a recruiter.
TomNomNom 15y ago
What amazes me about a great deal of the recruiters I've dealt with is their inability to do basic word-matching. Recruiter "I have a great role for you as a Ruby developer!" Me: "Do you have a copy of my CV?" Recruiter: "Yes indeed, I have it on my screen right now!" The word "Ruby" does not appear on my CV, at all. This has happened to me more times than I can remember; with Ruby, C++, C# and a whole bunch of other things not mentioned anywhere on my CV. You don't even need to have heard of a technology (never-mind understand it) to narrow candidates down more than this.
- hga 15y ago
  Indeed. I've been out of the job market since 2004 and today after a (thankfully) long dry spell I got a "cold email" asking about a .NET position. I was working on UNIX(TM) when .NET came to be and therefore it's never ever been on any of the resumes I left behind. Then again, since wherever resumes of mine that are still floating around are so old, a shot in the dark like this has a higher chance of working than your situation, where I assume your resume is reasonably up to date.
- briancurtin 15y ago
  A good percentage of the contact I get from recruiters is for Django jobs, for which I have zero experience to offer. "Hey I noticed you have a lot of Django experience, I have a great role for you!"...yeah, actually not, I have never even installed Django, but I do have a lot of Python experience. I guess this is slightly better than what you're seeing since they're at least in the ballpark, but still horribly annoying. It just gets marked as spam for me.
tptacek 15y ago
Here's my most recent recruiting cold call: Him: Hello, I need to speak to the person who manages your servers. Me: Uh, who is this? Him: I need to report an issue with your servers. Are you the person who manages the servers? Me: What kind of issue? Him: Do you manage the servers? Me: I manage the office. What's the issue you need to report? Him: Oh! I'm calling because I understand that it's very hard to find good Linux and Ruby on Rails people in Chicago and- Me: You're a recruiter? Him: Yes, and- Click. Our current recruiter policy, at least in the Chicago office: $50 to the person in the office who can keep a recruiter on the phone the longest using only Emacs Eliza. In terms of actually recruiting people: * It's one of the key jobs for the management team; for instance, it is the thing I spend the most time on after billable work. * We do increasingly generous referral bonuses for good candidates. * We're doing a number of outreach programs (free classes and the like) to meet candidates. Ultimately, like SEO consultants and direct sales people, the problem with recruiters is adverse selection. There are good recruiters out there, but they can more or less print money; they aren't cold-calling you. Anyone who is cold-calling isn't a good recruiter. There aren't many good recruiters. The most useful shorthand is "all recruiters are terrible".
- davidmathers 15y ago
  $50 to the person in the office who can keep a recruiter on the phone the longest using only Emacs Eliza. I think you should take it to the next level and use the zippy quotes from psychoanalyze-pinhead.
- Peroni 15y ago
  Anyone who is cold-calling isn't a good recruiter. I completely disagree. The most successful recruiters always need to generate new business in order to stay successful and whilst it's great to pick up business from recommendations, often you are left with no option but to pick up the phone and start introducing yourself to people.
- dspillett 15y ago
  I usually respond to conversations like that with "you started this conversation with a blatant lie, why the hell should I trust you enough to do any sort of business with you?". They often call back almost immediately in the hope of someone else picking up the phone instead of me. Other common lies are "I'm a personal friend of Mr Anderson" (Mr Anderson doesn't exist, we made him up and listed him in a couple of places as our resources/personnel manager) or "I was talking to <some person> earlier today" (that one is particularly fun when they state they were just this minute talking to someone I has been sat opposite me talking to nobody for the last hour or few). I've stopped being nice to them. I don't even make an effort to be professional. Some companies will call repeatedly, day after day, sometimes several times a day. The only way to get rid of them I've found is immediately asking to talk to their boss to discuss being taken off their lists and demanding to talk to their boss until you get to or then hang up. And if that fails find the company's address and send them a letter by registered post stating that we do not want to deal with them, will not give them any more of of our time for free, and that any further calls will result in them being invoiced for our time at our consulting rates (we've gone as far as that twice, both times we heard nothing else from the company in question afterwards).
shawndrost 15y ago
Here's another side of the story: I just moved to SF, and I'm looking for jobs. Two friends sic'd a bunch of recruiters on me, and it is awesome! Here's the process: 1. They email or call me, and I send my resume and short summary of what I want. 2. They send me streams of awesome jobs. (Two have sent bad jobs, but gmail has a hotkey for that :D ) 3. I say I want to talk to XYZ at one of these times, and they hustle to make it happen. 4. They tell me little nuggets like "The last guy I placed here made $X" I'm running my own processes in parallel, and I can tell you that they suck a lot more. Non-recruiters -- and even in-house recruiters -- are hard to herd.
- angelbob 15y ago
  Fair enough. That's the most use I've heard of anybody getting out of recruiters. Well done! It's probably worth putting up a blog post somewhere about it :-)
benmathes 15y ago
The roles that we fill at this stage are highly specialized and generally call for nearly contradictory attributes in candidates. You need incredible good engineers who are not already in golden handcuffs, are crazy enough to join a risky early stage company, do not want to found their own company right now, want to work at all hours, and are aligned with the culture you are trying to build. It seems that this is indeed what startups are looking for. It also seems that they are generally unwilling to pay market salary. And startups don't seem willing to part with enough equity to make up the difference in the slightest if you weigh in how unlikely it is for employees to see any return on equity. There may be a reason why these jobs are hard to fill.
- gaius 15y ago
  Quite. There have been recent discussions on HN which point out the darkside of this: that early employees of startups often take as much risk and work as hard as the founders, yet get a tiny sliver of the upside. Co-founder, or nothing.
  - benmathes 15y ago
    There has been quite a bit of discussion, going back almost 2 years: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369039 I'm personally interested in this because I know first hand about the bottom of EV-comp curve: I personally enjoy working at really early-stage companies, have little in the way of expenses (27yo DINK), but don't have enough saved to start my own thing (payed off 50k in student loans last year). It feels somewhat akin to working at game companies: Working in the industry is glamorized, so young and energetic people flock to it and get relatively shafted on the margins. My job is nowhere near as bad as working at somewhere like EA, but it's not unlike it either. I won't be doing this for much longer though, as the market isn't changing fast enough. Next time it's co-founder or series C+. In-between I always feel like I'm being had, to a degree.
- pnathan 15y ago
  Certainly I fall somewhere in that category. I'm not in a position to co-found, but would like to wind up at a startup. However, due to the high-risk nature, I want to have a good solid chunk of equity that I could cash out (loosely equivalent to the valuation of the risk that I took on)
oleg_kikin 15y ago
Shameless plug: http://recruiter-review.com/ http://recruiter-review.com/
- Shengster 15y ago
  Pretty awesome idea, thanks!
rmason 15y ago
I had a conversation with a recruiter and she said how can you expect to get a job if you have ColdFusion on your resume instead of Cold Fusion? I directed her to adobe.com so she could see the correct spelling. She went oh crap, I've been throwing away all the resumes with ColdFusion because the employer spelled it Cold Fusion. No wonder the client is complaining to me about the low quality of candidates that I am sending them. She promised to get me an interview with them but never called back.
- mgkimsal 15y ago
  Wow. I wanted to LOL at that and claim you made it up, but it really does sound plausible. I've considered putting together a training course for tech recruiters - something like a one day bootcamp to familiarize them with specific tech, so they know the diff between java and javascript, for example. but... need to find the time to do that on top of everything else!
  - knotty66 15y ago
    Just last week I was sent a job requiring C++ and extensive Ball and Builder experience. It took me a couple of minutes to figure that one out ...
    - ramchip 15y ago
      Borland Builder? I didn't know that still existed...
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - knotty66 15y ago
        Yeah - the recruiter didn't know it had ever existed!
Rinum 15y ago
Perhaps we need a startup to disrupt the job recruiting industry?
vijayr 15y ago
It is outrageous when they take 20% of the billing rate (or more) hour after hour, every hour. All for sending a few emails, making a few phone calls, and arranging the interview. Among the middlemen in all industries, tech recruiters do the least work, and are least knowledgeable of the industry they work in - a real estate agent for example, does far more work than a recruiter, and could actually be very helpful. There has to be a better way to do tech recruiting.
- danssig 15y ago
  Actually, I would pay up to 25%... for the first (6 mo or less) contract. They got me that, how ever they did it. But I got me the extension so why do they expect more than just a payrolling fee for the extentions?
dsr_ 15y ago
The comments here about how bad contingency recruiters are point to a lack of three skills: - listening - industry knowledge - politeness Now, a new recruiter might not have much industry knowledge, but you can pick up listening skills and politeness (for any given culture) in a myriad of jobs. Why don't they have these valuable skills? Recruiters aren't very good at recognizing people who would be good recruiters...
randall 15y ago
http://www.hackruiter.com/ http://www.hackruiter.com/ is maybe the only exception to the rule. But they're sort of an invite-only thing... so not exactly useful for most startups.
brudgers 15y ago
Back during the housing boom, I landed two consecutive jobs through recruiters. Both were cases where the recruiter had a well established relationship with the hiring company (and needless to say were only recruiting me for that specific company). But it took a lot of contacts with different recruiters to land each of those jobs. Among my favorite experiences was the guy who asked me, "Have you ever heard of x, inc? "Uh, I worked for x, inc. and it is listed on my resume." I have a couple of conclusions. 1. All it takes is no regular job, a cellphone, a computer, and an account on a resume board to be a recruiter - and it shows. 2. The vast majority of recruiters stand between you and the job because they have no relationship with the company hiring and therefor you are more expensive to hire and more of a PITA to hire because the recruiter is trying to get his cut (and if she doesn't get it, you will get the "company isn't interested" phone call from the recruiter). 3. Really good recruiters are a valuable resource, know their industry and players, and won't put just any warm body forward in hopes of a score - they will screen the hell out of you. I learned the first question to ask a recruiter is about their contract with the employer - the good one's have no hesitation describing their relationship. The bad one's waffle.
djhworld 15y ago
I'm not sure what it's like in the states but here in the UK, recruiters are nothing more than glorified salespeople. The problem also lies in the fact that many recruitment agents get paid a woeful base salary, the rest being topped up by commission payments based on successful candidates they pass on. So it's in their interest to ring as many people as possible and put forward as many people as they can because there's a good chance they'll get a "bite" somewhere down the line
veritas9 15y ago
Try CodeEval.com. It's free to use and we've helped dozens of awesome companies hire awesome talent through out platform. We run the only free technical screening tool out there. And with out sourcing product, unlike annoying recruiters - we send very little but high quality candidates that are pre-screened.
namidark 15y ago
Everyone seems to be hating on recruiters -- I actually just found a near dream job by me actually getting in touch with one. I'm using the language and tools I love, and I'm rolling over into a full time position with awesome benefits. Yes they take a cut of your hourly wage -- but I quoted it so up there that its not that big of a deal anyways (don't undersell yourself).
danielk015 15y ago
As a third party executive recruiter, I definitely have to agree with many of the comments and frustrations that have been expressed. Unfortunately, at best the perception of recruiters is that they are a necessary evil sometimes in getting access to job opportunities. No recruiter is perfect and even the best retained ones do some cold calling during the week to establish relationships. However, I do agree the approach should not based on gimmicks and sales tricks, but have the intent to establish good rapport with those that are contacted. But at the end of the day, a recruiter that is in tune with the market, cold calling should really make up less than 20% of their "deal" flow. Great hires are made through referrals, and great recruiters gets constant networking referrals to keep their pipelines full and their days busy. If the recruiter is doing their job, either they are getting warm leads from their networks when jobs are broadcasted, or their networks is referring strong talent to them. Like a lawyer or accountant that desires to create a reputable brand in a particular marketplace, recruiters needs to see themselves as resources within this marketplace and not view recruiting as purely a transactional game. From my experience, just because I don't collect a fee does not make a relationship unsuccessful. Providing great customer service and building strong relationships will usually evolve into mutually beneficial interactions in subsequent years.
livingwithgeek 15y ago
As an in-house Recruiter at a startup, I thought I'd throw my $0.02 in. The bottom line: you're right. There are a LOT of "bad apples" out there spoiling the names of the decent Recruiters. One person here said they've never had a call from a good Recruiter; that's because we know better. I don't call people for jobs they're not suited for. In fact, I rarely call Techies at all; you don't answer your phones. Anyway, it's NOT always the Recruiter that sucks, as I demonstrated here: http://bit.ly/pokYV1 http://bit.ly/pokYV1 Loved this discussion though. Thank you all for solidifying so many of my beliefs.

245 points by akharris 15y ago

9085 15y ago

I think if you use a recruiter to help find new people to put through your interview process then they can be highly effective. It doesn't make sense to trust in a recruiter to bring you the perfect fit. They bring you people and then you must determine if they are the proper fit. I see no harm in recruiters. You don't have to hire anyone they bring you.

gchucky 15y ago

I think the title needs to be changed to reflect the gist of the post: that for _startups_, recruiters are probably a waste of time. For a more established organizations, recruiters tend to work, I think.

davidhansen 15y ago
Except large, established organizations usually have HR departments that perform the functions of recruiters anyway. Or at least they do in my idealized fantasy world, where the role of HR is to acquire, foster, encourage, and compensate talent.
- davedx 15y ago
  Large, established organizations typically use both their own HR department and external recruiters. It's particularly useful to use recruiters to find freelancers (mileage varies a lot of course).
- gujk 15y ago
  That's crazy talk. A hiring manager's job is to acquire talent. HR's job is to smooth the details of the process and keep it legal.

dpritchett 15y ago

Quote: You need incredible good engineers who are not already in golden handcuffs, are crazy enough to join a risky early stage company, do not want to found their own company right now, want to work at all hours, and are aligned with the culture you are trying to build. That really is asking for everything. I hope you have figured out a way to explain your value proposition to these dream candidates.

bloggergirl 15y ago
The line you quoted stood out for me most. It does seem like a tall order. Does networking work better (than hiring a recruiter) when recruiting for startups? Do you come to places like HN to build relationships? It seems you'd have to win people over 1-to-1 -- get them to believe in your vision and culture enough that they'd join you, in spite of all the risk -- which takes time and energy (both worth it) as well as a keen understanding of where to go to find dream talent (tough).
- philco 15y ago
  Data suggests that close to 60% of all skilled $90k+ jobs are found through networking. (Sources: http://meeteor.posterous.com/why-job-postings-are-useless-for-your-startup http://meeteor.posterous.com/why-job-postings-are-useless-fo...) Shameless Plug which is why we built Meeteor.com - our aim is to get you warm introductions into the companies you're interested in, through your friends.
umjames 15y ago
Agreed. Are there people who really want to work at all hours? Maybe eager students right out of college. Personally, I'm at the point where if I'm going to be working at all hours, I'd better be one of the primary beneficiaries of that work.
- phillmv 15y ago
  Basically, you want that rarest of birds - shy sparks who aren't nestled in a large company yet. Too introverted to be really aware of their market value and have a life and smart enough that they're going to be obsessed with the work and work at it all the time. Considering I'm having a hard time finding "reasonably competent" Rails devs, I can't imagine how you might hire for that kind of position.

csel 15y ago

There is a big difference between agency recruiters and recruiters within a company. I have not had any bad experiences with recruiters who work for a company (that is not an agency). In fact, even agency recruiters, there are definitely some bad apples but a lot of them generally are fairly good to deal with. If I were you, I might change the title of your post to be more specific on the type of recruiters you are referring to.

larrik 15y ago
If you actually read the article, that distinction is completely irrelevant, since the proper title is more like "Recruiters are a waste of time for start-ups."

ticks 15y ago

As far as I can tell, it's like choosing between paying for display advertising or affiliate marketing. Two different mindsets and neither are a bad thing. You either do the recruitment in-house and absorb all the risk to your business, which means lots of extra interviews, staff looking through high volumes of paperwork, etc. Or you hand it over to a third party, pay them nothing for the process (i.e. they take on the risk) but then pay highly for results.

wpietri 15y ago
Except that, most 3rd-party recruiters being clueless, you still have to do all the work. The only sensible way I've seen to use them is as a pure resume source. The folks at Wealthfront explain how: http://eng.wealthfront.com/2011/07/hire-best-forget-rest.html http://eng.wealthfront.com/2011/07/hire-best-forget-rest.htm...

BiWinning 15y ago

So where do you search for engineers if you're a startup?

Nate75Sanders 15y ago
Go to various tech meetups/meetings that seem relevant and then try to identify smart people by what they say in meetings. Then approach them. Maybe sponsor a relevant meeting by buying the pizza/beer for it. This buys you the opportunity to give a company introduction and let people know you're hiring. Very cheap advertising. meetup.com is probably the generic place to look for these types of meetings, but every city probably has its own, better site. In Seattle, among others, we have http://www.seattletechcalendar.com/ http://www.seattletechcalendar.com/ and http://www.seattle20.com/ http://www.seattle20.com/ among probably others. Sitting in your office waiting for resumes/cover letters is the absolute worst way to try to get people. It also leaves you with only an interview to get to know the potential hire, while at the meeting you may find out all sorts of desirable or undesirable characteristics about them. Additionally you may get input from that person's peers.
- gujk 15y ago
  Yes. An onsite interview is 4-hour sell meeting: sell your coworkers on the candidate, and sell the candidate on the coworkers and office and etc. If you aren't pretty confident in a hire before the onsite, the onsite won't help.
getsat 15y ago
You can post in the monthly "Who's Hiring?" threads on Hacker News and let them come to you.
mikeleeorg 15y ago
I totally agree with Nate75Sanders. And to build on that, when creating your marketing plan, think about allocating a portion of that effort into recruiting and building a brand that's attractive to the people you seek. Zappos has built a great brand that attracts candidates. I've known people who've read Tony Hsieh's book, then wanted to join them. There are lots of startups that not only have some good buzz in the press, but also have outspoken founders & employees that - whether they've consciously thought about this or not - have crafted a desirable impression of their company. What attracts you doesn't necessary attract someone else, but I've heard colleagues saying they'd love to work for Justin.tv, Hipmunk, AirBnB, Quora, Codecademy, DuckDuckGo, etc. Some of that is because they personally love & use those products. And some of that is because they love & follow the cofounders. Share with the world your thoughts, your culture, and how your product is making the world (or at least, your industry) a better place, and you'll have a better shot at attracting great people.

tonyedgecombe 15y ago

There is a bigger problem with recruiters and that is there is a whole group of candidates who don't need them and won't use them. The best candidates are falling over opportunities, they find positions through their own network, not agencies. If you only use recruiters you will never find these people.

fooboy 15y ago

This cuts both ways: looking for work takes a substantial, non-zero amount of time, and it's extremely frustrating when startups decide to speak with you even though they know hiring you is "a long shot." Searching for work at a startup has been a protracted, fruitless process. They have no problem conversing with you and checking out your background over coffee, lunch, whatever. After a few conversations and a technical interview, you find out there isn't a good fit. Rinse and repeat for any number of tech startups, and you'll be waving goodbye to a month or two of your life. Has anyone else had this experience? To me, the whole recruiting process is f'kd on both sides.

ajross 15y ago
It's time for some tough love: If you're getting shot down repeatedly after technical interviews, then maybe you need to expand your search to other areas. That's not a process problem: you're not getting the jobs you want because they don't think you can do them. So the solution to avoid wasting time is not to apply to jobs for which you aren't qualified.
- fooboy 15y ago
  I wish someone had told me this sooner, because after going through the above scenario again and hearing "we'd love to hire you if you had a bit more experience" for the umpteenth time, I realized you're right. Thanks for the tough love--I'm going to focus on getting that experience.
tomcreighton 15y ago
My opinion: if startups aren't serious about hiring you, they shouldn't go through the dance. Why are they wasting everybody's time?
- pyoung 15y ago
  Interviewing is a tricky thing. I have been on both sides of the court, and it is very difficult to get a good idea about a candidate's potential simply from the resume/cover letter. If you keep getting contacted by companies for interviews, but fail to get past that stage, I would recommend two things. 1. Make absolutely sure that your resume is accurate. If, in the interview, it looks like you 'embellished' your qualifications on your resume a bit too much, it is guaranteed to get you tossed into the 'no' pile. 2. Work on your interview skills. It is surprising how bad some people interview. It took me a couple practice tries before I really became comfortable with the process.

danilocampos 15y ago

I need to write a post to discuss this at greater depth, but... I am fucking astonished at how inept most recruiters are. I mean, just awful and useless at their "jobs." If we concede the point that, especially in the Valley, technical talent is in high demand, it stands to reason that any overture to such talent needs to be persuasive, informative and intriguing. It should explain the role in reasonable detail, while making a sane case for how cool the company and opportunity will be. Ideally, it should demonstrate that the recruiter has a basic understanding of a given prospect's skills and career trajectory. Super bonus points if it doesn't seem like a form letter. Instead, what I get is stuff like "Hey, I'm looking for developers for a role I'm filling. You need to be this, this, and this. Oh, and this is a plus. Mmkay, lemme know!" Well. Congratulations? Hey, I have a job. And it doesn't involve proving to a random recruiter that I'm skilled at it. And from such pitches, how would I know that I'd even care? I know nothing about the company and only have the vaguest notion of what I'd be wanted for. Recruiters are a waste of time, though mostly their own. A founder out being social has a much better chance, I think, at successfully recruiting limited talent. Not that they have time, I know. And don't get me started on the pitch that opened with "I'm looking for some iOS studs!" I had a friend at the company they were pitching. They weren't impressed when they heard about this one, especially since they had no formal relationship with the bozo.

dpritchett 15y ago
Maybe you're not looking, but don't you have some iOS dev friends who are less comfortable in their current positions? I take unsolicited recruitment approaches with a grain of salt, but I make an honest effort to go through my mental Rolodex to see if there's anyone I know who might benefit from making the connection. When I respond to a cold call it's either politely or not at all. Just tracking the volume and content of these approaches is valuable information that I can use to better manage my own career in the years ahead, not to mention the goodwill I can engender by making the occasional introduction.
- danilocampos 15y ago
  > don't you have some iOS dev friends who are less comfortable in their current positions? Gave this some thought for awhile. But no. Everyone I know worth their salt in iOS has solid gigs – way better than a lot of the turds recruiters are offering, anyway.

w33ble 15y ago

I had expected this to be related to using recruiters to find jobs. I've found that to be primarily a complete waste of time as well, but I suspect the reasons are the same. To most recruiters, it's just a numbers game, as the article points out; they simply "throw engineers at companies in the hopes that one or two will stick and they’ll get their commission". In my experience, it's quite rare to find a recruiter that will spend even a little bit of time actually matching candidates to the position in a meaningful way. It's also possible that, like the author, I've only ever dealt with really bad recruiters before.

prophetjohn 15y ago
I'll often get calls from recruiters telling me they've found a position for which I'm a perfect match. And then they explain it's a senior developer position requiring 5 years of experience, when it's very clearly stated on my resume that I'm a college student looking for an internship. They just keyword search resumes.
- ajross 15y ago
  Sort of. Remember they have two sides of the database: positions need filling and candidates available. If you reply to whatever they send you, they can drop you into the second bucket. So there's benefit to them (maybe even to you) even if the position isn't a fit.
- lotharbot 15y ago
  I've gotten similar e-mails and calls recently, based on a resume I posted to a job site 5 years ago, trying to match me to positions with requirements I don't remotely match. Further, I'm now a full time stay-at-home parent, which is my dream career. What's sad is, when I tell recruiters this, on occasion they'll still try to convince me of what a great fit their position would be.
ericdykstra 15y ago
One recruiter reached out to me when I was fresh out of college, and brought me in for a meeting. He then suddenly stopped responding in an email thread and I never heard from him again. Then again, that's a one-time experience. But my time with the recruiter was as wasteful as time spent posting my resume on Monster and other job sites.

lanstein 15y ago

cue Peroni...

Peroni 15y ago
Typical. The one day I chose to ignore HN in order to make a dent in my mountain of work and this article gets posted. For what it's worth, I agree wholeheartedly with the majority of the article. Recruiters who focus on start-ups are wasting their own time as well as the start-up's time. Yes there are a huge number of start-ups hiring and yes some will engage recruiters but the vast majority don't have the budget. I would happily wager a months salary on the fact that 99.9% of recruiters don't understand how a tech start-up works and even if they make the effort to learn, every start-up is different with their own individual challenges and quirks and it requires an immense amount of time and effort to truly understand what these companies need. No recruiter will invest that level of time. Instead they will throw a few CV's at the role and hope something sticks. I'm giving a talk at Hacker News London tomorrow night and the topic is 'Recruiting for start-ups'. It's a brief talk on how to improve your chances of finding the right people for your start-up and how to keep them. At no point do I even attempt to suggest they engage a recruiter, in fact I strongly encourage them not to.

z5h 15y ago

I had an idea of making recruiters put their money where their mouths are. Want to represent me? That'll cost you $2000/year. If you find me a great job in the next few years you you get many times your money back.

snorkel 15y ago
Recruiters would not consider such an arrangement unless you're a celebrity of the industry with a stellar resume. The candidate pool is too large to spend time and effort trying to place a single candidate in a great job.
- mrgoldenbrown 15y ago
  At least this might force the recruiter to admit what his true assessment of your chances are - if you don't call their bluff, they will forever tell you that you are a perfect fit, and that the job is the best ever.
- polymatter 15y ago
  maybe something universities could do to differentiate themselves. or individuals? I'm horrendous at selling myself and (now that I've been unemployed for >6 months) would gladly pay a ridiculous amount for someone to coach me through getting a job. I keep telling people that I'd like an agent. Everyone takes it as a joke :/
salem 15y ago
Whatever happened to that startup that would pay you to go to job interviews?

motters 15y ago

I've had very mixed experiences with recruiters. At best they ask reasonable questions and provide informative information about companies. At worst they're rude, condescending, unprofessional and openly confess that "I know nothing about software". I think that the probability distribution is skewed more towards the latter than the former.

pg 15y ago

A few days ago I moderated a panel discussion at the Computer History Museum with the founders of Dropbox, Evernote, and Wildfire. I asked whether it was worth dealing with outside recruiters, and they all said no. They all had recruiters working for them in house. In fact between 3% and 5% of their employees were recruiters. They said the best source of people initially were the friends of the founders and the first employees (which is one reason it's helpful to have gone to a good CS school) and that as soon as you've exhausted this source you should start hiring recruiters.

dpritchett 15y ago
pg, I'm curious about the advice you give to YC founders on identifying and recruiting early employees. Based on tutorspree's job posting they need roughly the same level of technical skills as a founder but they're getting a maximum of 3% equity and a below-market NYC salary. I'd guess the founders are getting 5-10x the equity and a salary that's not too far off from the one offered above. Is this package consistent with your advice? Does it generally work out well for the companies in question?
- tptacek 15y ago
  Equity grants are based on risk, not ability. Sometimes, very talented technical people are assuming extra risk due to opportunity cost; perhaps some other startup is offering comparable equity but has a longer runway and/or more traction. If those people are good at negotiating, they get better equity grants. A few factors play in to the gulf between founder and early employee equity: * Founders have by definition committed to the idea before it had any traction at all. More risk. * Founders have spent more time at the company than employees. Each day spent at the startup, in addition to accruing compensable effort, carries opportunity cost (not to hop ship to some other company) and thus more risk. * Founders have often worked, at least for a time, at zero salary. More risk. * Founders that can get their companies funded, accepted into YC, or bootstrapped to market traction can presumably do that again somewhere else --- again implying they're accepting the opportunity cost of committing to one startup instead of starting another. Most employees, regardless of ability, can't say that. It's important to remember that founding teams have drastically different compensation packages than employees do; it's almost an apples/oranges comparison. You want to remember this not to empathize with the founders but to keep in mind how different their incentives are from yours.

sgdesign 15y ago

If it's a designer you're looking for, skip recruiters and check out my project: http://folyo.me http://folyo.me It'll cost far less than a recruiter, and I'll refund you if you don't find someone.

oneplusone 15y ago
Are you using the same model as dibbble, or why are you not accepting signups?
- sgdesign 15y ago
  It's not the same model, every application has to be accepted by me personally. I've got enough designers (about 250) compared to the number of job offers currently on the site, so I've decided to close sign-ups for now.

jamiequint 15y ago

This is basically an argument that contingency recruiters are bad. You should differentiate this in the title from in-house or contract recruiters (retained search). Contingency recruiters, as you've noticed, have no incentive to filter out junk because they can just take a throw it at the wall and see what sticks approach. Also, there are a ton of bad recruiters, just like there are a ton of bad engineers. There are awesome recruiters out there and the sample of those who have cold called you rather than going through trusted channels is likely strongly biased towards the bad.

gujk 15y ago

Recruiters are marketplace makers, not matchmakers. A recruiter is completely incapable of determining who is a good fit or of asssessing talent, and traditional compensation models (x% of annual salary, paid on hire) are not aligned with succession outcomes for business. Recruiters are superior to staff at one thing: maintaineding a Rolodex. They have no ability to choose competently from that Rolodex, though. If you have good PR and a good jobs page, you don't need a generic recruiter.

johnnygleeson 15y ago

LinkedIn both relies on recruiters for revenue and reduces their necessity in the market. I would like to know how they think that will play out.

car 15y ago

It seems that the author is confusing placement agencies with recruiters working directly for a company (also see pg's comment). I've had great experiences with experienced recruiters at a startup, to help us find candidates, while at the same time getting pounded by unethical, moronic agencies. The recruiter helped us wade through hundreds of CV's, and eventually found an awesome Stanford CS MS that we ended up hiring. And this was while the recruiter worked for us as a contractor, so no 30% salary fee. So a great recruiter is worth their weight in gold, because they can potentially find that perfectly fitting candidate, giving a boost to a fledgling startup. Unfortunately, such recruiters a far and few between. Opposed to that, I got daily calls from agencies, that weaseled their way past our operators to talk to me directly, being super aggressive and downright rude when I politely told them to stop calling. This all, of course, because of the 30% fee salary fee when they place someone.

joshu 15y ago
The problem is that placement agencies also call themselves recruiters.

car 15y ago

It seems that the author is confusing placement agencies with recruiters working directly for a company (also see pg's comment). I've had great experiences with experienced recruiters, to help us find candidates, while at the same time getting pounded by unethical, moronic agencies. The recruiter helped us wade through hundreds of CV's, and eventually found an awesome Stanford CS MS that we ended up hiring. And this was while the recruiter worked for us as a contractor, so no 30% salary fee. Opposed to that, I got daily calls from agencies, that weaseled their way past our operators to talk to me directly, being super aggressive and downright rude when I politely told them to stop calling. This all, of course, because of the 30% fee salary fee when they place someone.

kabrummett 15y ago

As a technical recruiter I am not shocked by this post but I am a little frustrated with the large brush that is painted on the industry as a whole. I mean, I have worked with some BAD Developers, everything they write breaks the minute it is in production, you can never pry them away from the foosball table or lunch room, they smell and can’t speak in complete sentences BUT I still recruit for technical talent because not everyone is alike. Just like every industry there are rock stars and other guys just trying to put food on the table. I have been honored to survive this tough economical climate in the confines of a corporate recruiting gig for a technically forward high frequency trading firm in my hometown of Houston. Over the last few years I know more recruiters who have lost their jobs than I can count, some have lost their homes and their families. Does this sound familiar to anyone, maybe say the days of 2001 for the tech set? If the stories I have heard our true (I got into the biz in '04) developers making 150/hr one day are banging on recruiters doors begging for interviews the next. So ya, I get it, some recruiters have zero technical skills, know little to nothing about the job/client but at their core they are human beings. And just maybe, the client doesn't have a lot to sell at the moment, maybe they are still working out the kinks to their "value proposition" but they know they are onto something. So ignore the calls, politely say you aren't interested but remember, the tides can turn…quickly. The recruiter who doesn't know squat about server level architectural may be next door neighbors to someone who has enough funding to throw you a bone.

deleted 15y ago
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Shengster 15y ago
Good developers are hardly ever on the market. The majority of them are happy at their current jobs, and they know they could go anywhere else they wanted because their skills are highly valued. I'm sure it gets annoying when they frequently receive emails about "Technically Forward High Frequency Trading Firms" from recruiters who happened to find them through playing buzzword bingo. These recruiters tout that this new "opportunity" will give more money, benefits, responsibility, good looks, and sexual prowess, but never do the due diligence to make sure that their client is actually a good fit. It's the shotgun approach that most recruiters use that turns good developers off. Maybe once these recruiters treat developers with more respect, so will they.

datadon 15y ago

I had a call from a recruiter once, asking if I would be interested in a Ruby on Rails position. I said no, that's not what I'm looking for. She then asked me to explain what Ruby on Rails was, how it related to other technologies and was it popular because a lot of people seemed to be asking for it. Of course I explained the best I could, to make the world a better place and all that, but it seems (as other commenters have pointed out) that there could be a real niche for techies to run a recruiting firm that know what they're talking about.

simon 15y ago
"but it seems (as other commenters have pointed out) that there could be a real niche for techies to run a recruiting firm that know what they're talking about." I'd love to do that. What would such a company look like?

chollida1 15y ago

Mabye the title is a little off, but from my experience we have an inhouse recruiter and she is worth her salary and more. I'd be interested in wow do other companies hire without a recruiter.

TomNomNom 15y ago

What amazes me about a great deal of the recruiters I've dealt with is their inability to do basic word-matching. Recruiter "I have a great role for you as a Ruby developer!" Me: "Do you have a copy of my CV?" Recruiter: "Yes indeed, I have it on my screen right now!" The word "Ruby" does not appear on my CV, at all. This has happened to me more times than I can remember; with Ruby, C++, C# and a whole bunch of other things not mentioned anywhere on my CV. You don't even need to have heard of a technology (never-mind understand it) to narrow candidates down more than this.

hga 15y ago
Indeed. I've been out of the job market since 2004 and today after a (thankfully) long dry spell I got a "cold email" asking about a .NET position. I was working on UNIX(TM) when .NET came to be and therefore it's never ever been on any of the resumes I left behind. Then again, since wherever resumes of mine that are still floating around are so old, a shot in the dark like this has a higher chance of working than your situation, where I assume your resume is reasonably up to date.
briancurtin 15y ago
A good percentage of the contact I get from recruiters is for Django jobs, for which I have zero experience to offer. "Hey I noticed you have a lot of Django experience, I have a great role for you!"...yeah, actually not, I have never even installed Django, but I do have a lot of Python experience. I guess this is slightly better than what you're seeing since they're at least in the ballpark, but still horribly annoying. It just gets marked as spam for me.

tptacek 15y ago

Here's my most recent recruiting cold call: Him: Hello, I need to speak to the person who manages your servers. Me: Uh, who is this? Him: I need to report an issue with your servers. Are you the person who manages the servers? Me: What kind of issue? Him: Do you manage the servers? Me: I manage the office. What's the issue you need to report? Him: Oh! I'm calling because I understand that it's very hard to find good Linux and Ruby on Rails people in Chicago and- Me: You're a recruiter? Him: Yes, and- Click. Our current recruiter policy, at least in the Chicago office: $50 to the person in the office who can keep a recruiter on the phone the longest using only Emacs Eliza. In terms of actually recruiting people: * It's one of the key jobs for the management team; for instance, it is the thing I spend the most time on after billable work. * We do increasingly generous referral bonuses for good candidates. * We're doing a number of outreach programs (free classes and the like) to meet candidates. Ultimately, like SEO consultants and direct sales people, the problem with recruiters is adverse selection. There are good recruiters out there, but they can more or less print money; they aren't cold-calling you. Anyone who is cold-calling isn't a good recruiter. There aren't many good recruiters. The most useful shorthand is "all recruiters are terrible".

davidmathers 15y ago
$50 to the person in the office who can keep a recruiter on the phone the longest using only Emacs Eliza. I think you should take it to the next level and use the zippy quotes from psychoanalyze-pinhead.
Peroni 15y ago
Anyone who is cold-calling isn't a good recruiter. I completely disagree. The most successful recruiters always need to generate new business in order to stay successful and whilst it's great to pick up business from recommendations, often you are left with no option but to pick up the phone and start introducing yourself to people.
dspillett 15y ago
I usually respond to conversations like that with "you started this conversation with a blatant lie, why the hell should I trust you enough to do any sort of business with you?". They often call back almost immediately in the hope of someone else picking up the phone instead of me. Other common lies are "I'm a personal friend of Mr Anderson" (Mr Anderson doesn't exist, we made him up and listed him in a couple of places as our resources/personnel manager) or "I was talking to <some person> earlier today" (that one is particularly fun when they state they were just this minute talking to someone I has been sat opposite me talking to nobody for the last hour or few). I've stopped being nice to them. I don't even make an effort to be professional. Some companies will call repeatedly, day after day, sometimes several times a day. The only way to get rid of them I've found is immediately asking to talk to their boss to discuss being taken off their lists and demanding to talk to their boss until you get to or then hang up. And if that fails find the company's address and send them a letter by registered post stating that we do not want to deal with them, will not give them any more of of our time for free, and that any further calls will result in them being invoiced for our time at our consulting rates (we've gone as far as that twice, both times we heard nothing else from the company in question afterwards).

shawndrost 15y ago

Here's another side of the story: I just moved to SF, and I'm looking for jobs. Two friends sic'd a bunch of recruiters on me, and it is awesome! Here's the process: 1. They email or call me, and I send my resume and short summary of what I want. 2. They send me streams of awesome jobs. (Two have sent bad jobs, but gmail has a hotkey for that :D ) 3. I say I want to talk to XYZ at one of these times, and they hustle to make it happen. 4. They tell me little nuggets like "The last guy I placed here made $X" I'm running my own processes in parallel, and I can tell you that they suck a lot more. Non-recruiters -- and even in-house recruiters -- are hard to herd.

angelbob 15y ago
Fair enough. That's the most use I've heard of anybody getting out of recruiters. Well done! It's probably worth putting up a blog post somewhere about it :-)

benmathes 15y ago

The roles that we fill at this stage are highly specialized and generally call for nearly contradictory attributes in candidates. You need incredible good engineers who are not already in golden handcuffs, are crazy enough to join a risky early stage company, do not want to found their own company right now, want to work at all hours, and are aligned with the culture you are trying to build. It seems that this is indeed what startups are looking for. It also seems that they are generally unwilling to pay market salary. And startups don't seem willing to part with enough equity to make up the difference in the slightest if you weigh in how unlikely it is for employees to see any return on equity. There may be a reason why these jobs are hard to fill.

gaius 15y ago
Quite. There have been recent discussions on HN which point out the darkside of this: that early employees of startups often take as much risk and work as hard as the founders, yet get a tiny sliver of the upside. Co-founder, or nothing.
- benmathes 15y ago
  There has been quite a bit of discussion, going back almost 2 years: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369039 I'm personally interested in this because I know first hand about the bottom of EV-comp curve: I personally enjoy working at really early-stage companies, have little in the way of expenses (27yo DINK), but don't have enough saved to start my own thing (payed off 50k in student loans last year). It feels somewhat akin to working at game companies: Working in the industry is glamorized, so young and energetic people flock to it and get relatively shafted on the margins. My job is nowhere near as bad as working at somewhere like EA, but it's not unlike it either. I won't be doing this for much longer though, as the market isn't changing fast enough. Next time it's co-founder or series C+. In-between I always feel like I'm being had, to a degree.
pnathan 15y ago
Certainly I fall somewhere in that category. I'm not in a position to co-found, but would like to wind up at a startup. However, due to the high-risk nature, I want to have a good solid chunk of equity that I could cash out (loosely equivalent to the valuation of the risk that I took on)

oleg_kikin 15y ago

Shameless plug: http://recruiter-review.com/ http://recruiter-review.com/

Shengster 15y ago
Pretty awesome idea, thanks!

rmason 15y ago

I had a conversation with a recruiter and she said how can you expect to get a job if you have ColdFusion on your resume instead of Cold Fusion? I directed her to adobe.com so she could see the correct spelling. She went oh crap, I've been throwing away all the resumes with ColdFusion because the employer spelled it Cold Fusion. No wonder the client is complaining to me about the low quality of candidates that I am sending them. She promised to get me an interview with them but never called back.

mgkimsal 15y ago
Wow. I wanted to LOL at that and claim you made it up, but it really does sound plausible. I've considered putting together a training course for tech recruiters - something like a one day bootcamp to familiarize them with specific tech, so they know the diff between java and javascript, for example. but... need to find the time to do that on top of everything else!
- knotty66 15y ago
  Just last week I was sent a job requiring C++ and extensive Ball and Builder experience. It took me a couple of minutes to figure that one out ...
  - ramchip 15y ago
    Borland Builder? I didn't know that still existed...
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - knotty66 15y ago
      Yeah - the recruiter didn't know it had ever existed!

Rinum 15y ago

Perhaps we need a startup to disrupt the job recruiting industry?

vijayr 15y ago

It is outrageous when they take 20% of the billing rate (or more) hour after hour, every hour. All for sending a few emails, making a few phone calls, and arranging the interview. Among the middlemen in all industries, tech recruiters do the least work, and are least knowledgeable of the industry they work in - a real estate agent for example, does far more work than a recruiter, and could actually be very helpful. There has to be a better way to do tech recruiting.

danssig 15y ago
Actually, I would pay up to 25%... for the first (6 mo or less) contract. They got me that, how ever they did it. But I got me the extension so why do they expect more than just a payrolling fee for the extentions?

dsr_ 15y ago

The comments here about how bad contingency recruiters are point to a lack of three skills: - listening - industry knowledge - politeness Now, a new recruiter might not have much industry knowledge, but you can pick up listening skills and politeness (for any given culture) in a myriad of jobs. Why don't they have these valuable skills? Recruiters aren't very good at recognizing people who would be good recruiters...

randall 15y ago

http://www.hackruiter.com/ http://www.hackruiter.com/ is maybe the only exception to the rule. But they're sort of an invite-only thing... so not exactly useful for most startups.

brudgers 15y ago

Back during the housing boom, I landed two consecutive jobs through recruiters. Both were cases where the recruiter had a well established relationship with the hiring company (and needless to say were only recruiting me for that specific company). But it took a lot of contacts with different recruiters to land each of those jobs. Among my favorite experiences was the guy who asked me, "Have you ever heard of x, inc? "Uh, I worked for x, inc. and it is listed on my resume." I have a couple of conclusions. 1. All it takes is no regular job, a cellphone, a computer, and an account on a resume board to be a recruiter - and it shows. 2. The vast majority of recruiters stand between you and the job because they have no relationship with the company hiring and therefor you are more expensive to hire and more of a PITA to hire because the recruiter is trying to get his cut (and if she doesn't get it, you will get the "company isn't interested" phone call from the recruiter). 3. Really good recruiters are a valuable resource, know their industry and players, and won't put just any warm body forward in hopes of a score - they will screen the hell out of you. I learned the first question to ask a recruiter is about their contract with the employer - the good one's have no hesitation describing their relationship. The bad one's waffle.

djhworld 15y ago

I'm not sure what it's like in the states but here in the UK, recruiters are nothing more than glorified salespeople. The problem also lies in the fact that many recruitment agents get paid a woeful base salary, the rest being topped up by commission payments based on successful candidates they pass on. So it's in their interest to ring as many people as possible and put forward as many people as they can because there's a good chance they'll get a "bite" somewhere down the line

veritas9 15y ago

Try CodeEval.com. It's free to use and we've helped dozens of awesome companies hire awesome talent through out platform. We run the only free technical screening tool out there. And with out sourcing product, unlike annoying recruiters - we send very little but high quality candidates that are pre-screened.

namidark 15y ago

Everyone seems to be hating on recruiters -- I actually just found a near dream job by me actually getting in touch with one. I'm using the language and tools I love, and I'm rolling over into a full time position with awesome benefits. Yes they take a cut of your hourly wage -- but I quoted it so up there that its not that big of a deal anyways (don't undersell yourself).

danielk015 15y ago

As a third party executive recruiter, I definitely have to agree with many of the comments and frustrations that have been expressed. Unfortunately, at best the perception of recruiters is that they are a necessary evil sometimes in getting access to job opportunities. No recruiter is perfect and even the best retained ones do some cold calling during the week to establish relationships. However, I do agree the approach should not based on gimmicks and sales tricks, but have the intent to establish good rapport with those that are contacted. But at the end of the day, a recruiter that is in tune with the market, cold calling should really make up less than 20% of their "deal" flow. Great hires are made through referrals, and great recruiters gets constant networking referrals to keep their pipelines full and their days busy. If the recruiter is doing their job, either they are getting warm leads from their networks when jobs are broadcasted, or their networks is referring strong talent to them. Like a lawyer or accountant that desires to create a reputable brand in a particular marketplace, recruiters needs to see themselves as resources within this marketplace and not view recruiting as purely a transactional game. From my experience, just because I don't collect a fee does not make a relationship unsuccessful. Providing great customer service and building strong relationships will usually evolve into mutually beneficial interactions in subsequent years.

livingwithgeek 15y ago

As an in-house Recruiter at a startup, I thought I'd throw my $0.02 in. The bottom line: you're right. There are a LOT of "bad apples" out there spoiling the names of the decent Recruiters. One person here said they've never had a call from a good Recruiter; that's because we know better. I don't call people for jobs they're not suited for. In fact, I rarely call Techies at all; you don't answer your phones. Anyway, it's NOT always the Recruiter that sucks, as I demonstrated here: http://bit.ly/pokYV1 http://bit.ly/pokYV1 Loved this discussion though. Thank you all for solidifying so many of my beliefs.