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Ask HN: We all know recruitment is broken. How can we fix it?
I know, this one is a frequent one, and it's not a new phenomenon.
What I am puzzled about is the sheer amount of recruiters who somehow are able to make ends meet being a middle-men in the market. I used to be a sales guy, and thats what I did on linkedin in 2012. Spamming people with offerings, but at least I tried to take time to see if it can be relevant to them.
I am getting interview requests for accounting, NFT production, opera singing, speaking at a slingshot conference and one that really shook me was army consultant for gun law in southern-Europe.
I guess part of the issue are incentives. Companies willing to pay recruiters to spam as many candidates as possible to get some numbers in and fill in the OKRs for the quarter.
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Doesn't have to be a tech solution, but curious if anyone thought about ways of fixing it?
To clarify, I mean both experience for companies looking for candidates as well as candidate process of finding opportunities.
- gregjor 4y agoCompanies don’t pay recruiters to send spam. Recruiters get paid for successfully finding a candidate and getting them hired for a job. Recruiters play a numbers game. The more potential candidates they have in their database the better their chances of filing a job. People looking for jobs themselves often play a similar numbers game, applying to hundreds of jobs, and many online job boards play the same game, listing as many jobs as they can find (or scrape) and building an audience of job seekers. We don’t all know that “recruitment is broken.” If you only see recruiters as a source of unwanted emails you might get that impression. But recruiters only need to place one person in the jobs they have to fill to succeed. Emails cost next to nothing. In fact recruiters can do very well if they provide value to companies who use them to recruit.
- kirso 4y agoPerhaps I didn't mention all the reasons so its not just a matter of spam but: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845802 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20845802 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11580938 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11580938 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20708026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20708026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25298983 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25298983 Funny that you posted a similar reply here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23123686 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23123686 I agree that not everyone will find the process frustrating. My humble personal experience and at least 90% professionals around me says otherwise though.
- gregjor 4y agoYou have illustrated that “hiring is broken” and “recruitment is broken” threads get posted on HN fairly often. A small sample from a small and possibly unrepresentative subset of job seekers. I don’t question that maintaining a profile on LinkedIn or similar sites will lead to a lot of unsolicited recruiter email. I don’t have a LinkedIn account anymore, so that fixes the problem for me. I explained why that happens, I didn’t say it doesn’t happen. The recruiting and hiring processes we see in the tech industry may not give the best results for anyone, and may have unwanted side-effects like spam. I tend to agree, which is why I have made similar comments before, and why I have advised not playing the numbers game to find a job. In my experience good recruiters exist. You have to cultivate an actual relationship with competent recruiters, not just put a CV on LinkedIn and expect every recruiter to care about you and your preferences.
- atlgator 4y agoMake it simpler to apply. Every time I click Apply on a LinkedIn job posting and it takes me to a Workday or Brassring portal to create an account, I immediately close the window. If you want me to create an account and do a formal application during the interview stage, that's fine, but not before the resume review.
- GianFabien 4y agoIt's not a single problem. There are layers of perverse incentives. I also suspect that there are differences between geographical regions. Recruiters operate as call-centres, staffed by salespersons with no real IT knowledge nor understanding of how technologies are actually used. The AI software recruitment companies use is no better than some keyword matching, scoring system. To do technology recruiting well, the "consultants" need to be experienced in their field. But such people are unlikely to be motivated to cold-call, etc. I see it as a problem whose solution is to do things that don't scale.
- kirso 4y agoThere are definitely several layers here: - Approach - Process of application - Interviewing - Offer process I guess I just wanted to rant in general about this entire flow. Have you ever tried the `meritocracy based recruitment tests`? As in they send you some exercises to solve before they invite you to the interview?
- GianFabien 4y agoI haven't tried MBRT. But I'm more a BA/PM contractor. Totally agree with you that the process is broken. In my experience more during the early stages. What I have seen over the decades (yeah that long) is that the knowledge level of consultants has plummeted. Used to be that the consultant knew the candidate personally and was a true matchmaker on behalf of both parties. These days, it seems that consultants are just hammering away trying to reach their KPIs. More like off-shored call centers.
- tony-allan 4y agoFrom the recruiters point of view I expect that the process is nearly perfect. All you need is a cheap call centre, some pseudo keyword matching software, and employers willing to pay money. The product is of course the applicants (that's us).
- dsattt 4y agoIt cannot be fixed because it's an ego trip. HR wants to feel important, interviewers want to feel smart and the executives want to make a bargain.