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In my experience recruiters routinely do nothing. I hired a substantial team of about 50 engineers at a FAANG by getting a LinkedIn recruiter account, thinking

In my experience recruiters routinely do nothing. I hired a substantial team of about 50 engineers at a FAANG by getting a LinkedIn recruiter account, thinking hard about the geographical state of tech and where I could find engineers looking to get a better job in a better place and directly in mailing them as the leader of the org. I customized each message and made it clear I was the one hiring and I’m not a recruiter. I had as much as a 70% initial conversion rate and a 30% overall conversion to offer rate. It was grueling because we are still talking about somewhere in the 200+ person range to interact with in addition to my normal job. But in that time I got precisely zero hires out of recruiting and sourcing.

logicalmonster 4y ago
I don't think many engineers want to do hiring, but I'm 100% certain that even the most introvert and unmotivated engineer would do a better job at it for technical fields than 99% of recruiters. I think many recruiters do about as much as they can without knowing technology at all. The problem is that they can't really do much of anything other than being a middleman without knowing technology. I don't mean that recruiters must be able to code or anything. I mean that recruiters should be able to have an intelligent 5 minute conversation with somebody about some of their projects, ask an intelligent question or two, and be able to have a fairly solid idea if the applicant is likely to be full of shit or not. This is why we get plenty of dumb things like recruiters asking job applicants for a laundry list of dumb "How many years of experience do you have with X technology?" questions. It's about all they are capable of.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Yeah and to be clear I’m the most introverted of all folks, and it was literally torture forcing myself to do this but I wanted to actually get my effort done and I could see from my peer teams the sourcing and recruiting functions were not functional. I don’t think they actually do nothing though. They’re just highly ineffectual. Not only do they target candidates wrong as you mention they’re known to be five steps removed from any decision. The power of being the hiring manager and directly involved in the project is hard to measure but it’s significant. The other issue is recruiters don’t actually know the tech landscape in enough detail. They know the rough shape of major employers, but details like “UIUC is in central Illinois and there aren’t many employees in the area and those that are there aren’t that desirable so recruiting phd students out of the program isn’t that hard” or “national labs under Trump are a terrible place to work so recruit folks working on climate change super computing projects” aren’t practically tractable. They’re also, to your point, unaware of the adjacencies of technologies - while they know what stack you’re hiring for, they can’t know X is similar to Y so X is sufficient. It’s a hard job and entirely thankless, and I always feel tremendous empathy and sympathy for folks in the recruiter role. But that doesn’t help the fact they’re almost entirely useless in that role.
  - logicalmonster 4y ago
    > It’s a hard job and entirely thankless, and I always feel tremendous empathy and sympathy for folks in the recruiter role. Every job has good and bad things about it, and I'd acknowledge that there's some really bad aspects to recruiting such as the following: > Having to give people bad news frequently is emotionally draining to them sometimes. > I'm sure it gets quite monotonous to round up a bunch of candidates for any role. You probably have to call a lot of people and have the same conversations over and over and over again, day in and out. > Being among the first in line for layoffs in bad times sucks. > I'm sure some client demands they get are unreasonable. There are companies that want to immediately find somebody who takes 50% of the average developer salary who has the technical experience of an entire IT department in 1 person. That said, recruiters can get a pretty favorable overall path in life: for a small fraction of the mental effort of a developer, you can get a fairly large percentage of their salary without having any notable skills other than a few general skills such as being able to organize sending emails and maintaining appointments on a calendar.

logicalmonster 4y ago

I don't think many engineers want to do hiring, but I'm 100% certain that even the most introvert and unmotivated engineer would do a better job at it for technical fields than 99% of recruiters. I think many recruiters do about as much as they can without knowing technology at all. The problem is that they can't really do much of anything other than being a middleman without knowing technology. I don't mean that recruiters must be able to code or anything. I mean that recruiters should be able to have an intelligent 5 minute conversation with somebody about some of their projects, ask an intelligent question or two, and be able to have a fairly solid idea if the applicant is likely to be full of shit or not. This is why we get plenty of dumb things like recruiters asking job applicants for a laundry list of dumb "How many years of experience do you have with X technology?" questions. It's about all they are capable of.

fnordpiglet 4y ago
Yeah and to be clear I’m the most introverted of all folks, and it was literally torture forcing myself to do this but I wanted to actually get my effort done and I could see from my peer teams the sourcing and recruiting functions were not functional. I don’t think they actually do nothing though. They’re just highly ineffectual. Not only do they target candidates wrong as you mention they’re known to be five steps removed from any decision. The power of being the hiring manager and directly involved in the project is hard to measure but it’s significant. The other issue is recruiters don’t actually know the tech landscape in enough detail. They know the rough shape of major employers, but details like “UIUC is in central Illinois and there aren’t many employees in the area and those that are there aren’t that desirable so recruiting phd students out of the program isn’t that hard” or “national labs under Trump are a terrible place to work so recruit folks working on climate change super computing projects” aren’t practically tractable. They’re also, to your point, unaware of the adjacencies of technologies - while they know what stack you’re hiring for, they can’t know X is similar to Y so X is sufficient. It’s a hard job and entirely thankless, and I always feel tremendous empathy and sympathy for folks in the recruiter role. But that doesn’t help the fact they’re almost entirely useless in that role.
- logicalmonster 4y ago
  > It’s a hard job and entirely thankless, and I always feel tremendous empathy and sympathy for folks in the recruiter role. Every job has good and bad things about it, and I'd acknowledge that there's some really bad aspects to recruiting such as the following: > Having to give people bad news frequently is emotionally draining to them sometimes. > I'm sure it gets quite monotonous to round up a bunch of candidates for any role. You probably have to call a lot of people and have the same conversations over and over and over again, day in and out. > Being among the first in line for layoffs in bad times sucks. > I'm sure some client demands they get are unreasonable. There are companies that want to immediately find somebody who takes 50% of the average developer salary who has the technical experience of an entire IT department in 1 person. That said, recruiters can get a pretty favorable overall path in life: for a small fraction of the mental effort of a developer, you can get a fairly large percentage of their salary without having any notable skills other than a few general skills such as being able to organize sending emails and maintaining appointments on a calendar.