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Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

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Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#131

Post by celticninja »

nordic_nomad wrote: post #112
joeyspn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an incredible opportunity to move to London and the result was: - £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer - No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc) - No free food/snacks/bevare at the company - No perks (equipment, etc) When questioned about this, the recruiter sa…

Holy god, that's a job in technology? Sounds like your typical retail wage slave situation here in the US. Even entry level tech jobs are in the $40-$50k range generally.

Not in London it isnt. £15k is below average wage, way below for London. Unless this IT job was excel monkey or perhaps keyboard cleaner original commenter is full of shit.

I know trainee developers (no education but some skills) who have started off on £21k and that is low for IT in London. I find it hard to believe that any IT role in London was filled for £15k by anyone other than the most junior of people.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#132

Post by robotkilla »

ckozlowski wrote: post #43
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is completely common in America. Is the London job market scene just messed up?

I took a job abroad after coming from the U.S., and updated my LinkedIn accordingly. Soon after, the spam shot up through the roof. All of the same, non-descript, no-details contacts the author describes. It's been striking.

I torched my linkedin account a while back after recruiters wouldn't stop hounding me. I also despise social networks of all sorts so that contributed to my decision.

Before I torched it though I tried a little experiment. I left my tech skills in place, but also added things like "Blacksmithing" and "Former POTUS" as my skill set. I also said "Do not contact me" and "I hate recruiters" and something along the lines of "if you contact me, you clearly didn't read my profile" - the spam seemed to increase for a while before I finally deleted the profile completely.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#133

Post by robeastham »

ascorbic wrote: post #47
mbroshi wrote: post #34

I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant. >> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited. Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for i…

Are you in the UK? If so, I'm seriously surprised this doesn't ring true. To me it exactly matches my experience both as a contractor and as an employer. As to who is being exploited here, it's the whole IT industry. They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they leech off our industry. They may not be sending children down mines, but that doesn't diminish the fact they are terrible companies and terrible people.

As a London based developer (VR these days), I have to say that I immediately recognise the hammed up picture this guy paints of IT recruiters in the UK.

I only ever found one recruitment company that I liked who I felt was consistently top notch when I was freelancing. They didn't ever call me unless I signaled I was looking for work and always negotiated better rates than I felt I was able to when I was first starting out. They were called Recruit Media, but they were later swallowed up by a larger company that I cannot vouch for.

Some former employees set up a new agency that continued in the same vein as Recruit Media - http://www.wearefutureheads.co.uk/. They focus on web and digital content creation specialists. They know what the acronyms mean as well as how to spell them properly. If you're looking for a no-bullshit web/digital recruiter in this in the UK then you could do a lot worse.

Disclaimer: I have never worked as a recruiter and I have no links with Futureheads beyond being placed by some of their staff and also using them to recruit freelancers for projects I have led.

Obviously it goes without saying that you're much better off developing your professional network, negotiating a good rate and going direct if you can.

Just felt compelled to write this to illustrate that not all of them are bad. Sadly I'd estimate that at least 99% of the firms here in the UK are complete time wasters.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#134

Post by tommyd »

adrianb wrote: post #51
raverbashing wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just left my old number (that I don't use anymore) in linkedin

That's still not good enough. I've had recruiters look at who my current employer is then call the public phone number of the company (the reception) and ask for my name. I'm not joking. Happened more than once.

I don't usually object to recruiters and haven't had any major issues with them (one saying "I notice you have Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP experience... what about LAMP, do you have any experience with that?" did make me laugh though!) but one did go too far and when they couldn't get hold of me, Googled my name, found my name on an info page for a club night I DJed at, called the promoter's number (who was a friend of mine) and told him he urgently needed to get hold of me regarding work. Needless to say both I and my friend were pretty p*ed off (he used the line "come on, I know the best people are hard to track down" as if that made it okay) and he didn't get the time of day from me!

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#135

Post by crucialfelix »

mattzito wrote: post #5

At least in the US, the whole recruiting industry hit its nadir during the dot-com bubble of 2000. I remember getting a cold-call from a recruiter, "Hey, got a great gig at a soon-to-IPO startup for a Solaris and Linux guru", "No thanks", hang up, the phone next to me rings, same dude, literally just dialing up the extension tree. My boss at the time had a strategy where whenever a recruiter called offering "top notc…

In NY during that time period one company got a cold call from a head hunter asking to speak to "Mitch" or some name like that. That was the dog's name. They had gotten some list of names and it included the office dog.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#136

Post by rb2k_ »

ascorbic wrote: post #47
mbroshi wrote: post #34

I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant. >> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited. Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for i…

Are you in the UK? If so, I'm seriously surprised this doesn't ring true. To me it exactly matches my experience both as a contractor and as an employer. As to who is being exploited here, it's the whole IT industry. They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they leech off our industry. They may not be sending children down mines, but that doesn't diminish the fact they are terrible companies and terrible people.

I think that might be the main difference.

I worked in Germany and in the US. The only time that recruiters got a tad annoying was when I was working in Germany and got 2-3 UK agencies. By far not as bad as the post makes it seem, but some slightly annoying things such as calling me on a Sunday evening, trying to give me prep speeches and overusing my name, script reading, trying to not tell me the client name, mispronouncing the skills they were looking for, ...

In the US, the recruiter eMails are more frequent, but usually pretty civilized. Especially the bigger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google) that have their own in-house recruiters tend to be pleasant to work with.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#137

Post by nordic_nomad »

pricechild wrote: post #6
protonfish wrote: post #4

And yet they are our only weapon against business owners who are just as clueless but lack the incentive to pay a competitive wage. When it comes to salary negotiation, it's nice to have Shithead in your corner.

Could you expand on that? If you can't negotiate with the owner, how does shithead help?

If you have a good recruiter (the last one I worked with was such) they'll negotiate for you. This one asked me what I was looking for, said I could get more than that, and then got even more than that for me. Just because they have industry data and like jobs to back up the negotiation.

I've had bad ones of course, I think everyone has. But the good ones can do a lot more leg work than you have time for and find you a much better situation than you could find on your own, plus play both sides to make their comission as big as possible which benefits you.

The best are agents, the worst are pimps.

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#138

Post by pjc50 »

ascorbic wrote: post #47
mbroshi wrote: post #34

I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant. >> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited. Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for i…

Are you in the UK? If so, I'm seriously surprised this doesn't ring true. To me it exactly matches my experience both as a contractor and as an employer. As to who is being exploited here, it's the whole IT industry. They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they leech off our industry. They may not be sending children down mines, but that doesn't diminish the fact they are terrible companies and terrible people.

I think it sticks out because, in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces. And in the recruitment business it seems to happen a lot.

(Omission, elision and euphemism is the British way!)

Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

#140

Post by celticninja »

pricechild wrote: post #6
protonfish wrote: post #4

And yet they are our only weapon against business owners who are just as clueless but lack the incentive to pay a competitive wage. When it comes to salary negotiation, it's nice to have Shithead in your corner.

Could you expand on that? If you can't negotiate with the owner, how does shithead help?

more if you as an individual are not good as negotiating (and in IT there can be a higher % of people with less than stellar social skills) then these people will negotiate on your behalf. Its their job to negotiate so if they want to place you you tell them you want $x per day and if they dont get it for you you don't do the job.
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