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Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

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Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#61

Post by gallerytungsten »

When faced with such nonsense, hack the system.

Invent a couple "companies." Give them a web site and an important gloss of Serious Business. Have a couple friends or clients act as the contact point for the reference. Even more amusing: hire an offshore outsourcing company to act as the "human resources" department of your reference company. They should be under strict instructions to act very haughty with the recruiter, and tell them that "Mr. X" is far too busy to take their call, and to then sing your praises to the sky. Most recruiting drones will be quite satisfied with this encounter.

Recognize that they are only jumping through the hoops of their own corporate policy. Your hack is to grease this path for them and get that sweet, sweet money you desire.

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#62

Post by PakG1 »

illumin8 wrote: post #46
wccrawford wrote: post #5

You have failed to understand her job. Her clients are requiring these things. I know this, because the company I work for has had to draw hard lines on recruiters. Before that, they would send us utter crap and waste our time. Now, we don't get many hits, but most of them are actually worth talking to. She asked you all those questions because when she assumes things, her customers get really angry. Sending bad recr…

I respectfully disagree. Every reputable company I've ever been offered a job at requires references after they've decided to hire you. Any recruiter trying to harvest references of "managers and people in authority" is just a weasel trying to fill their sales contact database.

Bingo.

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#63

Post by pluc »

I'm not sure what you think your problem is. When someone asks you for reference you don't have, whether it's a landlord or a new employer, and you don't have the kind of references he wants, call up your best friends, and tell them that today, they're senior developers at this big company, they've worked with you and they love and respect you.

You're a freelancer. Nobody's gonna do this shit for you.

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#64

Post by PakG1 »

techiferous wrote: post #34

Some advice: If you don't like dealing with recruiters, come up with your own marketing strategy that doesn't involve recruiters.

Easy to say, hard to do, no? If he could, wouldn't he already be doing it. Assuming that it would actually work better, of course, otherwise there wouldn't be any point.

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#65

Post by KoZeN »

koevet wrote: post #10

I have been freelancing in Europe for the last 10 years and I have learned to avoid recruiters as much as I can. In the last 4 years I have managed to get contracts through connections and skip middlemen all-together. It takes more time but it's rewarding. Few rules I use when I deal with recruiters (in Europe): 1) There are really an handful of recruitment companies with a good reputation and history. By default, I…

Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.

Ouch. You cut me deep koevet.

In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here.

Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number).

If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency.

Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens.

TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#66

Post by ig1 »

My startup is working on fixing this problem :-)

However we're avoiding the contractor market at the moment, because for contractors the recruitment agency often acts as an employment agent as well as recruitment agent (i.e the company will pay the agency and the agency will pay the contractor). Companies prefer this model so they can just have a handful of agencies they can pay rather than having to deal with paying hundreds of contractors directly.

I'm currently playing around with a couple of ideas how to innovate in the contractor market, but essentially they involve minimizing the pain of dealing with recruiters rather than replacing them. Although as my focus is more on the permie market initially, it may take me a while to get around to turning those ideas into a reality !

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#67

Post by ig1 »

wccrawford wrote: post #5

You have failed to understand her job. Her clients are requiring these things. I know this, because the company I work for has had to draw hard lines on recruiters. Before that, they would send us utter crap and waste our time. Now, we don't get many hits, but most of them are actually worth talking to. She asked you all those questions because when she assumes things, her customers get really angry. Sending bad recr…

I agree the recruiter should be filtering candidates before submitting them; I disagree that it should be by using references.

There's an inherent conflict of interest for recruiters in handling references who are also potential leads, hence it's a situation that they should avoid placing themselves in. If they're going to do it at the very least it should be done by an outside agency.

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#68

Post by tomjen3 »

patio11 wrote: post #37

Remind me to tell you of the time a recruiter at a very large bank attempted to place me as their VP of Technical Operations for the Tokyo branch office. "If I might ask, what gave you the impression that I had sufficient leadership experience to be appropriate for this position?" "Your CV says that you ran a multinational software company from Japan for four years." "..."

To be fair, most people would properly assume that "a multinational software company" was a bit bigger than bingocardcreator.com.

So I wouldn't blame the recruiter.

Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue

#70

Post by charlesdm »

KoZeN wrote: post #58
koevet wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was actually hoping to read a reply from a recruiter. Good to hear that there is someone in the IT European recruiting business with a genuine interest in doing the job properly. How would you go regarding changing the current "95% of my colleagues suck" situation?

You can't. My industry is driven by one thing only, money. Recruiters get paid incredible bonuses for placing candidates and are less interested in how you feel and more interested in ticking off keywords fed to them by their client. Example: One role I have on my books right now is for a 3rd line support analyst. My colleague, a guy who makes about £50k to £60k, submitted a candidate who he listed out the tech requi…

How much do you guys make per placement in general?

Lets say you have someone with a salary of £60-70k. On average, how much do you earn when you place them and how long do you spend to fill a position? I know that there are extremes, but still.

Looking at the amount of spam I get on LinkedIn, I'm always under the impression that recruiters are looking for like 100 different positions at a time, but that's probably wrong.

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