Stop dealing with recruiters. Figure out a way to market yourself directly to clients.
Your geographic location should not be a barrier to this; you have the power of the intarwebs at your disposal.
Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
71–80 of 114 posts
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#72Some extra information to consider:
0) Many employers hate recruiters just as badly as most job seekers hate recruiters
1) Recruiters earn their money off of getting employers to sign with them, they lose money on trying to find employees (and pretending to screen them the way the lady did in this post).
2) Proportionally they spend a great deal of time being very courteous to employers, yet are very brisk and rude to employees
3) They feed your MS Word document through a program that scans it for key words, they never actually look at it
4) They just copy and paste your information into their resume template which removes any of your contact information but has their huge logo on top
5) I've been in 2 companies that went under and had to find a job fast, all 3 times I found a job it was _never_ through a recruiter.
So yeah, just avoid recruiters. Your time is too valuable for that.
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#73Remind 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.
Hundreds of thousands of elementary schoolteachers manage to find my website and read the about page. It's on the blue Googles and the green Googles, and the blue texty clicky thingy on my resume will take you to it, too. If reading that prior to contacting me about my desire for a job is not in the recruiter's job description, what do they do all day?
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't sound like an issue of honesty. Context is important. Questions must always be answered from the questioner's point of view. If you've finished a PhD involving mathematical modelling, from the recruiter's perspective you are definitely good at maths. So the correct answer to "Are you good at maths?" from a recruiter is simply "Yes". If he wants more details then he'll ask for it. The correct answer is no…
"Most people give long winded answers when they're trying to weasel out of giving the straight answer that they don't want to give because it'll make them look bad." It's well-known that "geeks" generally try to answer questions literally, and as accurately as possible. It's also pretty well known that the better at a field you are, the less highly you think of yourself (the Dunning–Kruger effect.) Put those two toge…
It's actually a great indication that someone has had little experience with a true master in any field if they think hesitance to claim expertise is earmarking a cover up.
Reminds me of the concept of enlightenment. If you think you're enlightened, you are nigh assuredly not.
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#75Remind 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." "..."
You should have responded in the affirmative, just to see how far the rabbit hole would go.
At least that's what I'd want to do, except I'd probably wimp out.
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#76You have to understand one very important thing. Recruiters are the email advertisement newsletters of the real world. Someone (or yourself) places your email in a bucket and boom, you're getting this great offers, so yo go check one out. Then the offer is asking you to provide more info about yourself and then asks you to get other people involved. After a while of this process you start to get the impression that the offer is not worth it, and if you ever actually bought something you realize it was actually vastly overpriced (underpaid?). So you then click on the unsubscribe link, but alas they keep sending you stuff, and then you get emails of the people you placed in a similar position. Six months later you get emails from people you don't know asking you how you could be so stupid to start a chain reaction of people giving out other people's details, and then by chance you save a telemarketer from suicide and he then tells you the story of how he used to be in charge of a newsletter. He helps you unsubscribe and all, and then tells you: "Oh who cares about the offer (job?) it was no good anyways, we just wanted to get as many names and emails from you so we could tell our bosses that we deserve that 20 dollar bonus at the end of the month."
Conclusion: Don't deal with recruiters, you need to build yourself as a brand and create your own reputation wherever you want to work. No excuses.
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#77My favorite recruiter story:
In summer 2008, I was looking for work. At one point, I saw a job listing at The Hive [1], calling for Erlang. I don't have much Erlang experience (one proof-of-concept DNS server), but it's on my résumé. I applied, just in case.
Well. It turned out that, when you Googled "erlang resume", I was on the third page. Over the next month or so, I heard from about 20 bottom-feeder recruiters, with that same job. Most of them were trying to claim that the job was with a client of theirs, but none of them knew anything that wasn't in the listing on Dice. It got to the point where my wife could recognize a new one on the phone, even if they didn't say "Erlang" to her.
(Mind you, I've also had good experiences with recruiters. But "he wasn't a fool" doesn't make as good a story.)
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 w…
That's so hard to quantify but I'll do my best.
Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:
Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.
From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.
Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.
A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.
As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#79tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit. This statement acurately describes 95% of my colleagues. I will happily accept the challenge of changing your perception of our industry. I'm a technical recruiter that covers the London market. Feel free to send me your CV. My details are in my profile. Also, feel free to have a look through my comment history. I'm not on this site to pick up leads or pus…
I think recruiters would do a better job if they spent more time reading HN. You probably understand your "product" better than most of your competition ever will.
Re: Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
#80I 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%.…
Again, I may sound harsh here, but, given a couple of exceptions, my experiences with recruiters are nothing short that horrendous. That is why now I resort only to personal connections and on networks like Linkedin.
I'm also noticing a worrying trend recently:
(caveat: I'm not an native English speaker but I have lived in the UK and I use English as my working language. I can recognize UK accents pretty well).
More often than not, I'm getting phone calls from recruiters with a very strong cockney accent that clearly have no idea of what they are talking about and they sounds like they just landed on that desk without any previous experience in the industry. These are particularly pesky. They go straight to the flag-raising questions and they make you feel like a complete idiot. Honestly, these cowboys are just damaging the image of an already deeply wounded industry. I don't know how your industry deals with dishonest or unprofessional behavior, but if you want to get the trust of people like the one hanging in this community you have to work on some mechanism to keeps the bad apples out of the basket. I can actually smell a business idea here, like a guild of super-hero recruiters, who never let you down and do actually find you your dream job.