Recruiters are, by and large, a waste of your time

Him: Hello, I need to speak to the person who manages your servers.

Me: Uh, who is this?

Him: I need to report an issue with your servers. Are you the person who manages the servers?

Me: What kind of issue?

Him: Do you manage the servers?

Me: I manage the office. What's the issue you need to report?

Him: Oh! I'm calling because I understand that it's very hard to find good Linux and Ruby on Rails people in Chicago and-

Me: You're a recruiter?

Him: Yes, and-

Click.

Our current recruiter policy, at least in the Chicago office: $50 to the person in the office who can keep a recruiter on the phone the longest using only Emacs Eliza.

In terms of actually recruiting people:

* It's one of the key jobs for the management team; for instance, it is the thing I spend the most time on after billable work.

* We do increasingly generous referral bonuses for good candidates.

* We're doing a number of outreach programs (free classes and the like) to meet candidates.

Ultimately, like SEO consultants and direct sales people, the problem with recruiters is adverse selection. There are good recruiters out there, but they can more or less print money; they aren't cold-calling you. Anyone who is cold-calling isn't a good recruiter. There aren't many good recruiters. The most useful shorthand is "all recruiters are terrible".

There were many people drawn by the allure of finance back in 2006-2008 and are now thinking of leaving. Generally people have enough money to carry themselves for some time on a low salary, have the risk tolerance (after all, they can cover themeselves), and can work at all hours.

Did they present any evidence to support this position, or does "should" in this case just mean that this is what they did?

There have been a few times when I've talked to technical people at startups and come away thinking "if it weren't for Tarsnap, I'd totally go work for them". In contrast, every time I talk to a recruiter, I come away thinking "if this is the sort of people they have at X, there's no way in hell I'd ever want to work there".

I'm not sure what the best solution is here, but it seems that recruiters are far from perfect.

   1. They email or call me, and I send my resume and short summary of what I want.
   2. They send me streams of awesome jobs.  (Two have sent bad jobs, but gmail has 
      a hotkey for that :D )
   3. I say I want to talk to XYZ at one of these times, and they hustle to make it 
      happen.
   4. They tell me little nuggets like "The last guy I placed here made $X"