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All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

hackerjobs.co.uk

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Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#21

Post by Peroni »

ianpri wrote: post #16
Peroni wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. We are still pretty much at MVP stage but you can hopefully get a hint in our intro blog: http://hackerjobs.co.uk/blog/2012/3/25/when-jonny-met-stevie Long story short, all job boards with a tiny number exceptions are catering primarily to the recruitment industry. Our priority is currently, and will always remain with the direct employer and the job seeker. As the site grows we will be adding features…

But why launch even an MVP that is essentially no different to the vast majority of other portals (HN, stackoverflow careers, gumtree) etc? Would it not be more useful to launch with at least some of the innovative features you've hinted at? What value are you adding to direct employers or job seekers?

But why launch even an MVP that is essentially no different...

In the short few months we've been up, we've had confirmation from a large number of companies having successfully filled vacancies via our site. That alone is justification to get it up and live. Also it's the best way of testing what works and what doesn't and more importantly, getting feedback on what users like and what they don't.

Would it not be more useful to launch with at least some of the innovative features you've hinted at?

If they were complete, they'd be live! The process we follow is to launch an MVP and iterate often. As we get a feature to a usable level, we'll update.

What value are you adding to direct employers or job seekers?

At the moment there are few publicly known job sites in the UK that contain zero recruiter vacancies. As a minimum, we provide that alternative right now with the promise of a lot more to come.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#22

Post by rmc »

nw1188 wrote: post #4

"The reality is that passive racism and ageism is still extremely active within the recruitment industry." I agree this is an issue in the industry, but I believe this point is a serious issue at the companies end rather than the responsibility of the recruiters. Surely the reason it is easier to "sell" white European candidates is that is what the companies want, and the people they end up hiring, this is completely…

In a way yes, the companies should not behave like this. But that doesn't absolve the recruitment companies. They are still breaking the law and behaving immorally. Shame on them.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#23

Post by narag »

zalew wrote: post #14
nw1188 wrote: post #4

"The reality is that passive racism and ageism is still extremely active within the recruitment industry." I agree this is an issue in the industry, but I believe this point is a serious issue at the companies end rather than the responsibility of the recruiters. Surely the reason it is easier to "sell" white European candidates is that is what the companies want, and the people they end up hiring, this is completely…

"had an unofficial yet extremely active rule where if the applicant had more vowels in their surname than consonants, their CV was instantly dismissed" could somebody tell me who is it discriminating against? it sounds ridiculous, or I'm not getting the reference.

I believe that it means foreign names have more vowels. But not sure if it's really so.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#24

Post by Peroni »

qznc wrote: post #19

The most elegant way to "fix" a market is to change the incentives. There is a contract between employer and recruiter. The employer does not want to be pestered all day about useless candidates. Just subtract some percentage from the recruiters fee for each wasted call. Let's say the employer gets on average 20 calls until a candidate qualifies and the third of those gets the job. This means 60 wasted calls for 3 ca…

Interesting concept however it won't work.

The pestering calls are random agencies trying to get your permission to recruit for their roles. Give them permission and they won't pester you unless they legitimately have a good candidate. Usually a recruiter will send a maximum of 5 candidates per vacancy.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#25

Post by drsim »

rmc wrote: post #20
drsim wrote: post #18

Recruitment agents work particularly well for contract developers, the ethics notwithstanding. Permanent is a whole different ball game that I'm not going to touch on. TLDR: The model isn't broken, it could use some optimization. Everyone likes to bash a recruiter. And, some guy who takes 80 quid a day out of your pocket for months should be an object of derision, no? Look at the flip side: agents act as stimulus for…

Everyone likes to bash a recruiter. And, some guy who takes 80 quid a day out of your pocket for months should be an object of derision, no? People don't hate recruiters because they take money, but because they are rubbish at their job.

Their job is to place a candidate with a client. They're good at it otherwise they would have died out long ago.

The gripe I hear from colleagues is X, Y, Z always ending in 'and they take £££ from me a day!'

My post notes the problems with the model, but it isn't broken.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#26

Post by aidos »

Peroni wrote: post #24
qznc wrote: post #19

The most elegant way to "fix" a market is to change the incentives. There is a contract between employer and recruiter. The employer does not want to be pestered all day about useless candidates. Just subtract some percentage from the recruiters fee for each wasted call. Let's say the employer gets on average 20 calls until a candidate qualifies and the third of those gets the job. This means 60 wasted calls for 3 ca…

Interesting concept however it won't work. The pestering calls are random agencies trying to get your permission to recruit for their roles. Give them permission and they won't pester you unless they legitimately have a good candidate. Usually a recruiter will send a maximum of 5 candidates per vacancy.

You say that, but we've sent back plenty of candidate cvs with a firm "no" the moment they arrive from a recruiter.

Would be interesting to have financial repercussions for low quality cvs coming through.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#27

Post by ktr »

citricsquid wrote: post #2

> Job boards are not doing anything even remotely innovative enough to disrupt the recruitment industry and the primary reason for that is purely because no-one wants to upset their cash cow. Except us that is. We don't pander to the recruitment industry. Quite the opposite in fact. We've sent a number of warning shots into the air to make them aware that we intend on impacting the need for reliance on their industry…

Well, since this came up I thought I'd share what I'm doing: http://www.teamcruiting.com. Would love feedback.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#28

Post by rhinds »

zalew wrote: post #13
rhinds wrote: post #11

I agree - having recently been through tech recruitment processes its pretty painful - at the end of the day recruiters are just sales people, their single goal is to sell you and the roles, regardless of what your goals or skills are. As a result, with a few friends I have been working as part of a team working on a product to try and disrupt the recruitment industry (was actually going to do a Show HN, as we have j…

> Its a online resume building site, that lets developers plug in to GitHub, stackoverflow, etc, to demonstrate their projects and experiences sth like https://masterbranch.com/ ? except the latter lets you connect other repos than github.

yep, it would certainly appear so..

Just as we were finishing build I also got a private invite to the StackOverflow beta career profile site (now publicly open i believe) which is the same thing but more mature (connects Stack score and a tonne of code repos etc)

So it seems we are not first to the party, but at least we can try and enjoy building a (hopefully) nice product!!

Hopefully a differentiating factor might be that we are planning on focusing more on the company profile/job stuff and generally the whole end-to-end recruitment experience, but lets see..

Thanks for letting me know about masterbranch though, seems like a really nice site.

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#29

Post by rhinds »

zalew wrote: post #13
rhinds wrote: post #11

I agree - having recently been through tech recruitment processes its pretty painful - at the end of the day recruiters are just sales people, their single goal is to sell you and the roles, regardless of what your goals or skills are. As a result, with a few friends I have been working as part of a team working on a product to try and disrupt the recruitment industry (was actually going to do a Show HN, as we have j…

> Its a online resume building site, that lets developers plug in to GitHub, stackoverflow, etc, to demonstrate their projects and experiences sth like https://masterbranch.com/ ? except the latter lets you connect other repos than github.

also, we are developing further integration with other repos and third parties, but as we are only second day live it will be incremental..!

Re: All that is wrong with the Recruitment Industry

#30

Post by rhinds »

Peroni wrote: post #12
rhinds wrote: post #11

I agree - having recently been through tech recruitment processes its pretty painful - at the end of the day recruiters are just sales people, their single goal is to sell you and the roles, regardless of what your goals or skills are. As a result, with a few friends I have been working as part of a team working on a product to try and disrupt the recruitment industry (was actually going to do a Show HN, as we have j…

This is what I'm talking about. Bit of advice, stick up some form of an 'about us' as it's not immediately evident what you are trying to achieve with the site. Had I not read your comment first I would have been a bit confused.

Thanks, thats good advice - we did have an about blurb in one of the early design iterations, but we obviously decided to drop it - will add some details back in.

Thanks for checking out the site.

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