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
#2Flash Harry was played by the recently deceased George Cole, gawd bless 'im. I've had first hand experience of the London recruitment scene, as permie and contractor, for many years now, and much of it is just as described in this funny & truthful article. However, one malpractice the author misses is Shitheads bunging brown envelopes to HR staff at large corps to manipulate the PSL. Also, there are some good recruiters out there who know and understand the skill sets they trade in. I've been lucky enough to use a couple of them as a hiring manager when I was permie at a bank. But they are very much in a minority...
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#3I'm looking for work right now (need an embedded engineer in the UK?) and some job boards have a tickbox "[]agency" or "[]direct employer" and most of the direct employer ones are also recruiters. That is a small thing but it's pure evil. And the sad thing is I'm sure that if I asked a recruiter "how can you sleep at night doing this" he'd just shrug and laugh because to him it's normal.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#4And 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.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#5At 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 notch" development talent, he would demand that he only wanted people with >15 years of java experience (remember, this was in 2000, and we also weren't a java shop). If they said, "Absolutely, no problem", they went on the banned list. Most recruiters failed this test.
The whole market was so frothy, I remember people who went from being bartenders to high-end tech recruiters making crazy money and doing coke with their clients in the bars they used to work at...and then back to bartending when the bubble burst.
Today, I feel like it's settled into an annoying-but-manageable background noise. I still get random recruiter reachouts, "Hey, I have an immediate opportunity for a contract Oracle DBA in illinois at $20/hour, interested?" (no, of course), but at least it's easy enough to hang up on them.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#6And 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?
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#7And 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.
They are more likely to negotiate against you than for you. They will tell you the company is offering less than what they actually are, and they will tell the company that you are asking for more than you actually are. Then, if it's at all close, they don't have to actually negotiate, they can find the middle on their own and both of you are happy with the outcome because you didn't know the original set-point.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#8At the end:
To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than Shithead would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#9And 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.
Have you tried to negotiate without a recruiter?
Many companies are now sharing some of the recruiter costs with the employee if they go direct. In London [currently] it is an employee market, so this is a simple and effective incentive.
Re: Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation
#10And 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.
The workers are poorly pad because they accept the offers. The recruiters are there because companies like them, I don't know exactly why? Maybe the whole procedure results in lower salaries?