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

blog.tutorspree.com

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

#101

Post by TDL »

brador wrote: post #15
danilocampos wrote: post #11

I need to write a post to discuss this at greater depth, but... I am fucking astonished at how inept most recruiters are. I mean, just awful and useless at their "jobs." If we concede the point that, especially in the Valley, technical talent is in high demand, it stands to reason that any overture to such talent needs to be persuasive, informative and intriguing. It should explain the role in reasonable detail, whil…

If they had the skill set they'd be using it. Think "Those who can't, teach". Similar concept with recruiters. They're salespeople, not talent.

Salespeople can certainly be talent, even recruiters. Too many in sales fields are transactionally oriented as opposed to building long term relationships (which are easier & less costly to sell to.)

Regards, TDL

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

#103

Post by TDL »

benmathes wrote: post #68

The roles that we fill at this stage are highly specialized and generally call for nearly contradictory attributes in candidates. You need incredible good engineers who are not already in golden handcuffs, are crazy enough to join a risky early stage company, do not want to found their own company right now, want to work at all hours, and are aligned with the culture you are trying to build. It seems that this is ind…

It's not just not getting a large part of the up side. If the company fails, there isn't enough base pay to create a financial cushion to rely upon in the lean times. Something I have personal experience with.

Regards, TDL

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

#104

Post by vijayr »

It is outrageous when they take 20% of the billing rate (or more) hour after hour, every hour. All for sending a few emails, making a few phone calls, and arranging the interview. Among the middlemen in all industries, tech recruiters do the least work, and are least knowledgeable of the industry they work in - a real estate agent for example, does far more work than a recruiter, and could actually be very helpful.

There has to be a better way to do tech recruiting.

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

#105

Post by benmathes »

gaius wrote: post #81
benmathes wrote: post #68

The roles that we fill at this stage are highly specialized and generally call for nearly contradictory attributes in candidates. You need incredible good engineers who are not already in golden handcuffs, are crazy enough to join a risky early stage company, do not want to found their own company right now, want to work at all hours, and are aligned with the culture you are trying to build. It seems that this is ind…

Quite. There have been recent discussions on HN which point out the darkside of this: that early employees of startups often take as much risk and work as hard as the founders, yet get a tiny sliver of the upside. Co-founder, or nothing.

There has been quite a bit of discussion, going back almost 2 years: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1369039

I'm personally interested in this because I know first hand about the bottom of EV-comp curve: I personally enjoy working at really early-stage companies, have little in the way of expenses (27yo DINK), but don't have enough saved to start my own thing (payed off 50k in student loans last year).

It feels somewhat akin to working at game companies: Working in the industry is glamorized, so young and energetic people flock to it and get relatively shafted on the margins. My job is nowhere near as bad as working at somewhere like EA, but it's not unlike it either.

I won't be doing this for much longer though, as the market isn't changing fast enough. Next time it's co-founder or series C+. In-between I always feel like I'm being had, to a degree.

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

#106

Post by dsr_ »

The comments here about how bad contingency recruiters are point to a lack of three skills:

- listening - industry knowledge - politeness

Now, a new recruiter might not have much industry knowledge, but you can pick up listening skills and politeness (for any given culture) in a myriad of jobs. Why don't they have these valuable skills?

Recruiters aren't very good at recognizing people who would be good recruiters...

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

#107

Post by kabrummett »

deltaqueue wrote: post #76
kabrummett wrote: post #47

As a technical recruiter I am not shocked by this post but I am a little frustrated with the large brush that is painted on the industry as a whole. I mean, I have worked with some BAD Developers, everything they write breaks the minute it is in production, you can never pry them away from the foosball table or lunch room, they smell and can’t speak in complete sentences BUT I still recruit for technical talent becau…

I suspect you'll get downvoted for this, because the tone of your comment insinuates developers need recruiters. While this may be the case for the lowest percentile, the fact remains that companies need recruiters to locate and hire that top percentile of talent.

The tone of my post implies that the candidate/recruiter relationship is a reciprocal one, in good times we need you in bad times you may need us. The intent of my post is to share the recruiters side and hopefully have a balanced debate. I get that there are BAD recruiters out there, I totally hear that but not all of us are clueless, which is, in my option, the tone of the original blog

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

cperciva wrote: post #65
pg wrote: post #23

A few days ago I moderated a panel discussion at the Computer History Museum with the founders of Dropbox, Evernote, and Wildfire. I asked whether it was worth dealing with outside recruiters, and they all said no. They all had recruiters working for them in house. In fact between 3% and 5% of their employees were recruiters. They said the best source of people initially were the friends of the founders and the first…

as soon as you've exhausted this source you should start hiring recruiters. 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 th…

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by kabrummett »

Shengster wrote: post #66
kabrummett wrote: post #47

As a technical recruiter I am not shocked by this post but I am a little frustrated with the large brush that is painted on the industry as a whole. I mean, I have worked with some BAD Developers, everything they write breaks the minute it is in production, you can never pry them away from the foosball table or lunch room, they smell and can’t speak in complete sentences BUT I still recruit for technical talent becau…

Good developers are hardly ever on the market. The majority of them are happy at their current jobs, and they know they could go anywhere else they wanted because their skills are highly valued. I'm sure it gets annoying when they frequently receive emails about "Technically Forward High Frequency Trading Firms" from recruiters who happened to find them through playing buzzword bingo. These recruiters tout that this…

So great point, the best developers are never out of work. How would you recommend a recruiter network with said developers? How do we build mutually beneficial relationships? I tend not to cold call people, just because I think there are better ways to meet people but not all recruiters have that type of network.

I suppose I am interested in a solution oriented debate. I hear how you don't like be contacted, how can we do it better?

Oh, and a technically forward HFT means that we are using decently cutting edge stuff, HPC, low latency code, etc. As for offering you better looks and sexual prowess I think I have to opt out on that one. If you find that job, let me know I will send it to a few ex boyfriends. :)

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

#110

Post by tomcreighton »

wpietri wrote: post #78
tomcreighton wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My opinion: if startups aren't serious about hiring you, they shouldn't go through the dance. Why are they wasting everybody's time?

I go through this dance a fair bit. At least for us, we're totally serious about hiring. It's just that we're very fussy. To understand why, think about what we hope to happen. If we do things right, then anybody we hire today will be a de-facto leader two years from now, because they're one of the people who's been around since the early days. Any code they write will be in core parts of the system. And they're goin…

Fair point. I suppose it depends what you considerable a reasonable amount of time to evaluate a potential employee. All in all, it took me about two weeks to run the gauntlet at my current job (a startup), and I don't think that's unreasonable, given how busy everybody is.

If you keep getting passed over, however, I can see how that starts to really mount up.

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