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Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

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Re: Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

#111
post #36
post #28

Maybe there's an opportunity here to build a web-based recruiter reputation system. The good recruiters would be happy to stand out from the bad.

The good recruiters would be happy to stand out from the bad. Only if you can provide some ex-ante assurance to the good ones that your reputation system isn't going to be gamed by bad ones who focus on gaming rather than being good recruiters.

Isn't that like saying "yeah, but it would have to work"? Seems like you should assume I meant that. In your scenario, the good recruiters would not stand out from the bad.

Re: Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

#112

I never understood why they stop communicating if an opportunity doesn't pan out? Why wouldn't they be interested in cultivating a long term relationship? That's what I think I would do if I were a recruiter. I'd keep in touch with say 200 people I know are really good and keep placing them as they switched jobs. I'm guessing at least 10 or 20 of those people would be switching jobs every year.

The quality recruiters do so. I personally just get swamped and neglect sending out updates.

Many times candidates are also applying for several roles and may not follow up on their own. I think the worst blunder is when a candidate desires feedback and gets only silence. Note that people, in general, hate delivering bad news "You were too weak on core Java / bad breath" and so avoid the conversation.

The recruiters in the field for several years (5+) sometimes place a candidate 2-3 x in new positions. Recruiters keep up with the rock-star talent, which is always in high demand.

It gets difficult to remember who does / is what if they are middle/average when burning through 200 profiles a day or 50 calls / day. Though I tend to do 50 / 10 for quality head hunting.

Re: Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

#113
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shot down by whom? There's nothing preventing someone from hanging a shingle as a recruiter. That's what I was getting at. Edit: Recruiting is one of those "make your own jobs" Ehrenreich describes in Bait and Switch .

Shot down by whom? the company I was attempting to recruit for. I've got at least one example where I offered a person I knew was good to a company that had hired me in the past. He was rejected without an interview. Being as I couldn't help the guy, I recommended him to an agency that worked with that company, and he got the job. Everyone seemed pretty happy with the deal, the guy stayed on for several years and fin…

Strong outgoing sales like personality. This role is mostly a sales position over the phone, with varying degree's of research for the best candidates. EG: finding a Sr Director of Technology in the SEO space for a $10M firm in the Valley; sourcing other firms with similar technical stacks; headhunting other Directors; selling the company; selling the hiring manager on the candidate; hopefully magic occurs.

But, many times its just X number of candidates results in X number of interviews and X number of offers. Some companies are more interested in volume, and some are more interested in placements (results) only.

Breakdown of different types of recruiters: http://www.job-hunt.org/recruit.shtml

Examples of high-quality retained search firms: http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/10553203/c_10676328

Re: Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

#114
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'They' are actually robots. In my experience they never stop communicating. Once you are in the database, they'll spam you forever.

Reply with an outrageous salary that would actually encourage you to switch jobs. For example, say that you're looking for IC positions with a minimum base of $250k (and that all of your friends are in that same compensation bracket). In my experience, that works well. As does, "I have N years left of graduate school and will not consider other opportunities until that is complete."

I just (honestly) tell them that I'm only interested in positions that allow me to work almost-exclusively from home. That normally makes them go away.

Re: Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vlad, Right or wrong, it's still a stereotype, and I'd appreciate that it be kept off the air. Signed: Arrogant Frenchman ;-) Dan

i don't honestly understand what is wrong (to the extent what it is almost considered a 10-letter word) about stereotypes usage. A stereotype is just a result of analytical and/or statistical aggregation. In this particular case he didn't stated what all Russians are shady. He stated that there is a [non-empty, and we all know it is really far from empty] set of Russians that have common trait of being shady and ther…

What's "wrong" with stereotypes is that the political correctness mindset denies there's the truth underneath these stereotypes. But obviously is.

My country has an healthy measure against correctness. We have lots of terrible jokes exploiting stereotypes off all nations. We still delightfully tell jokes about Nazis (well we were the first they attacked during WWII and also a most deserted country afterwards), though the war ended so long ago. We have jokes on Russians (hundreds of years of conflicts with those people), Jews (yeah even on how Germans killed them in out land), Americans, Muslims and so on.

And you know what.. it turns out to be extremely healthy. The foreigners (esp Americans!) are frightened on how terrible and rude these jokes are, but in fact such jokes dissolve many tensions instead of accumulating them.

The trick is: we also laugh of ourselves. Intensively.

Re: Why are technical recruiters so clueless?

#116

The consensus here is that recruitment agencies are clueless. So why hasn't the internet disintermediated them? This would be a good startup idea for someone.

Thinking about some disintermediations. On the supply side with consumer goods you have replicable stock (buy in more t-shirts/potatos). Presumably this is not how jobs work. You need someone to go around harvesting individual opportunities. Like collecting truffles as opposed to growing potatos.

With other unique items such as houses / ebay on the demand side you have various market entry costs: can the 'buyer' physically come over and see the house / can you get their paypal details? With jobs it's very easy (cheap) to apply, while for the employer it is costly to assess applications - making the pre-screening service offered by recruiters attractive.

Plus to disintermediate you'd need employers to directly deal with more of the HR process. That's open to them already, I suspect it's just not something people relish. Like you could save money washing your car but often it's just seen as a pain to be avoided.

Perhaps there are other improvements besides disintermediation: e.g. jobs sites with recruiter reputation/feedback. Seems pretty obvious but I actually haven't seen it around much. Can imagine there would be some bias (everyone who didn't get a post is peeved, plus some that did).

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