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

But at the end of the day, a recruiter that is in tune with the market, cold calling should really make up less than 20% of their "deal" flow. Great hires are made through referrals, and great recruiters gets constant networking referrals to keep their pipelines full and their days busy. If the recruiter is doing their job, either they are getting warm leads from their networks when jobs are broadcasted, or their networks is referring strong talent to them.

Like a lawyer or accountant that desires to create a reputable brand in a particular marketplace, recruiters needs to see themselves as resources within this marketplace and not view recruiting as purely a transactional game. From my experience, just because I don't collect a fee does not make a relationship unsuccessful. Providing great customer service and building strong relationships will usually evolve into mutually beneficial interactions in subsequent years.

For what it's worth, I agree wholeheartedly with the majority of the article. Recruiters who focus on start-ups are wasting their own time as well as the start-up's time. Yes there are a huge number of start-ups hiring and yes some will engage recruiters but the vast majority don't have the budget.

I would happily wager a months salary on the fact that 99.9% of recruiters don't understand how a tech start-up works and even if they make the effort to learn, every start-up is different with their own individual challenges and quirks and it requires an immense amount of time and effort to truly understand what these companies need. No recruiter will invest that level of time. Instead they will throw a few CV's at the role and hope something sticks.

I'm giving a talk at Hacker News London tomorrow night and the topic is 'Recruiting for start-ups'. It's a brief talk on how to improve your chances of finding the right people for your start-up and how to keep them. At no point do I even attempt to suggest they engage a recruiter, in fact I strongly encourage them not to.

If you look at some of the most attractive companies such as Google & Facebook, they all have their own internal recruitment team and they rarely engage outside recruiters simply because their own team is immensley talented.

On that note, if anyone wants to capitalise on pg's insight and wants to hire a talented recruiter, I am really keen to shift to in-house recruitment!

Presumably the quality of the first recruiter you hire will have a significant impact if they are going to be bringing in other recruiters as well. So how do you hire a good recruiter?