The Recruiter Honeypot

Rodeo -

I'm currently planning a move down under (my wife just spooked me by wanting to push the timeframe up to next year instead of 2015). Mind if I reach out to you sometime to chat about the market there and whether what you're doing would make sense for someone in my position? I'd be much obliged.

Depending on how you define interview. In my experience a rough funnel of 100 people (random people through a job board, not referrals) -> 20 phone screens -> 5-10 actual interviews. Generally at large organizations in the Valley a rate of 10 on campus interviews to one offer is considered inefficient (shoot for ~5 from an efficiency perspective). Too many in person interviews generally suggests a weak filter in an earlier step (you can learn quite a bit from a phone screen, for instance).

>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends!

What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model.

I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bullshit. You're just attempting (rationally, I might add) to depress the market for your existing talent.

First and for all, especially in the climate we're in, banning two or three recruiting agencies isn't really going to hurt the chances of an employee who could be persuaded to leave. Secondly, if your employee can be persuaded to leave in the first place that's on you, not the recruiter!

I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet, but when the time comes I think I'll find it hard to hold it against them.

Edit: mandatory notice of: great article, would read again, A++!

Being a good external recruiter in Silicon Valley is a tricky balancing act. Everyone in the Valley wants the superstars, so competition is ridiculous. Additionally, cultural fit in small startups is of utmost importance, so you have to learn the culture of the company your engaged with. The culture is also highly insular and revolves around being a jedi master of code, so if you're a recruiter you're expected to have a deep understanding of the technical needs of the company in addition to the cultural ones. Plus most startups want people who have an active understanding of new languages/frameworks/methodologies, so you also have to have thorough knowledge of the bleeding edge of tech. Lastly, this person needs to have good in-person skills, network, and ability to sell a position against whatever the competition is offering.

Since each company is different, every time you get a new client you need to recalibrate and get up to speed on what they need. This is why it's rare to find a truly good external recruiter (and impossible to find a good contingency recruiter for a short term engagement). In my opinion the best arrangements are long-term engagements, giving the recruiting firm time to understand exactly what you're looking for and calibrate their searches against that. Of course these engagements are expensive and time-consuming, so it's also why I'm a big fan of internal recruiters since they a) absorb and presumably live your culture and b) can have a much deeper understanding of your technology and team dynamics.

What he was doing was phone screening two people a day. Actual interviews were probably 1/20th that - so, approximately 400 Resumes = 100 Screens = 20 in person Interviews = 4 Hires. Which is a reasonable average over a year.

[edit] My strategy has always been for posted positions that I'm actually acting as the recruiter for, is to do the initial resume screen myself (I can triage a resume in 1 minute for a position that I know about), and then hand over the screening to a reasonably competent (but unemployed) person in that area, ideally with a set of standard questions that the two of us have come up with together.

I.E. Hire a Unix Sysadmin to screen systems administrators, and give them a list of questions like, "what is an inode, what is the difference between a process and thread, how would you sum up the total size of files in a directory, what's your favor unix based operating system and why, tell me about the unix systems you've worked on?" - This usually takes 30 minutes/person.

The interviews with around 5 people takes about 45 minutes per interviewer (30 minutes to 1 hour) - so, about 4 hours per candidates.

So - 400 Resumes (6 1/2 hours) = 100 Screens (50 Hours) = 20 interviews (80 hours) = 4 Hires.

Total investment per hire is about 136.5/4 = 35 hours. Only 7 hours/hire needing to be done by the hiring manager. The screening is the easiest stuff to be outsourced.

Of course, you can dodge 90% of this if you just get great internal references (removing the need for screening, filtering) - which is why internal references are so highly valued by companies. (That, and they don't have to pay $20K-$30K to an external recruiter)