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The Recruiter Honeypot

ewherry.com

81–90 of 162 posts

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#81

>However, I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder. Could someone elaborate?

Anybody she was getting recruiting emails from was trying to poach her (a founder).

Silicon Valley is small, incestuous and political. If all your competitors, other portfolio companies, etc. are getting recruiting emails from you, including their founders, you are going to seem either tone-deaf with bad recruiters or like you're trying to offend people you shouldn't offend.

Also, founders basically never say "yes".

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#83
> We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring

Whoa, wasn't there just a lawsuit where no-poach deals were determined highly illegal?

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#84
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to glue all these pieces together? I think overhead of managing all these small steps would exceed time savings you get from outsourcing. Overhead would be in: 1) Teaching ALL participants about job to fill. 2) Dealing with job seeker's frustration when he would need to answer the same questions to different people in the process. 3) Restricting access to potentially sensitive personal information.

4) waiting on the right bids when you just need to hire someone. 5) Outsourcing the DNA of the company to the lowest bidder. If your idea or your management team suck a recruiter can only do so much. Once you are worth your salt you can hire one full time recruiter and be done with it. Recruiting is more important, not less important. Commoditizing it means you don't know how to build a company.

Good points all.

On (4) this is a fatal flaw unless the market can provide enough liquidity that there is fast turnaround on bids. Overall I think it is a killer of the idea.

On your (5) I would say that many organisations have no DNA worth speaking of. This is the market I would be speaking to.

I have done contracting work for many different companies over my years. Rightly or wrongly, it's seen as a cost centre rather than a strategic issue in many cases (despite the rhetoric, of course).

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#85
post #38

This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags. Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll wri…

I recently worked with a recruiting agency that operated like a talent agency. The receiiters were not paid on comission. Instead, a team worked with me, and each pitched different companies to me. They prepped me for interviews, analyzed my strengths and weaknesses, and reviewed my past work and projects. In the end I had to choose between two offers. They encouraged me to take the slightly lesser paying one because…

Where was this geographically (San Fran? In the US at all?)

I was a Contingent (third-party) Technical Recruiter for 2.5 years (and hopefully never again, sans a cool company such as the above) and would love to work in that model. I only had the opportunity with something similar when our sales (the folks who got the requisitions / open orders) had many openings in similar "verticals." E.G. five different companies all looking for Java SE developers, with slight variations, but, for strong candidates I/we could get them several interviews, sometimes multiple offers.

Would be much more fulfilling. In most markets, however, this is (if the relationships are not established with multiple companies (which it sounds like the case in your situation)) "skill marketing" or trying to gain a sales foothold into a company by "marketing" a candidate to the company. At one of my former employers, the relationships were solid enough to where we created a few positions for some great candidates as we understood the departments needs. This is not typical at all, so finding a few companies actually making this a standard model would be fascinating (I imagine boutique retainer-model recruiting).

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#86
How many females were on the recruiting team? (i.e., how statistically significant was all of them getting pregnant in the same month...)?

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#87
post #83

> We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring Whoa, wasn't there just a lawsuit where no-poach deals were determined highly illegal?

Much different circumstance (more collusion) if you are thinking of the Google/Apple/Intel lawsuit: "Apple, Google, Intel fail to dismiss staff-poaching lawsuit | Reuters" http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/us-apple-poaching-...

Or Google: https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=1&source...

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#88

I friended Pete London on linkedin, because having connections with fictional recruiter honeypots is awesome. http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=60565153

Here's what I got here: You and this LinkedIn user don’t know anyone in common You can only view the profiles of users within your network.

Try doing an advanced search for firstname: Pete lastname: London region: San Francisco Bay Area

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#89
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to read his dissertation. "Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."

His other well known paper ( Decoupling IPv7 from Replication in Link-Level Acknowledgements ) is available from MIT[1] [1] http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686...

Haha, figure 1 is just awesome.

Re: The Recruiter Honeypot

#90
post #77
post #35

>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 bulls…

No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed. It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.

> you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are)

Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat. You don't even need to know that in order to recruit people.

--

I feel that NDAs are kind of bullshit too, but they're typically not as expressly oppressive. Unless they stretch into noncompetes, which are incredible bullshit.

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