I just wish we could solve this recruiter problem. For an industry full of problem solvers, nobody seems too keen on really fixing this.
1. Programmers don't like recruiters and would prefer not to have to work with them.
2. Companies think recruiting firms are experts and are adept at finding qualified candidates, which is false.
3. There are good companies that need good employees and good employees who want to work at good companies. Currently the 'solution' is to use the same corporate middle men who shuffle bad employees to bad companies and mediocre employees to mediocre companies.
Recruiter here (independent agency), and I've always felt that the problem is that fees are too high. With this much money being thrown at recruiters, it keeps the bad ones in the business. If fees were lower, only the best recruiters would survive - as well as those that are just best at making money, which doesn't necessarily mean 'best' - and eventually most of the bottom recruiters would exit the market.
Contingency recruiting is the overall source of the problem. Someone could make a few lucky hits a year and make good enough money to stay in business. If fees were say half of what they are now, that would put many out of business, and I'd assume those would the recruiters that everyone complains about.
The size of fees also leads to the ethics problems. You may or may not lie for $5, but what kind of lies might you tell for say $30,000? The large numbers and competitive nature make it a high-reward game that gives incentive to cheat and lie when necessary.
Smaller fees. I use small flat fees with a portion paid up front. The fees are small enough that I have little incentive to lie, and the up front portion is small enough that I'm going to hustle to get the second payment.
Contingency recruiters absorb 100% of the risk, meaning they can work hundreds of hours on a search but if the recruiter down the street fills it they get nothing. This is the reason fees are high - the risk factor. If you remove that risk to some degree (or share the risk) by paying some money up front, recruiters should agree to lower fees and companies should like the results.
As a recruiter, would I rather compete against 20 bigger firms for a 30K fee or would I rather be practically guaranteed a 15K fee? The answer for me is the latter, but may differ for others.
I care a lot about recruiters utterly wasting my time with garbage resumes, even when I've told them what I wanted.
I would prefer to see two or three resumes a month of people I want to talk to than two or three resumes a day of people that don't meet the bar.
Most of the good hires come from referrals anyway. Very, very few recruiter-fed folks have passed interviews and worked out, at any company I've worked at.
If you want two or three good resumes a month, you should pay recruiters some money in advance as I suggest. When on retainer, you don't feel a need to send unqualified candidates to give a client the impression you are working hard. Contingency recruiting is the reason you get three unqualified resumes a day.
Take away the recruiters incentive to send everybody they see, and you'll see quality go up.
You've given some good feedback here from the perspective of a recruiter, but I think there's a point being overlooked in the conversation: most recruiters don't seem to know that they are sending an unqualified candidates. That is to say, they are either lazy and haven't done any due diligence on the candidate, or more likely, they don't actually understand the skills at play and lack the ability to assess whether the candidate is qualified. A candidate is a string of buzzwords that they can bill out at X with margin Y. That seems to be the only things the typical recruiter knows. I'm sure there are excellent tech recruiters out there, but they must be as rare as good technical talent itself.
Thanks. And I agree. I, and you as well it seems, would like to smoke those people out of the market. If companies only used firms that did a good job and didn't give out their searches to every firm out there, those recruiters will be put out of business eventually. Some might get hired by these better firms who now have increased demand, and hopefully the bad recruiters who now work for good firms will learn.
Sounds easier than it is, but it starts with lower fees in my mind.
I cannot deny that contingency recruiting is the crux of the issue, but the fact that companies think they have to pay someone 30k to track down a decent programmer is another major problem.
Agreed. As I said, fees are too high. Companies are overvaluing recruiter services, which creates a larger recruiting market of mostly ineffective recruiters. Make that 30K less, say 20, and you'll see better results.
In my experience as a recruiter, founders have a very easy time finding their first few hires as they are all from the friends and family plan - all known quantities to some degree, perhaps a 2nd degree connection at worst. Then those few hires are probably good for a few more referrals.
Business starts picking up, all employees are working at capacity, and suddenly the pipeline dries up. This is when founders (and engineering leaders) start hitting up recruiters from their past. It's also the point where the company might be on the radar of recruiters, so engineering leaders are also getting incoming calls soliciting their business.
Under some conditions they do. Many founders don't have extensive social networks to recruit from. A fast growing company needs to fill positions and sometime the only time efficient way is to work with a professional recruiter.
Is there a version of this article for candidates? I don't have the network to be able to make a couple of phone calls and have a job in a week, so I'm interested in using a recruiter, but I don't know any good ones.
http://jobtipsforgeeks.com/2013/08/09/pretty/ is a good read for someone who is interested in finding a recruiter. One thing that the writer didn't mention was that some recruiters focus on jobs for a specific tech stack so you may want to look around their profile for a bit on LinkedIn to get a good idea of what they focus on.
Hey, I wrote that! +1 on what you said about tech stack, but I think fewer recruiters focus on tech stack these days. I think you are more likely to find recruiters with depth in a specific geography than a single language/platform.
1. Programmers don't like recruiters and would prefer not to have to work with them.
2. Companies think recruiting firms are experts and are adept at finding qualified candidates, which is false.
3. There are good companies that need good employees and good employees who want to work at good companies. Currently the 'solution' is to use the same corporate middle men who shuffle bad employees to bad companies and mediocre employees to mediocre companies.