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Tech Recruiters Defend 'Blacklists,' Lack of Feedback, Screening Techniques
Nerval's Lobster (2598977) writes Remember when executives at Apple, Google, and other firms "fixed" the market for highly skilled tech workers by agreeing not to steal each other's employees? That little incident made a lot of people think about the true modus operandi of corporate and third-party tech recruiters. Dice sat down with some of those recruiters, who talked about everything from "no poaching" tactics to the "blacklist" that exists for candidates who make boneheaded mistakes in interviews. The bottom line? Recruiters seem to pass the blame for some of the industry's most egregious errors on "junior recruiters and agencies," while insisting that their goal in life is to get you a job. How does that align with your experience?
Eat donuts.
From my experience, the boneheads were almost exclusively in the HR agencies. And that's a light term for fucking-unbelievable-idiots. I have tons of incompetence-filled horror stories. Techies (anything from coders to any branch of engineering), IMHO, should only be recruited by their peers. Period.
Recruiters (in general, I have known a couple of good ones) are in my opinion the absolute scum of the earth, complete parasites. They rarely have a clue what they are talking about in terms of tech skills, and will try and shoehorn you into any job as long as they get their commission. Just a useless middleman.
Recruiters, right after realtors and used car salespeople, are my least favorite people in the world. They rarely help you, instead they frequently impede and often profit off your risks and successes.
Fortunately, technology now allows you to bypass these people. LinkedIn allows you to directly apply to companies, without having to go through recruiters. Even small companies that normally wouldn't have online application process.
...while insisting that their goal in life is to get you a job.,,,
The goal in life of a recruiter and recruiting agencies is to get the commission. No more, no less.
.
The candidate is nothing but a warm butt, and the job opening is nothing but a cold seat.
The recruiter''s goal is to put the warm butt into the cold seat, and get the commission for doing so.
How long must I be on this blacklist? I've learned from my mistake!
Anything HR says can and will be used against the company in a lawsuit if an applicant is rejected.
That's just reality.
"Recruiters Prioritize Activity Over Placements"
They're talking about the Indian recruiters, who get paid for making contacts rather than placing you. Unlike most US recruiters, who only get paid once you've been placed and if you stay there a while.
Since practically every tech company, including the big 5, hire recruiters its difficult to imagine their in-house recruiting who are likely composed of staff that once held other recruiting jobs dont practice the 'blacklist' and 'poach' policies as well. This isnt about independent recruiting companies but the fallout from apple, google, and others is apparently enough to warrant some defensive posturing from Dice. Throwing unnamed 'amateur' recruiting companies under the bus is a service Dice appears to readily offer for good reason: large staffing and recruiting companies are dice's bread and butter. If the product, namely people applying through Dice, gets wind that recruiters secretly blacklist and use underhanded techniques, it might impact their bottom line. ending the "article" with an apathetic platitude "You May Never Know Why You Were Rejected" further serves to keep the cattle in their cars.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Their job is not to screw up. That means they have to take the SAFE choices.
Companies dislike training. They would rather hire someone who already has all the named skills to do the job. So they go looking for that.
The problem is that those named skills? The reason they are named is that they have classes to teach you them.
What corporations usually really want and need are those qualities and un-named nebulous skill that can not be taught. They are not named because their are no classes, because they can't be taught in anything less than years. Or they are innate qualities - like intelligence and creativity - that people are born with.
As a direct result, recruiters go looking for the one thing they should NOT look for - the people that have the sills that can be taught. All the time ignoring the qualities and skills that can not be taught.
As for messing up an interview - that is just plain bad luck. You get sick, you have a bad day, etc.
Recruiters are a necessary part of a very flawed system. But they did not create the system, they merely try to make money satisfying the system.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
In my experience, recruiters rely so heavily on keyword searching resumes even the "good" recruiters are hardly more useful than the searchbar in my browser. I see recruiters as the next big block of "tech" workers to be outsourced overseas.
Since we have DICE in this discussion, why don't you fix it? If DICE is our friend and helping us to get a job, you could very easily change the rules to make this more worker friendly. There are only really 2 job sites, Monster and DICE. Why doesn't DICE get together with Monster and agree on some changes.
#1. require salary info in the job posting. It's insulting and dishonest to allow employers to not even bother telling us what they're willing to pay until after the interview process.
#2. require employers to assert that they don't use blacklists and no poaching agreements or risk losing access to your services.
Alternatively, maybe we the workers should setup our own employment site that does protect us and then refuse to use sites like DICE and Monster. We have the power, it's our laziness that allows them to continue abusing us.
Today's recruiters are the new method of shielding companies from their sexist/racist hiring policies. In the old days HR used to affix an A+ on the resume before passed off to the hiring manager. This A+ mark indicated that the candidate was a white male. All other resumes were discarded. Now with computer screening, the same filtering can be acomplished using keywords and Google stat data. Using third party recruiters, companies are now shielded from taking the blame for mantaining historic discrinatory hiring practices. My advice for female and minority applicants is to bypass 3rd party recruiters entirely and speak directly with company managers to get hired.
There are 2 types of recruiters, those with "skin in the game" (like in house recruiters) and those only trying to make their quota so they can keep eating.
There are 2 types of candidates, those who need a job bad enough to work with any recruiter, and those that can get a job easily because they have "in demand" skills, they don't need (or want to deal with) the second type of recruiter.
Luckily, I'm the second type of candidate and I will never again deal with the second type of recruiter. I love captive recruiters, even if I don't particularly care to work for their company, and I will happily give them referrals if I can. But the independent recruiters are all scum, and I choose that characterization carefully, I've never met one that was not, though interestingly they all swear they are different than the others. I'm working on a form letter to send to the scum recruiters, but I'm too nice to actually send it, so I'll just continue to ignore them. Like telemarketers and spammers, I realize they need to make a living, they just aren't going to get any help from me.
We keep blacklists, too, assholes. Once you've fielded a few headhunter calls, it gets pretty easy to pick out who is calling from where. If I have any suspicions, I will ask pointedly if they're representing anyone from my list, and if they are, I thank them for their time and politely explain that I'm not interested, before hanging up. Keep acting like shit to your hiring pool, and pretty soon, nobody will want to work with you... then you'll realize, quite too late, who you really work for.
For the most part I agree, though generalizations are always dangerous. I'm not actively looking, but my resume gets me lots of attention. 90% of all the recruiters that call are from overseas with poor English. From those overseas, 90% are demanding my time to review a job in a State I don't live in (in fairness, half of the offers I receive from US recruiters are not in the same State either but they are not demanding for the most part). Worse, 99% are for jobs that I don't have on my resume but related to some education or other SQL query hit. E. G. I have never held a Java Programmer job, but have my Sun Certification. I am not a DBA, but have certifications and know the Systems side of Databases (performance tuning, scaling, etc..). Demanding I review a UI developer job is a common request from foreign recruiters.
There are however a couple of recruiters in the SF Bay area who are pretty good at being real recruiters. Taos is at the top of my list for a no bullshit contracting firm which is exceptionally honest and technically sound. You are technically rated by other people working in the industry to gauge your strong points, weak points, and interests. Taos is _only_ a contractor, and you will almost never get a contract to hire job through them. They don't hide that fact, so I'm fine with it. They also offer training and education, certification reimbursement, and some other nice perks.
A few others are good as well, but I'm not going to make this a sales pitch.. just show an exception to the generalization.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Some stupid chick reading a checklist and 998 times out of a hundred they don't even know that the hiring manager has already made a decision. Let's face reality, NO ONE is outside hiring below the director level anymore. NO ONE. For anything. Unless you're an H1B from Hindu Holstein Contracting, you are shit out luck.
I was contacted on a recruiter via LinkedIn. They actually helped me get two really good offers. I interviewed at places I never would have found on my own. This is in Chicago though, so Silicon Valley is going to be a bit different.
I got a 2 year AD in Electronics Engineering (specialising in Avionics), worked for a company building industrial controllers (mostly oilfield), then went to university and got a BSc in Computer Science. Worked for a couple years but was basically sat on (no projects, no development, just doing very routine maintenance). And then left looking for something else. Found that everyone else considers my last job as limited too, and found it very hard to get employment, so started my own company. Recruiters are useless. The job interview process is so bizarre and crazy.
is that they're lying soulless parasites who provide no real value for either party. I'm amazed that they exist.
When a company flys you to their HQ for an interview (on their nickel), that's a good sign. When they fly one of their senior people out to talk to you, that's better.
Have gnu, will travel.
Recruiting based on potential is kinda like the hoy grail I suppose but there are ways. Almost any coder can get a decent mark in JAVA 101. That doesn't mean much in an interview. What you want is to know if the person has the ability to learn quickly, think critically etc. so HOW THE @#&$@ do you test that??
One example came from the language training I took. The training was for English speakers to learn French so they spent 30 minutes teaching us a few words, counting and the alphabet in Kurdish. WTF right?...wrong!! it was brilliant. None of us had a clue about Kurdish so when they tested us they found out what we learned in that 30 minutes. That let them know our potential to learn, motivation etc.
SO WHAT? In a job interview you already know they have a certain base of knowledge from their resume. Now give a quick 5-10 minute talk on some obscure programming language, database concept...whatever. Then ask the interviewee questions on it, ask them to expand concepts that were taught. How they react and the quality of their answers will give you great insight into their potential.
"Dice is the leading career site for technology and engineering professionals." Dice.com is owned by Dice Holdings, Inc (NYSE: DHX). Dice Holdings, Inc is the parent company of Slashdot.com.
Since 1979, I have been employed, able to move between jobs, in high demand and able to ignore recruiters. It wasn't until 2011 when I experienced my first layoff that I had to give recruiters serious consideration as the entire employment landscape had changed.
I have had to figure out how to work with recruiters - understand how they work and separate the chaff from the wheat.
Recruiters come in many different flavors. The younger tech worker will. more likely than not, deal with younger and less experienced recruiters. More experienced prospectives get handed off to the more established recruiters. And, since they get a commission based on things like the salary of the hire, to the victors go the spoils, right? The less experienced have to deal with more perspectives in order to earn enough for a bite to eat. It makes them hungry. And, it can make them rude.
One thing you should never do is piss them off. Yes, you can be blacklisted very quickly. Given how many corporations use recruiters and how frequently they change firms, that blacklist can follow you around and persist based on whether they record your transgression in their systems or not.
You need to stay on top of the recruiter (sounds promising given how many good looking ladies work in the field...good luck with that) and watch how they modify YOUR resume. They WILL rewrite your resume in their style and draw from what you submit to them. You HAVE the RIGHT to see what it is that they are submitted to their client on your behalf. Ask for it. Also, ask for a limited right to represent. More reputable firms will only hold you to a given position - not lock you out or blindly send your resume. But, get it in writing before you sign on so you can work with other recruiters for different positions and companies.
Make yourself accessible but not overly accessible. I use Google Voice to take recruiter calls. It lets me weed out those who I have an established relationship with (and, who I have given my cell number) and those cold calling me. The call transcripts the GV produces can be rather humourous as a by product - good for a laugh. I thought about publishing some of the funnier transcripts (Hi .my name is , I think I am a recruiter).
I ignore most emails from recruiters from those that exhibit too much familiarity, poor grammar, provide limited details, ask for too much information (no, I AM NOT going to give you my salary history for the past 30+ years, my SSN, or my first born) or don't respect simple things like my geographic location or skillset. Additionally, while I might not respond to every email, I do look at the more promising ones to see if two or more emails appear to represent the same position. In one situation, I had three recruiters from three different offshore firms trying to represent me for the same position with the State for a mobile architect. One would say the position was at $55/hr and 6 month duration and another would say it's $70/hr for 12 month CTH while another was saying it offered $85/hr for 12 months (no, CTH). Yes, the were for the EXACT same position (they cut and paste from the same feed). And, when I spoke with a firm in the State and asked if they knew about this position, I found out that the State was actually paying $110hr, it was 6 months (6 months left in the fiscal year), but expected the contract to be renewed for another year. So, it makes sense to shop around.
When you find a recruiter that seems like a good match, work with them. And, keep them on file. I still get calls from many of them hoping I am willing to leave my current employer - I will listen and consider even if it really isn't in the cards. They have gotten to know me. They are keepers. If they change firms, find out where they have gone. I have a short list of those I will seek out if my situation changes again.
As for job sites such as DICE and MONSTER. I have found DICE to be pretty good at sending job descriptions that better match what I might
"Hello, my name is Rajesh and I'm calling from InterMegaSkillTech in New jersey. I have a job opening..."
These people are just grabbing a job posting off a wire, doing a database search, and call/emailing every hit. They have no in or connections with the firm they're "recruiting" for.
Absolutely worthless. If there's a position in your city, it's much, much preferable to find a recruiter in your area headhunting for it.
Recruiters are straight up Used Car Salesman.
Maybe easier said than done. 99% of the jobs I've had I have gotten with employers/departments who do their own screening and interviews. Out of the countless jobs I have applied for over the years through recruitment agents I only had ONE that I was offered, in that case the recruiter had a long standing relationship with the company, they understood IT, and the interview was still done by the actual managers I worked under.
Can be time consuming, but where I can I try to wade through all the crud on the jobs sites, and figure out the actual company where possible, then go look on their own website jobs section, and apply directly through that. Another bit of obvious advice I can offer is to identify the companies you'd like to work at, and where possible create a profile on their own jobs/hr site and get email alerts.
That statement, as "profoundly idiotic" as it is, sounds like it comes from simple ignorance. One wonders, "How many Asian women has this person ever met or interacted with?"
The good thing about ignorance: It can be cured. It just takes life experience. If he spends enough time around non-diffident Asian women, then his life outlook will expand.
This is why I am opposed to blacklists. If you walk into a room where someone has a book open, but can't read (i.e.: displays ignorance), walking out of the room and shutting off the light on the way out isn't going to help anybody.
True, as of that interview, that person probably wasn't someone that you wanted to hire at that moment. And you shouldn't feel obligated to take on a charity case that displays ignorance so staggering that it boggles the mind.
However, you don't know what five years will do to a person's life outlook. If that same person happens to get a job and spend two years living in Tokyo, Japan, they might see life in a completely different way after that.
I run a recruiting company. And, I am genuinely sorry to hear such criticisms.
I hope you are better than most but with most recruiters unless you are a perfect on paper fit you will not get the time of day from them. I've dealt with a LOT of them over the years both as an employer and a job candidate. Recruiters ONLY want people with very deep and narrow domain expertise and (ex: 5 years experience accounts payable with a Fortune 500 manufacturing company) and make no effort whatsoever to figure out whether a person can actually do a job if they are the slightest bit non-traditional for the role. They also rarely understand anything with any significant technical content that isn't really well defined and industry standard. Worse they don't even give you the respect of telling you why they are ignoring you and most of the time they do ignore you.
Now this shouldn't be surprising because the recruiter almost always gets paid by the hiring firm so they have no incentive to give job applicants any respect unless it results in them getting a position filled. They'll be polite enough to you but mostly they will ignore you unless you happen to be the person they need right at that moment. For example I am an engineer and a certified accountant (not as weird as it sounds like). I have a resume with very diverse experience and my skill set is that of a generalist which means recruiters have NO idea what to do with me. In years past I've been blown off by more recruiters than I care to think about.
If HR at any company says "we only want the best, not the rest" then they can look bad.
If HR says "our job is to get you hired" then you can't fault them.
This is not an exercise in truth, it is an exercise in covering their buttocks in public speaking.
while insisting that their goal in life is to get you a job.
Their goal is to stay in business, which means their goal is to make whoever pays them happy while not making either the government or the talent pool as a whole unhappy with them.
If they are paid by the companies, then their goal includes NOT getting you a job that will make THEIR CLIENT un-happy. If you've made bone-headed mistakes in interviews this may include not getting you any job with any of their clients, unless maybe the client is looking for a job where your bone-headed mistakes are not relevant to the job in question.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
But the independent recruiters are all scum, and I choose that characterization carefully, I've never met one that was not, though interestingly they all swear they are different than the others.
I can introduce you to several independent recruiters that are most definitely not scum. A few I've worked with for years on both sides of the recruiting process and I know a few personally. *Some* are pretty good folks. BUT you aren't entirely wrong either. Most recruiters I've met are little more than commission whores who won't give you the time of day unless you are the perfect fit for whatever job they are currently trying to fill.
I'm working on a form letter to send to the scum recruiters, but I'm too nice to actually send it, so I'll just continue to ignore them.
Probably a good idea. It costs nothing to be polite and ignore them and it doesn't cause you heartburn later on.
In my I.T. career, I've only met ONE memorable recruiter who honestly seemed to be concerned about matching the top candidates for the positions he knew of openings for. And in that case, he actually spent over an hour with me getting *detailed* information about my skills and strengths/weaknesses, before telling me that he honestly placed more software development people than anything else (I was seeking a network or systems admin job at the time.). He still kept my info on file though, in case the right opportunity came along. And to his credit, he contacted me LONG after I assumed he'd forgotten all about me and moved on, to let me know when something finally came his way.
Almost every other time? I'd say the recruiters I encountered fit one of two basic profiles. First were the "enthusiastic but clueless". Typically these would be the younger people you could tell were just starting out doing recruiting. They couldn't wait to get ahold of your "current resume" and to take you out to lunch to meet you face to face and chat. But after that? Crickets.... Months would go by without them so much as offering a single worthwhile opportunity. When they suddenly re-appeared, calling and leaving voice-mails, email, etc.? They had some job that 5 or 6 other recruiters were also trying to fill. You could find it listed all over the internet job search sites in most cases. Basically, it was clear they needed you more than you needed them.
The second type was the "just need warm bodies to meet my quota" type. These tended to be the slightly older and apparently more experienced recruiters who would send you opportunities that were clearly not even a good fit for your talents or skillset, but insisted you should go to the interviews anyway. After a while, I figured out a lot of these guys worked with H.R. for a few "pet companies" who liked to use them for one reason or another (probably because they low-balled your salary and saved the company some $'s or charged lower finder's fees). They didn't care about finding you the job you wanted, so much as just throwing your resume at their biggest customers every time some of the "key words" on it matched what the business said it needed for a new opening.
And no I'm not being sarcastic....
I have developed relationships with three over the years and met them for lunch or in their office.
1. I call up my recruiters and tell them all I'm looking for a job paying X and in what part of town.
2. I send them my resume.
3. They send me a list of job descriptions and I tell them which ones to send my resume to.
4. I go through a phone interview and see if I am interested in them and if they are interest in me.
5. I go to an in person interview.
That process is a lot easier than randomly looking on job boards especially when you're already employed.
It is interesting where an industry, recruiting, turns over so fast that if it were powering a wind turbine, it probably would provide electricity to half America. It is an industry that has become a necessary evil it seems. However, these was a time when you could get a job by actually sending a resume to a company, get a interview, and get a offer with out having a middle man. And there are rumors that it still happens. So how did they get so important? I've interviewed with a agent and had to explain what a command prompt was, or what is the JVM and why does JAVA need it. For the most part I think they hire good looking people and that is all they are.
From their viewpoint, their goal is to get you a job with a client that is prepared to train you up with the skills that they need. But it gets to the point of insanity when they keep trying to push you into C device driver positions for government contractors simply because that was something you did twenty years ago, and you have spent the past fifteen years doing C++/OO/GUI stuff.
I don't even believe recruiters actually read resumes, or understand most of what they are reading. Most of them don't understand what their customers are looking for or what the candidates can do, or how those match up, nor does there seem to be a correllation between what a candidate is looking for and what a recruiter fits them to. I don't know what's worse--being a candidate in spite of my preference, or being a candidate for a job I'm not qualified for. For example, in spite of knowing ("it says here that you want...") a preference, I get countless calls about ("...but would you maybe consider ..?").
It would appear that the only successful aproach for these critters is just to throw resumes against the wall and see what sticks. We hates them so much.
Begin Dice induced rant...
Fuck. Dice. I signed up for that shit website and have been inundated with SPAM and bullshit from recruiters for years, even after cancelling. Bunch of scumbags....
They're also trying their damnedest to ruin Slashdot...
It's articles like this when I think "why the fuck do I still come here?"
The best signs I've seen that a recruiter is quality are:
They don't call during the workday
They don't spam you with every gig they have available that you match a keyword search for
They don't push back on when high salary requirements are communicated
Those would seem to be three pretty simple signs, but it's amazing how many recruiters fail those tests, ESPECIALLY the third sign, which is arguably the most important.
See, with open floor plans abound, calling me during the workday assures that I'm not going to get to talk to you (and everyone suspects the person stepping away from his desk all the time to take calls of looking for a new gig). The spray-and-pray recruiting method tells me that you don't give a crap about actually mapping people to jobs, you just want as many "sales" as possible.
Finally, any recruiter that pushes back on pay requirements is afraid of losing their entire commission by having what seems to be a good match go up in flames over the candidate going for top dollar -- after all, they don't have an incentive to get you the best possible salary they can (even though they'l all say that), but they have the incentive to get you to accept an offer as fast as possible to bring in a constant stream of commissions. Negotiations falling apart over, say, asking for $160,000/yr rather than settling for $150,000/yr means that if they're seeing a 5 percent commission on first year's salary, means they're risking $7,500 to push for your extra ten grand, which only gets them another $500 if successful.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
You are just cattle to them, they don't give a damn. As long as someone goes to market and doesn't embarrass you when they do
If the headhunter fudged his credentials enough to make the interviewer think he was worth interviewing, don't you think they would also fudge the job description?
well i've blacklisted a few agencies and pseudo tech recruiters that dont make the difference between a bit and a byte , whats the point of talking to those people when you know very well that they are working with a weighted list of keywords they couldn't define if their life depended on it , recruiting tech/geeks should be left to tech/geek peers
In my 15 years in technology, I've never *once* had a recruiter contact me and then thought, "Wow, they really read my profile/resume/whatever and it seems like this could work for me." They're constantly pushing gigs that have ZERO relation to what I do or are a 10 year backward step. When I point that out, they point to their "if you know anyone who'd be interested" paragraph that they put in when reaching out to you. Sooooo, I'm supposed to do *your* fucking job? Fuck off, go away, you're wasting my time.
I've talked with hundreds of recruiters in the past 11 years. They've only managed to get me two or three interviews. And from what I hear from my friend who hires, recruiters try and throw something out of control on top your salary like 25%. So in the rare situation they do get you an interview, it is even more rare they can get you a job. The only sane approach to getting hired is to apply directly to companies.
God spoke to me
I have been recruited twice. I never met either one of my benefactors.
The first time, the guy was knowledgeable and competent. I still had to pass the rigorous five-hour on-site interview with the company, and I was quite pleased with the outcome.
The second time, I actually told the recruiter that he was asking inane questions and I demanded to speak to a "nerd" so that my skillset could be properly vetted. He was rather a dimwit, but it didn't really matter. He got my foot in the door of a startup of whose existence I had absolutely no knowledge. I still had to pass the extensive interviewing process (in this case, two separate hour-long interviews, and a withering 6 hour on-stie interrogation). Nonetheless, everything worked out in the end, and although I thought it was a steep price, I guess he earned his $40,000.
Finally, any recruiter that pushes back on pay requirements is afraid of losing their entire commission by having what seems to be a good match go up in flames over the candidate going for top dollar -- after all, they don't have an incentive to get you the best possible salary they can (even though they'l all say that), but they have the incentive to get you to accept an offer as fast as possible to bring in a constant stream of commissions. Negotiations falling apart over, say, asking for $160,000/yr rather than settling for $150,000/yr means that if they're seeing a 5 percent commission on first year's salary, means they're risking $7,500 to push for your extra ten grand, which only gets them another $500 if successful.
Good point.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Their job is to make money in a parasitic relationship between the job seeker, their recruiting corp, and the employer. I actually got placed in my current position by a recruiter. It was initially a temp position, and I was very clear I was looking for the possibility of a long-term.
They tried to put language where I'd not be able to interview for a permanent position with a company they'd placed me in (for 3 months after end of placement). I got that taken out, but later found they're put language into the employer's section where *THEY* had to pay a penalty for accepting me as a permanent employee. Keep in mind this is after they were already making 20-40% above what I got paid for the time they placed me as a contractor.
Then, AFTER the company has decided it was worth paying the blood money to keep me rather than a fresh interviewee, I'm settled in for a few months when the same recruiting agency comes back and asks me if I'd be interested in [position] elsewhere. Yes, the company paid them to keep me, and months later they're trying to poach me away already. Not ethnical at all, IMHO.
A while back my mobile phone rang at work. It was a number I didn't recognize and I let it go to voice mail.
No voice mail was left. A few seconds later the phone rang again with the same number. I picked it up this time thinking it may be important.
After determining that it was another recruiter, I said "No, thank you." and hung up. At this point I was already a bit annoyed about the double call.
A few seconds later the phone rang again - same number. This time I picked it up and said something like "Is this a recruiter?". "Yes, I think we got disconnected last time." So, I laid into the guy for calling three times in a row, while I was at work. I told him how unprofessional it was, blah blah blah, and that I really didn't need his services while I was working.
Later that day I received a nasty email from the guy, who admitted that he had just now done his research and looked me up on LinkedIn. He told me how rude I was and that he expected different from someone working for the company I was at.
I used to get a LOT of recruiter calls every week. Ever since this idiot called me my phone is pretty quiet.
after all, they don't have an incentive to get you the best possible salary they can (even though they'l all say that), but they have the incentive to get you to accept an offer as fast as possible to bring in a constant stream of commissions.
This is the important point, and one that it took me a while to figure out. You're not paying them (I hope to God you aren't paying them), so they don't really represent you. Sure, their commission might be better if they got you an extra $10K a year, but if they have to try 3 times as many companies, that's three times as much work for them. They could have instead spent that extra time getting two more commissions.
That doesn't mean they are bad people. You just have to understand their motivations while you are dealing with them.
full disclosure: I haven't had a good experience with "recruiters"
It is misleading to say that they want to "get you a job." Best case - their purpose is to match the "best fit" candidate with the right opening, Remember that "best fit" doesn't equal most experienced/skilled - it means the optimum combination of experience/skills/salary/personality for that company
Worst case: you get idiots reading from checklists, sending out spam about "seeing your resume online"
It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/
as far as I could comfortably spit a dead rat.
Many moons ago, my senior year at engineering school, the placement office sent me a note (on actual paper!) that a big bank wanted to interview me. I couldn't imagine why, since I hadn't expressed any interest in business IT. A few days later, I met with a close-to-retirement VP who frankly admitted that he knew nothing about technology; his function was to assess people. The bank wanted people for their new IT headquarters in New York City, and I was on their list because I already lived there (or my parents did); they were trying to avoid hiring people who were looking for an excuse to move to NYC. We had a pleasant conversation, in which I freely admitted I didn't expect much technical challenge, and the older gentleman convinced me to put my resume in the queue anyway.
A few weeks later I went to the bank headquarters in NYC for "a technical interview", and it was every disaster on this page. The interview time was a myth, as was the person I was expecting to see; instead an HR person who had been a fresh-out last year, and who had no idea what he was doing in his own area let alone IT, gave up on questions and gave me a "skills test" to fill out (presumably my soon-to-be Computer Science degree from a top engineering school didn't count).
So I went back to school, took out my trusty typewriter and the VP's business card, and wrote him a letter describing my experience (staying polite!), and making clear that while meeting with him had been pleasant, the mismanagement after things left his hands convinced me that there was absolutely no way that I would ever want to work for the bank. I heard nothing for a few weeks, then a brief note of apology.
A few weeks later, my parents called me to tell me to go find a copy of The New York Times for that day. In the business section was an 1/8th page ad for that same bank with two profiles, one with a speech bubble including a dozen or more tech buzzwords, the other with a thought bubble empty but for a question mark. The sub-heading of the ad was: "Is your interviewer qualified to interview you?" I guess that old VP still had some pull . . .
What frustrates me most, is that it is exactly a simple pattern matching algorithm. Also, 15-30 minutes into a simple phone screen and the village idiot can tell whether or not the interview is going well. Any technology specialist worth his/her salt can pick up a manual and learn the specific commands, or google a method of debugging a particular technology etc. If you don't know the exact judo they are looking for, your doomed.
I was out of work for eight months this past year. I've talked with hundreds of recruiters, had 60 interviews, and three job offers at the same time before accepting my current job. As a contractor, this was par for the course.
The bottom line? Recruiters seem to pass the blame for some of the industry's most egregious errors on "junior recruiters and agencies," while insisting that their goal in life is to get you a job. How does that align with your experience?
Yes, their goal in life is to get me a job. The problem is that in the eyes of any recruiter I've spoken to in the last 5 years, "a job is a job," and if they get me any "job" then they feel entitled to some cut either from me or from the company they've attempted to place me with. Most recruiters would be satisfied if they got me hired on as a cashier at Walgreens, as long as they got a commission out of it.
I have a long background in IT dealing with everything from Apple IIs through multi-thousand desktop deployments; a development history that encompasses nearly 15 years of PHP (laugh if you like) with a prior foundation in C and C++; 10+ years MySQL, 9 years SQL Server/TSQL/DTS/SSIS; 7+ years at a multi-billion dollar enterprise with accompanying domain-specific knowledge in that industry. My resume spells out what I'm best at with no puffery or bullshit or buzzwords about things I don't do. I'm always open to a new opportunity that's somewhat commensurate to my experience and ability.
But what do recruiters call me about? Such promising opportunities as...
I've recently fielded a phone call about a senior GIS position for a trucking company. There is zero on my resume or any of my job site profiles to indicate that I'm at all familiar with GIS, mapping, or over the road logistics. Recruiter's end of the conversation was, paraphrased, "GIS is just like Google Maps, you've heard of Google Maps, right? You have data experience. I think they need someone who can put all their truck data on a map like Google Maps. I can get you an interview tomorrow! Are you available about 10?"
I don't do any of those things. I don't claim to do any of those things. I still get the phone calls, though, because hey, this guy is an IT person and that company is hiring for their IT department. Must be a perfect fit! Does it work this way for other industries as well? I mean, really, are there podiatrists out there who get recruiting calls about pediatrics? Are there recruiters calling up bartenders trying to place them as USDA inspectors? Do folks working in Accounts Payable get cold calls about calculus professor vacancies, because, y'know, it's all numbers 'n shit?
When I do get the occasional poke about something I'm qualified for and might be interested in, there's no depth to anything the recruiter knows. What's their setup like, lots of iron or are they heavy into virtualization? Are they doing a lot of ETL from incoming feeds or is it mostly OLTP from their own internal applications? Even simple questions like how big is their team? What might their salary offer be? Where is their office located? I might as well be asking the moon, I can go find the job posted on DICE.COM* or Monster or Indeed and get more details than what the recruiter can tell me. But by golly, they can get me an interview tomorrow! Am I available at 10 AM?
Recruiters used to provide a valuable service, or at least I believe that they did. There was a time when you could find a guy who would spend a few hours getting to know you, maybe take you out to lunch a couple of times,
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I've always had good experiences with recruiters. I refuse to even work with HR departments unless I'm getting a job through a direct social contact and get specifically hired.
For those that have bad experiences with recruiters, I don't know what to say. I give them all my resume and project information, we socialize what the compensation is back and forth depending on the gig and go from there. Maybe I've just had good recruiters, but at most I go for one interview and get the gig or if it doesn't seem to be the right fit, I get the second one. I've never had to go beyond that much work, but, I think a big part of it is I have a fairly narrow and deep specialty with fortune 500 companies (which someone else commented on was a problem) so maybe that's why it hasn't been a big deal with a high demand skillset.
I do, however attempt to avoid HR at all costs. Other than the first day I get the security badge, I never see them again.
Recruiters save me time and energy. If I have a contract ending, or choose to leave my current position for another company, they do all the work. I just have to look nice and show up. I have no interest in going through gyrations to try and find gigs and fax resumes, fill out job websites, I just say what city I'm interested in or what filter criteria I need for any open positions and sit back and watch my money at work..
I'm a satanic clam.
HR idiots, and they are legion, are like retarded hunchbacks serving their evil masters, but poorly. Just as Evil Overlords, or those who aspire to that title, have difficulty finding good help, companies have a terrible time finding HR people that are not complete fucking morons that cause far more harm than they do good.
Actually, i would say that HR and Recruiters are at opposite ends of the same coin.
It is extremely difficult to get through the HR recruiting process.
Sending resumes to HR may as well send them into black holes (the information destroying ones)
The online application process is horrible and is only eclipsed by the paper application process.
Many IT departments, in order to justify their salaries, list 20 years experience in XYZ application-specific programming language which is not taught anywhere. But then HR departments include that in their screening process and come back with ZERO candidates.
And even with a large amount of technical experience, the reality is that half of everything you do is going to require business-specific knowlege that you wont learn in school. And 40% of what you are doing will be application-specific or environment-specific. So really only 10% of what you will be doing in any technical postition is relative to your previous experience or education!
So again, just getting an interview with HR is a major barrier to many otherwise qualified candidates.
-And really, how is HR going to verify ANY of what someone says on their resume? Do you really think they are going to call china or india to validate the diploma from a worker who studied abroad?
The candidates that finally make it through the HR screening process are either lying through their teeth, or the candiate will be asking 5x your entry-level salary anyway.
So I welcome the recruiters! Let them send me some warm bodies and I will decide in the interview whether I think they qualify.
"Kazeem was obviously less than worthy"
oldhack: "Security is a waste of money until shit hits the fan. 5 minutes later, it becomes waste of money again. "
My perspective some time ago is startup and job applicant.
Experience is dated since it covers 25 years and memory is subjective.
The four charactistics of EVERYTHING is quality, price, time and
scope.
1.)CEO: it's a buyer's market so low price, then time (need him .
yesterday or let the team carry the burdren, the position has
been vacant for TWO YEARS)
2.)recruiter - we know you are obese, but you love eating fast food
junk food. We also enjoy the addictive relationship
3.)Job applicant: it's about the price and and sometimes the quality
and NEVER the SCOPE. The scope means the range, learning
opportunities, match of your full capabilities.
4.)What does this mean in reality? The ladder and even lateral
transfers in big companies ARE BROKEN. So, you ascend to CTO
but cannot get to CFO accounting or even accounting systems.
5.)Your other optiion is the IBM - I have been moved consultant /hotel. This is known as 'bandaid fixit'
living out of a suitcase
or E.R. emergency room physician. Don't let them die, but don't
try to fix root cause.
6.)real world example. NPR Radio Car Talk Brothers, M.I.T. Graduates.
Despite going bankrupt a few times running a car repair shop,
they have NOT been pursued for consulting.
NASA astronaut called about a frozen nut fastener. so the Car Talk
brothers integrate engineering AND technology. NASA did NOT
ask for their talent.
7.) the BEST matching startup is where the present employee
helps RECRUIT a stranger that is more multi-talented than he is.
This would reduce the role of the middlemen industry - the
recruiters.
8.) summary, Capitalism run amok. the USA Medical system pays
on the factory model of SICKNESS. Doctor paid per price per medical
operation. Other countries, the doctor is paid to keep you well,
not just fill bodies in jobs or perform more back surgeries.
9.) My new venture (one of them) is the matching service allows
employee to CONFIDENTIALLY work with the recruiter to find a replacement. No MORE a conflict
of interest than other arrangements including the boss only
secretly working with a MAGIC producing 3rd party recruiter.
boss makes a BIG mistake and blames the '3rd party recruiter'.
10.) my experience is subjective, however 50 to 80 percent of
talent match to positions ARE INEFFECTIVE, not sustainable
and waste of talent and opportunity.
Have you taken a new job in a newer company in a new industry
and know in three months, it was just a 'steppingstone' and
you continued to work there for 2 or 4 years?
11,)This reflects the decline and aging of USA, IMHO. /
agiliity is rare. Go to San Francisco and find Erlang / Haskell
Engineering integrators.
a.)why Erlang? it runs the internet
b.)why Haskell or FP? think parallel
c.)why Engineering? GPU hardware is a lot faster than abstract software
Job Recruiters have some of the WORST CHARACTERISTICS of house real estate agents. :)
This is not a personal ad hominen attack and I LOVE some recruiters.
The difference of 100 to 110K is BIG to the job applicant. The difference to the
employee company IS SUPER HUGE.
The THINKING or mentality of the recruiter is:
Why 10K percentage is too small. THE LOSS TO A WINNER TAKE ALL
sales commission, real estate agent houses or even NEW CAR SALESMAN
is huge.
read the books on game theory, economic principal agent conflict of interest,
and even open statistics. Hint, women or minorities get sc--- ewwwwed.
Pay win - win. PLAY FAIR. PAY LOW, but the bonus MUST BE PAID
The jobs I REALLY Want - the money is NOT important.
I want the EFFECTIVE making a difference.
I want the learning and THEY HAVE NEVER SENT ME TO A PHILOSOPHY conference
as a 'perk.' It deals with logic, so MY LOGIC is that I go on vacation or
I'd rather you use the tax deduction expense.
My part of the deal is the funny jokes I tell during the Yourdon 'Death March' and
the up to 28 hour marthon sprints during a major internet storm.
Yeah, sometimes I am hard core and I was born an engineer.
SHAME ON U companies for not sharing about your soul to the RECRUITER
'religion confessor.'
beore, I used to LOVE junk food and now I get into CRUNCHFIT.
crunchfit is where the young and i am older exercise to vomit stage and sometimes
the hosptial.
It's like being gay or a 'minority' or a SECRET PHILOSOPHY WRITER.
Yes, I've told the boss directly, I AM A HERMIT FOR TWO DAYS. Contact me
only in case of life and death emergency.
I know most likely I will fail, but I going to try again to reform your entire codebase.
The recruiter actually has a FAR WORSE job than the love interest match OKcupid
or the house/condo real estate agent or even the travel agent.
subjective IMHO
1.)recruiter MAKES YOUR CAREER as matchmaker. you spend the most time making
LOVE to your supercomputer and/or your teammates, not in a homosexual gay way.
2.)matchmaker for love interest. She really is weird, especially when you almost
pass out during crunchfit time and she keeps going. Fitnes is a shared hobby.
Alas, in my opinion like the JOB RECRUITERS the quality has declined rapidly.
reference: wired article about math guy who gamed the system to find his wife on
OK cupid.
personal note: never used OK cupid.
3.)house/condo. it's a place to invest in and the faster I can sell it the better.
The love interest Female (i am male) is gonna choose the spot and the itnerior decor.
HR in Fortune 1000 to 100 exist solely to protect the company from lawsuits, and to screen out qualified Americans in favor of cheaper Visa riders looking for a path to citizenship. I know of a fella from Russian who quit his job 1 hour after securing his citizenship...walked off the job without so much as a fuck you. Americans get screwed out of gainful employment, immigrants flood the market and bring their families over to suck on the govt teet, and the shareholders are happy they get their dividends while the unemployment/disability rolls continue to climb. I can't wait to get rid of Obama's America and go back to Reagan's America.
So far, what I've seen most recruiters do is to read off random lists of jobs broadly in the area you are interested in. Even the ones who claim they have experience in a certain area are completely clueless.
I have seen one instance of a recruiter not being completely useless. She did an automated "objective suitability test" which was similar to an intelligence test, testing certain aspects of decision making. That was interesting at least.
So far my experience shows that companies who outsource their recruiting don't actually care about what people they get. Eventually this will lead to the "Dead Sea"-effect in those companies making them unable to hold more qualified people.
I understood that recruiters would sometimes do this -- usually replacing your address information with that of the recruiting firm, largely to protect themselves from companies that would do something underhanded like contact the candidate directly after telling the recruiter that they were taking a pass on the candidate -- but I found out that that's not the only reason. Back when I was working with VMS (early '90s), I went into an interview for a job as a VMS system manager only to get bombarded with programming questions. And, while I've done a fair amount of programming over the years, these questions were completely off the wall so I asked the interviewer if I could see the copy of my resume he was referring to. The recruiter had inserted wording that made it seem as though I had years of experience as a COBOL programmer -- which I most definitely was not. I apologized and ended the interview. The phone call I made to the recruiter after the interview was no fun. For the recruiter. I never worked with him or anyone else at that firm again.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Yep. I try to scare them off first at this point by stating my salary and benefit requirements up front -- if Hired.com did one thing right, it's removing some of the taboo of talking pay before the phone screen -- which is top 10% for the area.
Plus, now that I'm hiring for my team, I've had conversations with those good ones from the other side of the situation. Makes it even easier to know who I'm going to message first if I ever decide to look again.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
-- Arthur C. Clarke
Most rewrite your resume for their particular style and, as you noted, to remove personal contact information.
Good recruiters won't change the fundamental nature of your resume. Still, you should ask to see a copy of what they are submitting to avoid situations like you encountered.
Seriously, these people are bottom feeding scum. They come off as having things in your best interests and really they are just a notch below used car salesmen. You want me to have the job, then don't fucking pit me against 10 other guys so you can game the system. Don't call me back after I've already told you that I'd like to be submitted for a job and tell me that, "Oh the requirements changed." or "Oh, they don't want to pay that much money." then don't waste my fucking time. Or call me in the middle of the fucking day and waste my time about me being a good fit and wanting to meet me or asking me where I currently work or how much I make. Bitch, I don't know you, I don't owe you shit. You do all the work, you get paid by where you put me, but don't fuck with my time. Or to be in an interview with all of the experience I have on my resume that you can verify when I tell you that I've done this, been here, done that, and ask me boneheaded and moronic interview questions. I will work for you, I will be a hard worker too, but pay me and I will give you my best day in and day out. Just don't fuck me, fuck with me, or give me bullshit and I won't do the same to you. The whole thing is a fucking clique-y scam. I'm a long time working Mechanical Engineer. I've produced things that many of you buy and many things you will never see unless you work in industry. The entire HR/recruitment industry is a fucking scam. All of it.