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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?
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.
Yeah, but then the female employment ratio would fall even lower, and then you'd have all the Anita Sarkeesians of the world whining again and telling us to fix it.
As if education wasn't feminized enough, with boys in decline everywhere but stem (never a problem worth mentioning though) that they want men to yield the final "stronghold" they see men have, and it never occurs to them that they worked for it.
And then the white knight editors here at /. can gleefully post the story how everyone is failing women.
Everyone knows the HR dept is for liberal arts buffoons to lord over the rest of the company of actually productive workers. That and protect the corp from lawsuits.
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.
This. Recruiters today are nothing more than a pattern-matching algorithm; if you precisely match the list of skills they need, you're in. Any slight deviation - no matter how well qualified you are - and you won't get anything from them.
Recruiters would reject an application from Steve Jobs to work at Apple, because he didn't have 20 years of experience in the smart phone field.
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.
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.
Almost exclusively, yes...but not entirely. And we blacklist recruiting firms as well...at least I do. I have only 6 blacklist entries in the spam management settings for my personal domain, and 4 of them are to keep me from getting contacted by companies like KForce...companies whose recruiters' behavior is so egregious that I consider contact from them to be a threat to my career.
But then, on the other side, I've interviewed (as a hiring decision maker at my company) people who are so unfuckingbelievably full of shit that I documented it in detail and sent it back to the recruiting firm with an admonishment for not doing a better pre-screen. I would neither be surprised nor bothered if such people were then blacklisted by that recruiter. If a resume is a little bit exaggerated, that's expected. But don't go in for a crucial position with a ton of responsibility that requires a lot of technical expertise if you don't have the slightest goddamned idea how any of it works.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
When I did tech support for a very small IT shop, the manager there said he deliberately hired based on personality. He'd hired some guys with certs out their ears and a decade of experience who would then argue with the end users, resulting in the users getting angry with IT. After that, he switched tactics and hired tech savvy part time students from the local university who had all the necessary people skills, and taught them the tech skills they needed. This resulted in 1. happier customers 2. cheaper labor 3. great experience for the employees, who were paid pretty well for part time and who graduated with 1-3 years of goodies under the belts and usually at least A+ by the time they were done with their college degrees. Most of us alumni out of that tech shop have moved on to good, well-paying jobs we would not have been qualified for otherwise.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
My experience, at several tech companies
Additional anecdotal:
My experience, running a tech company and interacting with a great many other tech companies... Nobody gives a shit if you've got tits or a cock, or even both.
Are you competent? Awesome.
Are you incompetent? GTFO.
I'm sure somewhere, someone is being abused based on whether their parts are internal or external. No doubt. But we've got a tempest in a teacup situation going on. Which makes sense, techies aren't special magical creatures. They fall for news-o-tainment just like the rest of the world.
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
Myself and most people I know that work IT (or most any field really) get their next and often better jobs from people they have met and known along the way in life.
You have to be personable and network, make friends...because when those folks get new jobs, they should become your FIRST contacts you make when you want to job hop.
When you get to the point where you might consider contracting yourself out...often your foot in the door is with contacts you already know.
It isn't always what you know, but WHO you know that most often gets you the job.
And if you can get a little personality and people skills to go with it, you will often get jobs over people that actually may have the edge on you from a purely technical perspective.
I've raised above ranks of people that were much better technically than I was, but were afraid to stand up and give even a small presentation in front of a group of 10 people, or even their peers.
So, you may lament everything should be based on merit, but so far in my many years in the real world, that just isn't the case very often.
Network, meet and stay in touch with people, and you will have much better job opportunities open up for you when you need a job, or when you want to job hop for a better salary.
And if you ever want to become independent and contract...it is invaluable to have contacts out there that know you and like you.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Are you competent? Awesome. Are you incompetent? GTFO.
Okay, BUT... this brings us back to OP.
Anti-poaching agreements and "blacklists" are equally anti-competitive practices, and have no place in a responsible tech company. (Hear that, Apple?) Blacklists can be abused just as much as the other, PLUS it can encourage discrimination.
Let's say your HR staff has a candidate who is a tech wiz, but just not a good fit for the company. Rather than just turning them down, a less-than-honest PR dept. could blacklist them, to keep them from getting hired by the competition.
The same could be done if the hiring person or people just plain didn't like a particular gender or minority.
I've been a victim in the past of abuse by HR in a large company. The head of HR felt that rather than doing an actual job of HR, it was her real job to protect the company against grievances.