Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
is that they're lying soulless parasites who provide no real value for either party. I'm amazed that they exist.
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
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.
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.
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.
This sounds like a load of B.S. to me, unless you have some proof to back it up?
I can tell you that in close to 30 years of working in I.T. -- I've never seen this sort of behavior by H.R. In fact, when it came to I.T. hiring -- the hiring managers were often pushing to find a qualified female or minority candidate, precisely BECAUSE they got nervous about having nothing but white males in the department.
I helped interview candidates at one of my previous I.T. jobs, and my boss was openly frustrated that we just couldn't recommend any of the female candidates we interviewed. He was even hinting to us that we might want to adjust our standards a bit and give one of them a chance if we thought she could at least learn what was needed..... Only reason it didn't happen was the women who applied (for a workstation support job) were clearly uncomfortable doing such things as unscrewing the cover of the case for the desktop PCs and upgrading RAM or swapping out a defective part. We were too small a department to hire people who couldn't "hit the ground running" with that stuff.
I'm sure racist employers are out there -- but it's really not that big a problem, from my experiences. Most people simply want employees who can get the work done efficiently, because labor is too big an expense to spend it on someone who lacks the skills or motivation.
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
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 . . .
I think the core of what you're saying is true, you're just overgeneralizing. It's not just "white males" who tend to have decision making positions, it's "fit, good looking, tall white males" who discriminate against EVERYONE who is not a fit, good looking, tall white male. Of course, not 100% true, but true often enough to hurt and anger in other than just AA's. And possibly even more prominent since it's rarely against the law to discriminate against people who are short or fat, or can't run 2 miles in 14 minutes.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target