7 ms·

Munchausen Syndrome by Recruiter

34 points by benrothke 6y ago

dvt 6y ago
Apart from the points the article makes (all good), and the overarching lesson (don't use a recruiter), this line really stuck out to me: > Job loss is one of the most stressful life events, along with the death of a loved one, divorce, and a significant illness. It's so sad (and true) that a job loss -- something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things -- is comparable to the death of a loved one or an illness. End-stage capitalism, indeed. It's probably why a whole bunch of us are attracted to the startup life and doing your own thing -- even though that comes with its own set of (more often worse) downsides.
- benrothke 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply. To clarify, I did not mean to imply not to use recruiters. Rather to use them selectively and cautiously. As a good, trusted recruiter can mean the difference between getting a job and not. I know a few of the best, and would gladly recommend them.
- u678u 6y ago
  > It's so sad (and true) that a job loss -- something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things Maybe if you're a developer in a strong economy that is true. I've seen lots of middle-aged people laid off that started the spiral into unemployment, divorce and at least one suicide.
  - dvt 6y ago
    I think you may have misunderstood my post. A job loss shouldn’t matter, but sadly it does.
    - u678u 6y ago
      Yeah I get it you're right too.
dsr_ 6y ago
I have dealt with around 100 technically-oriented recruiters in the last 30 years. That's not a huge number, but it is plausibly a statistically reasonable sample size. I have been on both the wanting-to-hire and wanting-to-be-hired sides. I can name precisely one recruiter who was both honest and knowledgeable. As a rule of thumb, recruiters don't know what the buzzwords mean and can't judge quality. They are salespeople without product knowledge.
- hawk_ 6y ago
  they may not understand the buzzwords but do they generate matches that wouldn't have happened otherwise? i don't have an opinion either way but understanding the meaning of the terms seems to be irrelevant to what they do.
  - dsr_ 6y ago
    A random number generator also generates matches that would not have happened otherwise. I think it is odd, in Hacker News, to see the opinion that semantics don't really matter. Java vs JavaScript. Linux vs Linux Kernel. FPGA vs LPGA vs RPG vs RPG vs RPG-III. Those are all basically the same, right? (Field programmable, ladies' professional rocket-propelled golf role-playing report generation language: there's probably three jobs at game studios that could use all that, actually.)
    - hawk_ 6y ago
      perhaps I didn't fully explain that. my point was that the most direct criteria for a recruiter's performance would be how many matches they made compared to a primitive automaton. whether that requires understanding buzzwords may be true but isn't self evident. it's a bit like SV's obsession with whiteboarding. too many people in SV conflate good performance at whiteboarding with good performance at work. the true measure still is good performance at work though.
  - ugh123 6y ago
    If they don't understand the meaning of terms in a resume and how that may or may not align with the requirements of the job, then what value do recruiters bring? If they're merely there to "match" on buzzwords and technical jargon- then that could easily be done by software. What else do tech recruiters bring to the table?
euthymiclabs 6y ago
In psychiatry, we've thankfully replaced the term "Munchausen syndrome by proxy" with the much more accurate "medical child abuse." Parents hurting children by creating medical illness is an important problem to monitor for--not a medical disease. I'm not sure recruiters are that malignant. But understanding their role, their incentives, and what you can rationally do about this is an important discussion.
- benrothke 6y ago
  Thank you for the clarification. True, not all recruiters are like that. But people use them with trust. But in the end, can be hurt by that blind trust.
  - euthymiclabs 6y ago
    Agreed. Blind trust is always a serious risk.
bmk44 6y ago
While I agree with the article's main takeaway that you need to have a good relationship and work together with recruiter, I mostly disagree with the negative scaremongering about sharing your resume. Every single recruiter I have ever shared my resume in order to apply for a particular role explicitly asked me to confirm a "right to represent" statement and only then would they share my profile with a target company. In my most recent job search as a senior front-end developer, I turned my LinkedIn profile to be "seeking work - visible only to recruiters" and I corresponded with over 300 recruiters over the course of 4 months. My initial reply message to every recruiter who contacted me included a greeting, my salary expectations, my phone number, and my schedule during which I am free to chat, as well as a copy of my resume. They all appreciated that I laid my cards on the table since it eliminated 15-30 minutes of pointless back and forth required for them to get this information from me, and they could also cut the conversation short immediately if whatever role they represented wasn't a good match. This kind of job search process took relatively long but ultimately, with little effort, I was able to land a gig that's a perfect fit at the top range of my salary expectations. Pro-tip: create a dedicated email address for the purpose of your job search and NEVER include your primary phone number on a resume which you share with recruiters or portals such as dice.com.
- codingdave 6y ago
  > Every single recruiter I have ever shared my resume in order to apply for a particular role explicitly asked me to confirm a "right to represent" statement and only then would they share my profile with a target company. So far as you know. I once had a great conversation with a recruiter where they were pairing up myself and a former co-worker to join the team of a 2nd former co-worker for a year-long contract. It was just about a slam dunk deal, and everyone involved wanted to move forward with it... until HR informed us that our resumes had been submitted without our knowledge or permission (from old resumes they found online), but we were in their system already and could not be brought in by our recruiter. Nor could we get the first recruiter to work with us as the 2nd recruiter had the contract to fill the roles. In the grand scheme of things, we just moved on to other jobs, but there are definitely cases where the systems in place, and bad actors, throw wrenches into the works no matter what you do.
- 6y ago
tboyd47 6y ago
I agree with your main point, that you should be careful which recruiters you work with. Some small nitpicky arguments, though: > A single good recruiter who knows you, your skillset, and what you want will serve you much better than numerous recruiters who just want your resume. > The best time to develop a good relationship with a recruiter is when you are happily employed. That will be an opportunity for them to leisurely understand you. When the time comes that you will need their services, they will be strategically placed to help you. I'm not sure this is useful from a candidate's perspective. Just having recruiters as personal connections won't grant you access to some secret network of jobs in the future. So talking to recruiters when you aren't looking for a job is largely a waste of time, better spent updating your LinkedIn profile and filling out your resume. > When is it ok to send your resume to a recruiter? ... Only after you have spoken with them. A message via LinkedIn or job board is not enough. I don't think this is accurate. When I do recruiting for clients, I'll typically request the candidate's resume before the initial call so we'll have more to talk about. It may not be standard practice among recruiters, but it works for me. It's not only against the candidate's best interest to be double-submitted, but against the recruiter's self-interest as well. So I'm not going to submit a candidate unless I know that candidate wants to be submitted by me.
jariel 6y ago
Maybe we need agents. Athletes pay x% of their income to agents because it's worth it. I'll bet $1000 the same would apply to tech. Most people have no idea what they are worth - which usually means undervaluing themselves, but just as bad, overvaluing. Having someone who is objective and understands business just look out for you a little bit is probably worth 5% of your income. You'd earn more than that in the end. Esp if they had easy access to lawyers, or could mostly speak the language, etc.
- thechangelog 6y ago
  Does this exist? As someone in the midst of some major career changes I’ve been wishing for a “career coach” sort of role. Someone to help with both compensation, but also to advice on which roles to take now to set myself up for my most desired roles in the future.
- tboyd47 6y ago
  Just saw this posted in New: https://www.fastcompany.com/90604436/levels-fyi-leveling-tech-salaries-leveling-negotiation https://www.fastcompany.com/90604436/levels-fyi-leveling-tec...
- schnevets 6y ago
  You may be on to something. While complaining in a different thread, I realized recruiters today are not "agents" or "partners", they're "brokers" whose job is to complete a transaction in a way that grants them a big bottom-line. The big recruiters have a continuous churn of entry level employees, so reputation does not play a part in their mission. Maybe this kind of relationship between 10x developers and representation would be beneficial for the entire industry.
- Grimm1 6y ago
  I've strictly used firms that are paid a percentage of my signed salary by the company upon hiring me. This heavily aligns incentives in much the way agents are aligned with athletes so that I maximize my compensation when I'm looking for work. Singlesprout comes to mind here. I'm still responsible for swatting down roles I don't like but when I see one I like I know they'll go to bat to maximize their own earnings. Though I ultimately didn't take their offer because I was able to play it against a local company for a matching salary and bonus to avoid a move it was a good experience working with them and only mildly painful to break it to them that I would be taking another offer.
ugh123 6y ago
Have your recruiting and legal team add language to posted job descriptions saying something along the lines of: "[company] does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd parties & agencies. [company] will not pay finder's fees for unsolicited resumes that result in employment by [company]."
ChuckMcM 6y ago
The ones that annoy me were recruiters who would 'scrape' together a resume for me from my LinkedIn, then submit that to a company. I unilaterally stopped taking any connection requests from recruiters.
- superbcarrot 6y ago
  That's appalling. Where do you live? I've never experienced or heard of this in the UK.
  - schnevets 6y ago
    This happened to me in the United States. I responded to a message, they listed out ~10 companies that were hiring rapidly, I said I wanted to update my resume since I had some other experience that were relevant to some of those firms, and the recruiter said they already sent out an export from LinkedIn. 7 out of the 10 firms rejected the submission by the recruiter. That was the last time I ever responded to a LinkedIn message.
matsemann 6y ago
I've never seen recruiters applying on behalf of candidates. Not sure if that's done at all in my country (Norway)? It would just feel weird and tacky to have a middle man. I'm perfectly capable of browsing listings myself and send the CV. What value does a recruiter provide in this instance? What's normally done here is that companies hire recruiters to fill a spot. And then those (British, always British agencies) go to LinkedIn and shotgun spam every breathing human being with tech in their resume. And cold call. I've started to not answer and then later block british numbers calling me, but a few minutes later they will just call through a local proxy in Norway. Just as much spam as microsoft-spam-calls from Asia. And if you end up talking with them it's just a waste of time. They won't name the company, the benefits, and can't even answer basic questions about the position. Their only value is to get the open position in front of more eyes, but that value is dubious given that I will never have anything to do with a company hiring these spammers. Honestly, if you're a tech company you should do your own hiring as the candidates will be your most valuable resources. Outsourcing your moat is bad business.
- duncan-donuts 6y ago
  Anecdotal but I once had a recruiter submit my resume to a job through the company I was currently contracting with. It was an awkward conversation when the recruiting director sat me down and asked why my resume was being submitted by another recruiter.
- benrothke 6y ago
  Yes, things are done quite differently here in the USA. As to browsing listings yourself; the issue is that many senior positions, if not most, are not publicly listed. For a company looking to fill a senior position, a recruiter provides the benefit of giving them a set of highly qualified and vested potential candidates. For many firms, that is an extremely valuable service.
  - soco 6y ago
    The UK recruiter/spammer agencies won't have that internal knowledge anyway, they only skim Monster and the likes.
throckmortra 6y ago
After a couple of tries with "headhunters" I decided I would never work with them again. If a recruiter, directly employed by a company, reaches out to me for a position in said company, I find it agreeable to look at their proposition. But this is only because the incentives are correctly aligned in this case. Headhunters are incentivized differently, to your detriment. We should be looking to abolish the need for headhunters in the tech industry.
- benrothke 6y ago
  Don’t let the 99% of bad recruiters effect your feelings for the 1% of recruiters that are excellent.
KDJohnBrown 6y ago
A few years ago a recruiter called me up enthusiastically and earnestly said, <name of my co-founder af a company I sold> personally asked me to reach out to you immediately for an urgent lead devops position we have open?” I said, “oh wow, that’s great! Just hold on one second to put on my headphones”. I used that pause to bridge in my former co-founder and say “hey, I have Captain Recruiter in the phone here and he says you want to hire me. Why didn’t you tell me this on our hike yesterday?” My good friend and business partner fired him on that call. My friend, he is an excellent judge of character and trusted this guy a lot. “captain recruiter” had a great reputation in the SF tech scene, he was also a sociopathic liar. I have been contacted by about 5,000 recruiters in the past 25 years. 3 of them found me job. 2 of them I referred successful candidates to. The rest ranged from incompetent kids working from IT sweat shops in India, to millionaire sociopaths. One recruiter asked me out on a date on OkCupid just to pitch me for a job with Dropbox. Headhunters are scum. (Edited for typos)
cstross 6y ago
30 year old anecdote: Lo, many years ago, I was working for a small company as their one and only technical author. I decided to leave (something to do with a 50% pay rise to go work for a much larger company that wasn't obviously circling the drain and due to go bust within 3 months). I gave notice, and as my then-employer had no HR policy and no HR department (it was management by autocratic whim: one boss and about twelve technical staff) he asked me to hang around long enough to draft a job description and tidy up some loose ends. So: job description for technical author duly drafted and sent to recruitment agencies. Whereupon we got CVs back by fax. Wildly inappropriate CVs. I remember one perplexed phone call that I ended after the recruiter at the other end of the line said, "technical author, technical support engineer -- what's the difference?" So yeah, watch the quality of your recruiters! (Whichever side of the table you're on.)
einpoklum 6y ago
Why can't you tell the recruitment agency to get your specific authorization before each send of your CV to any company?
superflit 6y ago
I have to ask. Do we have good recruiters? The ones I interact seems to no be interested in my strong and *WEAK* points so I got matched with a good position? I have a feeling that we don't have recruiters just spammers that throw 100's CVs in company an latter claim their "reward$" (1 month or 2months) for their effort. I know it is kind of blanket statement. But I am ignoring all recruiters that came from X "Talent" companies. And right now I am tweaking my filter more. I don't think I will have any recruiter left after I tweak it. I don't like to switch jobs neither be in a job that is not suited to me. A good recruiter in a good position would be able to see it and improve my chances.
JNRowe 6y ago
I like Tom Morris' bees repository¹ as an example of recruiter practice, because you can really feel the frustration in the README. ¹ https://github.com/tommorris/bees https://github.com/tommorris/bees
mastrsushi 6y ago
If you don't have some distinguished portfolio then recruiters are great.....if you want to spend the next 10 years as a DoD Java MVC Senior developer. It's really inspiring to work on a virtually abandoned procedural code base from 10 years ago written in an OOP language. I think the peak excitement is implementing business logic because that's the closest you'll get to writing algorithms. Cog in the wheel, cog in the wheel. I like when my boss tells me I take too long whwn the majority of my time is spent debugging broken old code and trying to figure out how anything works. Yes I'm projecting, and yes I'm depressed.
ficklepickle 6y ago
I recently found a good recruiter that actually gets me, and I am so bloody grateful. It has been life changing. I have been trying to break out of contracting for sometime. The job application process is hell for me. I applied for so many jobs that I knew I would hate, I had this notion that I was gonna have to suffer a terrible employer for a while. Then I found a perfect position and managed to get the attention of the recruiter. He's a real human, he knows his shit and most importantly he just got me immediately. Now I'm on the cusp of breaking out of contracting AND the front end, into an amazing full stack position with an awesome company. Good things can happen to quietly competent people! You do have to put yourself out there, which can be difficult. It helps if you have some interesting projects in your back pocket. I reversed engineered a car share app and reimplemented it as a web app. Fortunately they thought that was cool. If anybody out there is struggling through a similar situation, hang in there and be kind to yourself. Feel free to reach out if you wanna talk it through.
mastrsushi 6y ago
Munchausen Syndrome, sounds like a bad case of the munchies to me.

34 points by benrothke 6y ago

dvt 6y ago

Apart from the points the article makes (all good), and the overarching lesson (don't use a recruiter), this line really stuck out to me: > Job loss is one of the most stressful life events, along with the death of a loved one, divorce, and a significant illness. It's so sad (and true) that a job loss -- something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things -- is comparable to the death of a loved one or an illness. End-stage capitalism, indeed. It's probably why a whole bunch of us are attracted to the startup life and doing your own thing -- even though that comes with its own set of (more often worse) downsides.

benrothke 6y ago
Thanks for the reply. To clarify, I did not mean to imply not to use recruiters. Rather to use them selectively and cautiously. As a good, trusted recruiter can mean the difference between getting a job and not. I know a few of the best, and would gladly recommend them.
u678u 6y ago
> It's so sad (and true) that a job loss -- something that doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things Maybe if you're a developer in a strong economy that is true. I've seen lots of middle-aged people laid off that started the spiral into unemployment, divorce and at least one suicide.
- dvt 6y ago
  I think you may have misunderstood my post. A job loss shouldn’t matter, but sadly it does.
  - u678u 6y ago
    Yeah I get it you're right too.

dsr_ 6y ago

I have dealt with around 100 technically-oriented recruiters in the last 30 years. That's not a huge number, but it is plausibly a statistically reasonable sample size. I have been on both the wanting-to-hire and wanting-to-be-hired sides. I can name precisely one recruiter who was both honest and knowledgeable. As a rule of thumb, recruiters don't know what the buzzwords mean and can't judge quality. They are salespeople without product knowledge.

hawk_ 6y ago
they may not understand the buzzwords but do they generate matches that wouldn't have happened otherwise? i don't have an opinion either way but understanding the meaning of the terms seems to be irrelevant to what they do.
- dsr_ 6y ago
  A random number generator also generates matches that would not have happened otherwise. I think it is odd, in Hacker News, to see the opinion that semantics don't really matter. Java vs JavaScript. Linux vs Linux Kernel. FPGA vs LPGA vs RPG vs RPG vs RPG-III. Those are all basically the same, right? (Field programmable, ladies' professional rocket-propelled golf role-playing report generation language: there's probably three jobs at game studios that could use all that, actually.)
  - hawk_ 6y ago
    perhaps I didn't fully explain that. my point was that the most direct criteria for a recruiter's performance would be how many matches they made compared to a primitive automaton. whether that requires understanding buzzwords may be true but isn't self evident. it's a bit like SV's obsession with whiteboarding. too many people in SV conflate good performance at whiteboarding with good performance at work. the true measure still is good performance at work though.
- ugh123 6y ago
  If they don't understand the meaning of terms in a resume and how that may or may not align with the requirements of the job, then what value do recruiters bring? If they're merely there to "match" on buzzwords and technical jargon- then that could easily be done by software. What else do tech recruiters bring to the table?

euthymiclabs 6y ago

In psychiatry, we've thankfully replaced the term "Munchausen syndrome by proxy" with the much more accurate "medical child abuse." Parents hurting children by creating medical illness is an important problem to monitor for--not a medical disease. I'm not sure recruiters are that malignant. But understanding their role, their incentives, and what you can rationally do about this is an important discussion.

benrothke 6y ago
Thank you for the clarification. True, not all recruiters are like that. But people use them with trust. But in the end, can be hurt by that blind trust.
- euthymiclabs 6y ago
  Agreed. Blind trust is always a serious risk.

bmk44 6y ago

While I agree with the article's main takeaway that you need to have a good relationship and work together with recruiter, I mostly disagree with the negative scaremongering about sharing your resume. Every single recruiter I have ever shared my resume in order to apply for a particular role explicitly asked me to confirm a "right to represent" statement and only then would they share my profile with a target company. In my most recent job search as a senior front-end developer, I turned my LinkedIn profile to be "seeking work - visible only to recruiters" and I corresponded with over 300 recruiters over the course of 4 months. My initial reply message to every recruiter who contacted me included a greeting, my salary expectations, my phone number, and my schedule during which I am free to chat, as well as a copy of my resume. They all appreciated that I laid my cards on the table since it eliminated 15-30 minutes of pointless back and forth required for them to get this information from me, and they could also cut the conversation short immediately if whatever role they represented wasn't a good match. This kind of job search process took relatively long but ultimately, with little effort, I was able to land a gig that's a perfect fit at the top range of my salary expectations. Pro-tip: create a dedicated email address for the purpose of your job search and NEVER include your primary phone number on a resume which you share with recruiters or portals such as dice.com.

codingdave 6y ago
> Every single recruiter I have ever shared my resume in order to apply for a particular role explicitly asked me to confirm a "right to represent" statement and only then would they share my profile with a target company. So far as you know. I once had a great conversation with a recruiter where they were pairing up myself and a former co-worker to join the team of a 2nd former co-worker for a year-long contract. It was just about a slam dunk deal, and everyone involved wanted to move forward with it... until HR informed us that our resumes had been submitted without our knowledge or permission (from old resumes they found online), but we were in their system already and could not be brought in by our recruiter. Nor could we get the first recruiter to work with us as the 2nd recruiter had the contract to fill the roles. In the grand scheme of things, we just moved on to other jobs, but there are definitely cases where the systems in place, and bad actors, throw wrenches into the works no matter what you do.
6y ago

tboyd47 6y ago

I agree with your main point, that you should be careful which recruiters you work with. Some small nitpicky arguments, though: > A single good recruiter who knows you, your skillset, and what you want will serve you much better than numerous recruiters who just want your resume. > The best time to develop a good relationship with a recruiter is when you are happily employed. That will be an opportunity for them to leisurely understand you. When the time comes that you will need their services, they will be strategically placed to help you. I'm not sure this is useful from a candidate's perspective. Just having recruiters as personal connections won't grant you access to some secret network of jobs in the future. So talking to recruiters when you aren't looking for a job is largely a waste of time, better spent updating your LinkedIn profile and filling out your resume. > When is it ok to send your resume to a recruiter? ... Only after you have spoken with them. A message via LinkedIn or job board is not enough. I don't think this is accurate. When I do recruiting for clients, I'll typically request the candidate's resume before the initial call so we'll have more to talk about. It may not be standard practice among recruiters, but it works for me. It's not only against the candidate's best interest to be double-submitted, but against the recruiter's self-interest as well. So I'm not going to submit a candidate unless I know that candidate wants to be submitted by me.

jariel 6y ago

Maybe we need agents. Athletes pay x% of their income to agents because it's worth it. I'll bet $1000 the same would apply to tech. Most people have no idea what they are worth - which usually means undervaluing themselves, but just as bad, overvaluing. Having someone who is objective and understands business just look out for you a little bit is probably worth 5% of your income. You'd earn more than that in the end. Esp if they had easy access to lawyers, or could mostly speak the language, etc.

thechangelog 6y ago
Does this exist? As someone in the midst of some major career changes I’ve been wishing for a “career coach” sort of role. Someone to help with both compensation, but also to advice on which roles to take now to set myself up for my most desired roles in the future.
tboyd47 6y ago
Just saw this posted in New: https://www.fastcompany.com/90604436/levels-fyi-leveling-tech-salaries-leveling-negotiation https://www.fastcompany.com/90604436/levels-fyi-leveling-tec...
schnevets 6y ago
You may be on to something. While complaining in a different thread, I realized recruiters today are not "agents" or "partners", they're "brokers" whose job is to complete a transaction in a way that grants them a big bottom-line. The big recruiters have a continuous churn of entry level employees, so reputation does not play a part in their mission. Maybe this kind of relationship between 10x developers and representation would be beneficial for the entire industry.
Grimm1 6y ago
I've strictly used firms that are paid a percentage of my signed salary by the company upon hiring me. This heavily aligns incentives in much the way agents are aligned with athletes so that I maximize my compensation when I'm looking for work. Singlesprout comes to mind here. I'm still responsible for swatting down roles I don't like but when I see one I like I know they'll go to bat to maximize their own earnings. Though I ultimately didn't take their offer because I was able to play it against a local company for a matching salary and bonus to avoid a move it was a good experience working with them and only mildly painful to break it to them that I would be taking another offer.

ugh123 6y ago

Have your recruiting and legal team add language to posted job descriptions saying something along the lines of: "[company] does not accept unsolicited resumes from 3rd parties & agencies. [company] will not pay finder's fees for unsolicited resumes that result in employment by [company]."

ChuckMcM 6y ago

The ones that annoy me were recruiters who would 'scrape' together a resume for me from my LinkedIn, then submit that to a company. I unilaterally stopped taking any connection requests from recruiters.

superbcarrot 6y ago
That's appalling. Where do you live? I've never experienced or heard of this in the UK.
- schnevets 6y ago
  This happened to me in the United States. I responded to a message, they listed out ~10 companies that were hiring rapidly, I said I wanted to update my resume since I had some other experience that were relevant to some of those firms, and the recruiter said they already sent out an export from LinkedIn. 7 out of the 10 firms rejected the submission by the recruiter. That was the last time I ever responded to a LinkedIn message.

matsemann 6y ago

I've never seen recruiters applying on behalf of candidates. Not sure if that's done at all in my country (Norway)? It would just feel weird and tacky to have a middle man. I'm perfectly capable of browsing listings myself and send the CV. What value does a recruiter provide in this instance? What's normally done here is that companies hire recruiters to fill a spot. And then those (British, always British agencies) go to LinkedIn and shotgun spam every breathing human being with tech in their resume. And cold call. I've started to not answer and then later block british numbers calling me, but a few minutes later they will just call through a local proxy in Norway. Just as much spam as microsoft-spam-calls from Asia. And if you end up talking with them it's just a waste of time. They won't name the company, the benefits, and can't even answer basic questions about the position. Their only value is to get the open position in front of more eyes, but that value is dubious given that I will never have anything to do with a company hiring these spammers. Honestly, if you're a tech company you should do your own hiring as the candidates will be your most valuable resources. Outsourcing your moat is bad business.

duncan-donuts 6y ago
Anecdotal but I once had a recruiter submit my resume to a job through the company I was currently contracting with. It was an awkward conversation when the recruiting director sat me down and asked why my resume was being submitted by another recruiter.
benrothke 6y ago
Yes, things are done quite differently here in the USA. As to browsing listings yourself; the issue is that many senior positions, if not most, are not publicly listed. For a company looking to fill a senior position, a recruiter provides the benefit of giving them a set of highly qualified and vested potential candidates. For many firms, that is an extremely valuable service.
- soco 6y ago
  The UK recruiter/spammer agencies won't have that internal knowledge anyway, they only skim Monster and the likes.

throckmortra 6y ago

After a couple of tries with "headhunters" I decided I would never work with them again. If a recruiter, directly employed by a company, reaches out to me for a position in said company, I find it agreeable to look at their proposition. But this is only because the incentives are correctly aligned in this case. Headhunters are incentivized differently, to your detriment. We should be looking to abolish the need for headhunters in the tech industry.

benrothke 6y ago
Don’t let the 99% of bad recruiters effect your feelings for the 1% of recruiters that are excellent.

KDJohnBrown 6y ago

A few years ago a recruiter called me up enthusiastically and earnestly said, <name of my co-founder af a company I sold> personally asked me to reach out to you immediately for an urgent lead devops position we have open?” I said, “oh wow, that’s great! Just hold on one second to put on my headphones”. I used that pause to bridge in my former co-founder and say “hey, I have Captain Recruiter in the phone here and he says you want to hire me. Why didn’t you tell me this on our hike yesterday?” My good friend and business partner fired him on that call. My friend, he is an excellent judge of character and trusted this guy a lot. “captain recruiter” had a great reputation in the SF tech scene, he was also a sociopathic liar. I have been contacted by about 5,000 recruiters in the past 25 years. 3 of them found me job. 2 of them I referred successful candidates to. The rest ranged from incompetent kids working from IT sweat shops in India, to millionaire sociopaths. One recruiter asked me out on a date on OkCupid just to pitch me for a job with Dropbox. Headhunters are scum. (Edited for typos)

cstross 6y ago

30 year old anecdote: Lo, many years ago, I was working for a small company as their one and only technical author. I decided to leave (something to do with a 50% pay rise to go work for a much larger company that wasn't obviously circling the drain and due to go bust within 3 months). I gave notice, and as my then-employer had no HR policy and no HR department (it was management by autocratic whim: one boss and about twelve technical staff) he asked me to hang around long enough to draft a job description and tidy up some loose ends. So: job description for technical author duly drafted and sent to recruitment agencies. Whereupon we got CVs back by fax. Wildly inappropriate CVs. I remember one perplexed phone call that I ended after the recruiter at the other end of the line said, "technical author, technical support engineer -- what's the difference?" So yeah, watch the quality of your recruiters! (Whichever side of the table you're on.)

einpoklum 6y ago

Why can't you tell the recruitment agency to get your specific authorization before each send of your CV to any company?

superflit 6y ago

I have to ask. Do we have good recruiters? The ones I interact seems to no be interested in my strong and *WEAK* points so I got matched with a good position? I have a feeling that we don't have recruiters just spammers that throw 100's CVs in company an latter claim their "reward$" (1 month or 2months) for their effort. I know it is kind of blanket statement. But I am ignoring all recruiters that came from X "Talent" companies. And right now I am tweaking my filter more. I don't think I will have any recruiter left after I tweak it. I don't like to switch jobs neither be in a job that is not suited to me. A good recruiter in a good position would be able to see it and improve my chances.

JNRowe 6y ago

I like Tom Morris' bees repository¹ as an example of recruiter practice, because you can really feel the frustration in the README. ¹ https://github.com/tommorris/bees https://github.com/tommorris/bees

mastrsushi 6y ago

If you don't have some distinguished portfolio then recruiters are great.....if you want to spend the next 10 years as a DoD Java MVC Senior developer. It's really inspiring to work on a virtually abandoned procedural code base from 10 years ago written in an OOP language. I think the peak excitement is implementing business logic because that's the closest you'll get to writing algorithms. Cog in the wheel, cog in the wheel. I like when my boss tells me I take too long whwn the majority of my time is spent debugging broken old code and trying to figure out how anything works. Yes I'm projecting, and yes I'm depressed.

ficklepickle 6y ago

I recently found a good recruiter that actually gets me, and I am so bloody grateful. It has been life changing. I have been trying to break out of contracting for sometime. The job application process is hell for me. I applied for so many jobs that I knew I would hate, I had this notion that I was gonna have to suffer a terrible employer for a while. Then I found a perfect position and managed to get the attention of the recruiter. He's a real human, he knows his shit and most importantly he just got me immediately. Now I'm on the cusp of breaking out of contracting AND the front end, into an amazing full stack position with an awesome company. Good things can happen to quietly competent people! You do have to put yourself out there, which can be difficult. It helps if you have some interesting projects in your back pocket. I reversed engineered a car share app and reimplemented it as a web app. Fortunately they thought that was cool. If anybody out there is struggling through a similar situation, hang in there and be kind to yourself. Feel free to reach out if you wanna talk it through.

mastrsushi 6y ago

Munchausen Syndrome, sounds like a bad case of the munchies to me.