Ask HN: Why are there still recruiters?

If you post an ad for a software dev position, you're going to get dozens to thousands of applications, and most of them won't even be close to what you're looking for.

Recruiters aren't perfect, but many of them are quite good. And from the perspective of a hiring manager, having a recruiter find you candidates is much less time consuming than posting an ad and then trying to read through and filter the applications that come in.

To answer your question, systems are just systems. They can never replace the human element which is required when dealing with people. Hiring is a friggin tough job and I can totally see the value of "good" recruiters now that I have been looking to hire people even though I am too small to hire recruiters yet.

Good recruiters can do the initial "human" filtering of connecting the hiring team/manager with better candidates. Online Systems cannot yet do that. Most online systems can be rigged with Bullshit Resumes and there is no way to tell unless you talk to the candidate. Good recruiters can separate the wheat from chaff before it gets to the hiring manager.

The second was when we were looking for an EE graduate and specified that applicants must have an engineering degree. We got hundreds of graduates with every kind of degree under the sun who were just blanket sending their CV to every listing with the word "graduate" in the title. With that many CVs we had no choice but to use a recruiter to sort through everything.

1: Filtering. The downside of the internet making it easy to apply for jobs is that the candidates that do apply, don't tend to be the candidates you want. If you put a job up on Monster / Indeed etc, you're going to get a lot of candidates who aren't remotely qualified for what you're looking for. There's a lot of sifting that needs to happen. If you're a hiring manager you don't want to spend 20 hours initially qualifying and disqualifying candidates, when you can spend 2-3 hours talking to the most qualified people.

2: Talent attraction. A good recruiter finds out what someone wants in their career and then matches them with an opportunity. This sort of discovery doesn't happen that well on the internet.

3: Candidate pipeline management: A lot of companies have stupid complicated interview processes and end up losing a lot of talent that way. If you aren't Google, you can't put people through that sort of thing (and even Google lose a lot of candidates like that).

By and large HN doesn't understand sales particularly well. Selling companies things for $XX,XXX - $XXX,XXX is that you aren't doing the greasy used car / insurance sell. A lot of enterprise is project management with multiple stakeholders. Permanent recruiting is a similar situation.

I'm a hiring manager and having a firehose of applicants would fill me with dread. My company has tried various "hacker" recruitment sites and they are all terrible - in terms of candidates and the supposed tests they use to rank applicants.

Recruiters are expensive but so is my time, they are very much a necessary evil for the foreseeable future.

On top of that, from my linkedin I see the same recruiters moving around from one company to another every 1-2 years. You may find yourself talking to the same recruiter from company A now that you're applying at company B.

I don't know outside of SV if recruiters sound like a broken record too...

Laws of Supply & Demand intersect with basic human needs and wants. Good Talent is in short supply, always.

Good Talent craves purpose, significance, meaning, growth, certainty, variety, contribution, love, and respect.

Until Skynet can start engineering that match between employers and Good Talent -- recruiters are safe.

I understand that recruiters who work directly for the hiring manager/firm provide value by filtering candidates. Unfortunately, jobs often get posted to multiple job sites by multiple secondary recruiters, exacerbating the need for filtering. Candidates can waste time dealing with multiple recruiters for what they think are different positions, only to learn that they are the same spot.

The industry could streamline this problem - and make the experience better for candidates - by eliminating paid referrals from secondary recruiters.

This is on top of the fact that it is emotionally draining. Every person you talk to as a manager that you try and get to work for you is a sales pitch. To get people that you really want, you need to be engaged and energetic and positive about the workplace, even if you feel down. On top of this, reading resume after resume is actually draining. There are many, many that are poorly written, and you have to slog through them, because 1. you want to see if that person really is any good, 2. sometimes you don't have a large enough pool that you can just immediately discount someone. Having someone clear out the first round of all of that saves quite a bit energy.

For context, I keep a spreadsheet everytime I look for a job, so any stats below are accurate.

1. My resume never goes into a black hole. I always know the status of my resume.

2. I always know the salary they are willing to pay before I start the process.

3. Recruiters generally get me to the top of the pile because I have a a track record of doing well in interviews with them.

4. I know more about the interviewing process because they debrief candidates after their interviews so they can warn me what to look out for.

5. I know what technologies are a must have and what technologies are a nice to have.

Recently, I've seen both sides of the coin from the same recruiter. I got my current job from going through him. Now I work with him to hire developers.

So the stats from my last job search in 2016 using recruiters. All of this was in a two week span.

jobs applied for: 16

recruiting agencies: 8

phone screens: 11

Hiring suspended/Req Closed: 4

offers: 2

in person interviews: 3

rejections: 1 (I took myself out of the running for all the others)

I would have never had that success rate randomly applying for jobs on a job board.

I had 6 phone screens in one day all with different companies.

I've had some very good coffees with recruiters that gave me a lot of insight in the tech industry, some roles that were a match, weren't. They asked a lot of questions about myself and from there could find roles that would match where I wanted to be.

Recently I sent a CV to a company for an open role I saw because I wanted to work in that company. The internal recruiters of this company saw that my CV was a better match for a role that I hadn't seen announced. They sent it to another department / followed through.

Recruiters that only match buzzwords provide very low value but good recruiters can be career changing.

In recruiting - it is cleaning and filtering effort that saves lots of time and effort for both parties.

Having said that - there are lots of recruiters acting like spammers.

Most of them are getting zero replies from otherwise perfect potential candidates is because they are missing the most important point when crafting their request.