Tell HN: Tech Recruiters have no clue
I applied for a 3 month contract position online. I have this recruiter call me and give me the usual bullshit and it gets to the usual "can i send over your CV to them?", I say sure as i always do after they've wasted 15 minutes of my time asking if i know PHP, if i then know LAMP, then asking my if i know Linux, apache and MySQL, then asking me if i know HTML, then CSS and you get the idea. They ask me all these questions even though 1) my CV they are looking at in front of them says so and 2) they got my CV by me sending it on an online ad asking for these specific skills.
So after i've given them permission to send my CV, the woman asks me for 2 technical references, i say to her that if the company likes the look of my CV then i'd be happy to provide references but i dont just hand out peoples details on a whim because i'd hate people to do that to me. She tells me that she cant send my CV without first getting the references. Normally i'd tell her to piss off politely at this point but the daily rate was going through the market rate ceiling and i'm a whore for money.
So i say sure, i'll give you references, i'll go and get permission from them and get back to you. I do this and email her the next day with contact details. She emails back and asks what companies they work for, i tell them they're freelancers that i've done work for. She says that colleagues arent good enough and will need managers i've worked under. I explain they're clients, not colleagues, and that i'm not an employee, i'm a self employed developer with my own company and clients, i dont and have never had a manager, i'm the guy people come to because they're not technical, i take care of everything for them. The position i'm looking for requires me to be the main technical guy there, surely she'd get where i'm coming from. She asked for technical references, thats what i gave her, people who understood and could articulate my technical ability.
But alas no, i've been penalised for not being a corporate drone, i avoid working for large corporations because its soul destroying and i hate bureaucracy. I like working for other freelancers and small agencies, its far more friendly and less political and i dont have to write screeds of bullshit documents when a quick email is good enough.
Anyway, sorry for the rant but this pissed me off today, i really wish i could totally avoid recruiters as when i have found work without them its been orders of magnitude easier and faster, but they know where the good paying gigs are. Someone please disrupt this industry.
tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit.
113 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadYou already know how to market yourself. You're just trying to market yourself to a different set of people.
Also, you can't at the same time say you're a whore for money and then complain that you have to prostitute yourself to make your money.
Second, recruiters get paid as a percentage of the salary they get you, and aren't afraid to get you an amount that gets them a good amount. I always hate to play hardball (effective as it is) and talk about how much money I want, but recruiters love doing that it. It's their job. And, if they are a jackass about it, you just say (after you start work) "oh, sorry about him, recruiters, sigh" and keep whatever they negotiated for you. Then you are the good guy, but you get the benefits as if you were the bad guy. :)
FWIW, I doubled my salary by working with a recruiter. And I like the job better! Being a corporate sellout is highly underrated.
There was probably no job, and she was doing "market research".
I know this, because the company I work for has had to draw hard lines on recruiters. Before that, they would send us utter crap and waste our time. Now, we don't get many hits, but most of them are actually worth talking to.
She asked you all those questions because when she assumes things, her customers get really angry. Sending bad recruits can get her banned from that company altogether.
She asked for corporate drone references because you'll be doing corporate drone work and her clients want to make sure you can do it.
Interestingly, most IT managers hate recruiters as much or more than I do, but - like me - they're at the mercy of their corporations' "preferred vendor lists".
Any recruiter trying to harvest references of "managers and people in authority" is just a weasel trying to fill their sales contact database.
There's an inherent conflict of interest for recruiters in handling references who are also potential leads, hence it's a situation that they should avoid placing themselves in. If they're going to do it at the very least it should be done by an outside agency.
The established and more senior recruiters will be much more professional and polished. They all have their quirks and little tricks, but just learn to deal with it and if you're senior enough, be patient to find appropriate recruiters.
Few rules I use when I deal with recruiters (in Europe):
1) There are really an handful of recruitment companies with a good reputation and history. By default, I distrust a recruiter calling from an unknown agency. There must be thousands of small recruitment agencies in Europe, I get a fairly high amount of emails/calls every week and I mostly ignore them.
2) Be suspicious when a recruiter knocks at your door or publish a job ad with an out-of-market rate. Rates are low these days. They just want to harvest CVs.
3) If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview.
4) Don't waste time talking technical stuff with a recruiter. They don't know shit. In 10+ years I have met maybe 2 recruiters with a real technical/dev background. Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.
5) Most of the time jobs coming from recruiters suck. A company with a decent vision on how to build software will never use zombie recruiters. Maybe they will contact one of the big player or, more likely, they will go on the market themselves. Recruiters jobs are mostly financial/telco crap where Java 1.4 is the standard.
6) Be aggressive when it comes to rates. Recruiters markup is around 20% (again in Europe). It may vary dramatically. So think about it: You are giving 20% of your salary to a guy who phoned you one day, sent you to an interview the next and disappeared. Also, some recruiters (very few) are transparent about the markup. They are normally worth your trust.
7) When you leave a contract, keep good relationship with everyone at every cost. It will pay back.
They're always fishing for people (a major alarm bell should be if they're asking for hiring managers or persons of authority) who they can then spam with offers of services.
Ouch. You cut me deep koevet.
In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here.
Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number).
If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency.
Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens.
TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.
(caveat: I'm not an native English speaker but I have lived in the UK and I use English as my working language. I can recognize UK accents pretty well).
More often than not, I'm getting phone calls from recruiters with a very strong cockney accent that clearly have no idea of what they are talking about and they sounds like they just landed on that desk without any previous experience in the industry. These are particularly pesky. They go straight to the flag-raising questions and they make you feel like a complete idiot. Honestly, these cowboys are just damaging the image of an already deeply wounded industry. I don't know how your industry deals with dishonest or unprofessional behavior, but if you want to get the trust of people like the one hanging in this community you have to work on some mechanism to keeps the bad apples out of the basket. I can actually smell a business idea here, like a guild of super-hero recruiters, who never let you down and do actually find you your dream job.
Do recruiters really take as much as 20%? This seems ridiculously high to me. How much of their time are they investing compared to the employee?
As for recruiters taking 20%, that's a comparitively low figure for such a high daily rate. If one of my clients was requesting a £500 a day calibre candidate I wouldn't touch it for anything less than 30% in reality.
We are providing a service, plain and simple. The service fee is calculated in relation to the calibre of candidate as the more senior the candidate, the more difficult they are to find.
If so, does that truly not sound ridiculous to you? If all people got employed through recruiters then the recruitment business would make up about one fifth of the total economy!
I'm sorry, but this is an accounting fiction. The cost of an employee to an employer is the total cost; dividing up the total cost and ascribing it to this or that is irrelevant from the perspective of the employer, and disingenuous from the perspective of the employee.
In the US we have social insurance taxes which are sold as having an "employee" portion and an "employer" portion, but this too is just accounting fiction:
The employee is worth $107,650 to the employer; that part of the money goes to taxes, or to a recruiter, or to a gym membership is wholly irrelevant.KoZeN, I also hate sounding harsh because I think I've read comments of yours in other places that sound very clueful -- but this very comment of yours is a perfect example of the rampant, rank slipperiness which seems to exude from every corner of your profession.
The bottom line is that recruiters make the transaction significantly more expensive for both parties -- without adding a heck of a lot value (other than an endless appetite for trolling job boards and screening emails) to either side.
For example, if the client says to you, a recruiter, that they're willing to pay £500, that already means that their real, true, internal budget real budget is £600. As in, they'd be happy to pay that £600 for someone they found for someone they found through their own channels.
Or if you look at it the other way: even I, as a developer, decide that it's fine (if not great) to take £500 per day, I still pay (through the nose) for it, in that I know I'm being billed at a significantly higher rate, and corresponding I have to walk an eggshells in every meeting with management knowing that they're paying through the nose more for each day of my time then they should have to, and with fellow developers also (resentful of the fact that their company is paying significantly more for a unit of my time than for theirs, also). Plus the additional, very substantial risk that I will get laid off sooner than I otherwise might, precisely because of the higher rate (and the fact that they have to walk on eggshells, or otherwise deal indirectly with me because I'm branded as coming from an agency).
All of this, aside from the fact that the 20% overhead you're quoting is a very low outlier, in my experience. In fact, in all cases when I've had direct knowledge of a recruiter's overhead, it's been 30% or higher - with 50% being not uncommon.
I know I'm fudging a bit: recruiters do provide some value (much of it psychological, in that they serve as proxies, or foils more like it, in various parts of the negotiation process); it does take time to sift through those job boards (and many employers just don't know where to post, or how to post effectively); and a very small portion (less than 10%) of recruiters -- it seems you may be one of them -- do seem to have natural talents, and are capable of adding substantial value to the negotiation process (in terms of knowing the market, sizing up candidates, etc).
But the vast majority do not (again, other than serving as a psychological buffer for a highly nerve-wracking process both ways). Many seem to add substantial negatives (either through obfuscations, outright cluelessness, general slipperiness and stuffiness, etc).
And either way, it's simply intellectually dishonest for you to claim that we, as contractors, don't pay for your hefty fees. Of course we do (and so do clients) -- we both pay through the nose. And we just don't seem to get all that much in return.
The recruiter phoned me up and asked me if I was good at maths. I explained that it depended on the subject area because, although I have just finished a PhD involving mathematical modelling (as stated in my CV and cover letter), I wasn't a mathematician by training and it would depend on what methods the company were using.
I learnt an important lesson that honesty doesn't work with these people. He cut me off and said I wasn't suitable because this position required somebody that was good at maths. My CV wasn't put forward.
If you've finished a PhD involving mathematical modelling, from the recruiter's perspective you are definitely good at maths.
So the correct answer to "Are you good at maths?" from a recruiter is simply "Yes". If he wants more details then he'll ask for it. The correct answer is not a really long winded answer which the person who asked the question will not be able to understand because he doesn't know what mathematical modelling is.
Most people give long winded answers when they're trying to weasel out of giving the straight answer that they don't want to give because it'll make them look bad. Listen to any politician, for example. I think it's perfectly reasonable for the recruiter to come to the conclusion he did given that he didn't understand your answer.
Whether you think that recruiters should be able to understand your answer is another matter. We all know that most don't have sufficient domain knowledge, so the best thing to do is to answer appropriately.
It's well-known that "geeks" generally try to answer questions literally, and as accurately as possible. It's also pretty well known that the better at a field you are, the less highly you think of yourself (the Dunning–Kruger effect.)
Put those two together, and you'll see that geeks who are very good in a field will tend to give long-winded answers explaining exactly what they know and don't, instead of a simple answer. I do this myself all the time.
The fact is, after spending years in the company of postdoc level applied mathematicians and theoretical physicists, I would feel massively dishonest to say that I was good at maths. However, I do see the point of trying to put myself in the shoes of the person asking the question.
Indeed. I do this too and have to work to stop myself. It's much easier in hindsight.
Reminds me of the concept of enlightenment. If you think you're enlightened, you are nigh assuredly not.
You are right. She is wrong. It's that simple.
To you, TamDenholm, and anyone else here at hn:
Feel free to use me as a technical reference whenever you run into this illogical and ridiculous road block. Just email me one line of code to print "Hello World" to the screen. If it is correct, I will happily tell the recruiter that 100% of everything I've ever seen you program was perfect. My contact info is in my profile.
Exactly as I propose in grandparent. Reread it if necessary.
they usually want to know about the work relation you had with the reference.
I will tell them that we are colleagues on-line. Although we have never met in real life, we participate in Hacker News together. Believe me, I know much more about lots of people here than many I know in real life. For example, I would heartily recommend patio11, kirubakaran, iamelgringo, or tptacek over some guy down the hall who I know nothing about except sports conversations at the coffee machine. It is 2010: in our industry, virtual relationships can easily carry as much weight as physical ones.
Just inventing something is dangerous and ethically questionable, recruiters or not.
There is nothing ethically questionable about my offer. I will tell the truth. I will also include this thread. Recruiters have created an artificial roadblock to keep people from working by protecting their turf. This is just a handy method to turn that roadblock into a speed bump. If they are required to collect professional references, this helps them satisfy their requirement.
I operate under the assumption that everyone is telling the truth until I find out that they aren't. Then I have nothing more to do with them. So, your CV and a phone interview should be more than enough for a recruiter to qualify you. It they can't (or won't), then one of two things must be true: either they are mining CVs or they are incompetent.
Then, what if the hiring company actually contacted you?
I fully expect them to and I will tell them the truth, including this thread. AFAIC, your CV, phone interview, and participation on Hacker News deserves at least a minimal amount of respect from hiring people. Requiring references prematurely is unnecessary and insulting.
I (obviously) feel very strongly about this and stand by my original offer to anyone here.
A few asides:
1. I never give references until after receiving a job offer (contingent upon acceptable references). If a company is incapable or unwilling to make a preliminary decision based upon the interaction between me and any number of their employees, then I don't want to work for them.
2. I have a great deal of respect for competent and professional recruiters. But then again, you're probably not reading this because you were able to do your jobs without references in the first place.
3. To recruiters who are mining CVs, representing jobs that don't exist, or misrepresenting jobs to protect your listings, please understand that I (and probably most of the competent professional programmers here) want nothing to do with you. Please become professional or just go away.
I had understood your proposal just fine, and was wondering about the recruiters' side. I and surely most of us on HN agree with what you wrote on virtual relationships, fairly assessing a candidate based on the CV, and handling personal references with respect.
However, will such an HN reference pass the recruiter, and then the hiring person at the company? A technically clueless HR person won't be too impressed by "this guy on a web forum says my Hello World is fine". Again, I agree that in an ideal world, they would call the candidate and figure out his skills on their own, but they don't.
In any case, I'll bookmark your original post, one never knows :-)
Is it an offer contingent on references? (Edit: re-reading your post, I see that is the case.) If so, that seems not much of an offer at all.
This is an unusual practice and I have never seen it in that sequence, but then again, I am more exposed to professional non-technical services, so perhaps things work differently.
I find good reference checking -- and it is hard to do it well -- is excellent to identify traits that are difficult to test for during interviews, such as timeliness and integrity.
Edit number two: I do understand however not providing references until the final stage, when only two or three candidates remain.
(A very cursory search reveals startupcafe.co.uk, for instance)
This is my first experience with a recruiter and I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone. It's much better to market one's self than to rely on others, even if they can negotiate a better salary.
It's not much different from the employer's point of view either. Unless your vacancy is for something which is very low skilled, you're much better off making contacts through your existing programmers or reaching out to local user groups.
Apparently wanting to be paid $10K more then I was getting working in a supermarket as a drone was rediculous.
Oh I feel dirty... I really don't think incentivize is a word.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/incentivize
http://cycle-gap.blogspot.com/2007/09/glorious-history-of-hr...
However, you do find some gems. When I find them, I keep them updated at ALL times about where I'm at what my situation is. I even have a few friended on FB (which is a big deal for me) because they're friends now.
They will always call me when something I'm a really good fit for comes up just to see if anything has changed since the last time we talked. They trust you because you make them look good and in return you get "first dibs" on really good positions.
This statement acurately describes 95% of my colleagues.
I will happily accept the challenge of changing your perception of our industry. I'm a technical recruiter that covers the London market. Feel free to send me your CV. My details are in my profile. Also, feel free to have a look through my comment history. I'm not on this site to pick up leads or push for business, I'm here because I have a legitimate interest in the industry and I find that HN is a fantastic gauge as to the pulse of the industry.
How would you go regarding changing the current "95% of my colleagues suck" situation?
Recruiters get paid incredible bonuses for placing candidates and are less interested in how you feel and more interested in ticking off keywords fed to them by their client.
Example: One role I have on my books right now is for a 3rd line support analyst. My colleague, a guy who makes about £50k to £60k, submitted a candidate who he listed out the tech requirements to and asked the candidate to answer 'Yes' or 'No' if he had exposure to those systems/languages. No probing questions, no challenge of his competencies, no understanding of what the various languages were but purely and simply ticked the boxes.
People like him are the norm so when I get on the phone and ask the same guy to explain the difference between powershell and the command prompt and why the powershell is more advanced, a straightforward question for a techie but not what you expect from a recruiter, it throws him for six and those who know what they are talking about stand out from that point forward.
Lets say you have someone with a salary of £60-70k. On average, how much do you earn when you place them and how long do you spend to fill a position? I know that there are extremes, but still.
Looking at the amount of spam I get on LinkedIn, I'm always under the impression that recruiters are looking for like 100 different positions at a time, but that's probably wrong.
Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:
Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.
From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.
Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.
A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.
As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.
If you know what you're talking about in comparison to 90% of the other people, wouldn't it be a lot easier to place one candidate and get £15k from him rather than the £1k you're getting now.
You say that the general aim is to earn your salary in bonusses, so that means that an average recruiter has to place around 60 candidates per year. If they earn around £15k per person for the company, that makes +- £900k of which they take home £60k. Rough calculations of course, but seems like pretty good margins for people that know what they're doing.
All in all I have found my contact with recruiters to be helpful in a few ways. The short semi-technical phone interview is a low pressure way to practice one's spiel. It is a good exercise to explain the tech to someone who doesn't know much about it. Also good practice for the soft questions: "Tell me a little about yourself" "Strengths and Weaknesses...blah, blah" "So why are you looking to leave your current position?"
I have interviewed about 8 times in the last year and have gotten one offer. All but one came through recruiters. In my experience the recruiters put me in a position to get the job. My failures I associate with not quite selling myself - or lack of knowledge in a key area and also with the level of the competition.
It has been a learning process and recruiters have been helpful at points.
I wish sometimes I could get brutal honesty from recruiters/HR. After you have gone through 3 interviews and have the indication that they are considering you - you wonder what went wrong?
It would be great to get such input from the other side. How do recruiters see tech candidates? What are common pitfalls, etc?
"If I might ask, what gave you the impression that I had sufficient leadership experience to be appropriate for this position?"
"Your CV says that you ran a multinational software company from Japan for four years."
"..."
So I wouldn't blame the recruiter.
At least that's what I'd want to do, except I'd probably wimp out.
To this day, I still get random emails from recruiters trying to post me in a position as a Java developer. I think the only qualification for a recruiter is the ability to type "java" into a Monster search field.
I wonder if one could recruit and interview recruiters?
But what if I paid a 10 percent fee? Would they then be out there finding contracts for me? Is that something that's ever done?
At least, most of the horror stories I've read about European recruiters come from England?
(My limited experience from e.g. Sweden is bett... hrm, not as bad. An article written by me would use the word "clueless" often, but just a few "sleazy" and maybe one "evil". I'd even use some positive adjectives, like "human", "working hard to learn" and "serious".)
You, as a potential employee, are not their customer -- you're the commodity being sold. It doesn't change the way you feel about how you are treated, but awareness of that relationship may help keep your patience and a level head.
(Quote taken from this "What about your job do you wish other people understood?" Reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/e1dsi/what_about_... )