Ask HN: Why are you using recruiters for recruitment?
I'm trying to understand why companies seem to use recruiters exclusively. I've worked for small to medium sized global companies, that have always offered a way around using recruiters (careers page etc), or not used them at all.
Looking through LinkedIn and various other job sites, there appears to be little way to apply for some of the jobs there, but through a recruiter. Do technical recruiters really offer value for money over a standard HR department filtering applications?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 47.4 ms ] threadIf you post a job to a semi popular job board, you get a glut of CVs, most of which are completely irrelevant. You hire a recruiter to protect you from that.
BTW, are you the FSK of "FSK's Guide to Reality"? If so, please count me in as a huge fan.
Finally, many positions are difficult to fill especially if the company isn't well-known in technical circles. The easiest way to get candidates is to go through recruiters
This may be true, but it's often doubly true for recruiters. The best recruiters I've spoken to admit that they know very little about the subject.
No matter what, the candidate always has to be judged by someone who does have the required expertise, which means someone who's not HR or a recruiter.
I'm no fan of recruiters, but the good news here is that recruiters who have the exclusive right to offer candidates to a company, tend to be the better ones: not too expensive, not getting in the way too much, contracts without non-compete clause (because they have this exclusive deal anyway), and they really try to add some real value, because otherwise they might lose this exclusivity deal.
The real problem are the recruiters who try to get in front of those exclusive recruiters: they take the job descriptions from the exclusive recruiters and spread those all over the place, including in our mailbox. They have a much higher rate, often taking $10 off our hourly rate (for freelancers at least), insist on non-compete clauses that limit your job opportunities later, and try to make as much money with as little work as possible by simply shoveling piles of CVs towards anyone who might be looking. And they get in the way of communication between candidate and company, though that effect is unintentional.
From my own experiences, this is very true. Some didn't know the difference between JavaScript and Eclipse which made me very skeptical about their ability to assess my skillset.
Even if someone is already applying for jobs, if your resume goes through a recruiter, they can talk you into at least interviewing at a place you otherwise might not, which gives the company a chance to sell themselves to you (for instance, there are a lot of extremely talented and exciting teams and projects in otherwise boring companies that you might not be aware of).
A recruiter can often do some level of assessing candidates before their resume gets to an engineering manager, saving a LOT of time for someone who's already very busy.
On some level, it's the idea of outsourcing things that someone else can do better. If you find someone who can bring in great candidates for interviews better than you can, why wouldn't you hire them, so you get better results and can focus on what you do better?