I've always thought this would be an interesting business (side project?)
It would be like a whitelist of recruiters. You could go and enter your zip code and get a recruiter in your area. Maybe see various metrics as rated by employees.
Maybe to start you could let all recruiters sign up, and remove them as soon as a poor review comes in. Maybe set up some "honey pot" resumes and see if they spam them, and remove them that way too.
I think you need to expand on your review criteria.
Recruiters are incentivized by the companies that hire them for two things:
1) Providing a steady pipeline of candidates for their clients.
2) Maximizing the compensation numbers for candidates they close.
It's arguable that a recruiter that pushes hard to get you a good salary "cares" about you. But they won't care too much if the company they get you into completely burns you out and treats you poorly. Nor will they spend much time prepping you for interviews if they don't see you as a sure bet to land a position with one of their clients.
Why would they suggest you to interview if they don't believe you are a fit? I think that's one of the criteria that differentiates good recruiters, that don't want to bring someone in to interview just to "keep the pipeline going".
I used to work on an ERP software that is used in-house by many recruiting firms so I understand the industry well.
hkarthik's comment is right on the money.
The very high level executive recruiting firms tend to care more about both sides of the equation (employee and client/employer) because its a higher stakes game for them and the talent pool is fairly limited at that level.
Actually #2 isn't quite true. The benefit the recruiter gets from his candidate getting a higher salary is not as compelling as getting them hired period.
| 2) Maximizing the compensation numbers for candidates they close.
The recruiter's motivation is the same as a realtor's: Close the deal as soon as possible in order to earn the commission. A 10% salary bump for the candidate is real money. A 10% commission bump for the recruiter is nothing when they could be spending their time earning a whole other commission.
Of course, a good recruiter is going to make sure that the candidate's salary expectations are in line with the employer's. If a recruiter brings you an offer that's exactly what you wanted you've almost certainly left money on the table.
There's no way to really prevent a system like that from being gamed by recruiters without entering into agreements with employers that have little to no upside for them.
I know of at least one company that games Glassdoor by posting dozens of fake positive reviews for themselves. (I'm not aware of any options to report this to Glassdoor.)
From their FAQs:
> Since we're unable to fully verify the identity of an anonymous user, we require each user to certify their employee relationship to the company when they post any content. We also require all users to validate their email address before their posts are made available to the community. This verification process allows us to put measures in place to identify suspicious users and/or posts. And all of these, combined with active community moderation and our commitment to review every post, allow us to have confidence in our information.
What a joke. By "certify their employee relationship..." I'm guessing they mean tick some checkbox, because I don't recall having to prove anything when I've posted reviews. And verifying email addresses? Gee, nobody is going to get around that...
I know of a company that does this, too. It IS possible to report individual reviews, and I did just that with several obviously-faked reviews from management. Glassdoor responded that management and CEOs have a right to post reviews, too. That's great, and I totally agree, but I reported multiple reviews that didn't claim to be management at all, they claimed to be developers and designers who loved their jobs.
Meanwhile, I had to rewrite a negative review because someone claimed that I was revealing trade secrets. Unless treating your employees like shit is a trade secret, I did no such thing.
In my experience, Glassdoor reviews aren't worth much. They can be taken down for inane reasons, but won't be for legitimate problems.
What about verifying LinkedIn profile? I'm sure there is no silver bullet, there will always be exceptions. The community around it has to be good for a tool like this to be valuable.
There is one called Scout (http://goscoutgo.com/) but their target audience is companies that are looking to use 3rd party recruiters, not the candidates themselves.
I've been slowly working on a sideproject for this. The tricky parts are in defending against recruiters gaming the system, and in making it something other than a venue for complaining (i.e., getting people to rate 2-4 stars, not just 1 and 5).
Why would you go through a recruitment company when hundreds of startups are scouring Angel List everyday? I'm genuinely curious. I happen to be an in-house recruiter for a YC startup, and I always wonder why talented people don't just approach us directly, or post their resume in a public place...
I use gmail. I can use it to keep track of how often they've been spamming me, and how often they've ever sent me on an actual interview.
If someone has been emailing me for years but never sent me on an interview, I configure it to remove their messages from my inbox.
There also are a couple others I refuse to deal with. They insist on meeting me in person each time, but never sent me on an interview, or sent me on a large number of low-quality interviews. If I was unemployed and desperate, I might give them another chance. I already have a (mediocre) job, so I'm trying to spend my limited job search time efficiently.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 69.5 ms ] threadIt would be like a whitelist of recruiters. You could go and enter your zip code and get a recruiter in your area. Maybe see various metrics as rated by employees.
Maybe to start you could let all recruiters sign up, and remove them as soon as a poor review comes in. Maybe set up some "honey pot" resumes and see if they spam them, and remove them that way too.
Recruiters are incentivized by the companies that hire them for two things:
1) Providing a steady pipeline of candidates for their clients.
2) Maximizing the compensation numbers for candidates they close.
It's arguable that a recruiter that pushes hard to get you a good salary "cares" about you. But they won't care too much if the company they get you into completely burns you out and treats you poorly. Nor will they spend much time prepping you for interviews if they don't see you as a sure bet to land a position with one of their clients.
In my experience, far too few recruiters can evaluate fit effectively.
hkarthik's comment is right on the money.
The very high level executive recruiting firms tend to care more about both sides of the equation (employee and client/employer) because its a higher stakes game for them and the talent pool is fairly limited at that level.
The recruiter's motivation is the same as a realtor's: Close the deal as soon as possible in order to earn the commission. A 10% salary bump for the candidate is real money. A 10% commission bump for the recruiter is nothing when they could be spending their time earning a whole other commission.
Of course, a good recruiter is going to make sure that the candidate's salary expectations are in line with the employer's. If a recruiter brings you an offer that's exactly what you wanted you've almost certainly left money on the table.
From their FAQs:
> Since we're unable to fully verify the identity of an anonymous user, we require each user to certify their employee relationship to the company when they post any content. We also require all users to validate their email address before their posts are made available to the community. This verification process allows us to put measures in place to identify suspicious users and/or posts. And all of these, combined with active community moderation and our commitment to review every post, allow us to have confidence in our information.
What a joke. By "certify their employee relationship..." I'm guessing they mean tick some checkbox, because I don't recall having to prove anything when I've posted reviews. And verifying email addresses? Gee, nobody is going to get around that...
Meanwhile, I had to rewrite a negative review because someone claimed that I was revealing trade secrets. Unless treating your employees like shit is a trade secret, I did no such thing.
In my experience, Glassdoor reviews aren't worth much. They can be taken down for inane reasons, but won't be for legitimate problems.
If someone has been emailing me for years but never sent me on an interview, I configure it to remove their messages from my inbox.
There also are a couple others I refuse to deal with. They insist on meeting me in person each time, but never sent me on an interview, or sent me on a large number of low-quality interviews. If I was unemployed and desperate, I might give them another chance. I already have a (mediocre) job, so I'm trying to spend my limited job search time efficiently.