Are there any recruiters working in technology who get it? Anyone putting in just a minimum of effort to appear even half-way competent? If so, they need to speak up. The reputation of their profession is being soiled by completely clueless hacks.
Here’s a pitch I just got this morning:
Dave –My name is Kelly ** and I am reaching out to you to see if you would be looking to make a career move. I am searching for creative and talented Ruby Developer to add to a rapidly growing team. The position is located in the San Francisco Bay Area. You do not need to be there now, but should be willing to relocated there within a short but realistic time frame. Relocation expenses will be shared by my client.
They are serious about bringing on the right talent, so they will pay for the right person. Base Salary is open and depends on your experience.
..snip…
About My client: They are a rapidly expanding, VC-funded tech startup positioned squarely on top of the social media marketing revolution. Their platform allows brand managers and marketers of all shapes and sizes to quickly create a variety of promotional campaigns to engage and interact with the users and fans of their brands.
You’d think that the job of the recruiter would be to narrow down the field of suitable candidates by actually doing some research on them. If they’re just going to spam people from emails they find on tech sites, why not just pay some shady Russians to do it?
The problem with this kind of hackery is that it has bred an outright animosity to recruiters in large parts of the tech world. The gut reaction of programmers to any recruiter interest is that they’re just as clueless as all the others that went before them. And that’s too bad, since I’m sure that there are companies out there who could actually use good recruiters to screen and find talent for them.
As things stand right now, though, I would never recommend the use of recruiters to anyone for a technical position. You’re much more likely to be associated with the incompetence of the recruiter than you are to find highly skilled technical talent.
Stevie J
on 05 Oct 10I think you should take it.
Adam Fitzgerald
on 05 Oct 10Agreed. We specifically don’t hire Ruby programmers through recruitment agencies. Much prefer to hire by word-of-mouth and community.
Dave Cowart
on 05 Oct 10I actually got that exact same email – and 100% of my resume is .NET employment.
Erik
on 05 Oct 10It’s your prefect chance to compare a VC-funded company to 37signals. Think of all the new blog posts!
Scott
on 05 Oct 10Who’s Dave?
Matt Jankowski
on 05 Oct 10Whenever we receive calls from recruiters, I quickly tell them that their competitors and industry as a whole has done an awful job for us every time we’ve given them a chance, and that we’re not interested in hearing them out or giving them a chance.
I hope that the various job boards that are peer recommendation based rather than recruiter based are going to put recruiters (in tech/software at least) out of a job.
Jurg
on 05 Oct 10Dave,
Why are you so angry lately? Opinionated fine; I find that interesting, challenging, inspiring, etc. But angry? Take it easy!
(Just be happy they think you are a good Ruby Developer :P )
Groet, Jurg.
Ben Kittrell
on 05 Oct 10I couldn’t agree more. I’ve had to go through these companies for a long time. They have no idea what they’re talking about, provide no real value and get paid for essentially being a proxy.
The trouble is that most larger companies will only deal with recruiters and don’t have any of their own. You have to go through these recruiters.
I’m very anxious to get out of consulting and working for myself.
Phil
on 05 Oct 10I get this sort of shit from LinkedIn on a regular basis now.
Don Schenck
on 05 Oct 10I will answer your question: Because they don’t care. Because all they care about is making the placement, i.e. the money.
Who gets into recruiting because they LOVE technology? Answer: No one. At least none that I’ve ever met.
Jeff Mackey
on 05 Oct 10Totally agree. Having recruiters (in any industry) shoot out blind emails to hundreds of people is the same as job seekers sending out hundreds of cover letter/resumes with only the company name changed.
It has to be a tailored search on both ends, especially in IT.
(shameless plug forthcoming…)
I help run DetroitNet.org, a networking group in the Metro Detroit area, and our sole purpose is to get those folks in the IT industry in front of IT recruiters in a casual one-on-one environment.
Skip the resumes. Skip the cover letter. Show up, grab a beer, and start a conversation. We’ve had considerable success in helping people find jobs. And the other plus is that recruiters that actually “get it”, now use our events to cherry pick those seekers that “get it”.
It frustrates us to no end when we see emails like the one you describe. It reminds me of the post-and-pray days of monster.com.
J S
on 05 Oct 10Agreed. I went through one when I first moved to the big city, but I didn’t know it when I had applied to the ad. I also had never had experience with a recruiter before.
The guy was a friendly, decent guy, but in retrospect it is obvious he doesn’t actually understand how a programming environment should operate. He wanted to sell everything on “cool” factors and salary, when it turns out the job was remotely anywhere from cool, the salary (as good as it was) wasn’t worth the environment that I eventually walked away from. He told me he could find me other positions for SUBSTANTIALLY more money, but I turned them all down and took the right job on my own, in an environment that rules with talented, smart people who care about the quality of their work and customer service.
Money is a struggle sometimes, but daily work, productivity, “programmer happiness”, well-being, significance and office relations aren’t. I’d rather have peace of mind in the latter items. I’m young, single and without kids. Money can come later.
Robert
on 05 Oct 10I saw Jon Skeet say on twitter that he was recently contacted by a recruiter for a entry/mid level C# developer position.
So, the answer to your question… I have no freakin’ clue.
Ela
on 05 Oct 10So did you take that job or not?
Guillaume Laforge
on 05 Oct 10At least, you’re lucky, she figured out you were doing some Ruby somehow. Usually, they are even less clueless than that and try to sell you some SOA or other fancy IT buzzword of the day.
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Oct 10A friend of mine used a recruiting firm to find a position. I ended up providing a reference for him through the firm and spoke to a few individuals from that firm while he was trying to find a position. All I can say is I’m glad he ended up finding a job because the recruiting firm was filled with idiots that really had no technical competence whatsoever. I get the impression this is a common problem with technical recruiters and has already tainted the potential credibility of anyone in this profession in my opinion.
Frank
on 05 Oct 10A quick google reveals it was Wildfire Interactive. Time for them to hire a new recruiter (or do it themselves).
ceejayoz
on 05 Oct 10Well, surely you’re well qualified. ;-)
Peter Somerman
on 05 Oct 10I am a technical recruiter focusing on the Philadelphia Metro geography. I think it is a shame that the recruiting marketplace has a bad reputation. I for one come from a Business and Technical background and I find my roll as a technical recruiter the perfect marriage of my experience set.
I work closely with clients and candidates to understand the technology background and goals of both parties.
Now I can’t speak for all technical recruiters, but I’m basically a Business guy who is a frustrated programmer who likes to talk. FYI, I’m spent the majority of my free time getting deep with ruby & .net (real contrast I know).
I think the best recruiters talk to all parties in the market (Clients and Candidates) and make the best match possible. “Fishing” emails like the one posted above, may facilitate an introduction.
I’d rather in say… “I’m a recruiter who focuses on X… I’d like to speak with you to better understand your background and opportunities that you would like to review” With to goal of building a longer term relationship rather then the short term.
jschumann
on 05 Oct 10Is there anything more important to a tech company than its people? You can leave a lot of the other stuff to outsiders, but find and hire your own people. Learn your ecosystem. If you don’t have time to pay attention to the people you’re going to rely on to build your company, you probably can’t afford the time to be in business.
Tim Yandel
on 05 Oct 10Dave -
I get it. There are bad recruiters out there – just like there are bad doctors, bad cooks, bad film makers, and bad programmers.
Finding a good recruiter is tough – but don’t give up, look harder… make sure to pay attention to the ones that sound credible, can engage in a conversation and sounds like they are truthful about what they know and what they don’t.
I’ve been a technical recruiter for 7 years and while I know a lot about technology, I also know my limits. Recruiters that pretend to be technical will get burned all the time…
The bad press on recruiters is well documented, so having a bad experience with one only reinforces the value of having a good one. I would just caution you that making generalizations don’t make you look good no matter who you’re stereo typing.
When you do come across a good recruiter – make sure to refer them around, because a lot of people have a problem on finding good talent but feel helpless because they don’t have credible resources to go to…
Tim Yandel [email protected]
Peter Hickman
on 05 Oct 10One of the best I had was when the recruiter failed to notice that I didn’t actually live in Vancouver. Oh the skills matched up alright it would have been the perfect job for me.
Alas I live in the UK, never been to Canada or the US.
Suddenly the calls stopped :)
Iris
on 05 Oct 10It’s like sales. To sell an IT project to a customer, you have to know what you’re talking about and have some commercial skills. The same goes for the “selling” of tech jobs. People who have both competencies are rare and hard to find.
I actually tried to do some recruiting myself a while back. But since I am a geek I am useless at selling anything to anyone :-)
mlambie
on 05 Oct 10My absolute favorite is when they ask for “pearl” experience.
Rams
on 05 Oct 10Steve jobs Legendary Apple co-founder and boss from hell, Jobs told a woman he was interviewing for an upper-level human resources position, “I’ve never met one of you who didn’t suck. I’ve never known an HR person who had anything but a mediocre mentality.” And once during a heated meeting exchange, the sockless wunderkind suddenly kicked his shoes off and stuck his bare feet in a manager’s face.
Davide Alábiso
on 05 Oct 10What a dreadful, prefabricated pitch. Of course Kelly has never read anything about you, otherwise she wouldn’t had used harsh words like “VC-funded” and “managers”.
Paul
on 05 Oct 10I know what you mean. It’s really frustrating that so many jobs that are being advertised are done through recruiters.
I’m on the lookout, but recruiters act as a real barrier to me applying. As well as being utterly ignorant of what they are selling, most of them seem to have a fear of telling you anything useful about the position, and they insist on ringing during office hours, because obviously I want to talk about career opportunities while I’m in the office.
Sometimes it’s taken me five or six email exchanges to find out the what, where (no, vague region of the country doesn’t cut it), and how much of a job, at which point I’ve pointed out to them that a 2 hour drive is not “commutable”, £25k is not “competitive”, and UML and XML are not related (or some other idiotic mistake).
They are also incapable of looking at a candidate as a whole. I’m a bit of a jack-of-all-trades so I don’t fit into any easily defined pigeon-hole, they really don’t know what to do with people like me.
As a little experiment I looked a bunch of them up on Linkedin, almost all of them had started out selling cars, or insurance, or some other commodity.
I try not to get angry, but the amount of time I’ve wasted to get a straight answer out of recruiters pisses me off. The fact that so many companies use them mystifies me, especially when it’s so easy to advertise these days.
I’m almost tempted to setup a technical recruiting firm staffed entirely by ex-techies. I think it would be hard for me to do a worse job than most of them. However it would be a real uphill battle convincing people that you are not like the rest.
Eric Hayes
on 05 Oct 10Awesome; I didn’t know eNormicom was hiring again. Gotta go pad my resume.
Alan Houser
on 05 Oct 10we have a position for you Alan… they need you to start immediately… they’re looking for “CCS” (heehee), XHTML, Javascript, C#.NET, SQL…
Alan Houser
on 05 Oct 10Oh man. I have hundreds of stories. This particular example happened to me THREE times, so I basically exploded…
(recruiter) we have a position for you Alan… they need you to start immediately… they’re looking for “CCS” (heehee), XHTML, Javascript, C#.NET, SQL…
Ok, well. I’m a designer/front-end developer. I can deal with CSS/XHTML and have used some JS libraries. I’ve worked on several C#.NET teams, but I’m not a developer.
(recruiter) not a problem. just working on those teams is enough to consider you for this position.
Really? Because, it sounds like they’re looking for a developer.
(recruiter) You’ll be perfect. Can you start immediately? This position is for one month…
Sure, but I hope they need a designer. It would be embarrassing for all of us if…
(recruiter) Yup, you’re perfect.
(one hour later – hiring manager) Hi Alan, this is the hiring manager from (client name). So tell me about yourself…
I’m a Web Designer with 10 years of experience, working on the front-end of every project, blahhh…
(hiring manager) So you’re not a developer?
No. I knew this would happen.
(hiring manager) Why did you apply for this position, knowing you’re not a developer?
I didn’t. I told the recruiter that you’re paying that I’m a designer…
(hiring manager) This just won’t do Alan. The last guy we placed on this position stayed here for two weeks, and it was apparent that he wasn’t a developer…
I have to assume that I’m not getting this job or other opportunities with your company, right?
(hiring manager) That’s correct, I’m really s…
(Samuel L. Jackson steps-into my head… WELL, ALLOW ME TO RETORT!!!) You want to fill a DEVELOPER POSITION, right? The GD recruiter that you hired is roping-in anyone with a heartbeat. She’s the (f-bomb) person who placed your last DESIGNER, and she was obviously doing it again. All she’s doing is searching for keywords on resumes, and placing them. Do yourself a favor: Fire that (f-bomb) waste of money and call a DEVELOPER directly. And as for me missing-out on future DESIGN opportunities with your company, I DON’T GIVE A (s-bomb). CLICK
Cameron Barrett
on 05 Oct 10I remember back around the year 2000 or so, I had a recruiter tell me they were looking for someone with a minimum of 10 years of Java experience, despite of the fact that Java was not created by James Gosling until 1994.
Mal
on 05 Oct 10Being a recruitment agent is highly competitive, so they must be as vague as possible. Even some of the applicants will be trying to second-guess their client, in the hope of applying directly.
That said, applying for vague ads like this are like applying for a lottery and hoping for the best, which is why I try to avoid recruitment agents unless I am desperate.
Danielle
on 05 Oct 10I am a recruiter. I am hired by tech companies to find them talent. My technical knowledge is constantly on the rise… You have to start somewhere.
Companies continue to use recruiters is because same thing happens on the employer side.
An ubiquitous example: I post a job, looking for a PHP engineer, and 9/10 resumes don’t have any PHP experience. They have Java, they have C++, the candidate isn’t authorized to work in the US, the candidate is a job hopper. I mean, didn’t this engineer actually READ my posting? In some cases, the answer really is no. They set up some script to email every recently funded company with their resume. (Okay, I thought that was pretty cool, but you get the point). Job seekers spam too. I get about 10-15 resumes of the same people every month.
Although I am not a whiz, with the right guidance and close relationship with the hiring manager, we can really identify candidates who are on spec with our job, reducing the time that he has to take away from actually building our product.
Another reason recruiters have a place in this eco system is they are different sorts of people. Connectors, love people, networkers. These types of people can help you.
Danielle
David Andersen
on 05 Oct 10@ Tim Yandel,
There are a LOT of bad recruiters out there, a few good ones, and a very small number of exceptional ones. The barrier to entry in the field is low (have a pulse?) and the cost to hire them is low. This is, in my opinion, the gist of the problem.
David’s example is not an anomaly. I get these all the time. I’ve been pitched for positions I have no credible matches for and the pitches are ridiculously impersonal. I’ve also been on the receiving end of resumes from placement firms that don’t even remotely match the clearly defined requirements. The majority of the recruitment and placement industry in IT is tone deaf and run by people narrowly focused on generating transactions. It reminds me of real estate.
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Oct 10I get contacted all the time by recruiters who are clueless about how to do their job. Some of my major complaints:
- They contact about some position that’s so tangentially related to ones skill set, they are clearly just spamming all profiles on Monster/CareerBuilder for a keyword. I’ve worked with publishing content via an Interwoven CMS, say so on my resume, and get countless Interwoven developer/consultant contacts. Or maybe it is a skill set I have, but clearly from my resume I do a lot more or have a more senior position. So don’t contact me for a jr. web designer position when you see I’ve got a decade of experience doing both web design and online marketing.
- They call and leave the vaguest of messages, like “I’m Jon Doe with XYZ Recruiters and I have a position I think you’d be great for. Call me to discuss…” How about describing actual position? Who is the company or what’s their industry? Full time, contract, etc? Location? General salary range? Given the lack of targeting from the emails, I am not going to call back on a vague voice mail. Not after calling too many times to find out it’s a $20/HR Flash developer contract position in Ohio.
- They so often don’t have answers to basic questions, like “where is the job?” They’ll answer with things like Chicago area, or North Suburbs. I want an address to see what the commute will be like. Can I take transit? What would the drive be like? North Suburbs could mean a 20 minute commute or 1 1/2 hours.
ifesdjeen
on 05 Oct 10I do agree with the overall pattern, and it does happen from time to time. Most likely you know the story about some recruiter trying to hire Carlhuda for some project.
Although, I’m not sure why you use “shady Russians” for that. A whole lot of Russians are talented people, some come up with great startups, a whole lot contribute to Open Source project including Rails, and I know at least one who’d been Rails Core Team member. I can’t assume that it’s an appropriate allegory.
Mike Marshall
on 05 Oct 10Recruiting is harder than it sounds. If an Engineer is the ‘Super Star’ that our hiring managers are looking for, they tend to not have current resumes, they tend to already have jobs, and they tend to try and hide as much as possible in order to avoid the endless stream of emails and calls from countless unqualified recruiters.
If your getting a ton of calls from said unqualified recruiters for mismatch positions I would suggest making your resume / contact information harder to find and only the best will be able to track you down.
Cheers!
-Mike
Steve Pilon
on 05 Oct 10Most people are very good at their job. This isn’t a problem that’s industry specific.
Steve Pilon
on 05 Oct 10Ooops… I meant “Most people aren’t very good at their job.”
Including me, apparently!
Cheryl Craig
on 05 Oct 10This post and alot of the comment on it sadden and well frustrate me. I have been in the recruitment sector for a long time, left to expand my knowledge on a hands on technical role. I am now a specialised IT recruiter.
I can honestly say that you cant tarnish every agency and recruiter out there with the above comments. I on a regular basis approach potential candidates. But I would only ever contact them after I have gained full understanding of there back ground and direction – what specific background and technologies they have. I make all my candidates fully aware of the company and what to expect from the potential employer as well as in-depth coverage of the role, requirements and how that fits what they are looking for and what’s important to them.
I am a successful recruiter who also is an open net-worker and understand how important your first your first point of contact with either potential candidate or employer.
I can hand on heart say that if you ask any of my clients or candidates right now to rate my service provided as well as communication with them its not any where near the experience or negative comments you have posted above.
I do agree there are lots of lazy recruiters out there who are un-educated and dont understand the importance of the service they provide especially when sourcing candidates and whats the right way opposed to doing it the wrong way!!
The key to success of a successful recruiter in any sector is not to sell to a candidate or a client but understand there needs and provide a solution & service which meets and exceed them.
My thoughts are that you should use these negative experience with those so called recruiters and the agencies they work for an tell the relevant people within to address it the problems you’s as candidates and employer are receiving.
mknopf
on 05 Oct 10It all depends on the recruiter. We (at NASA) work with TEKSystems to bring us viable candidates, they have done an outstanding job of this simply because the recruiters we work with have been doing it a long time and have a clue in how to pre-screen candidates.
Recruiters are not all bad, just like programmers don’t all suck at what we do. Just like in all aspects of life you need to find good people and maintain relationships with them, that’s what results in success.
Paul
on 05 Oct 10@ All the recruiters who have replied to this
I am sure you are all great at your job, heck you are reading SvN so that means you at least interested in tech.
But I think you are exceptions, not the rule, not by a long stretch. I wish there were more of you.
I have had dealings with dozens of recruiters over the last couple of months, competent ones are unusual enough to really stand out when I encounter them. Really good tech recruiters are like gold-dust.
The vast majority I’ve encountered are ex car/insurance/phone salesmen working in big agencies.
I really don’t envy you working in the industry.
John Howard
on 05 Oct 10I can only speak for myself, but I hope we’re not all in that category; I’d be devastated if I were spoken in the same breath of some of the jokers who’re out there.
You have to take an honest look at the industry—I think one of the reasons you find a lot of ignorant recruiters is that for a lot it’s a very transitional job. This is true of a lot of entry-level sales positions. When you don’t go to school w/ a specific skill-set or trade there’s less of an obvious path. Either you invest your time into becoming good and knowledgeable about your job, or you end up taking an HR or PR or some such job. As good as I feel about my company, I look at my job as a pretty entrepreneurial endeavor, and make sure I do whatever I can to affect my team and any candidates / clients / references / etc., positively.
But I hear ya, sometimes you just gotta emote. Are their any shady Russians out there who were more insulted than the recruiters? :)
Patrick Corcoran
on 05 Oct 10Why is 37signals.com’s weblog always so arrogant and condescending? Same answer—why worry about it?
Tim Yandel
on 05 Oct 10@ David Anderson
I don’t disagree with you that the barrier of entry might be easier than some professions (there is no degree in Recruiting that you can get from an accredited university), but unlike some professions that you can get work based on you degree even though you might not be good at it, the recruiting field brings you in and spits you right back out if you’re not good. It’s incredibly challenging to run a successful business that you continually have to fight this reputation – but I tell you, while the barrier of entry might be easy, once you prove yourself to clients that you’re better than the competition, you have a client for life.
Next time you talk to a recruiter, ask: a) if they specialize in a particular area of technology (.NET or Java – not just I place developers). b) if they specialize in a particular metro area.
This should shake out the ones who specialize in “technology” just like you wouldn’t hire a developer who claims to be an expert in “everything”.
Tim
John Bannick
on 05 Oct 10I call this Recruiting Spam, and treat it accordingly.
However, I work here in Boston with some excellent LIVE recruiters who add value to the process.
As a hiring manager, the key is to demand that a recruiter: 1. Provide a limited number of pre-screened candidates 2. Be able to tell you why a candidate is a good fit
As an engineer, the key is to demand that a recruiter: 1. Be able to tell you why a job is a good fit 2. Prepare you for the interviews
If a recruiter doesn’t do this, dump ‘em!
John Bannick Java coder, hiring manager, and veteran of the psychic wars
Honest Truth
on 05 Oct 10Most headhunters are morons!
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Oct 10This post kinda reeks of “Don’t you know who I am”...
Cheryl
on 05 Oct 10Expanding on some of the other comments. I do also agree that the recruitment sector full spectrum is a difficult and not a pleasant experience for either client or candidate.
But the importance is when you find a good recruiter you do refer and expand on how good they are. The reason its harder for people to find us, is because of repeat clients and candidates that ensure we are kept busy and successful even in a recession.
You can only give people the chance and opportunity to either prove you right or for some of us wrong. After being out the sector for 2 years and only being back in for 3 months I already have a healthy candidate bank as well as clients wanting my assistance without picking up the phone to carry out sales calls.
DHH
on 05 Oct 10Tim, I’d love to hear some success stories. Someone should start a blog telling those. I’ve literally never heard a tech recruitment success story. That of course doesn’t mean they’re not out there, just that the industry seems to have a real image problem when they’re that few and far in between.
So please do counteract the flood of terrible stories with a few rays of sunlight.
Matt Doar
on 05 Oct 10Low barrier to entry, that’s for sure. There’s a good reason that Atlassian have the following approach to recruiters:
Rule 1: You can’t empty your candidate database into our inbox The first time you send us candidates, you can only submit a maximum of 4 candidates.
Rule 2: Great candidate, means a great relationship Make sure that these candidates are awesome. If one (or more) of these 4 candidates is hired, you may be allowed to submit more candidates and become our recruitment partner.
Rule 3: Unsuitable candidates, sorry mate! If none of these candidates you put forward is good enough, then we must unfortunately part ways.
Michael T. Halligan
on 05 Oct 10This is why good technical recruiters are compensated so handsomely. I know a sysadmin who turned technical recruiting into a multi-million dollar business, focusing on recruiting sysadmins. I also know a top-end recruiter who made $500k/year being the first hire for a number of start-ups during the last bubble. Most recruiters who contact you are literally phone banks and spammers in India.
Agentcurry
on 05 Oct 10Yea it is pretty bad.
Ignore the fact that 40% of the time the skills listed are not the skillsets I have, but every email feels like a spam.
It’s obvious we are nothing more than a name in a database that uses a lazy algorithm a kid could write. Add on the fact that the whole process is not personalized – it’s just Pathetic!
Paul
on 05 Oct 10@Tim Yandel
I think you’ve probably hit the nail on the head with your advice about asking if they specialise.
All of the small number of competent recruiters I’ve encountered have been specialists in an area, and have worked for a while with a number of companies. They also tended to be the least pushy.
Unfortunately the industry is rife with agencies that operate more like call-centers.
I suspect that there is also the issue that the ones that make the most noise are also the worst. By definition a good recruiter is one who probably contacts many fewer people because they are trying to be selective, whereas the rubbish ones are the ones you encounter all the time and notice, as they take the scatter-gun approach and spam everyone.
Rob Lambert
on 05 Oct 10I got a LinkedIn message like this yesterday. I felt extra special because it had a smiley :) in the subject!
Tim Yandel
on 05 Oct 10@ DHH
Check out my blog: www.hiringjuice.com Check out my CEO’s blog: www.candidateadvantage.com Check out my Tech guy’s blog: www.dotnetconvo.com Check out my CTO’s blog: www.osconvo.com Check out my RPO division’s blog: www.rpoconvo.com
Please interact, read and discuss… hopefully you’ll see that recruiters aren’t all about just making a quick buck, but using their powers for good. Making the technology community prosper is the mission – and shrink that community into a local metro area, it starts to make more sense.
Tim
FredS
on 05 Oct 10It’s spam. Treat as you would V1agra offers.
Scot Rubin
on 05 Oct 10The answer is really simple.
If they had a clue, they would be engineers, not recruiters.
Joel Parker Henderson
on 05 Oct 10Do you know about Mirror Placement especially for Ruby On Rails?
http://mirrorplacement.com/
I would put them head and shoulders above the rest—excellent signal to noise, strong technical understanding, and completely straightforward. I have referred several people to them, and have a peer using them to hire.
Oleg
on 05 Oct 10Me and my friends launched http://recruiter-review.com
Feel free to add your reviews
mhat
on 05 Oct 10Ascii-Ding-Dongs are all too often the only suitable response to clueless recruiter spam. See Ian’s http://furiousdingdong.com
Ben Hoffman
on 05 Oct 10I agree almost 100%. Most technical recruiters are horrible and use just try to talk to everyone. Even worse is the crappy people they send you most of the time!
I have found ONE good recruiter though, HCM solutions based in Chicago. The last company I was at hired almost 80% of their technical staff through them simply because listed and screened people.
Jeff O
on 05 Oct 10It’s a numbers game. Many managers don’t want to be bombarded with 500 resumes, so they let a recruiter go get 3-5 people. Most of the time, the manager will compare the candidates to each other and not some high-level standard as you might think. The recruiter doesn’t want to make this decision complicated/take too long = get paid later, so they don’t recommend the best candidates, but one qualified candidate and some lesser candidates.
Why are there development team managers who don’t have connections to 25 other professions who would love to work for them?
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10I can’t wait to weigh in on this one… Actually if you look through this thread the majority of the people in this thread that are educated work for my company (yandek and John Howard) so maybe it is just our business model that works.
@Scot Rubin. I could have been a developer but making 150K+ in my mid-twenties is better than most Technical Leads with 10+ years of experience.
I run a team in Chicago that specializes in placing PHP and Ruby on Rails developers in and only in Chicago. I run the PHP meet-up in the city ( http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-PHP-Meet-up/ ). I have placed 50+ RoR developers in Los Angeles and Chicago but DHH wants to here a success story.
There is a company here in Chicago (obviously not 37Signals) that is ranked in the top 15 places to work in Chicago and Top 150 fastest growing privately held companies in the US (Inc. Magazine) that took a very particular stance against recruiters so for 6+ months their 10+ positions remained open. After several follow-up e-mails from me that finally pinged me and asked for help filling some of their positions. Within 6 weeks I had filled 4 of their positions and have a few more people they are interested in currently.
How did I do this? I run a team of 4 recruiters and all we do is focus on Chicago and 2 technologies. This translates in 40+ hours a day with a hard core focus on networking and finding the top talent in the city. The 3 RoR developers I placed at my client were not people that attended every meet-up but they were extremely active on github. One of them didn’t even have a resume until the final round interview. My company does not focus on “buzz words on a resume,” we interview every candidate that we represent and really dig into what exactly they have done and how.
There are 15+ companies in Chicago with open Ruby positions with for the sake of this thread I will list without a fear of revealing my leads here are a few: Neoteric Design, CaptainU, Enova Financial (multiple reqs), Groupon (multiple reqs), Hashrocket (multiple reqs), Tukaiz (multiple reqs), Splore (multiple reqs), Backstop Solutions and a handful of others. For the most part these companies REFUSE to use an agency which leaves their positions open for months at a time.
Not everyone that hires a developer is DHH or Obie Fernandez. So the word of mouth, “they should know who I am” approach doesn’t work for the majority of companies.
Moral of the story: There are a lot of shitty recruiters out there. I would say the majority of them don’t know what the hell they are talking about but… Do you know how many “developers” I speak with on a day to day basis that have PHP on their resume and have never written OOP PHP or used a CMS/FW? A lot. Or how many “Rubyists” there are out there that think I am talking about a salad when I say Cucumber, a member of the Rat Pack when I say Sinatra or a place to sit when I say Couch? A lot of them.
I don’t hold that against them and consider all developers as unqualified I examine them on a case by case basis as managers should for recruiters.
If anybody has any questions on this feel free to give me a call I would love to chat about it more in depth.
Regards, Cortlin Handly Jobspring Partners 312-739-1300 [email protected]
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Oct 10I can tell the job market in Boston is picking up. I get a couple of recruiter emails a month, now.
Without failure each one sees that I have about 10 years of experience in development, and without failure each of them pitches me a Java job. My first reply is “Actually, I don’t have any experience in Java – I’ve spent the last ten years working with open source, primarily in Perl.”
This is where it gets interesting. At this point, some of them register the “open source” thing and pitch a sysadmin job. Some of them register the “not Java” thing and pitch a Windows .NET development job. Some of them register the “Perl” thing and pitch a PHP development job. If I’m lucky, they tell me where the job is; if I’m really lucky, it’s less than an hour’s commute.
So my second response, almost universally, is “I’m looking for a position doing development on an open source platform like Linux or FreeBSD or on Mac OS X, working in C, Perl, or Objective-C. Any position that requires me to use Windows has to be spectacular in every other aspect. This position needs to be located in metro Boston, reachable on the Red, Green, or Orange subway lines; if it’s not, it needs to be a remote working position at least four days a week. If you have anything that fits these criteria, I’d be thrilled to hear about it.”
Earlier this summer, I found myself explaining to a Senior Technical Recruiter that hiring someone with my experience and qualifications to be an architect for a web site built in Java was a terrible idea. I mean, really, shouldn’t a Senior Technical Recruiter understand the difference between Perl development culture and Java development culture, preferably before trying to recruit an experienced Perl developer to head a Java team?
Mike
on 05 Oct 10@Tim Yandel
I’ve dealt with your company before. No better than the rest. The people in your Boston office are a bunch of unprofessional frat boys. I’ve heard from hiring managers that you used to have a different name and a crappy reputation.
I can absolutely see why.
I talked to managers that your team set me up to interview with, apparently some people on your team actually were caught editing resumes before sending them. And at least two of my interviews were for positions that I was in no way qualified for or were told had different requirements than reality.
Nevermind the hard sell tactics and obnoxious behavior.
Don’t play the moral high ground. I can name at least 2 people in your office guilty of these things.
sarah
on 05 Oct 10I agreed, I have recruiter keep calling me for development position and I’m only a designer…
Chris
on 05 Oct 10@Mike
Completely agree. They’re the same losers that cold call for debt collectors. They usually have to change their name every couple years because they are vultures the world could do without. Maybe there are a couple good recruiting companies out there, but most seem to be shady so I said the hell with it.
IMO, companies that use recruiters only want you there temporarily and you get your W2 from the recruiting agency. So whenever they feel like it they can dump you without still paying unemployment.
Sometimes when I’m feeling sorry for myself, I think about doing that for a living.
Mike
on 05 Oct 10@Chris
That isn’t necessarily true about only wanting you temporarily. A lot of the 30ish person companies around the 128 belt just don’t have a dedicated HR person and don’t have the time to do it themselves… What’s really funny is finding out that I’m the xth person they sent to this job after not being qualified for the same previous company.
@Tim Yandel
If you need someone who is an expert at probability and statistics, make sure the candidate knows that. I haven’t taken prob&stats in several years, had I known I could have at least cracked open a book and read up a bit.
And tell your team that cold calling at 7am and/or 7pm is a terrible idea if you want people to do business with you, or even like you.
@DHH
Don’t fall for this smooth talker.
Mike
on 05 Oct 10For the record, Mike isn’t even my real name. Didn’t feel like using AC and don’t want to deal with any fall out from workbridge associates or whatever they’re called this month.
Isn’t it fraud to alter a candidate’s resume before sending it to the company?
Giles Bowkett
on 05 Oct 10It’s simple economics. They have no incentive to technical literacy, and spamming people works.
Don
on 05 Oct 10I had to follow up on this post with what I call Tech Recruiter Speak. http://thedon.me/2010/10/05/technical-recruiter-speak/
Tim Yandel
on 05 Oct 10@Mike
The simple fact that I have no problem revealing myself or my contact information should say that I’m not playing a higher moral ground – but I actually believe in this stuff. I don’t know who you are so I can’t defend myself in this situation.
If you’ve interacted with me personally within the past 10 months I’ve been in Boston then I have failed and I apologize immensely for the service you got. If you haven’t interacted with my Boston office prior to me being here then I can’t defend your experience with us.
I can tell you that I take this very seriously and I run my business as an honest business that doesn’t have any tactics involved.
I appreciate your feedback though – that’s how we all improve.
Tim
Michael Cohen
on 05 Oct 10Hey all,
Good points on both sides of the equation. Here’s the over-view of what I’m seeing:
Managers/Developers looking for a job are frustrated because 99% of the recruiters they talk to are incompetent.
Recruiters are frustrated because 90% of the developers we speak to are (despite our asking to the best of our abilities) also incompetent.
I don’t mind the total gripe-fest going on here, but I’ve seen almost no solutions to any of these issues so I’m going to pose the most logical one. I also work with John Howard, Tim Yandel and Cortlin, but here in Boston. Here’s the reason why our business has been around for 21 years and we’re very successful:
WE MEET OUR CANDIDATES AND CLIENTS!!! To any manager or candidate that doesn’t think it’s important to meet the person who is going to be filtering candidates for your company, or filtering opportunities based on your background, then no offense, but you also don’t have a right to complain that they are not on-point with what you’re looking for.
Tricks of the Trade: Be specialized in what you do (both technology and location) and meet the people you’re working with. Companies aren’t hiring machines to put in the back and do their coding, so why are people gauging their business relationships totally on phone conversations and pieces of paper written by people with no specialty in writing resumes!
Michael Cohen
@Matt Jankowski – is this the same Matt from Cantina?
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Oct 10A few more gripes from dealing with recruiters: - calling instead of emailing, especially during the workday. I’m going to screen any unknown number because I can’t exactly discuss opportunities at my desk at my current job. But it’s a lot easier to reply to your email from my desk… Also it makes it easier for the recruiter to include job description, etc.
- Contacting currently employed about contract/temp-to-perm positions. Also, not suggesting to employers retainig their service that a permanent hire might get a higher caliber of employee. There have been a number of role I’d have considered but, not as a contract or temp-to-hire when I am presently employed full time with health insurance, etc.
Michael Cohen
on 05 Oct 10@Matt Jankowski – Reason I was curious was that I placed someone with a Matt Jankowski here in Boston. The candidate is still there and as of 3 months ago he was doing amazingly!
“Thank you Mike, this is the best engineer I’ve ever hired here.” -Matt Jankowski (Cantina)
Recruiting Success Story!
Mike
on 05 Oct 10@Tim Yandel
You haven’t addressed the name changes, cold calling, or resume editing. I have not dealt with you in particular, but 3 of the guys in the Boston office. The hiring managers I met through the interviews set up by your company have all told me how they also felt used and that their time was being wasted.
Eric Anderson
on 05 Oct 10I wish recruiters/job boards/etc would post what salary they are looking to pay. Let’s be honest, salary is one of the more important things. Yea we all want a great place to work, yes benefits can be nice and culture is important. But if a job isn’t paying what you need then we are wasting everybody’s time.
Every job board should REQUIRE a salary range to post a job. I realize it needs to be a range. But put on your job board “price you are willing to pay for someone that barely qualifies for the position” and “price you are willing to pay for someone verging on being over-qualified”.
The 37Signals job board is just as guilty on this front. Cut through the bullshit and get to the meat. I really don’t care that you just got a ping pong table for your game room. The real question is what are you paying?
Eric
on 05 Oct 10I got my first full-time Rails gig (in the NYC financial industry) through a recruiter who contacted me out of the blue through LinkedIn. Wound up being a good job; I stayed there for a year before leaving (learned pretty quickly that working at an iBank wasn’t for me). He was a nice guy, and honest. YMMV.
Rubem Azenha
on 05 Oct 10At least your former company does not SPAM you with SAP job openings… :(
Thanksmister
on 05 Oct 10Just an observation about the exchange with the recruiter. The recruiter didn’t mention the name of the company, which immediately tells me they are in no way working for this company. They are just “cold” emailing anone and trying to fill a position they found on the web some place. They are finding jobs that any idiot with knowledge of Google can do, but they want a kickback for that level of effort.
If a recruiter contacts me and can’t tell me who they are working for, then I just ignore them and try to find the job myself. I would say 99% of all recruiters don’t work for anyone and just try to push some job they found on the internet. I am even getting calls from recruiters who are obviously not even from the US.
It becomes a numbers game at that point, through enough crap at the wall until something sticks. If you offshore your “recruitment” team and they send out enough email, and throw enough resumes at the job, something will stick eventually.
Just a rule of thumb, if the recruiter can’t tell you the name of the company, they are not legit. If they want a Word version of your resume, it’s because they want to strip off your contact info so the company can’t contact you directly.
Recruiters are bottlenecks, they are blockers, they are just the wall standing between you and your job. If a company wants to hire good developers, then take the time to find and research someone to hire, or hire an in-house recruiter that actually represents you.
The business of recruitment has become a meat market. Why should I give any money or the company give any money to a recruitment center that just sends an email with a job easily found on the web, its pretty pathetic.
Vasiliy
on 05 Oct 10Hi Guys, Would anyone suggest a job forum/ unixy user group/beer drinking place for NYC area? :)
Thanks
Tim Yandel
on 05 Oct 10Name change is because we’re a new company based on prior leadership being a little behind and our new leadership being more progressive… Also, some of the older tactics were a lot of what everyone’s talking about – being short sighted and about the bottom line more than reputation and experience.
Cold calling? I think the fact that I’m writing on a blog to communicate with you says something about me cold calling people. I consider myself pretty talented, but I can’t cold call and write you at the same time. Secondly, every introduction over the phone could be consider cold calling. If you’re against getting phone calls don’t answer the phone. I can tell you that I have better things to do with my time than cold call at 7 AM or 7 PM, but I honestly don’t see anything wrong with someone that is eager to reach you when you’re NOT AT WORK to talk to you about a new job. I see constant bitching some engineers saying they get calls about a new job at work, now you’re saying you don’t want those calls when you’re not… I think you can see a thread that you can’t please everyone.
As far as resume editing? what’s the point? you would just get fired if they fell for it. That catches up to you. I’ve never seen that happen or ever been accused of it.
just a thought – you might have gotten the job if you two weren’t busy bashing the recruiter that sent you there. And why did you agree to go to the interview anyway if it wasn’t a fit? I’m assuming we also doctored the job description as well?
Anyway – this has been a pretty interesting thread all in all and Mike, I still appreciate your feedback and will make sure that this stuff doesn’t happen.
Mitch
on 05 Oct 10“Shady Russians” ????
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10@ Mike
To address the name change:
Workbridge and Jobspring are owned by a company called Stride and Associates. Prior to Workbridge and Jobspring we had a total of 9 names across the US i.e. Boylston Group , Remington International.
None of our prior names suggested anything about placement, technology or jobs. Also, it helps us with contracts with bigger companies with multiple offices i.e. if Jobspring NYC gets a contract in place with a company in New York but that company has an office in Chicago then I can use the contract.
Plus, we restructured some of our training and management to adjust for some of the feedback we got over the years. This is not the same business it was 21 years ago so we rebranded.
In regards to cold calling:
What else would you expect us to do? Warm call? No matter how much research I did on you or your company you obviously would not work with us anyway. Let’s not forget that recruiting is a mix of tech, social networking and sales. Any company that has a sales team or solicits their business has to cold call in order to generate new business.
There has been an issue of spamming and calling in this thread. People say that recruiters spam them but go on to complain about getting calls. We have to get a hold of you some how.
Resume editing:
Our company (Workbridge / Jobspring) has a policy of meeting candidates before we ever represent them. While interviewing candidates we more often than not find out that they have some form of relevant experience that is not on their resume. Most people aren’t good resume writers. This doesn’t mean that we fabric or lie about their skills but with permission of the developer often help them highlight relevant work experience. If you have used Rspec but don’t have it on your resume for whatever reason and a job requires Rspec then I am going to tell you to put it on your resume and if its alright with you am going to help you add it to your skills so you can most accurately reflect your skill-set.
In regards to the interviews you went on @Mike. You agreed to go to the interview and the client agreed to see you. Maybe they just felt like they were wasting their time interviewing you.
Regards, CH
Mike
on 05 Oct 10@Cortlin Handly
You’re right, interviewing me for a job I’m not qualified for is a waste of their time… So why tell me I’m a great fit and then have me interview? And yes, I like when I’m called. But 7am/7pm is no good. Both times I’m busy doing something (getting ready for work or eating dinner with my family). Lunch time works great. I’m not complaining about cold calls in general… But do you want me to call you at 7am/7pm to ask if you have any jobs for me? I don’t think so.
It’s kind of a cop out to say we both agreed to meet each other when it’s under false pretenses, or do you really not see that?
How about I tell you I’ve got a job as a manager/recruiter available and you’ll be a great fit, then I tell the hiring manager that I’ve got an excellent aerospace engineer who they just NEED to see.
You’ll both say yes and it will be an absolute waste of both of your times.
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10@Mike
Thanks for acknowleding that we are not that bad. Mike I honestly apologize if any of us ever set you up on an interview that you weren’t qualified for. It was probably a miscommunication be you and us and us and the manager about what you had done and what he was looking for.
In regards to 7AM / 7PM. These are usually the best times to get a hold of people that are working. I would rather call you while you are getting ready for work or about to sit down and eat dinner than while you are at your desk.
These are the only times I am available and based off your experience can probably tell that we are often working even into those hours of the morning / night. We work hard for our clients and candidates which often translates into a lot of hours in the office.
colin
on 05 Oct 10This post is a great example of when threaded discussions make it possible to understand who is talking to whom.
Confused Recruiter
on 05 Oct 10@ All Managers/Candidates:
Your Seeming Wish-List for recruiters:
- No Phone Calls at Home - No Phone Calls at Work - No emailing you at work - Give you full disclosure on their clients so if you’re another agency or someone with no morals/ethics you could go around the recruiter and apply yourself - Recruiters should charge less (notice the lack of specifics, whatever a recruiter says is always too much… the fact that an engineer can earn a company $100-$500k a year has no bearing when looking at a $15-20k cost… really?!) - Recruiters should be technical. - Recruiters should know what you’re looking for technically, both in terms of the technologies as well as your growth path and addressing all of the concerns you have with a new job/moving to a new place.
So you want a Software Architect with perfect communication skills who is really into pro-bono work who is also conveniently telepathic…
My Point – There is always going to be a disconnect between business people and technical people. The best in their fields don’t argue and complain about these things, but get into solutions mode about how to close the gap between the two. Meet each other, be honest, be up front, and be about more than the here and now.
Dennis Eusebio
on 05 Oct 10Funny enough, we’re trying to solve this problem. In private beta at the moment but it will definitely prevent bad habits like this.
Vadim
on 05 Oct 10Good point, but bad example.
“Shady Russians” won 6 international programming contests over the last 10 years (link). US team won 0.
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Oct 10Are any of you actually /trying/ to recruit large numbers of rubyists right now, or to even find free skilled ruby talent. To be honest, the biggest problem in the community right now, to businesses, is that there’s no where near enough talent to go around. Salaries are already exploding and developers with a few years of rails experience are calling themselves “senior developers” and going into companies assuming roles that they’re no where near capable of fulfilling. Companies have to take it, and can’t deal with the issue because the market is completely starved. Sorry if this offends any of you that fall into this category, it’s not a hard and fast rule, but it’s true most of the time right now.
Robert Fleischahuer
on 05 Oct 10I am a recruiter as well and I have to say that I hear this from candidates on a regular basis.; there is a clear disconnect from most recruiters and job seeker. There are many recruiters out there that make a bad name for those with years of experience supporting technical clients.
So I ask how do we change this? What would make you change you stance on a recruiter/recruiters?
I completely get it and work to break these preconceived notions on a daily basis. I personally feel that I have an ability to find and identify IT talent that most corporate HR is clearly not capable of (a passion for technology too).
I completely understand both sides of the argument here and think this has been one of the most real conversation on this topic.
Rich
on 05 Oct 10@DHH:
“Dave?” Really?
To me, that’s one of the worst parts of the whole thing. They didn’t even get the name right, opting to adopt a false sense of familiarity over the fact that “David” is clearly the way you’re presenting yourself.
This may be a small point for some, but I actually know another David (I know! Small world! :) ) who prefers “David”. No problem as far as I’m concerned.
And I’m just some random developer; I don’t have the kind of “soft skills” job as a technical recruiter. Even I get that names are important.
For what it’s worth, it almost seems that the trend away from recruiters is similar to the trend away from publishers in the book industry, since both middlemen are becoming less useful.
AJ
on 05 Oct 10Was it just too easy to comment on the grammar and spelling?
I am searching for a creative and talented Ruby Developer
but should be willing to relocated there
This is the biggest turnoff to me when I get these emails.
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10@Rich
I beg to differ that there is a “trend away” from recruiters. My company just finished our highest revenue generating month in 7 years with half the staff we had 7 years ago.
Erin
on 05 Oct 10Not too long ago, I stepped into recruiting for technical talent on our team. I refused a tech recruiter title because I’ve rarely met a technical recruiter who understood how technology really worked. Most of my conversations with outside “technical recruiters” go like this:
Them: We have a great IT leader, perfect for you guys!!! Me: IT types don’t work well here…we’re a start up. Them: But they’re a really strong Flash designer. Me: /hangs up.
(We’re not a Flash shop and a 10 second search of our site would make that clear).
If you find a small company that really gives a shit about bringing on the right devs, they usually have someone in house who knows their stuff (and knows what they don’t know). Just takes some time and patience…but I can’t tell you how good it feels at the end of an interview when an engineer says “you know more about technology than any recruiter I’ve ever met with.” That’s a major win for me…and an even bigger win when they accept the offer.
cancel bubble
on 05 Oct 10Recruiters care about placing (i.e., commission), not placing the right person.
Confirm Cube
on 05 Oct 10Developers care about coding and increasing their skills, not mutually benefit a company.
Dmitry
on 05 Oct 10I’m pretty sure David meant russian spamers, who, as we all know, are the best out there.
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10@cancel bubble
If you ran a company why would you ever hire someone that wasn’t the right person? So wouldn’t it be in our best interest to show you the “right person” so you will hire them and pay us our commission?
As recruiters we attempt to offer a business solution / service to fulfill a specific need within a company (a developer). Developers attempt to offer a business solution with their specific skills (code).
Also, of course I work to make money. Who would ever take a job if that wasn’t the case? If you really didn’t want to make money from coding and only cared about open-source as a community and an idea you could spend all day contributing to github from a computer in a public library.
Justin Kruger
on 05 Oct 10Having been a tech recruiter while I was in high school and being an engineering consultant I have a fairly unique point of view.
1 recruiters will tell you want you need to hear as a developer, a company who passes on you, has no interest in being blunt. however a recruiter has an interest in you interviewing well with their next client. 2 being able to talk tech with folks goes miles. if you can talk to an engineer and actually understand what they are looking for, then you can be their advocate, and they will refer you. 3 yes you have to hustle, and some hustle on the bottom via numbers, but, you might find other ways to source your phone list. 4 why don’t recruiting companies sponsor tech events, actually putting together great events. build relationships with speakers and attendees. like, duh,.... 5 hold programing competitions, the best developers can win more than a cash prize, and even a $1-5k prize is worth it if you can place 2-5 engineers off of one competition.anyways, that’s my $.02
Anonymous Coward
on 05 Oct 10@Justin
The really good recruiters do host events. I hosted the LAMP developers meet-up in LA for months and now run / host the PHP meet-up in Chicago. My colleague Erin Wilson has hosted the RoR meet-up in LA several times. Again maybe its my company’s business model but the majority of our offices nation wide host some form of a meet-up.
Thanks Justin for your perspective.
Regards, CH
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10Sorry that was me..
Michael Cohen
on 05 Oct 10@Justin Kruger:
Really interesting, unique and great point of view. The only point I personally don’t follow myself is with negative feedback. I tell all my candidates in my first interview that I’m VERY blunt with feedback. It was a little nerve-racking at first telling someone they’re not a fit because of their communication skills or their culture fit. But the truth is that just like any other professional, people appreciate the truth, and when delivered allows one to work on and improve those things that others saw as a negative. I’ve done a few placements myself just having candidates talk to me on the phone for 20 minutes before an interview just to get all the jitters out and work on their pronunciation…
But all-in-all really great points, and something we’ve been trying to do here in Boston with Security meetups and PHP meetups!
Jeff O
on 05 Oct 10@Cortlin Handly – Can you compare job salaries today with 7 years ago since you work off of a percentage?
Bill Sullivan
on 05 Oct 10Now that the community is talking about the problem… how do we fix it?
“It’s gonna take a team effort”
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10Actually according to our math salaries haven’t changed as much as you think. Senior folks still make between 90K-120K. Our biggest month ever was in 2000 anyways.
Also, my company did not place contractors back then and now we do. As you can probably understand contract revenue comes in slower than FTE placement revenue. We actually saw results higher than we have in the last 5 years in every category in Sept. (new positions we tried to fill, number of interviews occured, number of placements and total revenue).
It’s really hard to find people these days for anyone.
Regards, CH
Jeremy Ricketts
on 05 Oct 10Hi there! I’m a recruiter conducting a search for a Web Developer using Ruby on Rails to come work for my client in Foothill Ranch (South Orange County) and your name came to my attention as someone who might be interested in such an opportunity. I’ve been sitting here staring at my computer screen trying to come up with a way to make this more interesting than it is, but truth be told, I cannot do that. And that’s because it is very interesting.
Jeremy Ricketts
on 05 Oct 10That was a line from the best (worst) recruiter email I ever received. The whole thing read like that!
John Jackson
on 05 Oct 10If they had a clue, they would be engineers, not recruiters.
Cortlin Handly
on 05 Oct 10@ John Jackson
Please refer to my first post on this thread in regards to your comment.
Jeff Putz
on 05 Oct 10I get this kind of crap constantly. Taking five seconds to search for my name with the word “resume” would land them on my resume, which would help those in Cleveland to see I live in Seattle now. And Seattle recruiters, in a place I’ve never explicitly looked for a job, they’d see that I clearly don’t with to do a contract job at Microsoft since I already work there.
Idiots.
Chris
on 05 Oct 10If you’re looking for a ruby recruiter in Sydney, talk to Steve Gilles. He’s the exception that makes the rule. Highly recommended.
As for C# / Java recruiters… don’t make me laugh with posts like this!!!
Art
on 05 Oct 10I don’t honestly think that “shady Russians” is an appropriate statement here.
Possibly this kind of perception is just a part of corporate culture or culture in overall, but to me it’s just stereotyping gone way too far.
I am Russian, btw, and I cannot say I enjoy those kind of comparisons.
KD
on 05 Oct 10If you use TechPloyr.com, you actually have a bit more control over even sharing your contact info as well as telling them you’re not interested – AND recruiters can ONLY find technologists relevant to the job they are recruiting for. There is none of their sales crap. I dig this site, it has helped me tremendously.
Serg
on 05 Oct 10Russian are shady, I am shady, I know Art – he is shady too!
P.S. This this thread is making a bit of a storm in a tea cup… Some idiot SPAM’ed someone who had to blog about it… Me.
Jon
on 06 Oct 10....and just ‘cause I know you like to get this stuff right…..the word you wanted was “Bred”, not “Breed”.
Bred –verb pt. and pp. of breed.
8-)
Chris Lloyd
on 06 Oct 10Somebody has already mentioned Steve Gilles in Sydney, but I’m going to also (independently) vouch for his awesomeness. He’s an absolutely a-typical a-star recruiter.
Steve sponsors bar tabs most months at RORO. He has a comp sci. degree and knows Rails (I’ve seen him use it). He came to his first Railscamp last year and was hacking Sinatra. Hell, a job ad he put up 3 months ago mentioned CoffeeScript.
Most importantly, he’s always placed good people in good jobs. He’s not in it to make a quick buck and it’s this attitude which has made him really popular here in Sydney.
Mike
on 06 Oct 10I am not sure if you could handle that job. ;)
Mark Wotton
on 06 Oct 10at the risk of sounding like a a sock-puppet: Steve Gilles is the only recruiter I’ve ever met who actually adds some value. He routinely checks out references, screens both applicants and companies, and does all the footwork that actually makes a recruiter worth the investment.
Jeremy
on 06 Oct 10Anyone want to start a recruiting agency to find good recruiters with me?!? ;-)
osmirnov
on 06 Oct 10Hi, “shady Russians”? This is not respect for the Russian and undermines confidence in you and 37signals. Rethinking!
Jack
on 06 Oct 10I hope you replied – “Don’t you know who I am?” :)
Prerna
on 06 Oct 10Take it, give it a chance and see what happens!!!!!!!!!
Kieran Bowler
on 06 Oct 10My favourite is when they assume JavaScript is just a long way of saying Java. I enjoy “educating” them about this.
Darragh
on 06 Oct 10Indeed, unfortunately a lot of recruiters don’t quite understand the tech and time gets wasted by meeting the wrong people.
At Dynamic50 we got fed up of this and set up our own specialist ruby recruitment company, Ruby50.
I’d always recommend chatting to a developer on the phone before bringing them in for a face-to-face interview, and if in doubt, send them a shot code test to complete.
Luciano Maiwald
on 06 Oct 10Thanks, you just made me delete the xing account I nerver used and only got mails like that from.
Scott
on 06 Oct 10Agreed. My friends and I often call recruiters “pimps” because they often provide no value in the transaction besides an initial email. Especially in the cases where 50 recruiters post the exact same position often within minutes of each other on Craigslist, Dice, etc.
A couple years ago I had a recruiter contact me regarding a position “that I’d be a good fit for”. I went along with his schtick for a moment and quickly realized it was a position that I was the hiring manager\lead on. Apparently that was a minor detail that the recruiter missed (that I was listed as the hiring manager when the position was advertised and that my current employer on my resume was the same). At least it confirmed that I was qualified to work on my own project. Needless to say I let him begin trying to schedule it all and then let him in on the joke and his lack of common sense.
Hendrik
on 06 Oct 10“Shady russians”.... insulting
DHH
on 06 Oct 10Re: shady Russians. Have a cow and a sense of humor. If spam was known to flow freely from Denmark, it would have been shady Danes. (No, it doesn’t mean that all Russians are shady).
John Jackson
on 06 Oct 10@ Cortland,
“It” posted my comment incorrectly. I was trying to chastise Scott for saying something so ignorant. As if all recruiters are just sitting around wishing they were smart enough to be programmers. Gimmie a break.
I’m also a tech recruiter, coming from a tech background. Bottom line is, you’re not going to win over anyone on this thread or otherwise with talk. Just show up and work hard, who cares what people think.
And one last thing, don’t brag about how much money you make. It’s not tasteful. You might as well have accused him of being a virgin. - JJ
kirsten renner
on 06 Oct 10Didnt read all the comments – however, as a technical recruiter, I’ll say two things #1 I was a programmer for a brief period – long enough to have a good/basic understanding of what I’m looking for, so that answers one of the above questions about how many of us love technology
2 I understand that I’m more likely to find someone through word of mouth than a job board, and that the majority of the people I want are NOT postedDo I go to the boards? Yes – I use every available resource.
ps I’m not in it for the $, I am not commissioned and I DO love technology (and HR) so, techncial recruiting is the perfect mix of these two things!
I get that a lot of recruiters suck, and they make MY job harder!
I want to build an awesome team – I want my team of rockstars to be so hot, people come to ME, wanting me to want them – wanting to be part of what we do!!!!!!
nathan
on 06 Oct 10Re: Shady Russians It would make sense if David just said “some russian” thus implying that ALL russians are bad. But he specified “shady” russians because ALL shady russians ARE BAD just like ALL shady (enter origin here) are bad.
DHH
on 06 Oct 10Nathan, I was referring to a spam gang. Reading this as “all Russians are shady” is just willful misinterpretation to get your panties in a knot.
James Mayes
on 06 Oct 10Don’t forget that candidates are often just as bad. Sure, recruiters “spray and pray” but there’s a helluva lot of candidates who go tot job boards, run a wide open search, then tick every box and “Apply All”.
PS. Been a techy, been a recruiter, been a hiring manager. Seen most of what there is in this space and not many are innocent of all crimes.
Allen Ackerman
on 06 Oct 10I’m a technical recruiter and I couldn’t agree more. However it’s not all of us. I have a technical background as a former developer and I keep up on technology. So I have a deeper understanding of what hiring managers are looking for.
That being said I have been looking for good technical recruiters to partner with for splits through a recruiter network I launched called The Hire Syndicate.
It is extremely difficult and they are few and far between. But there are some tech recruiters out there who ‘get it’ or at least come close.
ActionJackson - Recruiting Specialist
on 06 Oct 10I couldnt agree more with most of the sentiment of the folks in the tech field. Being a recruiter myself it offends me to be lumped into this category but I get it….perception is reality. I work for a major player in the IT staffing space and our ATS is full of communication activities that are simply email blasts to consultants, most of which are not even remotely qualified for the positions that they are being targeted for. Which is why I don’t send email blasts. I am old school and pick up the phone and fortunately, due to my years of experience in the field, I do have a decent rep as well as a solid network which helps
Jordan Harper
on 06 Oct 10I’m happy to reconnect with you and update you of the latest happenings at XXXXXX.
Tim Yandel
on 06 Oct 10As promised, here’s a success story… I’m sure there are more successful stories about there that should be shared but bad news travels faster than good news – we all know this.
Let me know your thoughts and whether you have any suggestions on how you would do it better if you were a recruiter… I have a comment section too. ;)
http://hiringjuice.squarespace.com/blog/2010/10/6/technical-recruiters-are-clueless.html
Also, check out our Youtube channel for success stories from the candidates themselves:
http://www.youtube.com/user/WorkbridgeAssociates
Laurence Clark
on 06 Oct 10If you are a manager hiring ICT technical staff, there is a right way and there is a wrong way to use recruiters.
1. The WRONG way a. Give the assignment to as many recruiters as possible. The more people you have working on it, the better the chance of success, right? b. Give them the minimum amount of information about the position, the technical requirements, the personality requirements, the company/team/cultural environment, the reasons a person would want to work in this role for this company. c. If they have questions, be very inaccessible, and if they do catch you, make them draw every piece of information out of you like blood from a stone. d. Show no sense of urgency, don’t react when they send you resumes. Always have plenty of higher priorities, trips out of town are good. e. Have a long involved hiring process with multiple interviews and no feedback to the recruiters or the candidates.
2. The RIGHT way a. Choose a small number of recruiters, preferably based on recommendations of your peers or members of your team. Choose recruiters who are well regarded by both hiring managers and candidates. b. By all means choose specialists in particular areas, but generalists with a big picture view can be good as well. Be prepared to form a long term relationship with the right ones and to put some effort into helping them understand your world and your particular quirks. c. For a particular assignment, choose one or at most two recruiters. Make it clear that you will be judging them on their performance and then making decisions on who will get future assignments. Exclusivity or near exclusivity is very important to recruiters, and you can use it to bargain down their fee. They will also be very motivated to give your assignment their highest priority and send you the best candidates. d. Be prepared to give detailed feedback, especially if it is the first assignment you have given that recruiter. If they are good, they will learn quickly and you will not have to spoon feed them on subsequent assignments. e. At the “sharp end” of the hiring process, when you have attracted an outstanding candidate, make sure the process is smooth, and take the recruiter’s advice on how to lower the risks of a good candidate going elsewhere. f. Expect and insist the recruiter provides post placement regular reviews in the first year after the hire to make sure both you and the candidate are happy. g. Give the recruiter intelligent feedback on the things you liked and the things you didn’t like about the way she/he managed the assignment.
As with so many things, it’s “garbage in, garbage out”. The recruiter can only do a good job for you if you give her/him the means. It’s a close partnership thing, and that’s the way both parties need to view it.
Jack
on 07 Oct 10Great dialogue here. I’m learning a lot. Not all recruiters are the same as evidenced from some of the responses here. I’m a recruiter/headhunter/matchmaker/talent finder or whatever you care to call me. Some of us don’t have to sell you. Great recruiters know how to develop a relationship and get on the same page quickly so you as a technologist want to “buy”. I won’t invest time speaking with you unless I can be of service to you or my client.
The real issue is, when you a technologist receive a call (cold or through a referral) from a recruiter, they actually may be one of the good guys and can possibly help elevate your career and propel it forward. Perhaps to quickly identify if they can, you can ask two simple questions. 1. “Do you know what I do technically? 2. “Why should I deal with you as a recruiter…How will you make my life easier and better? If you don’t hear the answer you like, just politely say “thanks, but you didn’t convince me and I will pass on working with you at this time. I’m not the guy/gal you’re looking for”.
Recruiters should get more training and make better use of their precious time when making contact with someone They need to know why they are calling, if its indeed a match and how they can have impact on your career. They also need to be humble enough to ask questions if they don’t know what would you like to do what kind of work and opportunity would be of interest to you. Technologists should be more open to the possibility that the recruiter calling could possibly help them achieve their career goals and hiring managers need to consider that we are effective partners and will only earn our fee if we fill the position with someone who will help their company grow.
Jack Roth EJR Search Partners, NY NY
Emily
on 07 Oct 10To the recruiters in the room – don’t pretend to be something you are not. We are recruiters – we recruiter – we are not IT professionals.
To the IT professionals in the room – you’re the IT professional, if I don’t understand what I’m looking for, please take a moment to educate me! You know best what you do and what position you are seeking. I’m sorry you have had a bad experience with a recruiter, but, we need to work together to land you the job and find our clients’ the best talent for the position.
Emily
on 07 Oct 10we recruit
Gabe Hollombe
on 08 Oct 10I’ll add another +1 for Steve Giles in Sydney, Australia. He’s the only recruiter I know who’s got a clue. More than a clue, actually. He’s great. If I was looking for work, I’d include talking to him as part of my job search.
BML
on 08 Oct 10I just received an email from a recruiter with the following subject: “CareerBuilder: Excitiing Branding Lead job at Dsicover – call me asap today before 2pm!”
Yes, two typos in the subject… and in the body she began by touting her 15 years of experience in recruiting.
Jeff R.
on 08 Oct 10Years ago, a technical recruiter asked me, “Do you know MFC?”. I responded “Yes”. He then asked, “What about Microsoft Foundation Classes”?
Ivan Evtukhovich
on 09 Oct 10I am shady Russian Ruby developer. Here in Moscow we have almost the same problems with recruiters.
Beendoingitright
on 12 Oct 10I’m a technical recruiter who makes almost $300k/yr, love the sucky recruiters for proving there is a difference in quality. Low hanging fruit is perishable and doesn’t last long. Candidates should work with professionals. Most good Recruiters make more than most techies.
This discussion is closed.