Don’t Feed the Beast – The Great Tech Recruiter Infestation

I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant.<p>&gt;&gt; “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... &gt;&gt; You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.<p>Who&#x27;s being exploited here? I think he&#x27;s implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think &quot;exploited&quot; I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.<p>If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.

At least in the US, the whole recruiting industry hit its nadir during the dot-com bubble of 2000. I remember getting a cold-call from a recruiter, &quot;Hey, got a great gig at a soon-to-IPO startup for a Solaris and Linux guru&quot;, &quot;No thanks&quot;, hang up, the phone next to me rings, same dude, literally just dialing up the extension tree.<p>My boss at the time had a strategy where whenever a recruiter called offering &quot;top notch&quot; development talent, he would demand that he only wanted people with &gt;15 years of java experience (remember, this was in 2000, and we also weren&#x27;t a java shop). If they said, &quot;Absolutely, no problem&quot;, they went on the banned list. Most recruiters failed this test.<p>The whole market was so frothy, I remember people who went from being bartenders to high-end tech recruiters making crazy money and doing coke with their clients in the bars they used to work at...and then back to bartending when the bubble burst.<p>Today, I feel like it&#x27;s settled into an annoying-but-manageable background noise. I still get random recruiter reachouts, &quot;Hey, I have an immediate opportunity for a contract Oracle DBA in illinois at $20&#x2F;hour, interested?&quot; (no, of course), but at least it&#x27;s easy enough to hang up on them.

One fairly recently cold emailed me 4 times in one day, the last email quite put out and angry that I hadn&#x27;t responded yet; this was followed by numerous cajoling to censorious emails in the following days, and then a letter mailed to my home castigating me for not responding. And then more emails. He finally went away.<p>Then there is the current one - scheduling an interview without my say so, I demanded she cancel it immediately, yet I subsequently get a call from the company &quot;Roger, where are you&quot;. She didn&#x27;t cancel it. I told her to she was not to represent me in any way, to not contact me again. Yesterday, what shows up in my inbox? Demands to respond to her email with regards to a client with clear evidence that she is still shopping&#x2F;talking about me. All this against a backdrop of me telling them my dog is diagnosed with a brain tumor, my life is occupied with dealing with it, and just leave me alone (true story, not made up to make them go away). Holy fuck.<p>I had an absolutely great recruiter once, he spent hours talking to me, working to find a good fit (something I found myself ended up working), but don&#x27;t ask me how to find someone like that. Unfortunately his specialty is in an area (HFT) that I decided that I don&#x27;t want to participate in.

About 10 weeks ago, I got an email from such a company, the payload being<p>&quot;Our database consists of over 2 million resumes of qualified consultants that we rigorously screen and are ready to be deployed. Our footprint is Nationwide.<p><i></i><i></i>* is a company that specializes in providing Project&#x2F;Program Manager, Architect, QA&#x2F;Code Testing, Business Analyst, DBA, ETL, Virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Storage&#x2F;Backup, Cyber Security, Analytics, Cloud, Financials, HRMS, ERP&#x2F;MRP, Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Data Warehousing, Front end&#x2F;Web&#x2F;Mobile Development&#x2F;Design, Middleware, Supply Chain, Logistics, Warehouse Management, Inventory Management, E-Commerce, SDLC, Networking, etc. specified contractors&#x2F;consultants for contract&#x2F;contract to hire projects.&quot;<p>I had to like the use of &quot;specialize&quot;.

Spammy tech recruiters are bad but corrupt recruiters and hiring practices are much worse&quot;<p>I live in Canada and I am amazed at the amount of corruption&#x2F;nepotism I see in IT hiring for government IT jobs. They will put out job requirements for senior java dev or web developer and you are supposed to fill out a matrix of required skill. In those supposedly mandatory skills&#x2F;experiences, they will put in some weird shit --stuff no one outside the hiring manager&#x27;s inner circle would know; this supposedly mandatory skill is used to weed out outsiders, allowing the hiring manager to hire their chosen people. In the 15 years I have been consulting as a Java developer, I have not received one interview call for any open position with any level government despite having all the other requirements. Considering the fact that so many IT initiatives of the government are plagued with controversies and their implementation is rife with incompetence, I feel the the recruiters and the hiring managers have kickback system in place.

Had really bad experience with recruiters in London<p>- Lies. From &quot;They have a free gym pass&quot; to complete bs like salary and position.<p>- Screwed up formatting of CV that I&#x27;ve sent (they wanted .doc) I&#x27;ve written that I have basic perl skills, recruiter changed it to good and destroyed the layout of CV making it unreadable. Good luck with perl question during the interview.<p>- Constant phone calls with no new information.

Alright, here&#x27;s another of my tech recruiter exchanges. This one got him to stop responding immediately.<p>-------------<p>Hello,<p>My name is Seth and I am a recruiter here at [redacted]. I came across your profile in our database and wanted to touch base. Are you still in the market for potential opportunities? If so, I would enjoy speaking with you soon.<p>Please let me know if you or anyone else you know is interested.<p>Thanks, Seth<p>--------------<p>Hi Seth. I am definitely available for &quot;potential opportunities&quot; to &quot;touch base&quot; with discreet clients. I am very interested. Please give me more information about these &quot;opportunities.&quot;

<i>phone rings</i><p>&quot;Hello?&quot;<p>&quot;Hello, is this Cloud Strife?&quot;<p>(pausing a moment to consider whether even to continue) &quot;...Yeah.&quot;<p>&quot;Hey, Cloud, how&#x27;s your afternoon going? My name is Michael Gravitz and I&#x27;m a recruiter for Warmbody Technical Services. I came across your résumé on Dice, and I noticed you have a lot of Buster Sword experience. We&#x27;ve got a great opportunity for a Bodyguard role with an established, profitable company in the electric power industry that I think you&#x27;d be a great fit for--&quot;<p>&quot;It&#x27;s Shinra, isn&#x27;t it.&quot;<p>&quot;Bingo! It <i>is</i> Shinra! Out of curiosity, how did you know--&quot;<p>&quot;Not interested.&quot;<p>&quot;Oh. Okay. Well, do you know anyone who&#x27;s looking and might be interested in this role?&quot;<p>&quot;No.&quot;<p>&quot;Oh! Well! I&#x27;m <i>so</i> glad to hear that <i>all</i> your friends have jobs, Cloud! You have a great day!&quot;<p>&quot;Bye.&quot;<p><i>click</i>

I recently moved jobs. Since I work in a fairly niche field, made plenty of good friends at my old workplace, and the company was looking to add to my old team while I was still there, I&#x27;ve had the pleasure of seeing several sides of a hugely inefficient job search.<p>First, there is the Chinese whispers from within the company. They don&#x27;t seem keen on finding candidates directly, which in this field is as easy as it gets, so off they go to the recruitment agency. My (now former) boss writes a job spec, this goes to HR (who aren&#x27;t familiar with any of the technical details) and HR add some company blurb and send it on to a recruiter, but not before crippling the job spec by slapping on a below-market salary that nobody competent will accept to try and save some cash.<p>The recruiters think they have plenty of candidates who will take the salary, but the candidates simply aren&#x27;t good enough or don&#x27;t have the right experience. The recruiters have no way of telling this, so they keep telling the company that there are plenty of great candidates and to keep interviewing.<p>From the applicant side, several friends of mine who are generally looking to move to a new job had this role aggressively pitched to them by a recruiter. Most of them would be brilliant for this job. What my friends really need is a ten minute phone call with my old boss to see if it&#x27;s a potential fit before starting any formal interview process. I&#x27;d have been happy to put them in touch directly at an earlier stage, but there has now been contact through a recruiter and I don&#x27;t want to meddle behind the scenes.<p>None of my friends ended up going for the job since the recruiters were telling them confusing things, and all got better offers than the advertised range elsewhere. The company have unsuccessfully interviewed a few candidates that the recruiters have pushed on them, the team has been desperate for someone new for months (and they&#x27;re crucial to the company&#x27;s success) and people like my old boss have no idea and little way of knowing how close they are to finding the right people.<p>And yes, the stereotype of the shiny-suited young &quot;failed salesman&quot; recruiter is unfortunately true in my experience.

At the end:<p><pre><code> To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than Shithead would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be. </code></pre> There are limits to this, and having someone from your team refer someone they know does not guarantee they will be an excellent worker, but I would tend to agreed that the overall quality of your team will be much higher this way.

This is mostly an angry rant, pretty amusing to me how upset the author actually becomes at times, I think its quite harsh.<p>I did like this idea towards the end of it: &quot;To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than [a recruiter] would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be.&quot;

US recruitment (at least around tech hubs) does seem a lot more civilized than the UK situation - most opportunities I see are directly advertised. I left the UK five years ago, and I still get most of my recruitment spam from UK agents. Someone clearly needs to educate those guys about aging their databases - someone who was in the market for opening level PHP gigs in 2001 is probably <i>not</i> still looking for opening level PHP gigs in 2015.

As a manager I&#x27;ve had a recruiter basically say &quot;That&#x27;s a nice development department you have there, shame if something were to happen to it.&quot; As he described that by signing a contract with him and keeping &quot;active&quot; by hiring his candidates a couple of times a year, he would not solicit the developers at my company.

I&#x27;m looking for work right now (need an embedded engineer in the UK?) and some job boards have a tickbox &quot;[]agency&quot; or &quot;[]direct employer&quot; and most of the direct employer ones are also recruiters. That is a small thing but it&#x27;s pure evil. And the sad thing is I&#x27;m sure that if I asked a recruiter &quot;how can you sleep at night doing this&quot; he&#x27;d just shrug and laugh because to him it&#x27;s normal.

This is an angry angry rant... and I&#x27;m not sure I agree. Some recruiters are pretty good. I was placed by one and I consider another an excellent giver of advice; he actually advised me to take a competing offer from another recruiter (of which I did not mention the name or deal, just the parameters). Generally my experience has been positive.

And yet they are our only weapon against business owners who are just as clueless but lack the incentive to pay a competitive wage. When it comes to salary negotiation, it&#x27;s nice to have Shithead in your corner.

I don&#x27;t get all the annoyance at recruiters. I don&#x27;t mind recruiters reaching out to me at all. If you don&#x27;t want their help, ignore their E-mails. If the opportunity looks interesting you reply, if not, don&#x27;t. Here&#x27;s an entire profession that exists to help get you a job (and to help employers find talent). Like every profession in the world, there are going to be a few jerks--just ignore them.<p>When times are good and everyone has their dream job, we all seem so annoyed with recruiters. When times are not so good, and you&#x27;re 2 months away from being broke, they are a potential lifeline.

The tech recruiter role&#x2F;economy seems like a tremendous conflict of interest, especially when they are outsourced. They are compensated primarily as a percentage of the salary for each hire they make. Like real estate agents, they get very little benefit from hiring well and primarily from hiring a lot. If those folks don&#x27;t pan out, more roles to fill and more bonuses to be had. It seems like an extremely short-sighted solution, which leads to short relationships that don&#x27;t sufficiently penalize nefarious behavior.

&gt;&gt; Contract tech workers sometimes believe agencies insulate them from a defaulting client.<p>This is true.<p>In one of my last contracts I was working alongside a guy who was contracting for them directly. He eventually walked out when they failed to pay (again!)<p>Agents are scum, but as someone that doesn&#x27;t have a vast network (most of the people I&#x27;ve worked with are still in the same perm position years or even decades later), and who doesn&#x27;t live in London, I&#x27;m afraid I don&#x27;t see that I&#x27;m going to be able to live without them any time soon.<p>Instead I&#x27;m actually trying to build relationships with the agents I have worked with that have found me appropriate work and who haven&#x27;t f*cked up in any way. They are few and far between, but they do exist.

I&#x27;m not suggesting the author is necessarily wrong, but I&#x27;ve been in the IT industry long enough to notice that there are more &quot;Recruiters are terrible people!&quot; articles whenever there&#x27;s a boom in tech jobs and people can find their own role. As soon as the market contracts and jobs become hard to find, all the articles stop.<p>I think people&#x27;s view of tech recruiters is a function of the market rather than a de facto truth - recruiters are perceived as bad as the market gets better because people don&#x27;t need them in order to find a new job. That doesn&#x27;t automatically mean recruiters are bad. Come the next downturn they&#x27;ll be useful again. We just need to recognise that.

Flash Harry was played by the recently deceased George Cole, gawd bless &#x27;im. I&#x27;ve had first hand experience of the London recruitment scene, as permie and contractor, for many years now, and much of it is just as described in this funny &amp; truthful article. However, one malpractice the author misses is Shitheads bunging brown envelopes to HR staff at large corps to manipulate the PSL. Also, there are some good recruiters out there who know and understand the skill sets they trade in. I&#x27;ve been lucky enough to use a couple of them as a hiring manager when I was permie at a bank. But they are very much in a minority...

I totally agree on asking the actual company what they&#x27;re paying the recruiter before you sign on; they will always be expecting an amount of work equal to full amount paid to the recruiter rather than the meagre sum that will end up in your pocket (which is exactly how hard you&#x27;re planning to work).<p>I have been told of people learning they were on long-term $50&#x2F;hour assignments where the recruiter is making $200&#x2F;hour over the top; no lie.<p>But the sickness doesn&#x27;t just come from normal people accepting jobs; these agencies are also held up by fucking Enterprise businesses. We recently needed to hire some additional staff and only received 3 resumes; 2 of which we&#x27;d seen before and were unsuitable.<p>I told management that the recruiter wasn&#x27;t doing their job and that maybe we could just put something on Seek, get a reply, then refer them to the recruiter. &quot;We can&#x27;t do that! The entire corporation has a contract; everything has to go through the recruitment agency and there&#x27;s no way around it!&quot;<p>How the fuck they knowingly got themselves into such a farcical situation (and for what benefit?) I&#x27;ll never understand... except that they&#x27;re fucking idiots.

The same stands for the real estate industry. Or worse. Most real estate agents add nothing just take money away from both tenants and landlords.

Oh I&#x27;m not finished yet, but this is a hilarious read! Lots of moments I was belly laughing out loud at the author&#x27;s wonderful use of metaphors.<p>Yeah in the USA, 2015 recruiting industry is far better than the author&#x27;s depictions. I have no idea what its like in the UK.<p>The indian recruiting market is not unlike this.<p>Its still a funny read either way

Yea, I just got one for managing plastic fabrication machines in some factory in the UK. When looking at why I got the offer, its because I had the words &quot;Tooling Engineer&quot; (title at current job) in my LinkedIn profile.

I&#x27;ve started using more of Gmail&#x27;s features to help control this.<p>First, there is the actual email address itself: Gmail ignores periods and anything after a + (plus sign). So every new site I sign up for gets a different email address, usually my normal email plus a postfix named after that particular site. This way, when I get emails from recruiters saying they found me through LinkedIn, but are actually using a form of my email address I&#x27;ve only used on Github, I know immediately what is going on.<p>And second, I just mark them as spam. Because they are.

I don&#x27;t know much about the English market, though I occasionally get their spam overflow. Still, I have to question how you regularly get into those kinds of relationships with anyone without being needlessly mean and disrespectful in initial interactions.<p>With recruiters here, I generally decline the job they were thinking of and tell them what I am interested given that it has to significantly beat my current work. After a few times back and forth, that eventually brings the conversation to an end. The nicer ones tell give me some local companies that wont pay third party recruiters but might be a closer match.<p>Really, I think recruiters naturally tend to over represent employers who are incredibly bad deals since the better the job the less often it is empty and the easier it is to fill for free through networking (I.e. you have employees who wouldn&#x27;t see guilt&#x2F;risk in recommending it to friends.)<p>Given that recruiters are sitting in that skewed perspective of the market, they should naturally get bitter and irritated with people who turn down their &quot;best&quot; positions while being rude throughout the process. Probably they also feel all the more helpless in their role since I can only imagine the bizarre feedback they get from their most rewarding&#x2F;difficult&#x2F;longstanding customers on what were &quot;good&quot; matches.<p>If recruiters were replaced by neural networks, it may kick off the first AI rights campaign to protect AI from poor input abuse.

Some valid points which could be made with a clear head too. I believe in market dynamics, the reason the recruiters aren&#x27;t gone by now is that market still needs them.<p>The author&#x27;s moral high ground is also funny. At the end of the day these guys are here to make a living, and making a living is indeed really hard. Somehow suggesting these guys are just born evil isn&#x27;t right, given the same circumstances most of us would behave the same way. Lucky we are engineers in demand. So far.

Coderstack (which is dead now) used to only accept direct job posts.<p>I wonder if a similar service would gain traction again. Because all of the job boards for UK have 90% recruiter spam really.

I think of recruiters more as a &quot;realtor for my skills.&quot;<p>It&#x27;s totally OK to not use a realtor to sell your house to your coworker&#x27;s son and his new wife in rural BFE for 20k $USD.<p>When you go to sell your mcmansion in a small town suburb for $80k USD, you might have a lawyer look over the sales contract, but you might not use an agent. There just isn&#x27;t that much at risk and you probably know the person you&#x27;re selling to.<p>When you sell your house for $120k USD in a bigger city, you almost definitely use a seller&#x27;s agent and might use a lawyer. There&#x27;s more risk because it&#x27;s a bigger city and you&#x27;re playing for more money. There&#x27;s probably some negotiation involved and you don&#x27;t sell a house every day so you need to know what&#x27;s normal, what&#x27;s legal, and where hidden traps are.<p>When you sell a house for $500k USD, you sure as hell use a a seller&#x27;s agent and a title company and a lawyer and everyone reviews the contract. That&#x27;s a lot of money to not have many eyeballs on the deal and rounds of negotiation.<p>Selling your skills is like selling a house. When it&#x27;s not that much money and you trust the people you&#x27;re dealing with, you don&#x27;t need a recruiter. When you&#x27;re negotiating salary and benefits at higher tiers, you need to know what&#x27;s normal and what&#x27;s acceptable, and that&#x27;s another service a recruiter provides. They also represent you to many buyers and help you with the negotiation and feedback process. Like a real estate agent, they are a critical impersonal cutout that helps everyone maintain face during a negotiation.

I never liked overly broad brushes, I understand the author is angry but calling <i>all</i> recruiters names is, I think, not cool.<p>But, I really enjoyed the funny writing!

Graduated in 1993, started contracting in 1995, and pretty much been at it ever since then. I have no issue with agents. They make my life easier.<p>The only and ONLY rule I have is that the employer knows exactly the rate I am getting and is happy with the rate they are paying the agent. I&#x27;ve seen contractors walk out on jobs once they find out the margin the agent is getting. An honest relationship is key.

I was thinking off writing almost the same blog post today. Its the same shitty situation here in Austria... Recruiters should burn in hell.

I&#x27;ve been on the job market the last few weeks, going mostly through New York recruiters. The quality of the experience has varied wildly, with some obviously doing the minimum work necessary, and just as obviously not knowing or caring about the &quot;acronyms&quot; on my resume. Others seem pretty professional, have apparently done research, and the clients they recruit for would indicate they have a reputation to maintain.<p>In the end, the gross factor doesn&#x27;t really matter to me -- the recruiters find me on LinkedIn, and I just say &quot;sure, I&#x27;ll talk to XYZ Co.&quot; unless it&#x27;s obviously sleazy or a bad fit.<p>It&#x27;s a bit grueling to cast such a wide net, and it&#x27;s obviously a hustle, but for me it&#x27;s mostly just a way to get an initial phone introduction&#x2F;screen with companies, and from there it&#x27;s apparent whether it&#x27;s worth the trouble to move to the next step.<p>I might not go this route again, though, having seen how little most recruiters add to the process.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;actualrecruiter" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;actualrecruiter</a>

I guess I&#x27;ll chime in here as someone who&#x27;s had a different experience. Actually quite a pleasant experience. They weren&#x27;t spamming me, they wrote to me once but something about the way they wrote to me caused me to remember this one particularly six months later. Probably because they weren&#x27;t spamming job postings, just saying &quot;hi there, I&#x27;m a recruiter, if you ever find yourself looking for a job I can help you find one.&quot; They had me four different interviews the next week and weren&#x27;t embellishing my qualifications. One of the interviews quickly lead to a job offer in a position I actually wanted to have. They&#x27;re taking a cut but it&#x27;s because they made my transition process fast and easy, instead of spending what could have been a month or two unemployed and starting to worry, and to me that&#x27;s worth something.

Hm recruiters are fine mostly for entry-level jobs. As time goes on, dealing with middlemen is increasingly irksome. Not only that, but then you need to deal with an up-to-30% paycut because of the middleman.<p>It&#x27;s a shame really. At my last job we would invite recruiters to send us candidates for entry-level PHP&#x2F;MySQL web devs, and largely they sent people who had been working with Wordpress too long, or only knew how to function in &lt;insert framework&gt;. The mismatch was worse than putting the ad out and filtering through the resumes, but it was less effort. I also saw some of the ads the recruiters posted, and I never would&#x27;ve applied because of a) wording (rockstar&#x2F;ninja crap), b) ridiculous skillset (10 years PHP experience... really?).<p>So the author here is a little harsh, but largely on point. Way too much slime, but sometimes necessary if you&#x27;re entry level

Just as an aside as the original article seems to think that the recruiter is taking money from him, i.e.t he 15% is 15% he could be receving. It does not work like that. Most employers know what the going day rate is for their required skill set. If they got a contractor directly they would pay the day rate, they would not bump it up 15% because they didn&#x27;t go through an agency. they pay the agency fee to undertake the work of locating the contractor. If they do the work to locate the contractor themselves why would they pay the contractor extra? They would not.<p>Its almost as if the article writer has so little knowledge of how recruitment works that he is a target for shitty people in the industry, kind of like how once you respond to a Nigerian prince loads of scammers come out of the woodwork.

I really dislike the lack of expertise <i>typical</i> recruiters have with the technical jargon and requirements of our industry. I&#x27;ve had many poor recruitment experiences where the recruiter couldn&#x27;t accurately explain the role, requirements, or why they thought I was a good enough fit to contact me in the first place. My github simply hits the right keywords and that&#x27;s good enough for them.<p>This has been made worse by not being able to explain the interview process. I specifically asked, many times to various recruiters, what I would be quizzed on or what I should prepare myself for. Few could tell me anything beyond, &quot;some technical questions about algorithms and data structures.&quot; Inadequate. The interviewer proper would ask random questions about memory architecture, optimizing the brute-force KNN algorithm, or simply how to reverse a string. Meanwhile I was studying binomial coefficients, heaps, tries, and the standard sorting algorithms. I have github projects that implement lattices for a logically monotonic distributed programming language. For someone such as myself this is unacceptable and leads to some dead-end interviews that are a complete waste of time.<p>I blame the way we &quot;funnel&quot; the &quot;dregs&quot; of candidates and have little to offer in terms of solutions. I agree with the author that companies seem reluctant to do actual head-hunting. I always assumed that if you contacted me for a job there would be a reason: you like some of the projects I host on my github or have seen my contributions to various open source projects -- that you already have an idea of my skillset and abilities and want to get to know me. Recruiters are more inclined to match keywords and send me through the process... they&#x27;re not incentivized to get to know me at all. All I can suggest is to not use a recruiter or at least choose one carefully: choose one that knows your industry well and can tell a min-heap from a max-heap.<p><i>edit</i>: fixed wording implying a specific github project was some sort of library or system when it implements a single programming language, not languages.

It&#x27;s the nature of the beast, other option...<p>Company hates recruiters.<p>Company builds an internal recruitment team.<p>Find out they can&#x27;t perform.<p>They then start using external recruiters.<p>There has to be a solution to this, whoever solves it will become very, very, very rich. At present, only internal hires or referrals seem to work best.

Had a recruiter email me recently saying:<p>&quot;JASON knowledge is an advantage...&quot;<p>Yep. I still don&#x27;t know jason

In Dublin this is starting to ring true for me.<p>though i don&#x27;t agree with classing them as reptilians. They&#x27;re trying to survive in a industry that forces them to things to survive.<p>I&#x27;m also skeptical this will last or will Tech bubble 2.0 burst soon?

I work in IT and I have literally never received an email from a recruiter. My secret? I don&#x27;t have a linkedin profile. Yeah, despite what everyone says my life and career have not collapsed without linkedin.

Ha ha - that was a funny read. You&#x27;ve got a talent for words, forget this new fangled DeVelOps thing you&#x27;ve been doing for 15 years and get into comedy writing.

A recruiter once lost it with me when I was job hunting about 5 years ago. They has put me forward for a job which I&#x27;d already applied for (one of the biggest consulting co&#x27;s in the world) and was convinced that I&#x27;d cut them out of the process completely (despite the fact I&#x27;d told them I&#x27;d applied).<p>Got offered the job in the end. Shitty salary (and not the most exciting of jobs as I gathered too).

disgusting text. could not finish reading it.<p>the author should try appreciating the fact that IT is an industry where one can choose between jobs. many people do not have that luxury and must swallow a lot of shit to earn a living. the author comes across as an entitled brat that has absolutely no empathy or understanding for fellow human beings, all the while dishing out horrible insults at their humanity. disgusting.

I don&#x27;t understand. If recruiters are leeches, why do employers work with them ? perhaps, it&#x27;s because they provide a service, no?

There have been times in my career when good recruiter was my best friend in the world... at least for a couple of weeks. These days I get spammed or called by five or six of them a day, most of whom haven&#x27;t even read my resume, and have no idea whether I am a fit for the latest position they are trying desperately to fill. It resembles a boiler-room stock pumping operation.

Given how common the experiences OP describes are among tech people of my acquaintance in the US, I have a hard time believing that anyone here saying &quot;I know hundreds of recruiters and none of them think like this&quot; isn&#x27;t a recruiter themself.<p>The thing I hate most is having a recruiter get in the middle of my salary negotiations and try to talk me down.

These types of people don&#x27;t just get themselves into recruiter roles lying about vacancies and candidates to swindle clients and skim the takings, but also into roles managing open source projects lying about download numbers and faking popularity rankings, to flip companies and sell consulting services and conference seats.

this post is truth. i removed myself from linkedin because of the amount of recruiters spam &#x2F; calls, the most annoying part was the constant incorrect matching of my skills with proposed jobs. (i work with node.js but was getting tons of requests for php and java jobs). the same recruiters didn&#x27;t stop contacting me even after i found a job (without their help) and stated clearly on my accounts that i was not available anymore. this was super annoying.<p>at first i put a warning on my linkedin profile, but it didn&#x27;t decrease the amount of spam.<p>then i started to threat via email every one using my personal email without any consent (seems like they sell cv database to each other).<p>i end up closing my linkedin account because i could not stop anymore all this annoying crap from recruiters. i still receive some emails once in a while and i threat them to remove my identity from their db, it seems to work for now.

This was quite excellent. You could just as well find &amp; replace &quot;IT&quot; with &quot;marketing&quot;, too.

I got my LAMP stack certification and this all went way!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thoughtbot&#x2F;liftoff&#x2F;pull&#x2F;178#issuecomment-57690259" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;thoughtbot&#x2F;liftoff&#x2F;pull&#x2F;178#issuecomment-...</a>

While I agree with most of this article, its a bit extreme. I&#x27;ve never liked spam, but is it really that hard to ignore them? I&#x27;ve had a recruiting firm call me 4-5 times and send emails and I started getting a bit upset...but far from that extreme

Possibly the most entertaining and well-written post I&#x27;ve ever encountered on HN.

I love this. The writing style reminded me of &quot;A Clockwork Orange.&quot;

Over the course of my career in Cali and Silicon Valley, I&#x27;ve been fortunate to work for some top tech companies on exciting projects (all through recruiters). I&#x27;m very thankful to recruiters.

After reading through this thread, it would seem that many commenters from the UK are able to relate, and that a number of people in the US market are judging based on no experience.

It sounds just as bad as New York City. I&#x27;m getting my UK settlement visa within the next month and will be back on job market, definitely not looking forward to this!

Some here are listing good and bad experiences. I&#x27;m considering finding one to help find jobs for my particular interests in another area.<p>Any tips for picking one?

I had a total clockwork orange moment reading this. Unrelated note - you may call me a pig, but I only take calls from female recruiters.

I think the plugin to block email doesn&#x27;t go far enough. I think it should be enhanced to autoreply with a markov bot.

Best way to not &#x27;feed the beast&#x27; is to write a quality resume&#x2F;CV and post it to your local tech careers site.

&gt; Once I talked a client into advertising a position themselves. The signal-to-noise ratio was appalling and sorting through the flood of applicants took days. Some cover letters were tragic, begging in broken English “I fast learner, my family starving, England less shooty, pliz you help us move?”.<p>Bah, you can rant without resorting to racist aping of ESOL speakers. Especially when the odds are good that the author only speaks one language.

In London, recruiters and real estate agents appear to be interchangeable. The bullshitter ratio is off the scales.

I don&#x27;t give my email or contact info to recruiters or random job sites!

I stopped answering the phone to unknown numbers because of this.

time to finally implement my non profit side-project<p>bad-recruiters.com

Complaining about recruiters has to be one of the all-time great humblebrags.<p>&quot;Oh woe is me--all these people keep calling me to offer well-paying professional jobs!&quot;

You lost me at suggesting &quot;IT&quot; = &quot;engineer&quot; when speaking to your grandpa.

You do realize that there is an entire IT Industry outside of Facebook and Google?

For the UK the picture is so very true. I admire the proper English of this article. Well worth reading.

IT people talking about being exploited, particularly by unskilled laborers, well... I understand how &quot;boring&quot; it might be to be <i>harassed</i> in this way, just as telemarketing is, but - come on - a little perspective, please. Surely you&#x27;ll understand that your <i>boring</i> doesn&#x27;t trump someone&#x27;s need to make money.<p>P.S. The author talks about &quot;us social inepts in tech&quot;. I hope he understands his article is a great banner to said ineptness.

It always depends on how you react, if you are passive (like the author of the article) or active. While I too get many mails&#x2F;calls that are unnecessary, I like to keep active contact with some recruiters I came to like and call them&#x2F;meet them on a regular basis, even when I have absolutely no need for a new contract. If you are a contractor, you are essentially owning a business and if you have a business, you should value potential customers. Crying like a baby about too much interest in your person is a loser attitude. As long as there are not too many middle men, I also do not care about them getting their cut, as the better ones use that money to get the right contacts for me in case I want to change the position. My current recruitment agency also uses some of the money for great parties and events, which helped me to get to know many others (clients&#x2F;colleagues...).