For the same reason most (if not all) real estate agents are worthless. There's no barrier to entry and there's the allure of easy money. Until the profits collapse the market will be inundated with wannabes.
As a Tech Recruiter and former Developer I've been first-hand witness to the incredible hypocrisy and mind-boggling anti-logic perpetrated by the recruitment industry and I've attempted to answer your question at length in my blog post 'All that's wrong with the recruitment industry' <a href="http://voltsteve.blogspot.com/2011/07/all-that-is-wrong-with-recruitment.html" rel="nofollow">http://voltsteve.blogspot.com/2011/07/all-that-is-wrong-with...</a><p>Someone in the comments below mentioned how they don't feel that the recruitment industry can be disrupted whereas I completely disagree. The industry is already suffering and multiple different factors are playing a part. As PG mentioned in a recent comment on a similar post, more and more companies are investing in building internal recruitment teams.<p>For the record, I agree that most tech recruiters suck. Even if you find a decent one, chances are they work for an organisation that imparts a vast amount of KPI's and compliance issues that generally restrict their capabilities and creativity.
The problem with recruiters is that they're the only (potential) vendor/service provider to your business that doesn't actually understand the product they are delivering to you.<p>* My hosting partner knows how operate servers and datacenters<p>* My employee payroll + benefits partner knows employee laws.<p>* My lawyer knows corporate law<p>* My CPA knows accountancy and tax rules.<p>* My recruiter is unlikely to understand very much about developers, the types of people developer I need to hire into my specific role, the needs of an engineering hiring manager, etc.<p>Why, therefore, people continue to use them is beyond me.
As an aside, I hate this post for one reason and one reason only: the hyperlink at the bottom alluring like-minded techies for a job in his/her company.<p>And that is not just in this post. Almost every such post that talks about something that strongly resonates with a techie and then drops the..."oh...btw...we are hiring..." at the fag end.<p>Please do mention if you require a green card or a H1-B or something related to residence status required of the position. I am forced to open up the line of communication with a are-you-willing-to-sponsor-a-H1-B. Only two out of a whole bunch I emailed had the courtesy to reply.
Nicely captures my issues with tech recruiters. The other big disconnect is that since tech is in so much flux, you want to hire smart generalists who can pick up new technologies in a few days if necessary.<p>Most recruiters have no clue how to find "smart developers". So instead they do a google search for "Java developer looking for job" and spam you with the top 10 hits with some great insights like "OMG this guy's great... he's <i>only</i> done Java for the last 20 years!!!1!". They don't understand why that's NOT a good thing in tech.
This is like complaining "Why is so much spam email irrelevant to me?" If someone cold-calls you their business model is to churn through many people who are annoyed before they find one who hires them. The great recruiters aren't going to cold-call you. So there's a selection bias.
It is a classic sales technique to ignore objections and to turn them into new lines of attack.<p><pre><code> - ... You have to go to HR first.
- Okay… in that case why don’t we have coffee or lunch next week?
</code></pre>
Bam. Objection ignored.
couldnt access the article, but fwiw since i'm in the china sw development industry where a significant portion of hires are done through headhunters:<p>- they don't know the least bit about software development, typically wih english or business degrees
- as a result, their search effort is solely based on keyword or company profile matching., i.e. to a certain extent large companies seem to have similar processes and requirements like hp, ibm, so this works some of the time, you could also say that facebook and google have similar requirements
- in china, because of the volume of applicants, there's no time to speak or meet with all candidates so you really just have a resume which doesnt say an awful lot<p>i spend my time mentoring recruiters on how to more effectively search for candidates, usually it's a process of giving them direct feedback on each resume, after developing somewhat of a repoire, it usually gets nominally better.<p>what would be more effective is if someone like me who's been a developer and now in development management, goes out and opens a headhunter agency, but that wouldnt provide the level of pay that i'm getting nor really interest me to be a broker.<p>i've dreamed of a social network like github + linkedin where not only actual code is available, but also a strong network of past and present co-workers are able to vouch for you. e.g. this guy worked with werner vogel at amazon and wrote significant portions of ec2 and has a lot of like minded followers of his work, of course an extreme case, but hopefully you get the point. it's about making the world of software developers smaller through social networks so everyone knows who and where the good, bad, and middle performers exist.
They usually suck because they don't understand technology.<p>To me, a good technical recruiter would be able to take my resume and actually understand (to some degree) what it is I'm doing. From there, when talking about my knowledge and interests, they'd be able to respond and interact, then tell me about actually relevant jobs on their hands.<p>Instead, the conversation is a like driving the wrong way on a one-way street. They always have the best job for you no matter how wrong of a match it is or how unqualified or even un-interested you may be. At best, most "technical recruiters" are "connectors" as other comments stated. Beyond that it's almost all spam.
The author should take his own advice more seriously. He links to his companies job postings, which consist of a long list of mostly boilerplate required qualifications, and little to nothing about what the company may have to offer prospective employees.<p>Not even a hint that they may be interested in the needs of the people they're looking to hire.
I did some (non-tech) recruiting about 6 years ago, and I always thought that given the time and effort, I could be an awesome tech recruiter. Maybe some day I will, although it currently isn't in my pants. Here's what I'd do:<p>- I'd want to take a long-term approach, and keep in touch with the people that I worked to place. After 2-3 years, they might just be up for a new position.<p>- I should know their skills deeply. Forget reading resumes, I'd read Github accounts. I should be able to read what skills they have, not be told them. Obviously not everything a person does ends up on Github, but the things they most enjoy and are best at often do. If a person enjoys working in Ruby, I'm not going to try to shoehorn them into a PHP position because they won't be happy and won't output the best.<p>- I'd want to deeply understand the actual needs of the placed position. So many Craigslist job postings that are by recruiters clearly don't understand the requirements of the job vs things that are nice to have.<p>- I also understand tech deeply. I don't be that poorly qualified recruiter who mistakes C# for CSS. I'd be able to talk about what testing frameworks people are using, or how they like to approach a problem in a non-confrontational way.<p>- While this might sound like marketing-spin, I would want to really think of it as just connecting friends who need jobs to companies of friends who are hiring. I actually do this now a good bit, since I know a lot of qualified tech people and send them emails when I get them about positions that really seem to speak to them. I never ask for money currently, because well... its just helping out friends and I want to see them happy.
Their behavior is just as frustrating from the other side. Since my resume says I've used Python for scientific computing, I must be a Django expert that has experience building scalable e-commerce sites, right?<p>That's what 90% of the recruiters seem to think, and I get a neverending stream of jobs from them not even remotely related to my experience.
We've never found recruiters useful. Perhaps it was the fact that most of the positions they recruited for were for large companies, and their candidate pool reflected that. Once however, when we were truly desperate, we tried to work with one agency.<p>I said right away that the only way this would work would be based on a success fee, and they accepted that. Also, I demanded that they send me a sample of anonymized CVs before we signed anything. So a couple of hours later they send me these three CVs, and when I looked at them, I immediately recognized the candidates (it's a small world, isn't it?).<p>The next step was to call the candidates and ask them if they're were really looking for a job. Turns out not one knew anything about the company in question and none of them were interested in switching jobs.
I agree, most suck. The only ones who don't are ones with many years in the industry they services. There are ex-engineers that make good engineering headhunters. There are ex-brand managers that make good marketing brand managers. Even still, the good ones still have minions running around getting meetings for them, and having lunch, and cold calling, and generally being worthless. The lackeys are in the same league as used car salesmen.<p>One subtle point the writer may have missed:
- I can’t really source candidates from agencies that are not on the vendor list. You have to go to HR first.
- Okay… in that case why don’t we have coffee or lunch next week?<p>The second line wasn't ignoring an exception. It was a subtle was of saying, "If you're not hiring, perhaps I can find you a job."
Despite being 50 years young or so, software still is making the transition from art to science.<p>You can't recruit for something you don't understand.<p>- They're not technical
- They're not connectors
- They don't understand the job as being beyond a list of skills
- Education doesn't come close to making up for experience
They violate the worlds shortest and most profound sales course. "Know your stuff, know their stuff"<p>From the article "I am thinking – does this guy not want to hear me? I am detecting a pattern: not only he doesn’t want to listen, he actually doesn’t care to consume any information at all."
I would say the example recruiter is <i>not</i> actually a connector. Based upon my understanding of the term, a connector has deeper connections than that, and is capable of actually putting people and concepts together in his/her head in a way that is relatively unique.<p>The recruiter described sounds like a more technologically advanced version of a beggar: ask everyone you ever come across for a handout, and you'll eventually get one.<p>Idiot recruiter story: in college, I did part-time work for the Corps of Engineers. It was basically an intership program, though with poorer guidance than you'd expect of one. I kept getting recruiter calls to work on Ada projects, despite it being nowhere on my resume. Recruiters refused to acknowledge my very relevant work experience (multithreaded C++) because they don't consider military experience, despite the fact I had nothing to do with the military...
I'm curious how this recruiter would earn $15,000-$20,000. Is that the going rate for a full time hire? Is it usually a percentage of starting salary? Does it vary widely from firm to firm? Is it %20 of the starting salary?
This is something we're trying to address at CodeEval.com. We're trying to make it easy for start-ups to hire without needing a recruiting team or contracting a clueless recruiter.<p>We've created a community of pre-screened developers who are actively or passively looking for jobs at startups. They have proved their programming chomps by solving dozens of programming challenges on our site.<p>If you're a start-up looking to hire without dealing with recruiters get in touch with us - william@codeeval.com
It seems that every week there's a couple posts complaining about recruiters these days.<p>It's one of the reasons why I've launched my own site to try and improve recruiting (for designers, at least): <a href="http://folyo.me" rel="nofollow">http://folyo.me</a>