Ask HN: How would you fix tech recruiting?

IMHO the biggest problem is the recruiters do not understand tech enough. If they did then they would not be recruiters, they would be techies.<p>How to fix? One of the big problems, and others have mentioned it. Employers with unrealistic expectations. I had a boss once create a laundry list of skills for a position, 3 years of each, that no one would have: Java, C, C++, C#, Ada, Java Script, and 2 different assembly languages, as well as a host of other techs. I complained it was a stupid list, as half of the languages listed we never used. Response: &quot;Oh but wouldn&#x27;t it be nice to have someone who could!&quot; WTF, all they were doing was encouraging liars to apply.<p>So I believe they should be allowed to list 3 maybe 4 primary skills &#x2F; experience. Then 3 or 4 &#x27;Would set you apart skills&#x27; (i.e. tie breakers). If you list more then you do not understand what your team does.<p>If you are thinking of making something, I would start by looking at Joel Spolsky <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;</a> he has written a ton on the topic (click recruiter to see his articles). He also had a site for recruiting where he vetted the recruiters for a bunch of topics. I cannot find the site or I would put it here.

Are you planning to be a recruiter? Do you understand their problems?<p>Business X wants super ninja engineer for less then market rate because they&#x27;re cheap and believe their mission statement should scream &quot;come work for us like a slave&quot;. You, the tech recruiter now need to find this potential engineer, how do you do this?<p>As you already know, step 1 is spam people on linkedin hoping for low hanging fruit. Yea we get spammed, but like Nigerian scammers and robocallers, we&#x27;re not the target audience, we are just unintentional victims in the recruiters process for finding a needle in a haystack.

To me, tech recruiting feels geared around people creating resumes that feature a lengthy laundry list of technologies that reward the best liars because that&#x27;s the idiotic filtering process that&#x27;s emerged.<p>What would make the job hunt better?<p>1) You need somebody technical involved in writing job ads. You also need to limit the technologies mentioned to a handful. If it&#x27;s a frontend webdev job for example, list out a few necessities (HTML, CSS, JS) and a couple of nice-to-have bits of tech like experience with SVG, React, and Git, but don&#x27;t declare those to be mandatory. A smart person who never used some tech you need will be able to pick it up faster than a middling liar who claims 5 years of experience with it.<p>2) You need a recruiter who understands the businesses they&#x27;re representing as well as technology to figure out if the candidate is a potential match.<p>3) You need businesses who understand that smart people who know their shit are better for the business than a middling developer who has some experience with your particular tech. Outside of very specialized and niche stuff, any smart developer will pick up new libraries and technology very quickly. Solve for hiring smart people, not trying to find somebody who just listed every technology they ever heard of on their resume.

I think Toptal’s model is as ideal as it gets. Engineers are vetted and interviewed once, companies can hire without interviewing, if it doesn’t work out in the first week Toptal covers the cost. This incentivizes Toptal to do effective evaluation of engineers, engineers don’t have to repeat interviews over and over, and companies save time and money.<p>I don’t see how that model could be any better really. Referrals are also a good model, but the talent pool is limited.

&gt; How do these people stay in business?<p>By finding enough candidates for enough businesses willing to pay the huge finders&#x27; fees that recruiting firms demand.<p>One of the things that amazes me is that companies will pay a recruiting firm tens of thousands of dollars to find a candidate that makes it through the interview process and stays there for at least 90 days but then they only offer $500 to their employees for referrals that get hired. I pointed out to HR at one company that I worked for that one of their recruiting partners pays $1000 for a referral that gets hired; given how much they would pay a recruiter, they should be offering at least $5,000 referral bonuses to someone recommends a candidate they hire, whether the person making the recommendation is an employee or not. They decided to increase the referral bonus to match the recruiting company (I kept feeding referrals for my employer through said recruiting agency -- my relationship with them started before and lasts long after being with that employer).

Frankly, the only good third party recruiters are good because of the human relationships they have with hiring managers are good companies. Likewise they will try to establish good relationships with you the candidate.<p>It&#x27;s a severely bifurcated group IMHO. There is a tiny pool of great third party recruiters. Then you have the vast unwashed masses of crappy ones. The ones that are at least decent seem to end up as internal recruiters at least.

Take it seriously. Get high IQ people to run this function.

Some of the job descriptions I&#x27;ve seen from recruiters are so bad it almost feels like a trap. Like if you respond you&#x27;ll be blacklisted for being desperate and have a harder time finding a legitimate job.<p>I saw an email the other day that offered 50-60k&#x2F;y in the Midwest. Remote would be &quot;considered&quot; after 6 months if you &quot;behave.&quot; Masters required PHD preferred.

&gt; I honestly feel like I could do the jobs of 10 tech recruiters with a few well designed bots.<p>Go ahead and do it. Neither tech recruiters, nor the tech recruitment process itself are cheap, so if you could figure out a way to make the whole process more efficient there is a ton of opportunity there.

I think most recruiters operate like email spammers - just throw out 1000&#x27;s of solicitations and hope one of them connects with somebody.