Lessons learned as a recruiter hiring developers the last decade

Tech recruiters: maybe there are a few tolerable ones.<p>In 2012, a recruiter proclaimed to me that Golang was &quot;irrelevant&quot; while having zero understanding of technology or the industry. I thanked them and marked their emails as spam.

In my experience in contracting is that most recruitment companies are run like sweatshops. They get lots of &quot;consultants&quot; (most with little to no IT knowledge) to do the recruiting. They are driven to hit KPIs and thus the candidate experience suffers. Yet another example of enshitification by biznoids.

&gt; 15. Last but not least, treating your potential hires with respect is always a winning strategy!<p>LOUDER, for most of the recruiters.<p>I gave up on working with or even responding to recruiters a good two decades ago because even then, most of them - even in the tech industry! - were of the “washed-up jock&#x2F;cheerleader” variety, trying to leverage social contacts to fill slots and having absolutely no clue about anything in tech.<p>And I mean complete technophobes that thought HTML was a sexually-transmitted disease… no shit, I had that comment back in the 90s from one of them that had only begun working with web developers.<p>For the final cherry on top, if you couldn’t materially further their career or metrics, you were noise to be ignored. If they determined that you weren’t a “rock star developer”, good luck ever hearing from them again.<p>So I just learned to ignore them back.

1. Are you licensed to legally operate an HR firm in my community?<p>2. Exactly why are you necessary to solve a given issue?<p>3. Why is it necessary to regularly cycle staff at your clients firm?<p>4. Have compensation packages been bid down in the time you have worked with the clients?<p>5. How bad is the coffee at your firm?<p>Unless your company can credibly answer all of these questions, than expect radio silence from intelligent life.<p>Have a wonderful day =)