This sounds amazing. I honestly think recruiters can be entirely replaced by a decent A.I. and good scheduling software. And we would all be better off.
Noooo!! Recruiters are so useful. They do a lot of leg work for you. They have access to many openings that aren't public. They can provide introductions to people you've always wanted to speak to. And they can convince good companies to create an opening for you if you would fit really well with the company.
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in. They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
They are invaluable.
I do have to say though that there is enormous variability in their skill. The secret is to only work with a few that have access to different contacts and that you trust. Don't spray your resume out there to bad recruiting companies.
I have noticed a difference between industries though. In my main industry (finance and financial technology) recruiters tend to be very knowledgeable and work very diligently to give you leads that fit your skills and priorities. I've noticed that in other industries like web or internet start up they can be atrocious. I get all sorts of random crap from them so you probably need to be extra careful in certain industries.
But i would never give up my recruiters. They take a lot of pain out of me trying to find a new position.
I have a lot of love for my recruiters. I wouldn't have nearly the career i do now without them.
You''re describing good recruiters, which are rare and far between. The majority is spam unfortunately. The problem I think is the incentive structure. When you see human beings as nothing more than a commission, the tactics get cutthroat.
I deal with more good recruiters than bad recruiters. I'm picky and the industry might make a big difference.
I also spend the time to really talk to the recruiter the first couple times so he knows a lot about me and what I'm looking for. And i don't feel he would work out for me, i don't work with him.
I takes communication and i think part of the problem is on the job seekers side. Too many are uncommunicative.
Any recommendations? The only recruiters I've ever interacted with are working for or on behalf of employers. They're looking to fill their position and if I'm not that person, I don't hear from them ever again. It would be awesome to have someone always out there looking on my behalf. Does that kind of recruiter even exist?
In-house recruiters are a lot different. I've met some very persistent ones that even after you say not interested they keep calling you (I'm glad one did because he broke me down and i finally interviewed and had great success at the company).
To find new external recruiters i look at the job listings (Indeed, LinkedIn, etc) and see if i notice the same recruiting firm listed at jobs i find interesting. Then i get in touch with the recruiter directly and have a discussion with him. So i kind of look for recruiters more than i look for jobs.
Agreed. There's a lot of snakes in the biz. I had to tell one to turn his auto-dialer down because it was annoying me. If I didn't answer he'd be hitting me up several times per day every day. Then he'd lie about not having an auto-dialer.
They want huge commissions but they don't add a lot of value. That commission is almost always way more than it would cost me for my time to recruit from my own network or through traditional means.
Many of them never even meet their candidates. When I was in the market a long time ago - they would prep me with what to say to the hiring company even if it wasn't part of my skill-set at the time. That's very dishonest.
I'm an employer and they'll call me and immediately start talking about a candidate. They'll ramble on and on about how great their candidate is even though I'm not hiring or I'm only hiring for a different role.
Part of their strategy is to push a candidate on you, get you to like them and then talk about their commission only if necessary. They get really squeamish if you ask about commission.
As someone who has previously conducting a job search while employed full-time, recruiters are a must-have. I don't have all the time in the world to job hunt during normal business hours. Having people who were motivated to be the one to find me a job saved me a lot of time, got me a lot of info, and the recruiter who was working for the company that inevitably hired me was super helpful in recognizing my potential from maybe a bit of a lacking quality resume, and pried for a bit more info... a dedication a faceless Google algorithm will never have.
most "good" points you mentioned there about recruiters code can replicate.
They do a lot of leg work for you
- simple stats and analysis
They have access to many openings that aren't public.
- This is just companies choosing their preferred recruiters in a fragmented industry. A solid platform would solve this
And they can convince good companies to create an opening for you if you would fit really well with the company
- I dont see code doing this. But how often does this happen though?
I get to send my resume to a few recruiters and they call me with all the openings that fit my skill set and i would be interested in.
- Not sure why you think this is exclusive to recruiters. Isnt this just another way of describing filters on a recruitment website?
.They make looking for a new position so much easier. Often they work in teams so you get multiple people doing this for you at the same time. Plus you build a relationship with them, their team, and the company so you with them better next time too.
- Its not hard to code something that can achieve this. Even saw a post here on HN about a site that can mass apply for jobs for you. Could make it a little more intelligent so it learns which jobs you prefer.
Companies in certain industries often don't publicly list because they don't want it widely known what they are looking for, what they are doing, or even that they exist sometimes. Or they don't want to weed through all the crap resumes and recruiters are their front line against that. That's not solvable with just a better platform.
And no algorithm, stats, and analysis is going to be a good as a recruiter who works regularly with a firm and knows what they are looking for, what the culture is like, and their internals.
Also recruiters help negotiate salary for you too, and that always helps.
Also recruiters help negotiate salary for you too,
and that always helps.
The recruiter's paid by the employer, and wants to maintain a good relationship with them. Surely their incentive is to place two candidates at $0.9x for a total of $1.8x, rather than placing a single candidate at $1.1x by driving a hard bargain?
I guess I'm confused as to why anyone would expect a better result by having someone else do your negotiation?
That's an interesting point but realistically I've never had that happen (that i know of at least). I've a always had them come back with better numbers than the initial offer.
Not down here in Australia. They get so much commission their interest is mainly in making a placement and will actively negotiate downwards if they think there is some risk in making the placement at a higher salary.
Most position i get through recruiters. And i get far more offers dealing with recruiters than not even if i don"t take them.
In NYC i might deal with 3 or 4. A lot o them have the same listings so i will work with the ones i either already have experience with or that seem to understand the biz best.
So maybe i work with one that has great leads with small trading firms, another with better access to large banks, one who is more on the financial technology side, and one who does tech start ups.
I try not to do one offs (deal with a recruiter for a single position) but it happens of course.
There are some places i never would have thought to interview at because of preconceived ideas i had, but I'm glad the recruiter was able to talk me into it (eg, Bloomberg has a top rate technical side handling their trading platform and news distribution - i never would have thought they were so talented).
Uh no, Google is an advertising company. You know the terrible full page creepy ads taking over mobile that make the internet almost unusable and you can't block? Google is responsible for that.
With Google Jobs you're the product to be sold. Only this time it's not annoying ad's, they're offering your employment for sale, your life.
Quite the opposite. If you have a site with Adsense and a good chunk of mobile trafic they recommend you to install ads for mobiles and there are options to show a banner fixed to the bottom of the screen and another to display an ad that takes all the screen. Google is really contradictory in that regard if you see what they recommend for adsense editor and what they said in the quality guidelines for search.
EDIT: To clarify, when I was a recruiter, we could build profiles on candidates, buy information on candidates, etc. It was pretty trivially easy to get all the relevant info from linkedin alone. My thought is, why not want that? It'd save me wasting a candidate's time if I could glance through his linkedin and see he/she wasn't a good fit. Because if you had a private profile, 80% of the time I'd be able to pull your phone number from a resume you'd posted somewhere (that my company paid pennies to have access to) and give you a call, just to find out real quick if you're a good fit or not.
>Few people would hire me if they had access to my full Google profile.
Why is that? What is it that google knows about you that the rest of the world couldn't somewhat easily find out?
I'm mildly surprised, because I can't think of anything google knows about me that would prevent me from being hired. The only thing is maybe my porn history, which is all in incognito mode anyway, and really not even that shocking in terms of content.
Haha I had considered this. I really am curious though, could you at least point out what class of data would be dangerous? I mean, maybe I'm exposing this with no idea!
Nothing special, it's not like I would get arrested, but when you have the habit of exploring, for example, political texts of all kinds, someone skimming and cherry-picking could find plenty of stuff to mark me as "inappropriate", even if they're a negligible part of the whole.
It's essentially the idea "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."
Ultimately we have to accept some form of centralized control to reap the benefits of this technology at scale. Would you rather be using an AltaVista job search?
The assumption is I google search the things I know and enjoy, which is actually pretty accurate for time-at-home bored-surfing.
One problem is I also spend a huge amount of time googling stuff I'm completely uninterested in and hate doing. What wires do you jumper again to test a mid 00s whirlpool freezer icemaker to verify its motor works, again? Once its fixed I never want to see that again, certainly don't want to work as an appliance repairman.
Possibly there is an algorithm to analyze behavior. Oh he's searching for freebsd something or other maybe he'd like a sysadmin job. Oh look he's hate-searching for icemaker repair again, better not suggest appliance repair jobs.
How different would your private life be, if you thought there was a chance it could affect your future job prospects?
If everything in my personal life were known over the last 20 years, I'd probably be unemployable. Let's just start with politics. I was an activist in my early 20s. When I was young, I had some pretty radical ideas. Google knows that, there's plenty in my gmail about it. Should that really be used to inform my current job prospects, 20 years later?
Google knows every time I've taken a sick day and lied about it (I carry my android phone, and use google maps).
There's no reason for any of your information to be shared with the prospective employers here, no? The flow of information here is from the employers, via Google, to you, not the other way around. Your information, plus what you type, would just filter that info down to what you actually care about.
I agree-ish. A good solution needs to happen. I've been happy with Hired from both sides.
Recruiters are getting vile. Recently one contacted a friend and told my buddy that I had referred him. My buddy hit me up after the call mad that I'd told a recruiter he was looking.
I'd never met the recruiter but he'd added me on LI at some point in the past.
It annoys me when IT folks despise recruiters and refuse to acknowledge how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters. Non-stem folks would easily exchange places with you.
Be thankful that jobs search for you and not the opposite.
Should we be thankful that there are lots of realtors? We should be thankful there is enough real estate and the price is accessible (at least for some of us). Realtors are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.
I liken it to web ads. The worst web ads will attempt drive-by downloads or are simply obnoxious -- loud, obtrusive, clickjacking, forced-redirects, autoplayed video on pay-per-bandwidth connections, ill-designed for different form-factors, badly layered under/over content. Then again, some ads are perfectly tailored, unobtrusive, small, and fast. Most people generally don't complain about the latter. They don't install AdBlockers to avoid the latter. But the latter are collateral damage of people avoiding the former.
> how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters
This is not costless. I stopped answering my phone because it was causing context switches while at work and affecting my productivity. Eventually I figured out that I needed to unsubscribe from recruiter lists (some of which were probably email-confirmation spam traps) and to completely obfuscate my job search profiles while I was not searching.
It annoys me when IT folks despise recruiters and refuse to acknowledge how lucky they are for being stalked by recruiters.
It was kind of flattering until I realized most of them never works for me.
They'll call, ask a lot, ask me to submit a cv although my updated profile is already on LinkedIn. They'll ask about salary expectations and then I won't hear from them again.
(BTW: Yes, I walk from one nice job to the next, can't complain. But I've found that for me talking to recruiters is pointless most of the times. FTR: I got my current job through a recruiter, first time in ten years I actually got a job through a recruiter.)
Yeah I'm not sure it's that much of a blessing either. Lots are interested in talking to me, but most of the jobs are a bad fit and it's fairly time/energy consuming to figure out which recruiters have positions that are a good fit.
Because they are not the same, not even close. Recruiters are pursuing professionals for their skills, while stalkers are pursuing their targets for... more nefarious reasons. Strawman alert.
> How is recruiters persuing professionals for their skills different from stalkers persuing their targets for their looks?
The former (speaking of recruiters targeting modern technology professionals; 19th century naval recruiters are a different story) has less of a history of escalating to physical violence and forced taking of what is desired by the pursuer, a context difference which results in a significant difference in the level of reasonably perceived threat to autonomy and physical safety involved.
So is every company who ever employed me, who MUST make a lot more money from the labors of my body than they pay me to remain profitable. What's your point?
I wouldn't call triviality when I see smart friends begging a job for months just because they made a bad decision somewhere in their past. Maybe it's just me.
