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Ah, I see what you mean now. > One friend of mine, who happens to be a head of the HR at a medium-sized company, told me, that for each publicly posted SWE job ad they get several 100s of applications. So they don't even bother to review the submitted applications anymore (!). Instead, they merely wait for the recruitment agencies to pick up the ad and find some reasonable number of "vetted" candidates via their own channels and bring them in to an interview. This is kind of a poor analogy, but I think a lot about parallels between talent agencies and the entertainment industry. Prima facie, there shouldn't need to be middlemen involved, right? And yet, there are, and they vary in quality from being horrible to being stars that the talent absolutely prefers to have. Interestingly enough, plenty of companies that try to disintermediate them can end up getting reputations as being talent unfriendly (IE Spotify), to the extent that the disrupting competitor inevitably plays ball. I guess what I think is fascinating is that your anecdote may reflect this. Frankly, I think the job application is not useful. Creating the equivalent of an effective "spam filter" or ranking for job applications is challenging, so there's no reason to expect it to always be clogged with poor match applications. Having been a hiring manager before, it's really, really time consuming to go through low quality applicant leads. It's time consuming enough that your job is nearly intractable unless you have an in house or contingent recruiter that does a good enough job at separating the wheat from the chaff. I've had to play recruiter and hiring manager at the same time before, and it was more than a full time job. Good recruiters are worth their weight in gold, and then some. What you want as a hiring manager is a lead, not an "application" and in order to get that, you need some kind of a pre-qualification process. I've had some really awful experiences with recruiters, some of whom will join my LI network, have an intro with me about a position, never respond, and then re-post that same position on LI. Then again, I've had professional recruiters that are extremely well informed, shephard me through the process with very well defined expectations of timeframes, and timely communication at every step up to and including a potential rejection. What I'm trying to get at is that you seem to think that the problem is too many middlemen, but I think the problem is not enough -- that is, the middlemen have an important job to do, but there are too many incompetent ones that are costing both companies and candidates valuable missed opportunities. |
Can't agree more. That said, there are so diminishingly few good recruiters, that it seems like we all would have been much better, if there weren't any recruiters at all.