Color me naive, but why is this a bad thing?
If your listing reaches more people, it's ultimately better for you.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.
It's the fee, which is a percentage of the employee's salary. That's much more than the listing fee on Indeed, likely by orders of magnitude.
There's also the downside that some scummy person is representing themselves as being affiliated with you, when they're not. So if they do scummy things to the candidate (which they likely would, given what they're doing to you), then you are painted in a bad light. Think of situations that HNers complain about here, and then imagine that it's your company being (wrongfully) dragged for having lousy interviewing practices.
The fee is the most common issue cited by employers.
I generally respond (as a candidate) to get a sense of the problem. I can assure you that bad representation is the biggest problem. It’s not uncommon for recruiters to say something really problematic (bluntly racist or sexist) or impose excessive interview steps to filter candidates, without knowledge of the industry. I often know the hiring manager well enough to give feedback and they are generally horrified.
I'm actively interviewing for new positions, and the amount of stuff that startups (most out of Silicon Valley) are doing is absolute batshit. From 2-hour tech screens to 19-hour unpaid interviews WORKING ON THEIR OWN CODE BASE, I will not be surprised when the DoL does a crackdown on the interview process. I have been in the software development industry for decades. If you can't tell if a candidate qualifies after 45-90 (tops!) minutes of interviews, you may want to look internally for problems. All they are really doing is rejecting a ton of super smart developers, many who may have disabilities.
Oh, and then there was that one company who told me I had no knowledge of a language and framework I am actively contributing to, and have built robust, scalable enterprise apps out of. "We are looking for experts of <language x> and also <framework y> and <framework z>." That was literally the message they sent me. They did NOT know about my contributions because my dumb ass tries not to show off stuff like that when looking for employment as I want to be weighed on my ability to write awesome code and not weighed on a popularity contest.
>> my dumb ass tries not to show off stuff like that when looking for employment as I want to be weighed on my ability to write awesome code and not weighed on a popularity contest.
I know you likely learned from this, but it's worth repeating especially for people who don't often go looking for jobs.
Getting hired is a sales process. You are the product. It doesn't really matter what you can do - that's probably not what you are selling to the interviewer.
What you are selling is the fact that _you_ (and you alone) are the best choice for the position. That means a combination of skill set and personality.
So specifically, being "popular", or "known", or "admired" in the tech community is a feature, one which is very valuable to potential employers. Being popular means you're (probably) not a dick, and that's worth knowing.
I say this with respect, but there were likely a bunch of folk they interviewed who can write code just as awesome as yours (at least in their eyes). I don't mean that to demean you, but clearly a) it's impossible to determine code awesomeness in an interview - it takes months for awesome code to even surface - and b) there are a _lot_ of people out there writing awesome code.
In Western culture it is considered polite to be modest, but being modest in an interview, or on a CV is a bug, not a feature. You need to sell, and sell hard, every possible accomplishment - without being a dick.
Writing awesome code is not enough. Fitting in with the team (ie demonstrating social skills), having deep knowledge of some framework (enough to contribute, and have those contributions accepted), publishing or presenting at conferences (ability to communicate and articulate), are all huge box ticks in the recruiting process.
I would imagine it's for the same reason that many big musical acts go to lengths to make it difficult for concert tickets to be resold. It's important to them to manage their relationship with their customers, and they simply don't want all or most of their tickets essentially being auctioned off to the highest bidders even if that is technically the most economically efficient allocation according to some extremely short-sighted interpretation of an Econ 101 textbook. Heck, it's the same reason Apple sometimes has long wait times for a new popular iPhone model instead of holding an auction and shipping to the highest bidders first.
I think you're right, it's what separates companies classing the same/similar behavior as unwanted, even illegal (grey market luxury watch dealers) vs encouraged (food delivery).
The relationship with the client and it's perceived value. Coming to think about it, probably a Michelin-star high-end restaurant would shoo away a doordash person coming to pick up takeaway.
If the recruiter is saying he's been hired by a company to find people for a given job posting, and he hasn't actually been hired by the company, that's fraud.
I have a strange case about this. Several years ago I was looking for a job. I found a listing for a position in a company and apply for it, then it went silence for a couple of weeks. I later searched for a posting that seems to be identical to the listing of the company I first applied (though it was presented in recruiter's name and at the time, I was naive enough not to check that it's identical to the previous one. Granted, the company hasn't advertised the position at the time the recruiter did)
It wasn't until the recruiter tell me to proceed with the on-site interview would I learned that in fact, the company the recruiter is seeking candidates for is the same company I applied and failed earlier. This leaves me scratch my head why the company didn't respond to job posting I applied directly, but decided to pick me up when I was referred to by recruiter. They could have turned down recruiter's referral about me and I won't be surprised one bit.
Fraud, misrepresentation, front-running, and a potential avenue for further scams (e.g., demanding payment from candidates, collecting personal information). For both candidates and companies, this may mean exclusion from consideration due to misrepresentations or concerns over exclusivity.
How is this different than doordash coming to pick up food from a restaurant and delivering to me? I think it's very similar, they charge an extra fee, restaurants might not sign up for this and it's not the restaurant employees handing me the food.
In this case, neither party has really signed-up for it. To the candidate, it might not matter that much if they don't have a negative experience with the recruiter, but to the company whose job listing was straight-up plagiarized and outranked on the same job board (with a big recruiting fee on top), it's very different. With doordash, you at least agree to the fee, right?
Well, for one either you or the restaurant wanted Doordash to do that job, and Doordash isn't misrepresenting themselves as if they were working for the restaurant (without the restaurant's knowledge).
Of course, with that said, there was some service a few years ago (maybe it's Doordash?) that was generating landing pages and buying domains pretending they were the restaurant. But that's also very shady.
> Doordash isn't misrepresenting themselves as if they were working for the restaurant
From what I head, the various delivery services have been setting up websites that pretend to be the actual restaurant's site, but list their own phone number. So they're committing fraud, too.
I don’t underdeveloped why you people are ignoring my second paragraph and repeating what I said. I guess trying to cover all bases in a message doesn’t work anymore, I gotta cover all bases in a single small paragraph, since posting a gotcha takes precedence over reading the whole message.
Delivery services DO misrepresent restaurants. If you search for a specific restaurant in your area, you will get lots of SEO spam that is not from the actual restaurant.
There's also the downside that some scummy person is representing themselves as being affiliated with you, when they're not. So if they do scummy things to the candidate (which they likely would, given what they're doing to you), then you are painted in a bad light. Think of situations that HNers complain about here, and then imagine that it's your company being (wrongfully) dragged for having lousy interviewing practices.