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by notphilatall
5307 days ago
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What amazes me the most is that recruiters today are largely as awkward and ineffective as they were ten years ago. Maybe it's just that the worst recruiters are also the noisiest, but I would think that enough recruiters would have learned that building relationships is far more valuable than mass-emailing. As a developer, if you're in my rolodex as a recruiter / talent agent with a clue, I'll likely reach out when I'm considering career options -- even if it's several years down the road. As a recruiter, once you gather enough developers into that relationship, you should have your bonus-based salary covered... right? Edit: I wrote a quick one-pager that I routinely send to recruiters who are particularly bad at their supposed job, http://notphil.com/recruiter_tips.html |
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Is it? Let's play devil's advocate. I think the following are at least somewhat true statements:
1) most vacancies are for run-of-the-mill jobs. Hence, the average recruiter has more of those vacancies than those that would help "building a relationship". Chances are even that most recruiters have only run-of-the-mill jobs on offer. Given that, they cannot afford to spend much time aiming precisely. So, they use buckshot instead.
2) if a recruiter finds you a job you like, you should be off the market for years (freelancing excluded). If a recruiter needs to land x jobs per year, and people stay in those jobs for y years on average, he needs a) x good vacancies per year, and b) relationships with about x times y good developers. I do not know what are realistic values for x and y, but I guess x cannot be much smaller than 25 (otherwise, one could easily run for a month without placing somebody anywhere. That probably would upset his boss, or worry the self-employed recruiter), and y probably would be around 5 years or more. So, a 'good' recruiter would need a relationship with over 100 people. Once one knows those people, that is doable (working full time, that is about two hours a month per person to keep up with LinkedIn profiles, blogs, whatever), but finding them in the first place will be a challenge.
3) it may be more profitable to get a good relationship with employers than with developers because those employers will bring in the vacancies without which you cannot do anything.
4) pay for typical recruiters may be too low to attract people with the combination of technical and social skills needed to do the job well.