[kelnos]

> If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company.

I'm torn on this. Having dedicated recruiting staff isn't cheap, and I'm not sure a small company could justify this unless they're constantly hiring. But I've gotten soooo much low-effort, generic recruiting spam from third-party recruiters that, were I running a company, I'd only resort to those sorts of recruiters if I had no choice.

[karaterobot]

Oh, I wasn't even thinking about recruiting staff, I was specifically thinking about outsourcing technical screening to a third-party company.

I'm specifically thinking of the time I was asked to do a karat technical screen when applying for a position with a small company, and it was a big red flag for me. This is a service that does a remote, screen-share-based technical screening. My view is, you're only going to get a worse outcome with this approach compared to doing the screening yourself: either you're spending a lot of time going through the recording afterward, in which case you might as well have just done it yourself in the first place, or else you are just looking at the feedback by the third party company and deciding based on what they tell you. Since the third-party screener doesn't know you business, product, culture, or tech stack, that seems like a terrible idea.

People will often acknowledge that hiring (or not hiring) is the riskiest thing a company can do, and yet take stupid shortcuts to save a little time on it. That's the mentality of companies I want to avoid.

[pcloadletter_]

While it's not fair, what I've settled on is this: if they can't spend for in-house recruiting, they probably can't afford me. This is based on ~20 years of this consistently happening. Again, not fair, but I have limited time to do job searching and empirically 3rd party recruiters have always hit a dead end.