[ludicity]

I've managed to recruit in Perth, which is probably as cursed as it gets. The two things are:

1. I don't bother recruiting on the public market. They're genuinely too incompetent, and you'd have the issue you raised over and over. We sent exactly one candidate to a "normal" company and it was a total waste of time

2. For the remaining companies, I basically consult for free to help them smooth out their process. Places that are already very good but candidate-starved don't need this, but most of them could use a small hand. This is maybe non-trivial to replicate but I have a reasonable psychology background and that has given me some aptitude for feeling out cultural fits. Recruiters have set their rates so absurdly high for no service that I can do this, AND run two hour tech interviews personally with candidates AND undercut competitors and still hit that $1K per hour rate. It's just nuts

[anitil]

Interesting! I suppose my thought is that once you scale up to running a team of recruiters you end up incentivising behaviours like 'build a list of CVs', 'pattern-match on keywords' and other pointless nonsense. I have run in to a couple of decent recruiters and their behaviour was much closer to 'have a coffee and chat'. I hope you'll talk about your experience because I'm keen to hear about it.