How often has this happened to you?

[SueEllen]

They are a filter for the worst applicants at best, and a total hindrance at worst, and they get paid even if someone much better was filtered out.

Companies still prefer to recruit from contracts of people in their own organisation, and via people who have the skills who contact them themselves.

The first is because you are hardly like to put someone forward for a job who you think will be completely sh*t, and the second is because the person has shown some enthusiasm and initiative in getting to them.

[jmo21]

On a similar theme, a guy I know (friend of a friend, only spent a bit of time in his company) was moaning on Facebook about recruiters and HR in general.

He’d been trying to get an interview for an advertised permie role, but couldn’t get through the agents, and wasn’t getting anywhere with HR either. A mutual friend who is an agent responded, giving it a bunch of agency bulltulip.

So I PM’d him to give him some advice, and also so mutual friend wouldn’t see my opinion of agents, I didn’t want to offend her.

Turns out my sister in law works for the company he is applying to. I put him in touch, she speaks to the hiring manager, my mate gets the interview arranged for a week later, and a couple of days after that, he got the job.

Win all round you say?

Well, turns out sis in law gets a £5000 referral bonus (surprised places still do these so big, it was just a support role as well) which she splits with me. Paid for a nice hol with the missus and the kids.

So yes, agents and HR are useless. Anyone can put 10 years Sql Server exp, Project Managed the £5million WoopyDoo Project for AwesomeCorp etc on their CV, and waffle their way to sounding half decent to an agent/HR bod (IF they bother to ask, and doesn’t just shortlist the first 10 people from the 200 applications they receive).

They are a filter for the worst applicants at best, and a total hindrance at worst, and they get paid even if someone much better was filtered out.

[BolshieBastard]

1. Recruiter phones you about a position that matches your skill well.
2. Recruiter decides you are not suitable, or recruiter submits your CV, and HR decides you are not suitable.
3. You guess who the client is, and contact some leading technical people there.
4. They quickly recognize your skills, interview you, and hire you. In fact they are relieved to finally get somebody competent after having been passed so many cheap and useless candidates by HR and the recruiters.

1 and 2 yes. 3, half yes (can guess who client is but dont know anyone on site). 4, not in this scenario but I have a very good success to application ratio.

[darrenb]

Most people wouldn't go to that much trouble to get hired by a company that lets HR or inexperienced agents get in the way of them hiring the best people. That's one of the nice things about working in IT; everybody uses it, and most of them have learned the wisdom of not letting HR or external recruiters dictate the quality of candidates they meet.

OK from that I understand that you have never had a problem or delay picking up a new contract. It's a nice world for sure.

[kingcook]

Imagine a real-estate salesman is asked to go into a hospital and decide on the best of four heart surgeons. It's ridiculous. Most likely he will just pick the person who makes him the most commision

FTFY

[Gentile]

Most people wouldn't go to that much trouble to get hired by a company that lets HR or inexperienced agents get in the way of them hiring the best people. That's one of the nice things about working in IT; everybody uses it, and most of them have learned the wisdom of not letting HR or external recruiters dictate the quality of candidates they meet.

[darrenb]

1. Recruiter phones you about a position that matches your skill well.
2. Recruiter decides you are not suitable, or recruiter submits your CV, and HR decides you are not suitable.
3. You guess who the client is, and contact some leading technical people there.
4. They quickly recognize your skills, interview you, and hire you. In fact they are relieved to finally get somebody competent after having been passed so many cheap and useless candidates by HR and the recruiters.

This has happened to me several times, including this week. Whenever I am confronted with this scenario, my first ideas are (1) that the client is screwing the recruiter and cutting them out of the payment loop, or else (2) that the client is just contacting me via the recruiter initially to try and beat down my rate. But "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." The simplest explanation is (3) that HR and recruiters simply don't know how to hire engineers.

Imagine a real-estate salesman is asked to go into a hospital and decide on the best of four heart surgeons. It's ridiculous. Most likely he will just pick the personality most similar to himself, the biggest blagger.

The general point that comes out is: Non-professionals should never be in charge of evaluating professionals. I think the legal profession has actually codified this principle somewhere. Information Technology has a lot of catching-up to do.

P.S. boomed