Why Recruiters Are Useless
Published at 07:59 on 13 July 2016
Those who most need help finding employment are those new in the market for a particular line of work, either as a result of recently graduating from school or a mid-life career change. But recruiters are hired at the behest of* the employer, and candidates with no experience are common as dirt, meaning employers need no special help in finding same. The candidates employers need help finding are those with specific, specialized experience.
But recruiters lack that experience, too, which seriously limits their ability to judge and match candidates with positions. Moreover, the positions being recruited for tend to pay better than the job of recruiting for them, so this state of affairs is inevitable. Thus if you’re an experienced candidate, recruiters are still of little or no help; they’ll just pester you with false lead after false lead.
I speak from experience here, having at one time been a freshly-minted CS graduate and now being a senior-level programmer. It went from recruiters being uninterested in me to me being uninterested in the (inevitably mismatched) opportuinities recruiters pestered me about.
Given that, is it any surprise that the low road dominates in the recruiting industry? Why seek people with any knowledge at all to recruit in a field? Just hire the cheapest workers in India you can find, even if they can barely speak coherent English.† They’re fated to do a bad job anyhow, so why even try? After all, doing a good job isn’t the point. Your business model is based on both candidate and employer making an unwise decision (i.e. to use you), not on providing value to either.
This leaves out the recruiters hired by busy employers whose staffing departments are themselves understaffed, of course. But when sleaze dominates an industry, the odds aren’t good. So if I see a recruiting agency’s name on a job listing, I pass. And when one cold calls me and leaves a voice mail, I just delete the message.
* Note I did not write “paid by”. That is because they are not. To claim otherwise is to state what I call the Recruiter Lie. Does anyone think employers have an unlimited orchard of money trees to harvest for paying wages and salaries? Of course not! They budget those costs, and the cost for paying recruiters ultimately comes out of the same pot for paying wages and salaries. One will come at the expense of the other.
† Which, given they are the cheapest, will be the case; competent English speakers will seek more honorable and better-paying work.