A Tech Recruiters
It was late September-ish when Ryan Bednar got the call.
“Ryan, I’ve got five engineering candidates here in my office, waiting for you,” the tech recruiter said to Bednar, co-founder and CTO of Tutorspree, a site that enables searches for local tutors.
Oh no! Did Bednar forget to mark it on his schedule? Those engineers drove from all over the New York City area to see him, the recruiter said. How could he have not known about this?
Oh, right, right: Bednar didn’t know about it because he never saw these engineers’ resumes. He’d only talked to this recruiter once. She never sent any resumes for him to review. It was, he said, an entirely fabricated meeting coming from an extremely aggressive headhunter who perhaps didn’t understand that building a business relationship includes not lying to potential clients.
He didn’t go to the meeting.
Headhunters in the technology space have always been like wild dingoes: a bit voracious. But this is just crazy, and it shows that the bad economy is making it worse, IT hiring managers say. “The bad economy has definitely made recruiters more hungry and aggressive in their tactics,” Bednar says. “This was a really strange tactic. I felt bad for the candidates for being duped by her, but there was no way I would do business with someone like that.”
It’s fun to gripe about tech recruiters who’ve gone feral. Just about everybody in technology has a story, either from the candidate part of his life, the hiring manager part of her career, or both. I already put together a rogues’ gallery of headhunter horror stories in Tales From The Crypt of Tech Recruiter Cluelessness, so now it’s time to hop over the desk and see what it looks like from the boss’s point of view.
As much as we all love to heap ridicule on the heads of the egregiously clueless, it’s more productive to get some input from a CTO who’s found the tiny percentage of recruiters who actually make his or her life easier. So read on for stories you may well relate to, along with some input on how to find tech recruiters who get it. (And for an even more detailed look at how to source a good tech recruiter, please read How to Find a Resume Pro Who Understands What the *&^% You Do for a Living.)
The CTO Who Would Rather Not Work for $10/Hour, Thanks Anyway
Mark A. Herschberg is an MIT-educated CTO who gets many, many calls from headhunters, as well as e-mail spam. He’s hired over 100 technologists, has interviewed close to 1,000, and has reviewed thousands of resumes. As both a candidate and hiring manager, he’s worked with over 100 recruiters and has been contacted by hundreds more.
One firm tried the same trick as the recruiter who tried to set up a meeting behind Bednar’s back, but this one went one step further: He tried to get Herschberg to interview candidates by telling an executive assistant to “Just put him on Mark's calendar,” Herschberg recalls.
“Mark will show up,” the recruiter assured Herschberg’s assistant.
Herschberg also has a blacklist of recruiting firms that spam him. For example, headhunters write, telling Herschberg that "Our database indicates you have the right background for a positions as VBA junior programmer." It’s a shotgun approach: The recruiters send e-mail based on their keyword searches. Herschberg gets this type of spam recruiting e-mail all the time, to the effect of “I saw you did xyz three years ago. Would you like to do abc for $10/hour?”
Again, these headhunters’ tactics are egregious because they’re looking to make a quick, easy buck. They’re not out to build relationships. They do simple buzzword searches and spam the candidates they turn up without vetting those candidates to determine if the position actually fits the tech professionals’ backgrounds. Any technical recruiter worth her salt would not offer a $10/hour position to a CTO unless, perhaps, she were darn sure the candidate was, for example, actually fresh out of school and that the title of CTO was just window dressing to fancy-up a startup’s roster. Otherwise, she’s not only insulting a CTO and wasting his time; she’s earning herself a name as a spammer and is likely to be blacklisted.
The CEO Whom Bad Headhunters Forced to Flee to India
Michael Kaiser-Nyman, CEO and founder of Impact Dialing, an auto-dialer with a hosted predictive dialer and voice broadcasting, got a call from a recruiter who told him that the recruiter had a senior web engineer from Yahoo who was “really interested in working for us,” Kaiser-Nyman recalls.
Kaiser-Nyman told him they weren't hiring. The recruiter asked if he could send along the resume
regardless. When Kaiser-Nyman got the e-mail, the resume showed the applicant's background was in Java and PHP. Kaiser-Nyman replied and told the recruiter that his was a Rails shop, not to mention that, well, not to be redundant, but they weren't hiring.
Several weeks later, Kaiser-Nyman experienced déjà vu. One of Impact Dialing’s engineers got an e-mail out of the blue saying that another recruiter had a senior web engineer from Yahoo with experience in Java and PHP who was really interested in the company.
“I'm still not sure what these recruiters' racket was, but clearly they weren't listening,” Kaiser-Nyman says.
It might not be too hard to see why Kaiser-Nyman has never worked with a recruiter, ever, period. Actually, he says he’s never had any luck in hiring developers on-shore, for that matter. It’s not that he hasn’t tried. “When I made my first hires, I tried really hard to find someone local, but there just aren't enough good developers to go around, and companies like Groupon and Google pay much more than a startup like my company can,” he says. “We of course offered large equity stakes, but with such good pay from established companies and even small stock options having the potential for large payoff, we just couldn't find anybody good in the Bay Area.”
So Kaiser-Nyman got a referral to a small off-shore development shop in India that he’s been “very happy” with. When Impact Dialing needed to hire a couple more people, they asked around and found another company with a similar caliber of staff that they were able to hire.
In lieu of relying on recruiters, he’s had to work hard to find decent programmers on his own. “It was difficult to find these firms, and both of them have very limited availability because they, too, are in high demand,” he says. “The best way I've found is by networking and asking for referrals.”
It’s not that Kaiser-Nyman wouldn’t like to hire recruiters. If you’ve got more money than time, it might be a good idea, he says. If, that is, you find a recruiter who actually listens to you. He was approached by some specialized recruiters who only do Ruby on Rails, for example. It seemed like those recruiters actually do a good job, Kaiser-Nyman says. But the recruiters were expensive, like all recruiters, and for a young company like his, it's better for Kaiser-Nyman to spend his time rather than his money.
How to Find a Good Recruiter if You Haven’t Already Fled to India
Now, a good recruiter, that’s something different. Herschberg has worked with several.
A good headhunter is one who’s actually read and understood a candidate’s resume, whether or not the recruiter has a technology background himself, Herschberg says.
Beyond that, a good recruiter has taken time to research the client, including the client’s corporate culture. She’s gotten to know her candidates. She’s essentially playing matchmaker between a person, not just a skill set, and a client, which is also going to have a personality vis-a-vis corporate culture.
If a recruiter isn’t doing that due diligence, he’s just relying on scripts and keyword searches. That’s nothing that a hiring manager can’t do himself. “It really comes down to, ‛I can go on Monster as well as they can and pull down keywords,’” Herschberg says. “What value are they giving me?”
And here’s where we get to Judy Kramer, a headhunter who’s everything a terrible recruiter should reform himself into being. As much as Herschberg adores bashing bad recruiters (“I could go on for hours,” he says), recruiters like Kramer get him downright laudatory. “When I’m hiring as a manager, I know this person is looking for a compatible match, not just that they’re using these scripts and blasting 10,000 people with this spam and blasting the hiring manager,” he says.
Back when Herschberg was a candidate, whenever Kramer used to call, she’d go above and beyond. “She doesn’t just say, ‛You wanted xyz, and it pays this much,’” Herschberg says. “Instead, she says, ‛This is whom you’d be working for; this is their CIO; and this is what their company culture is like.’”
Likewise, now that Herschberg’s in charge of hiring, Kramer has kept up the relationship, feeding him candidates who are real, live, flesh-and-blood people whom she knows Herschberg would like to work with. “She’ll say things like ‛This is your candidate: He really enjoys working in your industry,’” Herschberg says. “Beyond the resume, she talks about the personality and the fit.”
Herschberg’s used Kramer close to 15 years. He thinks that part of the reason she’s so good is that Kramer is a sole proprietor, of Remark Staffing. Such independent outfits are “Usually better than big companies,” Herschberg says, probably because sole proprietors have learned that if you don’t sell, you don’t eat. They know this is what you have to do. Their whole business is relationships.
Contrast that with a big company, which typically has a partnership with a Fortune 500 company. Big outfits like that know they’re getting a couple hundred openings a year from their clients, Herschberg notes. “They know they can just throw bodies against the wall. Eventually they’ll make money off of a subset of them. It’s all volume.”
Herschberg doesn’t have a lot more advice to give companies on how to find a good recruiter like Kramer or others with whom he works. All the good recruiters he’s worked with, whom he can count on one hand, all found him as a candidate and responded to his e-mail or posting. They called, they talked to him, and they got to know him. From there, they built a relationship.
Will LinkedIn replace recruiters? Herschberg thinks the answer is yes and no. As far as keyword matches go, well, Herschberg can just do those himself. He has a good network. He has lots of relationships, lots of connections to people. He can search around and find people in his network to match keywords.
What Herschberg needs is to find someone, out of the 300 people who match a given keyword search, who fit the culture. The very best recruiters can do that for him. They separate the wheat from the chaff for their clients, and they save him “Tons of work.”
But Herschberg estimates that the bottom 30% of headhunters are “horrible used-car salesmen spammers.” Another 30% to 40% are useless. “They’ll get in resumes but don’t understand what these words mean.” Maybe 20% mean well and try but aren’t very good at it. And of the final 10%, or so, maybe 6% are good. They’ll work out once in a while and won’t be a big waste of time, but he advises other managers: Don’t expect much.
A handful, the top 3% to 4%, are worth every penny and will get you a good person very quickly, Herschberg says. “With Judy [Kramer], every time she sends me a resume, that person gets an instant interview,” he says. “I don’t have to do a phone screen, even. If she says ‛This one’s OK,’ I know it’s not a waste of time.’”
Here’s to the top 3% to 4%. May they go forth and spread their progeny amongst us. May their number become multiplied, lest we’re forced to begin mad scientist cloning experiments.
Finally, if you’ve had a bad headhunter experience and require a little group therapy, add your own Stupid Recruiter Tale in the comments.
Let the grousing begin!
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