Good golly, how exciting! It was Groupon itself, e-mailing David about Development Opportunities at their Growing Company!
“We're always looking for folks with solid skills that can make a positive contribution to our continued success,” the tech recruiter gushed. If David were open to a quick conversation, it would be great if he could forward a current resume!
David posted the letter on his personal site.
A commenter, jrmehle, envisioned the preliminary screening interview might go something like this:
Recruiter: “How many years of Rails experience do you have?”
David: “ALL OF THEM.”
Yes, the recruiter had been trying to headhunt David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails web development framework, a man whom Google and O’Reilly had voted Best Hacker of the Year 2005 at O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention (OSCON).
“You’d think that the job of the recruiter would be to narrow down the field of suitable candidates by actually doing some research on them,” DHH (as he’s known) has written on the site for 37signals, the web-based software development firm at which he’s a partner. “If they’re just going to spam people from e-mails they find on tech sites, why not just pay some shady Russians to do it?”
The problem, he continues, is that tech recruiters’ lack of preparation and their general cluelessness about technology or tech players breeds “outright animosity.”
“And that’s too bad, since I’m sure that there are companies out there who could actually use good recruiters to screen and find talent for them,” DHH writes. “As things stand right now, though, I would never recommend the use of recruiters to anyone for a technical position. You’re much more likely to be associated with the incompetence of the recruiter than you are to find highly skilled technical talent.”
Here’s a rogues’ gallery of anecdotes that show how deeply clueless tech recruiters can be. I also came up with a tiny bit more advice—beyond “avoid them like rats in the plague years”—for technical professionals regarding getting something useful out of a recruiter. And if you’re a technical manager whose job it is to source your staff, please read A Tech Recruiters’ Guide to Driving Hiring Managers Insane.
But first, input from a former pest.
Brett Gallagher: Recovering Technical Recruiter
One Monday, Brett Gallagher had a new requirement: He needed to find an IT Program Manager to do computer programming and web development for a large technology company in its Michigan offices. Gallagher was very eager to get started, because he knew the payout for finding someone to fill the position was “huge.”
So he did what a lot of tech recruiters do: Just a touch of light research. He jumped on CareerBuilder and began calling person after person. He had all week to find a candidate, but by midweek, he had nobody. So he started calling people who were, shall we say, not an intuitive fit for the position at hand. In fact, he strayed so far from the requirement, one person told him to “Call back when I get all my facts straight,” Gallagher says.
It’s not that he was lying about the job or making up facts about the opening. He simply wasn’t prepared to make the calls. Gallagher had absolutely no background in computer programming or web development and worked for a recruiting firm that valued speed over quality of contact.
Is his story rare? Alas, no. Candidates get dropped from consideration “more than you would think,” Gallagher says, because it’s a numbers game. Even if technical recruiters for every assignment would like to find the right person who is at the right point in his or her life and career and is available and exactly fits the requirements, well... it’s probably best to just throw a bucket of people at the client to see if someone sticks.
“During my experience I was assigned too many accounts” that were reminiscent of DHH’s story, Gallagher says. “I was often told to do brief research about the company online and begin calling qualified candidates immediately. The whole idea behind this, although I do not agree, is the numbers game. The more people you can call and get on the phone, the better your odds of finding the right person.”
And then, of course, we have the technologists who populate the bucket that gets thrown at the client. One such:
Lee T. Ayres: Some Guy Who Must Have Been Talking to Himself
Soon after moving to Chicago in 2000, Lee T. Ayres found himself laid off. The very next day, he scheduled a meeting with a tech recruiter.
She looked his resume over and asked him what kind of company he was interested in working for.
Well, he said, he always preferred the more personal feeling of smaller companies. Yeah, he liked small companies a lot. He really didn’t want to work for some great big outfit.
She dug around in her files for a moment. "You might be interested in a company called ‘AMA,’” she said. “I think they’re a pretty big company that does medical equipment."
“Clearly, she neither listened to what I had said nor had any idea who the American Medical Association was,” says Ayres, now a senior analyst at Interhack Corp. “I excused myself and went home.”
Bill Horne: Knowledgeable in SQL, not in Being the Savior of Mankind
A few years back, business was slow, so Bill Horne decided to take an outside job to keep busy. He sent résumés to various temp agencies and heard back from one.
The recruiter gushed about his qualifications, sending him to interview at a company located over 40 miles from his house. When he got there, they said a key player had left to start his own firm and they needed someone to start right away, so he took the job.
It turned out that they’d already had someone working on their code—COBOL, which Horne knew well. That person was the owner's son-in-law. The son-in-law left to start his own Internet-based company in hopes of cashing in on the bubble. The son-in-law also left behind a mountain of unfinished business. The company's day-to-day billing was being cranked out of an ancient homegrown AR/AP system, which was the COBOL part of the operation. The son-in-law had promised the boss that he could tie it all together using Microsoft SQL Server. That was the part they expected Horne to handle.
The problem was, Horne had never worked on Microsoft SQL Server. He’d done SQL using IBM DB2: another animal entirely. “The new environment, the new coding rules, the new—well, the new everything—was too big a learning curve to climb in the time allotted,” he says.
So they fired him. Months later, he found out the headhunter had misrepresented his skills to the employer, and she got fired as a result.
The problem with recruiters is that their clients have unrealistic expectations, Horne says. Such expectations prevent headhunters from being the human resource professionals they were in the past –and could be again, if they were given the luxury of the time to source good job fits. “Their customers have sunk to demanding that they send someone with exactly the skills and experience the company (thinks it) wants, so the company can put them in place on a Monday and have them gone by Friday, with every task completed, every document updated, every form filled in, and every ego stroked,” Horne says. “Real people don't work that way, but companies in the technical sphere want to pretend that they do, so headhunters have been intimidated into an over-dependence on keyword search tools that pick [a buzzword like] ‛SQL’ out of my résumé, and they offer it up as if it read ‛Microsoft SQL Server forms design, reincarnation, inter-process communication, loaves and fishes, and automatic FTP interactions."
Nowadays, Horne answers a lot of Craigslist ads. He says he’d be “overjoyed” to find a recruiter who he felt actually cared about his career instead of just his own, or even to meet one who might be willing to at least try to understand what "SQL" means. “I can't work miracles; and headhunters who want to pretend that I or others like me can are killing their industry,” he says.
How to Find a Legitimate Recruiter
As for Brett Gallagher, he left the tech recruiting business in August. The recovering recruiter is now a Relationship Manager for Open Connection Media LLC. His advice for how to find a legitimate recruiter: Ask a lot of questions.
“Obviously, the recruiter is going to be asking a lot of questions, but it is perfectly acceptable for the job seeker to ask just as many questions, if not more, of the recruiter,” he says.
He found that potential candidates did, in fact, ask a lot of questions—at least, when they weren’t hanging up on him. But all too often, people were either very excited about the job opportunity or intimidated by Gallagher being a recruiter, he says. In those cases, candidates let Gallagher ask the questions, and all they wanted to do was bypass the screening period and get to the face-to-face interview.
It’s great for people to get excited, he says, especially in an economy like this. But we still need to ask about specifics, such as company size, the identity of the position’s direct report, the specific industry of the company, and what clients the company deals with. Ask questions that seem simple, as well, such as what hours the job entails, what are the shift types, or whether there are any premiums, Gallagher suggests. If a recruiter misses any of this kind of low-hanging fruit, she’s obviously ill-prepared. (For a deep dive into finding a recruiter, please read How to Find a Resume Pro Who Understands What the *&^% You Do for a Living.)
At the very least, even if it’s too late to save yourself, and even if you can’t think of any reason to use a tech recruiter, please, send this article to the next tech recruiter who inflicts cluelessness upon you.
We are optimists, are we not? We believe in the possibility for redemption of all misguided souls, is it not so? We do not believe recruiters are evil, and we do not believe that they are incapable of doing some good somewhere, sometime.
Let us, together, attempt to slap a bit of sense into their heads, instead of just slapping them to make them go away.
And in the meantime: If you have had a bad experience, add a Stupid Recruiter Tale of your own in the comments. We will all commiserate.
- Subscribe to RSS Feed
- Mark as New
- Mark as Read
- Bookmark
- Subscribe
- Email to a Friend
- Printer Friendly Page
- Report Inappropriate Content
