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Comment by DavidWoof | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, what is the point of tech recruiters? The tiny filtering they do for employers could be automated or done by a minimum wage worker. I don't see they have any value for candidates. Most of them just cruise the job boards doing keyword matches between applicants and jobs.

Why haven't they disappeared like other middlemen such as travel agents?

Is it just for protection against civil rights suits? I realize there's some highend headhunters that do real work, but the bulk of the industry seems worthless to me.

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Have you ever done recruiting? It's incredibly time consuming, and in the vast majority of cases the recruiter executes a process that ends up with a "no hire" decision.

Companies can't afford to have their employees spending all their time doing the recruiting process so the key point of recruiters is to do as much of the work as possible to free the time of the employers.

Once the decision is established to use a recruiter, then which recruit4er an employer chooses to work with depends on corporate priorities. The larger the company, the more likely it is to have a human resources department and therefore the more likely to have a "recruiter selection process" that emphasises things like size of the recruiting company, global reach, breadth of services, time in business etc etc. These bigger recruiters yes, sometimes (but not always) have "tech recruiters" with no particular knowledge of tech. Smaller companies that have the discretion to choose to work with any recruiter are more likely to work with whatever recruiter they ,know through personal connections, or whichever recruiter last hassled them on the phone for work.

I'd note that all of the above also applied to travel agents and other middleman jobs. The job was time-consuming, companies couldn't afford to have their employees spend a lot of time on it, the majority of cases wound up with no sale, etc. And technology largely supplanted it.

Although you're not explicit, it seems that your post is suggesting that the primary value-added function of tech recruiters is as a filter for companies. But be honest, what useful filtering can possibly be done by a tech recruiter that doesn't know the tech? The vast majority of tech recruiters aren't capable of anything beyond keyword matching and basic "are you presentable" filtering (which can have important legal implications in the US, of course).

Anyway, whenever this topic comes up, one of the top 2% recruiters who know their business well pops up and claims recruiters do all sorts of useful things. Well, yeah, maybe you're part of that top tier that does great work. But that's not the bulk of the industry, the bulk of the industry is the army of know-nothings at CyberCoders other large job mills. And they're very successful, but I honestly don't know why.

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