I learned how to hire & train recruiters to work for me pretty effectively for certain pieces of recruiting. To you, what makes a recruiter good and/or not good? Maybe I can share some thoughts on how to improve the not good parts!
They can be told to look for certain keywords, sure, but that doesn't, IME, seem to be sufficient to screen; obviously bad résumé use the right words (but in the wrong ways / in ways that to an expert clearly indicate a lack of understanding) so they pass the filter.
Brief technical screens can be done, but again, without technical knowledge, the recruiter can't know if the answer given by the candidate matches the answer they have in an answer key, if they are provided with one. Even relatively simple technical questions might have more than one right answer, or the answer might just be phrased in a way that a recruiter doing a human version of lexical edit distance isn't going to think passes, but any engineer would say would.
The problem in all of these is the lack of technical knowledge. Tech recruiters, on the whole IME, are trying to recruiter for a role that might as well be "town wizard". Any theoretical recruiter with technical knowledge would never work in recruiting — they'd fetch more in pretty much any real technical role, like an engineering role.¹
The other problem, again IME, is that there is a wide pool of candidates with very little actual experience, though they may have worked any number of years. Finding someone with actual knowledge and understanding of software engineering requires sifting through a lot of chaff.
¹One might see this as people aren't willing to sufficiently pay enough for recruiters / if you want a recruiter with technical knowledge, you need to compensate them adequately enough that other opportunities are not worth their time. I would agree here.
Here's basically how I did it:
- pick one job to focus on, where it's near impossible for a non-technical person to tell if someone is likely to be a fit, such as a full stack web developer with experience in a JavaScript and a backend language
- get 5 resumes, 1 obvious fit, 3 maybes, and 1 obvious no, all of which look great based on keyword soup, so an automated QA person and webmaster might look like a full stack developer, and the waiter who took a programming course 10 years ago has no shot
- provide any additional filtering criteria
- in a verbal conversation, ask the recruiters to rate, and explain, each rating
Try that. It's not perfect, and it's better for positions you can describe discrete hiring criteria. The bar for the recruiter is not filtering out the no and maybes, it's screening in the maybes and yesses into a guesstimate sorted list. You can focus in 3 & 4 list. Then you can start with obvious matches, keep going until the list starts feeling pretty thin, and draw a line based on your judgement call & supply of applicants.
Once you develop that working relationship with a recruiter, never let go! I have a handful of recruiters that I work with because they quickly absorb the feedback I give and I never see another candidate with that missing requirement again. If a recruiter shows they can't adjust/learn from your feedback, find one that does.
I was talking more about the building a recruiting pipeline to help us scale product/engineering. Generally, a good recruiter is one who saves the org time, and a bad one costs us time. The costs could come from having to iterate our process and get aligned on candidates, or it (usually) could come from having to reject a lot of candidates that might seem good but have some kind of systemic issue). Sometimes a recruiter can only seem to pull in C+ or B talent, and after a while you start to get convinced that's your bar for greatness because you're not even seeing solid candidates anymore.
How can I tell if a recruiter is any good when I'm interviewing / vetting them? It's kind of hard to tell without them getting some candidates in front of us. I can look at their past, but how much of that might be attributed to the company they were working for? When you recruit for a sexy company, it's probably really easy to build teams cause good talent seeks you out. Our company isn't sexy and well-known yet, so how can I tell if a recruiter will be able to get the talent we're looking for?
Bingo. If you have to go out and find people, you're gonna have a hard time.
Care to share more about this process? Or link out to a blog post or something?
But also, you gotta people what you really want, starting with the job description. In my personal experience, 75% of unqualified applicants apply because they thought they were a fit when they never had a chance. Saying "seeking high energy team player who likes coding" is gonna attract everyone you didn't ever want to apply to do just that.