Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

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1) Crooting is, more or less, the same racket as a dating service. The job of the crooter is to introduce the desperate to the undesirable, hope that both sides decide there's a match, and if so skim a little profit off one side for their matchmaking services. For that reason they don't want to drop role specifics (company name, details about job) until they think they have your ear.

2) Crooters are afraid that if they tell you the company name in their initial contact email, you will attempt to snipe them by applying for the job yourself without their help. Once they have you on the horn, they can instruct you to only deal with the company through them. Most (especially young) developers will be good little do-bees and do just that.

> Why is it always some mumbling about “growth opportunities” and how I’m a “good match” and so on?

3) You think a crooter actually reads your résumé? Bahahahahaha... Oh, you sweet summer child. Crooters only ever come across your résumé. Translation: Their ATS snarfed it up while crawling the big tech job sites (Indeed, Dice, LinkedIn, etc.) and returned your name when they did a keyword search. When the crooter says "I think you might be a good fit for the role" that's all it means -- your name came up when they plugged keywords in for that role.

As others have pointed out, it's spam-o-nomics: do this enough times, and eventually there'll be a candidate who'll bite, be a match, and go on to work for the client netting a sweet fat commission for the crooter. All they have to do is keep farming the system.

This doesn't explain why any firm would delegate their recruiting to a firm that does this. If they find a candidate it will be a terrible one (any decent candidate won't fall for it). I have a dev job. I do some recruiting. If I were to select a recruiting firm, my first question would be "how do you find candidates?" or "what do your first contacts look like"? If they wouldn't answer or I suspected they used the "I have a great opportunity I think you'd be a great fit for", then I wouldn't use that recruiter.

So there has to be more to it than that.

A theory of mine is that companies usually don't go to these firms, but other recruiters do.

My company goes to a good recruiter and offers $X to fill a role. They have a good track record and demonstrate a good network and good practices. We sign a contract. But what this HR firm does is start off by hedging their bets: they subcontract the recruitment to a lesser HR firm by offering $X/2 to fill the role. The firm below has less info about the position (because the top firm doesn't want or need to say, they just want leads) and because they get less pay, all they can do is spend a minimum of effort on candidates. This theory is at least plausible in the sense that it explains what we observe: that someone pays these firms money to do this.

Do older developers often go around the recruiters? What's in it for you to do that?

Older developers rely on their networks. What's in it for you is a better job, often working with people you already know.

Very much this. If I'm looking to know about a job somewhere, the first thing I do is check my network to see if anyone who knows me and has worked with me works there. Otherwise I'll see if people I'm close to know someone who works there.

Then I'll set up a chat with either an internal recruiter for that company or a hiring manager. The chat is to discover if the company would be a good fit for me, and on their side to see if I'd be a good fit for the company. If both of those things are true then interviews come very quickly afterward.

Having someone who works there means that you already have someone internally who can vouch for you. If it's already determined that you'd be a good fit from internal discussions then you generally have a leg up in the hiring process. And again it's also really great to figure out where you definitely don't want to be working.

That's a separate thing to sniping a recruiter once you find out the company name though. When I was hiring I don't think we'd have wanted candidates sniping our recruiters. They did a useful job and we paid them for it.

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