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Comment by Hnrobert42 | Hacker News Reader

I am on the other side of this. As a hiring manager using recruiters, I am annoyed by:

- lack of diversity in candidates. (not just virtue signaling. if all I see are nearly identical resumes, I assume the recruiter is just phoning it in.)

- candidates “just a little out of your price range” who are 30% over the top end of my budget.

- “confidentially” telling me what other offers a candidate has because then I know they are also leaking my offers to my competitors

- telling me every candidate is great

- telling me every candidate is a hot commodity like they are hotels.com

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You aren't getting what you want if nobody in those demographics is choosing to get a degree in CS in college. I choose to believe this is a cultural problem (which is why Nigerians are even more overrepresented relative to U.S. population in higher education than Asians, despite being black [1]), but certainly there are many factors that play into it.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-10-13/it-isn...

Probably annoying as a hiring manager, but one of the best ways for workers wages to rise is by using competing, “leaked” offers against each other.

This is in effect how you gauge what your talents are worth in the labor market. I’m glad offers get leaked for this reason

What it means is that I don’t tell the recruiter. The candidate can do whatever they want.

We pay well. I don’t alter my offers based on the others I hear about. We usually beat them anyway, but when we don’t, that’s too bad.

Well, this how I could negotiate up my starting salary. I told each recruiter the competing offer, they didn't have to leak anything.

> - “confidentially” telling me what other offers a candidate has because then I know they are also leaking my offers to my competitors

The only problem here is that they're claiming confidentiality which is obviously not true. Workers and their agents should be playing offers off each other.

These recruiters are not agents of the workers. My company, not the candidates, pay the recruiters.

Some of us actually have agents which represent us to recruiters.

The diversity thing is really hard to do anything about. I think I've seen maybe 10-15 relevant (in the loosest sense: person was a dev of some sort, not a career switcher) CVs from a woman over my entire career. And I did hire three of them, compared to dozens of men and thousands of CVs. Perhaps my estimate is wrong or something, it's hard to keep track of this number, but I do tend to give it an extra good look when it's a woman just because it's so rare.

I think it's the pipeline as well as selection: I work in finance and usually in smaller firms.

It may be hard, but that is their job. They are supposed to find me the very best candidates. There are plenty of professional groups, alumni associations, meetup groups, etc. devoted to diversity in tech. If they can’t even find a few women, then how can I trust they are really looking everywhere to find the very best?

> if all I see are nearly identical resumes, I assume the recruiter is just phoning it in.

Could you explain what you mean by this? I don't quite understand the language.

Phoning it in means giving up on doing a good job, and just putting in the bare minimum effort to get the job done. It comes from the idea of phoning in rather than putting in the effort to show up in person.

So in this case, they don't actually care about finding good (or underpriced) candidates, they're just spamming a basic resume match.

By way of example from the other side of the fence - my LinkedIn profile asks recruiters to state that they've read my pre-requisites for a role when they contact me. 90% don't do that (and clearly haven't).

The kind of recruiter that doesn't bother to read the candidate's profile is "phoning it in"

I delete all of those - the remaining recruiters are generally ok, though they're often offering roles that are trivially discoverable to anyone actively job hunting.

I think there is more to the original comment than this though. I'm interested to know how they measure diversity when reading a CV and how they judge a recruiter to be "phoning it in" or not. I know what the phrase means - I just don't understand the meaning in this context.

I mean if all the candidates are only from big companies or went to the same school or are all white men (this part I only figure out on videocalls), then I assume the recruiter isn’t fishing very many recruiting pools. I want recruiters who do more than search LinkedIn. They should be tapped in to local technology groups, alumni associations, professional groups, etc.

Thanks that makes sense.

I don't know if this is what they meant, but I assumed they were getting at the idea that a good recruiter will find you candidates who are better than they appear on their CV (because they'll be cheaper relative to their ability), and it would also show they weren't just spamming for a match to the template.

verb gerund or present participle: phoning

// ...

INFORMAL work or perform without much effort, interest, or enthusiasm. "I think of my playing as committed—I can't remember ever phoning it in at any performance"

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