Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dvtrn | Hacker News Reader

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Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise

and

that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)

Are readers supposed to read this as a suggestion that missing out is synonymous with losing out? I kind of take exception to these phrases because it strips a lot of agency out of otherwise exceptional people who are more than capable of navigating their careers to where they want them to be, maybe not necessarily where you as a recruiter think they should be.

Seems to me the market is very strong for employees and those with in demand skills and experience to back them up are probably missing out on job x but probably aren’t losing out by any equal measure-all other considerations being equal. One of the most common refrains I've been hearing right here on HackerNews in response to the 'Great Resignation' isn't that people are leaving the workforce, they're just finally leaving jobs they've been wanting to anyway and taking their labor elsewhere.

So

That said, what does it really matter if someone decides they want more autonomy in who they decide to interview with? Shouldn’t we be encouraging more of this?

Especially given some of the fees that come with hiring through a recruiter?

I don't think missing out and losing out are synonymous. I'm simply stating that if you decide to ignore any subset of potential opportunities solely due to the source, you are limiting your exposure to possibilities.

For example, if you don't have a LinkedIn profile, you will probably get far less incoming inquiries from hiring entities (external/internal recruiters, hiring managers, etc.). That's a decision many people make.

Everyone has autonomy in who they interview with - I'm not sure where that comment is coming from.

This isn't about autonomy or interviews. It's about the ability to say "yes" or "no" to additional information about opportunities. Nothing more.

EDIT: To address the Great Resignation thing, agreed there as well. I'm a resume writer/career advisor now and my business has been brisk. Lots of clients are changing industries to find more impactful work, better working conditions, etc. Obviously if someone IS leaving the workforce they aren't calling me to write their resume, but I'm seeing a lot of activity from people looking to find work they "feel better" about in one way or another.

As far as I can see, the only thing outsourced recruiters provide is blame-shifting. They're not better at judging candidates. They're not better at finding candidates. They're almost certainly worse at understanding what the company needs than the company, and worse at understanding what the candidate has to offer than the candidate.

But, if the company hires a few people they're unhappy with through a recruiter (which is bound to happen from random chance no matter how they hire), they have someone to blame. They can switch to another recruiter, and assure their further-ups that the problem has been addressed.

There are many corporate roles that are mostly about providing blame-shifting opportunities, but outsourced recruiting is an unusually pure one. Along with "networking"-logrolling, it's one of the things which I really can't stand about working in software development, and on darker days they makes me wonder if I shouldn't go be a hermit in a cabin in the woods or something instead.

Does this blame shifting really happen though? I've never seen recruiters get blamed for a bad hire. I've seen them get blamed for sending people that fail at the first interview though.

A bad hire isn't on a recruiter unless they are basically lying to the employer about the hire's credentials or background, and even then it's the employer's job to vet what is being said.

That's assuming the employer has infinite time and resources to interview and vet candidates. They don't, they are overwhelmed, and it's supposedly the recruiters job to make it easier, yet most seem completely clueless and useless.

I said bad "hire", not bad "interview" - this was by design. If a company makes a bad hire, it's not (generally) because the candidate was presented, but rather a flaw in their interview and vetting process. The "how" of the candidate appearing is mostly irrelevant at that point.

Companies are stupid. Recruiters talk them into bad hires all the time, then there candidate gets a job, experience, and they get to replace them the following year, placing another person with the original company and moving the other candidate to the next.

I’ve only seen the blame shifting work at another layer: HR dept telling us that they made their best by engaging a recruiting firm, they can do us a favor by finding other recruiters, but it’s not on them if all the candidates we get sent are mismatched.

> "networking"-logrolling

What is that?

I read it as a fairly mathematical statement of fact. There is a tree of opportunities, and one can choose to prune some of them at the root. By definition, any direct/anticipated; and any unanticipated, indirect opportunities; are gone. Which is a 100% valid personal choice, I interpreted the minor quibble being whether this is a net positive creditor to their overall success. On one hand, pruning opportunities is in principle a negative; on the other hand, time saved not dealing with undesired channels is a positive.

The reluctance to work with recruiters is mostly the "time suck" element. If you were to chase every opportunity sent by recruiters you'd waste a ton of time, but you'd also maximize your potential for getting offers that meet your criteria (whatever those criteria are).

It was meant as a statement of fact. To oversimplify, if you limit the information you are willing to receive, you won't have all the information you could have.

My main issue with the original post was that OP was crediting a policy of reduced information with doubling their salary. That just isn't the case.

Sounds like just a general statement of opportunity cost. If you're disregarding all recruiters, and someone comes along with a possible job that fits with a $200k raise that you would normally disregard out of hand, and most of your average raises you find on your own are $50-75k when you switch jobs, spending time talking to the recruiter would likely be worth it.

That doesn't sound like a thing that ever happens.

If I took every recruiter call I receive, I'd be spending half my week talking to recruiters. All for a tiny, small, infinitesimal chance that they might find me a job that A) is in a field I want, B) at a company I want, and C) at a decent salary.

I've been unemployed with next to no professional network before. And I took those recruiter calls. And they were a waste of time. I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.

In the end, the only way I've ever gotten good jobs is through the professional network. It was faster to build a professional network from 0 by working on open source projects and going out to meetups than to go through a 3rd party recruiter.

I agree with everything you say until you are out of work. At that point I start taking calls.

> I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.

It's somehow correlate, since one of the most potential client for recruiters are companies that hard to find employees. Though there are also companies that lack channel / networks to specific fields, it cannot be dismissed that the previous point still stand.

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