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I have a story from a client I worked with. They had 3 or 4 positions they needed filled for their team ranging from Jr to Sr level. But because they worked at a big company they couldn't do the recruiting directly, everything had to be through HR. While the problem was their assigned HR person was unresponsive and slow on the uptake and then took a huge vacation. So they just started looking at the applications that had been submitted through the portal and asking the division's secretary to reach out and start setting up appointments. Time to interview and make a decision on people went from literal months to 2-3 weeks.

Unfortunately this isn't a happy ending to the story. HR threw a hissy fit that they were being sidestepped (because they were completely incompetent ninnies.) And management had to come down on the manager who was doing it and tell him to follow the process.

My observation has been that if the company has fewer than 100 employees, yet has a director-level or VP-level "...of HR", you will watch candidates one after another slip through your fingers. When you don't have enough employees worthy of a "VP of HR", then that VP will find busy work to justify their existence.

My poster child is a company of about 30 that had a "VP of HR". I can't count how many candidates took another offer while she sat on her ass "checking references".

100% with you, but it’s not always easy to get control of your own recruiting. I’ve also seen HR get upset when their involvement is not what they expected.

Agreed, which is insane! We'll spend untold zillions fine-tuning and A/B testing the process by which we get users, but when it comes to getting coworkers it's "Well HR says the applicants have to make an account to apply so I guess that's just the way it is".

It will be that way inevitably as an organization grows, usually it's an investor requirement to prevent outright nepotism hires or discrimination. No one cares too much for the first few dozen employees but anything larger usually will come with "ffs go and implement at least some basic hiring standards to reduce the legal risks".

For what it's worth, in the US, the legal risks are negligible.

So long as you don't discriminate against a protected class, you're usually good to go. Nepotism is bad business, but it isn't illegal.

Investors do care about bad business decisions, so it makes sense for them to require good hiring practice. However, if a sole proprietor -- or a business with all its shareholders -- decides to hire inept cousin Vinny to keep him from idling about the house, that's usually legal. In a family-run business (where there is a paper-thin wall between business and personal finances), it may even make financial sense.

This differs from almost any other jurisdiction in the world.

Note I used HR for everything other than sourcing. The bottleneck is usually identifying people and initial phone screens. The rest of the process is legitimately HRs job.

This. I gave up working with external recruiting agencies even if budget allows it for exactly the same reason. They just can’t beat me and my team in productivity and opportunity costs are high. Investing 40 hours of personal time to close a vacancy 1 month earlier means being able to delegate 1 month worth of work earlier.

>Almost every place I’ve worked (early at startups later at megacorps) there were never enough recruiting resources. So eventually I just got my own recruiter account on LinkedIn and started using my knowledge of the industry and state of hiring to make my own search queries and reached out directly.

I've never worked for a tech company. But I have worked for two bulge-bracket investment banks.

In the first case I'm pretty sure the person looking to fill the role personally contacted my college's recruiting service (because she had received her MBA from there). In the second case I saw a Craigslist listing either by the person himself or his assistant, talked to someone I knew at the firm who worked near him, then reached out to the person directly. In both cases the person hiring did my first (and, in the second case, the only) interview, and I never talked to a true HR person, let alone recruiter, before receiving the offer. Does this sort of hiring never happen in tech?

Yes, it happens in tech. It's not even all that rare, really (at least outside of the FAANG crowd). I've reached a place in my career where I'm well-established and known enough that I don't really need to hustle to find good dev jobs anymore, but for most of my career, I got most of my jobs by being my own recruiter in that way.

> and I’ve never been able to convince a single other manager to do it.

I agree with everything you wrote, but if your company is big enough to have in house recruiters they probably don't want you doing it!

Not because they don't want to be able to hire great candidates efficiently. But because you presumably don't maintain the statistics they need to keep. For example, say (I don't know you and am just making this example up), you might without realizing it only be contacting candidates who have names that you recognize as male, while they want to make sure they are pulling from a wider pool to improve their chances of getting the best candidate They may have other reasons for collecting such statistics (SEC filings? Who knows?).

There are only a few bigger companies than the ones I’ve been at.

I only do the sourcing, and the HR side I leave to recruiting. The bottleneck in the process is the sourcing, and I have no desire to do HRs job.

On statistics, they only care about the statistics for their own sourcers and processes. There is no regulatory reason for collecting such stats.

Another thing to remember is HR is the weakest organization in any company, and recruiting the weakest in HR. Any manager worth their salt pushes recruiting around, not the other way around.

Ah, you're doing the sourcing part, which indeed is the thing i-house recruiters are worst at (despite being compensated just for that!). Sorry I misunderstood.

With reference bonuses, I think most companies do appreciate having their employees do sourcing, which makes your observation that you can't get others to do it all the stranger.

Almost all companies prevent hiring managers from receiving bonuses for their own referrals. I was hiring my own team, rather than using internal or external recruiters.

If you want something done right you often have to do it yourself.

Especially when the communication required to delegate it well is more work than just doing it.

My experience in a large corp is that whenever we can hire, we never have any issue finding very good candidates. The difficulty is getting approval from HR and management to hire externally.