Yan Pritzker photographer, entrepreneur, software engineer, musician, skier

Recruiters are bad netizens

Posted 5 October 2006 @ 9pm | Tagged thoughts

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That’s right, I said it. Ever since I’ve been on LinkedIn, which I joined primarily to keep tabs on old colleagues, I’ve somehow opened up a can of worms for myself. Every couple weeks now a recruiter spamcalls me on the phone, at my job, asking me whether I’m looking for work. Never mind that it says no cold calls in my profile on LinkedIn. I’m thinking of going as far as explicitly telling recruiters not to contact me. How can I deal with someone who will not respect my basic privacy, and not even bother to read my contact preferences in my profile.

LinkedIn is not a free harvesting ground for contacts. The whole idea is either you contact me through someone we mutually know, or you buy your way to me by using the paid features that let you send me an email. It is not ok to call! Besides LinkedIn, recruiters have infested (and I use this word in the kindest sense) every job board known to man, promoting the rise of expensive niche job boards such as 37 signals, joelonsoftware.com, and techchrunch.com. These places have a hard recruiter-free mentality which is awesome. My friend Keith is doing a startup called JobCoin that lets you put a jobboard on a highly trafficked blog. This is cool, because monster, craigslist, and others are useless or quickly becoming so.

It’s not that recruiters are bad people, no that’s not it. I’ve met a couple of them and individually they are nice folks. But taken en masse, they create a real problem. Now, I understand there is a legitimate need for the existence of recruiters, and that’s fine by me. My suggestion is that someone creates a place that is very recruiter centric. It’s a place where people who want to find jobs that are available through recruiters can come, and a place where recruiters can go to find potential recruitable people. We can even have a list of buzzwords that you can tick off to see if there’s a potential match. As we know, there are certain types of people who like this sort of thing, and others who do not.

So maybe we should just let monster turn into this recruiter breeding ground, a real monster (erm, pardon the pun), and let all companies who want to talk to their recruits directly go to niche boards. Maybe we’ll need a niche job board meta search so that a company can find and target the right niche job boards. If you cast a narrow net you might find the people you are looking for without needing a recruiter.

[Edit: I got a trackback from a company working on some sort of solution to the recruiter problem, check it out: itzBig]

Hi,

I do not for one minute think that a recruiter has a right to violate your instructions for contact. It is truly their loss if they fail to read what you write on your profile. I agree that some recruiters can be a little too aggressive for their own good. However it is in the nature of the job to ask the difficult questions. For every technically sound and emotionally stable candidate out there going about their business, there are nine flakes on two legs trying to become the etitome of Peter’s Principle, and rise to the level of their own incompetence. Theri stock in trade is their ability to manipulate and tap dance, not in the skills the recruiter seeks on behald of their client.

Having said that, when a recruiter comes across a hard-working, technically savvy, dependable person, they are anxious to establish a line of communication. You are the type of person they want for their client. You don’t have to extend the effort of actually initiating the selection process. You are good enough to have earned the title of Passive Candidate.

Yes, recruiters can be a pain in the posterior, but try to look at it like a right of passage that you have earned. Let them do the work for you,

Good Luck.

[...] SkwpSpace: Recruiters are bad netizens “That’s right, I said it. Ever since I’ve been on LinkedIn, which I joined primarily to keep tabs on old colleagues, I’ve somehow opened up a can of worms for myself. Every couple weeks now a recruiter spamcalls me on the phone, at my job, asking me whether I’m looking for work. Never mind that it says no cold calls in my profile on LinkedIn. I’m thinking of going as far as explicitly telling recruiters not to contact me. How can I deal with someone who will not respect my basic privacy, and not even bother to read my contact preferences in my profile.” Friday, October 6th, 2006Comments [...]

Don’t have anything actually constructive to add to this particular discussion :)

VladM pointed me to your clip on businesspov, which led me here.
Planyp.us sounds really cool – good luck to you guys!

Drop me a line if you’re ever in the Seattle area.

Igor (of qbit fame?)

Igor

How are you doing? Long time!

Dude – I have the exact same thing happening. Ever since I joined LinkedIn I get recruiters calling me – at work! – about gigs. Really annoying!

They’re easy to spot however. They always call the main switchboard instead of my direct line, and my phone rings differently when transferred from the switchboard. Needless to say, I’ve started to not answer those rings.

I’ll admit that I’ve found numerous (though not all) of my jobs and consulting gigs through recruiters (including my current job). But there’s still way too many recruiters these days, and taken as a group they definitely gum up the job search process. As you mentioned, job boards like Monster are completely useless these days. I put my resume on it for less than 1 week, but had to take it down due to too many contacts from recruiters.

I think people are going to have to start to do a lot more recruiter-less (and big job board-less) job hunting from now on.

What’s interesting about recruiters is it shows you the inefficiency that exists in the marketplace. Back in the day, you used to hire a travel agent to help you book travel. It was so cumbersome of a process that you needed a trained professional to help you navigate the mess! Today you can handle it on your own. Recruiters are professionals that are still desperately needed, but eventually will go the way of travel agents.

It’s too bad that it’s so hard for employers and job searches to efficiently connect. In both cases you’re overwhelmed by options, and the hit rate is so person you’re looking for gets lost in the noise. We resort to friends, our “network”, as a crude filter.

With JobCoin I’m not creating the magic bullet, I’m taking one small step towards improvement. Blogs are incredibly rich communities of people who are all connected around some common interests. By giving these communities a tool to connect with one another, all the sudden you find yourself surround by people like you. When it comes to hiring and finding jobs, that’s a great place to be.

-Keith

Interesting that I stumbled on this thread. A group of us have recently started up a site, http://www.recruiterless.com, to address this problem of recruiters as well.

We are taking a different tack — we are putting up a job board that only accepts direct-posts from employers. All job posts are moderated prior to publishing in order to ensure this. We think this will provide a solid alternative to the current job boards that are totally swamped by recruiter ads that don’t name the company, don’t describe the work, and only contain checkbox skillsets on the ad.

The blog-based job ads are certainly a big improvement over the current state of affairs on the main job boards, but we also think that a straight job board that eliminates the middle-man will also serve the IT community well.

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