6 reasons to hate recruiters, 3 ways to get revenge and 1 way to keep everyone happy
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Karen Mattonen shared an interesting post with me the other day and after reading it, I had to share it. Here are the highlights…
6 Reasons to Hate Recruiters
1. Managers hate recruiters because they are after their best people (and it took forever to get the team just right.)
2. Ego-geeks hate having to use a recruiter to find work because (they feel) that it is an admission of weakness. (After all, shouldn’t all companies be beating down their door to hire them?)
3. Clients hate recruiters because there is (at times) the perception that recruiters are merely slinging resumes with the hope that something will stick to the wall.
4. Candidates hate recruiters who treat them like a piece of meat; promising the world, then dropping them like a bad habit when/if the client is not interested.
5. Geeks hate recruiters who think they are qualified for a particular role when they are (obviously) not. (Its called “reading the resume people.”)
6. Geeks hate recruiters who submit their resumes to companies they worked at previously (or anywhere else, but especially that) without their permission. (Again, it goes back to reading the resume.)
3 Ways to Get Revenge on Recruiters
1. When a (search firm) calls, tell them your current company is doing a huge project and you are looking for a firm, then once you get them excited, do not return any of their phone calls or voicemails.
2. If a (search firm) is just plain rude, call them once you get established in a new position and have them submit resumes for a position in which you are the hiring manager; make the candidate screening extrememly difficult and intentionally not hire anyone represented by that agency.
3. When you are at the point of being hired, raise your rates (or salary expectations) to an unreasonable level and then walk away once the last-minute demand is not met.
1 Way to Keep Everyone Happy
Do unto others as you would have them do onto you.
Read: Why Do Geeks Hate Recruiters?
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Comments
Jim,
Stumbled. This was great – you just made my day. Recruiters can be very useful, but the incentives in the relationship are very off. The goal for them currently is to just get you in somewhere, anywhere, even at the cost of lying to the hiring company about you and your qualifications.
Jim,
Just another lovely one from you.
Self explanatory | I guess pretty clear to few of the many overnight recruiter.
Pinny is right, the incentives in the relationship should not or never be over looked…
Lads I hope we all are listening!!!
S.G
I hate recruiters!! The recruiters that call me 7 times a day with “Oh, just one more thing. Would you… uh… uh…. oh, I remember, you need to talk to this other guy Joe smith. He’s our account manager. He’ll call you later”. WTF?!?!
One recruiting company insists that they meet me at the interview and introduce me to the hiring manager. I went to the first interview they set up, and the hiring manager flat out asks the recruiter “You’re not sitting in on the interview, are you?” Do you know how bad that made me look?? I looked like I needed my hand held. Like I’m incompetent. That I’m so inept that I can’t possibly make it through an interview without these guys showing up to make sure I did it right. I thought it was a fluke. I thought, “They can’t possibly do this every single time, right?” Next interview I have that they set up I’m told that someone from the recruiting company will meet me there. I tell them no. I do NOT, under any circumstances want them to meet me there. Do NOT do this. I get an email later telling me that so and so will be at the front of the building 15 minutes before my interview to walk me in. Not only are they directly going against something I SPECIFICALLY asked them not to do, they’re also making me look like I’m a poser. You do NOT walk a programmer into an interview. You don’t do it. It’s all about confidence, and skill. First impressions are critical. If the recruiter is a dweeby idiot, then *I* look bad. This is MY interview… I can sure as hell handle myself without needing my hand held.
I’m never using a recruiter again. I get more interviews on my own then through any recruiting service. And it’s for positions that actually MATCH my skills.
Recruiters don’t know VB from C++.
Of the 6 reasons listed, there are several more reasons to hate Recruiters.
1. The lying. Recruiters are among the most dishonest people it has ever been my displeasure to met. They post bogus jobs to fill their contact database, and then feign any type of knowledge of not only the job itself, but the posting.
2. The inability or unwillingless to read resumes. This is super commmon with recruiters from India. Recruiters routinely call clients for a resume request for jobs seeks have no skills for; fail to read contact information.
They routinely ignore NO CONTRACT notices on resumes, and as well as all forms of NO RECRUITERS, PRINCIPLE PARTIES ONLY, NO 3rd PARTY CONTACTS.
Recruiters have no integrity, no manners, and are either unable or unwilling to read beyond a telephone number. I will never deal with a recruiter either as a job seeker or hiring manager.
Pretty much all-out hatred here. We really need laws to deal with unscrupulous recruiters, they impact society and the workforce in a negative way. Mostly they’re just low-class people trying to make a quick buck.
I work in information technology, and for some reason they are still heavily entrenched, even though teh IT boom of the late 90’s is long dead.
What gets me the most is the recruiters who actually think they have IT knowledge just because they recruited in the field. These recruites don’t know the difference between a hard drive and a case fan yet they have the right to judge my talent and experience. Really makes me fume.
Due to nothing but terrible experiences, I have come to the point where I refuse to respond to recruiters. Much of the time, the impression I have of the recruiter is that he’s unqualified for the job he does (based on poor grammar and sloppy email practice) and does not even understand the job he is trying to fill. The last experience I had with a large, national technical recruiter was an absolute disaster in which I was working with an total drama queen who would call me 5 times a day pointing out to me how my engineering Bachelors was a detriment to a technical position and how even with a Masters in Information technology and 15 years of experience I did not meet the hiring manager’s requirement of having a Bachelors in computer science. (So why send me for an interview, Ms. Recruiting Expert?) After going through a few rounds of interviews with a manager who was clearly vacillating on hiring anyone at all (which the recruiter eventually admitted), the final feedback I received was, “All the hiring manager would say is that one of you final interview candidates was dressed inappropriately. Do you mind if I ask what you were wearing?” When I responded a conservative, Talbot’s business suit she said, “Oh, well you were fine then. At any rate, the manager has asked us to send her more candidates.” That’s it. That is the feedback I received for four weeks of agony working with a whacko recruiter who clearly didn’t understand her client’s needs. What irks me more about it is that I was apparently dropped like a hot potato by the recruiting agency, presumably either because they think if one manager didn’t want me no one would. Or possibly because they think I wore a string bikini to an interview. Either way, it burned me out from the job search process, and now I will only apply to companies directly or work within my own network. As a stop gap, I have started teaching at one of our state universities (in Computer Science – guess my degrees are good enough teach in the field!). If something happens, it will happen through my own efforts and not working with some inept recruiting agency.
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