Recruiters are non-technical in every business though, why would we need special recruiters for programmers when we don’t need special recruiters for neurosurgeons?
Having recruiters as a problem is typically restricted to programmers who actually have advanced and/or highly specialized skills, or who have made themselves a public image.
Recruiter is not a technical person. If you want technical people recruiting you work somewhere smaller. The real weakness is inability to communicate with non-technical members of staff.
"I think that developers can understand developers better "
Very true and I am with you on that. However, when it comes to hiring, it is unfortunately not just about developers understanding developers. The reason most recruiters are not really technical is simple. Most Clients do not give a shit how technical a recruiter is. Clients have requirements and the bigger the client is, more lazy they will be to do any legwork on their own in finding good candidates. All they do is to outsource to these "technical" recruiters who charge a fee to find that right fit.
So this model works because clients are ok with it. But may be it is ok. Hiring includes searching through endless resumes, screening, salary negotiations, etc. which the recruiters can help with. For a developer, it sounds like nothing (I feel the same way) but clients value those steps a lot and pay essentially for that. Not for how techie a recruiter is.
If technical recruiters did actually have technical experience, they could make much more money being programmers rather than working as recruiters. Therefor, there are few to no technically experienced recruiters. This isn't a problem that's going to fix itself, unless companies start valuing recruiters by paying the good ones a lot more. Clearly, this isn't happening widely, if at all. So instead of bitching about bad recruiters, startup founders could put their money where their mouths are and hire technically experienced people to recruit for them.
Most tech recruiters were never programmers. A very absurd minority were ever excellent programmers. It seems like there should be a market for recruiters who can actually find really good programmers. Are any of you in this market?
Exactly. When I used to be looking for work, I never liked being the one trying to hound companies begging for work. Some people are suited to that kind of work and some aren't. It makes perfect sense for people to specialize so programmers do programming and recruiters do job matching.
That’s why you pay a technical recruiter. It’s their job to know all the terms and their relationships. They don’t need to know how to program them, just what fits what. Think the difference between a athlete and a sports reporter. The best sports reporters know the intricacies but no one expects them to play the sports they cover. Generic recruiters are not very useful.
Recruiters usually aren't good at programming. If they were - in most cases - they wouldn't be recruiting, but writing code... So their "identification of good programmers" is somehow limited...
"what kind of bubble are we in" - good question, and that was the key point. Tech recruiting is a big business, but recruiting in lots of other industries is not nearly as big. Why is that?
There are more programmers than athletes and Hollywood stars, but there are many more people in industries where using a recruiter/agent is not the norm. If you think that programmers are good at or enjoy handling their own finances, doing PR, or salary negotiation, I'd encourage you to talk to thousands of programmers and ask them how they feel about that. I have programmers come to me for advice on negotiation and what career moves to take that aren't even active candidates (jobs they found on their own, yet still seeking representation). Programmers that I have met hate that part of the business, hate negotiation and building their brand. Of course there are some that are willing to do it and are good at it, but the majority seem to be completely fine passing that off on to somebody else if they can.
Many recruiters are good at their job, however there are those that want to maximize their sales and don't really understand any tech, so if the customer is looking for XYZ Developer that is what they filter on.
My take is that we are in this situation because most hiring is done by managers and/or recruiters who have very little knowledge, or are completely clueless about programming. This leads to checkmark based recruiting where the client wants tech x, candidate has tech x on his CV,
If you do that, you will be recruiting talent that is not necessarily good at programming and you will be excluding talent with exceptional programming skills.
If you build software that sounds like a bad idea.
The most valuable companies in the world all converged into the same recruiting processes for a reason.
Technical recruiters looks for different types than most of the audience on HN. The tech recruiter looks people who can write decent code, but at the end of the day, will be replaceable commodities in an organization.
As a tech recruiter, your job isn't to find the next DHH. It's to arbitrage technical talent to fill positions. I don't think that they're motivated by quality as much as they are by finding just the right quantity.
That's fair from what I've seen in technical hiring (as mentioned, I only do sales recruitment). A lot of the big outfits hire kids straight out of school who don't understand the difference between C# and Javascript or the difference between front-end or server-side development. A lot of the issues with recruiters stem from the fact that recruiting companies (ironically) don't hire all that well.
Does anyone else find it out that the people (recruiters) in charge of finding good tech talent often have no experience in programming themselves? So, my question is how do they know if someone is a good programmer?
If all they do is read the resume, then we know, based on other people's comments here, that it's clearly not good enough of a method to find the best talent. So, if this is the case, why do we keep relying on recruiters to find us talent?
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