What did you expect them to do? It's not even that scummy. It's their business model.
I also feel that no poaching agreements are also bullshit. You're just attempting (rationally, I might add) to depress the market for your existing talent.
First and for all, especially in the climate we're in, banning two or three recruiting agencies isn't really going to hurt the chances of an employee who could be persuaded to leave. Secondly, if your employee can be persuaded to leave in the first place that's on you, not the recruiter!
I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet, but when the time comes I think I'll find it hard to hold it against them.
Edit: mandatory notice of: great article, would read again, A++!
It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.
Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat. You don't even need to know that in order to recruit people.
--
I feel that NDAs are kind of bullshit too, but they're typically not as expressly oppressive. Unless they stretch into noncompetes, which are incredible bullshit.
Every sensible employee should regard every paycheck as a renewed offer of employment. If a better deal exists, its their choice, not yours, whether they stay or not.
Your only real option is to treat employees well, make sure they know you appreciate their talents, and try to generate some loyalty.
The "rational" thing for a recruiter to do is to post fake jobs with huge salaries to jobs boards to get in resumes; and to offload filtering for quality onto clients so as to get more volume through; to shop resumes around clients in descending salary order so lower paying places only get candidates rejected by other employers; and as soon as the contingency fee comes through, to call the employee at work and try to get them to hop somewhere else so you can collect another contingency fee.
If all recruiters did this no-one would work with recruiters - businesses only work with recruiters because those recruiters claim they aren't going to act in this ("rational") manner - they claim they're going to look out for the client's interests.
For a recruiter to make this claim while simultaneously proving it false shows a bit of cheek, and obviously makes one doubt the sincerity of the claim.
When you talk about finders fees, then yes it would stand to reason that an agency would want to get as many of those as they can but they have to do so in such a way as to not appear to supply flaky people.
Agencies also generally place contractors and in the case of a contractor they ideally want to place the worst worker as high as they can. And when I say "worst" I mean "worst at negotiating for salary". That is, they'd like to hire you out to a big bank for $1k/day and convince you that $200/day is a lot of money so they can pocket $800/day on you. If that sounds bad, I've heard of worse arrangements. In any case, whatever they get the contractor in they're going to want to keep them there as long as possible so they can continue to earn off them.
If you want to stop the agency who placed with you from poaching your permis then you should insist on paying the finders fee over some time period. This avoids the need for immoral and unenforcable "no-poach" contracts and but gives the recruiter incentive to keep the employee in place. Especially if you arranged payments so that payments get larger later in the employment cycle.
Hmmm, maybe someone should make an agency and try this model. :) But if you do be careful because companies will try to flip it the other way: e.g. fire and re-hire the employee early on to avoid further payment (which is probably why agencies demand the fee up front now).
The economics of the recruiting business, as you pointed out, reward behaviour ranging from predatory to scummy. The best you can hope for is the guys who are merely sharks, and not scumbags.
Yet, the negative aspect you mention, is still contingent on being able to convince people to leave your company. Having talented people leaving your company is a sign you're doing something wrong; you either have a flaw you need to address or you shouldn't be concerned in the slightest.
My thesis goes, if all that was keeping someone behind was an unexpected offer out of the blue you had already lost them.
In the late 1970s I worked for a contractor who would sometimes hire comp-sci majors to help him. The contractor or small-business person or whatever you call him specialized in developing software for the IBM 5110, which before the IBM PC was the low end of IBM's computer offerings.
He told me of another contractor like himself who had an unreasonable client. The client was so unreasonable, IBM got involved in mediating the dispute, he told me. I got the impression that IBM also helped match contractors to clients.
And that's where your opinion comes from.
To be absolutely clear, I am not putting you down. I am merely stating what I believe to be a fact.
I see a lot of opinions on HN that obviously come from people who have never actually run a business. Of course, everyone is entitled to an opinion with the caveat that opinions loose a lot of validity when they are not backed by "skin in the game".
Bringing an employee onboard is an expensive process. The search itself can be expensive. If you found the employee through an agency you owe the agency a finder's fee. This typically runs from 15% and could be as high as 50% of the employee's salary. To put numbers to that, if you pay someone $100K and the agency charges 25%, you, the employer, owe them $25K.
Of course, it doesn't stop there. There's a lot more to employee compensation than the agreed-upon salary and recruiting costs. A quick Google search located this calculator:
http://www.artlogic.com/resources/employee-cost-calculator/i...
Using that as a reasonable reference I calculated that, if you keep your $100K/year employee for three years your annual cost is $150K per year.
If, however, you only keep them for one year (change "Expected term of employment" to "1") the cost goes up to $170K per year.
If we look at a $150K/year employee who leaves in one year the cost of that employee sits at around $240K.
Even this doesn't paint the entire picture. Bringing someone onboard takes work and will definitely consume clock cycles. More than one team member is likely to be involved in the on-boarding process. Overall productivity will be affected during this period until the new hire comes-up to speed and can "solo" if you will. The effort isn't trivial at all and it costs thousands of dollars for every hire.
There's also a hidden "cost" which takes the form of internal competitive data that you have to trust your employees with. Nobody thinks that this is a cost until you go through the experience of training someone for months only to have them go work for a direct competitor. These things do happen, and believe me when I say that it never sits well. At that point thin ethical walls protect you from a competitor gaining a leg-up through ill-gotten insight. This very directly equates to money.
The cost of poaching by --presumably-- the very agency you might be working with is also not trivial. You just dedicated a ton of money and time to bring someone onboard and the agency convinces him/her to go elsewhere. Now you are left with a hole to fill, which will take time and money. During that time team productivity will take a hit, product delivery will suffer and you will be distracted away from product and business development in an effort to fill the hole. I can't put a precise number on this but believe me when I say that it ain't cheap.
So, yes, anti-poaching is fair and just. For some it takes going through the pain of having this happen once or twice to understand the concept.
A couple thousand dollars isn't enough to convince most people to start over- something about their current work place made leaving seem attractive. Either the job does not fit them well or have reasonable paths for advancement (both from a development and career perspective), you are underpaying the employee, the work/social environment is bad, or something significant in their personal life has changed (graduating college, spouse got a job somewhere else, ect).
Poaching isn't unfair. You never have any guarentee for how long an employee will work for you, just as your employees have no guarentee they will still have their job tomorrow. The problem in the above situation isn't poaching; the problem is the employee wanted to leave.
If you want to keep people give them a compelling reason to stay. Collusionary practices like anti-poaching, Noncompetes and so on are not fair and just. They are immoral and bad for the markets. Engaging in any of these practices should come with hefty fines.
Incidentally the profile is entirely populated with content generated via Markov chains using logs from an irc channel I'm on as the corpus.
[1] - uk.linkedin.com/pub/markov-bambam/15/643/a56
"Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."
[1] http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686...
Baby Seals, Steve
"Activities and Societies: NKVD"
The UK Infosec recruitment industry is a ghetto (to paraphrase Zed Shaw) and I never targeted recruiters, only occasionally responding to those that targeted Markov.
Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy.
I would happily give up a percentage of my rate to someone who could get me ~15 hours a week worth of work at a market rate and insulate me from a lot of the overhead that I simply don't have time to deal with. Just like Hollywood stars focus on being Hollywood stars and leave the business of Hollywood to agents, I'd like to focus on my strengths and leave the business to someone else.
I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam.
First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non technical I might add) management. You'll get a salary and a fancier title than 'contractor' something like... Say... 'consultant' yes! Consultant! That's gonna bump up the hourly rate... But not YOUR hourly rate of course, that of the Firm my friend.
I guess my bitterness in this regard is quite obvious but here in South Africa, this type of thing is utterly rife. You have a few managers who have swept in over time on the winds of apathy and who for some I fathomable reason have good, big contracts and a slew of underpaid 'consultants' who run around doing their bidding.
You seem to believe that this relationship will play out the other way round where you are earning that 'market rate' and for a small percentage of that you'll have in your employ not only someone who'll ensure you're always employed but who is also a personal assistant that runs your admin?
That's called: 'a boss.'
Please correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems you have the world (as I know it) bass ackwards and programmers are not Hollywood stars, not where I come from.
If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made.
I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere
if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work.
My apologies if this seems overly aggressive I am just interested in how this could work - we could alll fit in 10 hours a week for beer tokens
In the end I had to choose between two offers. They encouraged me to take the slightly lesser paying one because they thought I would be happier in that position.
Talent agency model is definitely the way to go.
I was a Contingent (third-party) Technical Recruiter for 2.5 years (and hopefully never again, sans a cool company such as the above) and would love to work in that model. I only had the opportunity with something similar when our sales (the folks who got the requisitions / open orders) had many openings in similar "verticals." E.G. five different companies all looking for Java SE developers, with slight variations, but, for strong candidates I/we could get them several interviews, sometimes multiple offers.
Would be much more fulfilling. In most markets, however, this is (if the relationships are not established with multiple companies (which it sounds like the case in your situation)) "skill marketing" or trying to gain a sales foothold into a company by "marketing" a candidate to the company. At one of my former employers, the relationships were solid enough to where we created a few positions for some great candidates as we understood the departments needs. This is not typical at all, so finding a few companies actually making this a standard model would be fascinating (I imagine boutique retainer-model recruiting).
So we started with them representing me -- taking care of the business end of my freelancing -- and it worked out so well that we've partnered to create 10x Management, to expand the model. I bring the tech experience, and they bring the talent agency experience.
Of course, that's not enough by itself, and it's a long process, but there are recruiters who do go through all the trouble of learning technology.
(The following refers to most, but certainly not all)
They're generally loathed by developers for a multitude of reasons, they charge ridiculous rates, they come back and poach their placements, and commit a plenty of other sins. Yet they're still out there, plugging away and jamming my LinkedIn feed...
The only reason they still manage success is because the alternatives have to be even worse. Despite the ridiculous environment we're in right now, there are still folks out there who are interested in leaving their current jobs for greener pastures. But Dice.com isn't getting it done for these folks, and even if it is their resumes are getting buried beneath piles of unqualified candidates and/or getting filtered out by terribly built filtering software or, even worse, HR folks who mistake Java for Javascript.
I think the way you disrupt the recruiting industry is by significantly improving the alternatives. That or providing a completely new alternative that's wildly better.
Word of mouth has always been the better alternative. It works like a charm until networks are exhausted. Maybe that's the place to start.
That's actually an interesting idea. Please write it!
So maybe one person is really good at sorting a pile of CVs into a shortlist. Maybe another is good at phone screening. The company can outsource (via the site) any or all of the parts that go into filling a position. Providers (which would be individuals or small companies) bid for these tasks in an open marketplace along the lines of elance.
Effectively it is taking the roles of the recruiter and busting them down into pieces, and allowing different people to specialise into different things.
It's no more fleshed as an idea than that, but the basic concept is that a recruiter is considered by many to be overpaid, but fulfills a necessary evil. By allowing companies to directly outsource individual pieces they can utilise what they need from a recruiter without having to pay for the whole amount. And a skilled recruiter can get good work under their own banner without all the overhead of having to get an office and form a company, and themselves become freelance agents for hire.
Overhead would be in:
1) Teaching ALL participants about job to fill.
2) Dealing with job seeker's frustration when he would need to answer the same questions to different people in the process.
3) Restricting access to potentially sensitive personal information.
The Google/Apple/etc case is a bit different because it's between competitors, not between two parties to a given contract. Antitrust is about preventing/punishing anticompetitive agreements and behaviors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Exceptions_-...
So she really had no grounds to demand and expect it.
Second, agencies aren't placing people and then turning around and trying to steal them again. They just have your profile in a database, when a match comes up for a job they shoot you a mail. They don't remember that they placed you and they don't care. They make money by placing labor which has a very high fail rate so they live or die by volume. There's no time to consult a matrix to see what stupid clauses are between who, the employee will have to keep this sort of thing in mind. Remember, an employee taking a job and then leaving after a week for another $1k is going to hurt the employee more than anyone else involved so it makes sense the employee is the only one who needs to care about it.
Create a fictitious individual where, prior to linkedin, the only place Pete London existed was his own personal website.
I used to be a recruiter and egotistical as it may sound, I considered myself one of the better ones. My previous history on HN should back that up. I never, ever used linkedin when searching for decent people yet even I wouldn't have found Pete London. The best developers I encountered over the years were people who came recommended by other developers or people I met face to face at meet-ups.
If no-one but the creator knew Pete London existed then the only thing this experiment proves is that most recruiters aren't very good at using search engines. That's all.
The one point I agreed with significantly is hiring internal recruitment specialists. I've given a talk on that exact issue in the past and I am in the process of writing a blog post on my updated perspective of that approach.
In May 2010 a recruiter spammed the Hadoop mailing lists with a "Data Engineer (Analytics)" in MV. A month later I was blessed with an email from the same recruiter for the same job sent to my @apache address. Another month later he posted the job on LI's Hadoop group.
Fast-forward one year, a new recruiter spammed the mahout user mailing list saying he was looking for "Engineers with Machine Learning expertise".
Finally 2 months later I got an email sent to my @apache address from the second recruiter for a "Data Engineering Lead" position.
So it seems that they haven't used LI a lot and mostly rely on those "other channels" and direct emails. I personally find it disrespectful to send recruiting emails to user mailing lists but I guess recruiters don't know/care about it.
Wait a second, he was interviewing 100X more people than he was hiring??? Does that seem a little extreme to anyone, or is it just me?
[edit] My strategy has always been for posted positions that I'm actually acting as the recruiter for, is to do the initial resume screen myself (I can triage a resume in 1 minute for a position that I know about), and then hand over the screening to a reasonably competent (but unemployed) person in that area, ideally with a set of standard questions that the two of us have come up with together.
I.E. Hire a Unix Sysadmin to screen systems administrators, and give them a list of questions like, "what is an inode, what is the difference between a process and thread, how would you sum up the total size of files in a directory, what's your favor unix based operating system and why, tell me about the unix systems you've worked on?" - This usually takes 30 minutes/person.
The interviews with around 5 people takes about 45 minutes per interviewer (30 minutes to 1 hour) - so, about 4 hours per candidates.
So - 400 Resumes (6 1/2 hours) = 100 Screens (50 Hours) = 20 interviews (80 hours) = 4 Hires.
Total investment per hire is about 136.5/4 = 35 hours. Only 7 hours/hire needing to be done by the hiring manager. The screening is the easiest stuff to be outsourced.
Of course, you can dodge 90% of this if you just get great internal references (removing the need for screening, filtering) - which is why internal references are so highly valued by companies. (That, and they don't have to pay $20K-$30K to an external recruiter)
I have had stretches where it took me talking to ~80 candidates between initial phone screens, random chats, etc over two months before finding someone to hire.
And to be clear, I am not claiming that I found the 'best' person out of 80 people. 'Best' is a very custom definition depending on the environment, role, and fit.
That is not at all unusual.
When we got rid of a useless lummox a year or two ago, he gave his recruiter (the same agency we got him from) all out contact details (if you are out there, thanks for that...). Within a week of him leaving that agency called three of us claiming to be looking for a reference but immediately asking if we could be called out of work ours to reduce disruption. One of us let that happen and it turns out they were trying to get us on their books (err, no thanks, we don't want to be associated with the other "quality" peopel on your books!). Similarly the company got several calls from them most of which involved lies ("I was talking to <person x> earlier today" when <person x> had been on holiday all week).
In summary:
1. Recruiters will hit you from both ends. They make money out of both ends so it suits their business model.
2. Recruiters lie. Repeatedly. Constantly.
Since each company is different, every time you get a new client you need to recalibrate and get up to speed on what they need. This is why it's rare to find a truly good external recruiter (and impossible to find a good contingency recruiter for a short term engagement). In my opinion the best arrangements are long-term engagements, giving the recruiting firm time to understand exactly what you're looking for and calibrate their searches against that. Of course these engagements are expensive and time-consuming, so it's also why I'm a big fan of internal recruiters since they a) absorb and presumably live your culture and b) can have a much deeper understanding of your technology and team dynamics.
Whats the reasoning behind posting completely vague job descriptions (sometimes the location isn't even provided!).
I Would say 90% of the job postings I see online don't even give me enough information to want to contact them.
Usually that is because there is no job. The recruitment agency is trying to farm candidate details for two purposes: firstly so they can make claims to employers about how many people they have on their books with given skillsets and secondly so they have people to present to companies when they register a position as available.
Doesn't show salaries, but in many cases it's probably highly negotiable and dependent on experience.
My favorite is sth like "Your responsibility will include writing software according to the provided technical spec."
Meebo.com will be shutting down on July 11, 2012.
Meebo has been acquired by Google!
---
So Meebo was a recruiting operation for Google.
It puts that article in a new light.
This kind of make me envious and wanting to be there for a while., to experience how's it like to be valued and sought after.
The recruiters operate in the same way as spammers. They send email far and wide to see if they can get any bites. If you want to be valued and sought after I suggest you start reading all the emails about helping out folks in Nigeria.
Then write a blog post about it.
By changing the model to a subscription you can then open the market place up and make it very transparent. No more hiding peoples contact details from the employee, no more hiding the employers name from the job seeker.
We're only in Melbourne, Australia at the moment but if we get interest, we'll try and increase our reach. If you are in Melbourne and you're a freelancer / agency / startup, we'd love to talk: http://www.dragonflylist.com
I'm currently planning a move down under (my wife just spooked me by wanting to push the timeframe up to next year instead of 2015). Mind if I reach out to you sometime to chat about the market there and whether what you're doing would make sense for someone in my position? I'd be much obliged.
Keen to meet the recruitloop team, we'll be in Sydney at the end of next month, do you know them?
Also having landed a job at a company that is doing well is a high risk factor for pregnancy.
Small subset of recruiters that she was working with represents only minor danger to her company anyway (considering how many recruiters are out there).
By dropping "no poaching" restriction Elaine would be able to hire better recruiters.
Other than that - the article was an insightful read.
Whoa, wasn't there just a lawsuit where no-poach deals were determined highly illegal?
Or Google: https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=1&source...
No-poaching clauses are illegal in California, but poaching clauses can contain "referral fees" under which the poaching company must pay the original employer a substantial amount of money (usually, a year's salary of the employee poached) if they hire one of its employees during or within a year after the end of the contract period.
I was totally frustrated by the lack of responses to resumes that were flying from my outbox like cards from a blackjack shoe -- so I created a help-wanted ad on craigslist for a job that I thought I would qualify for and might have a chance of landing.
The resumes I got were from people with 3-5 years experience, masters degress, laundry list of skillsets, etc. Needless to say, the whole experience was disheartening -- but it taught me to be creative in my approach to the job market and that generally the "resume" based approach to finding a "match" (employer<->employee) is deeply flawed.
You and this LinkedIn user don’t know anyone in common You can only view the profiles of users within your network.
Uh... No, I wasn't thinking that, since there's a ton of places for recruiters to find candidates and LinkedIn is only one of them. Is this some kind of viral marketing piece for LinkedIn or something?
I have gotten maybe 6 recruiting messages on LinkedIn in my life. I finally deleted my account after the password debacle, it was so useless. Like a business contact sheet for people I already had contacts for. On the other hand, Monster.com is where most of the recruiters seem to come at me from. I get on average 8 positions sent to me a week when i'm not looking for work. My google voice gets less recruiter spam, but I had to set a separate GV line up just to catch all the recruitemarketer calls.
Could someone elaborate?
Silicon Valley is small, incestuous and political. If all your competitors, other portfolio companies, etc. are getting recruiting emails from you, including their founders, you are going to seem either tone-deaf with bad recruiters or like you're trying to offend people you shouldn't offend.
Also, founders basically never say "yes".
One thing I wonder about is given how boilerplate and sparse the honeypot's blog was, how little information there was to go on, and how uninspired the self-description was, I can't help but wonder if the good recruiters were the ones who didn't bother contacting him.
As a side note, I'm also confused as to why the metric for a good recruiter was figuring out that the profile was a fake (kind of in line with Peroni's comment above). Or was it considered good that he/she chose to use the phone as a recruiting tactic?
1) Get a recruiter in-house.
2) Treasure the recruiter as much as the tech talent.
3) External Recruiters will violate non-poaching agreements.
4) It is still useful to have a non-poaching agreement, as it helps as a mild deterrent.
5) Dread thy fellow startup more than a large company.
I was however confused by "I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder".
Was he saying this just because founders in SV are not a good fit to Meebo? Or are they bad employees? Or that it is considered bad to poach to hire a founder?
(I realized it not because of the name - I have seen very weird names before. I realized it because of her picture on the about page.)
Regardless, my question above is still open.
Depending on how far you want to take it, the term can really lose its meaning. Is a supermarket stocker a "display engineer"? They do have to make considerations for aesthetics, space, and so forth...
