What is wrong with Job Recruiters on Monster.com?

[Ranger X]

Whenever I get a call from a job recruiter, they're always asking me questions that they already have answers to. For instance, for those of us that have resumes on Monster, we have to put down something in the desired salary section. The recruiters are always asking this and some even ask for an e-mail address when they already have it! Many ask where I'm currently working (again, also on there). I can understand them asking about the job and what I do even though it's on the resume because some like to hear it (to make sure you can talk about your job without hesitation) and some are even suspicious of those who might have fake information on there. But they're usually not asking for information like that.

Do they just need to hear it from the horse's mouth?

 

[Stuxnet]

I fscking HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE recruiters... probably more than I hate car salesmen and the majority of real estate agents. Recruiters, at least in the tech industry, are nothing more than skill leaches. There was a huge boom in the industry and you had a bunch of people quit Joe Bob's Ford dealership to get a piece of the action. They're too lazy to acquire real skills of their own, so they instead wedged themselves right into the middle of the industry, much like HMO's did to healthcare back in the day.

Recruiters work for you AND the prospective employer, yet they could give a sh*t if either of you are a good fit for the other.

Recruiter: "Hey, I have a job for a programmer... interested?"

"I don't know, what's the job?"

Recruiter: "I can't really tell you that, since I don't trust you enough to not just circumvent me and go directly to the client."

"Well then I'm not interested."

Recruiter: "Can I see your resume."

"Whatever, it's on the way."

Recruiter: "It says here that you're a Java programmer. You can pretty much do database stuff, right?"

"What kind of database stuff."

Recruiter: "Oh don't worry, you'll find out in the interview."

(get to the interview)

Employer: "Well, we haven't received your resume from the recruiter yet, but they said you were the absolute perfect fit for our Senior Executive Database Uberadmin Manager"

"Fsck"

I can't tell you how many recruiters tried to morph my resumes into something completely other than what they were. In their eyes, if you're a "computer guru", then you know everything. We're all the same. "Oh, you have MS Access experience? Cool... there's this Senior Software Architect position that you'd be perfect for."

!@#$ I hate those !@#$ers.

 

[mzkhadir]

Originally posted by: jbourne77
I fscking HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE recruiters... probably more than I hate car salesmen and the majority of real estate agents. Recruiters, at least in the tech industry, are nothing more than skill leaches. There was a huge boom in the industry and you had a bunch of people quit Joe Bob's Ford dealership to get a piece of the action. They're too lazy to acquire real skills of their own, so they instead wedged themselves right into the middle of the industry, much like HMO's did to healthcare back in the day.

Recruiters work for you AND the prospective employer, yet they could give a sh*t if either of you are a good fit for the other.

Recruiter: "Hey, I have a job for a programmer... interested?"

"I don't know, what's the job?"

Recruiter: "I can't really tell you that, since I don't trust you enough to not just circumvent me and go directly to the client."

"Well then I'm not interested."

Recruiter: "Can I see your resume."

"Whatever, it's on the way."

Recruiter: "It says here that you're a Java programmer. You can pretty much do database stuff, right?"

"What kind of database stuff."

Recruiter: "Oh don't worry, you'll find out in the interview."

(get to the interview)

Employer: "Well, we haven't received your resume from the recruiter yet, but they said you were the absolute perfect fit for our Senior Executive Database Uberadmin Manager"

"Fsck"

I can't tell you how many recruiters tried to morph my resumes into something completely other than what they were. In their eyes, if you're a "computer guru", then you know everything. We're all the same. "Oh, you have MS Access experience? Cool... there's this Senior Software Architect position that you'd be perfect for."

!@#$ I hate those !@#$ers.

qft

 

[blackdogdeek]

i have the feeling it's because they have some search facility that just returns your name and contact info as having hit certain keywords. they contact you but don't really know for which words you were determined to be a possible candidate.

 

[toekramp]

i like the story

 

[SeaMonki]

lol...jbourne77's rant is so true, all those recruiters/headhunters care about is their commission.

 

[Stuxnet]

I had one recruiter send me to a job for COBOL. Nowhere on my resume did it say COBOL. Never did the recruiter ask me if I had any experience with COBOL. I got to the interview and the guy was like "I don't see anything about COBOL on your resume." I said "I didn't hear anything about COBOL in my conversations with the recruiter." "Why did he send you here?" "I don't know... maybe you need a new recruiter."

We were both pretty pissed off. I took a day off work and this guy had delayed a business trip to meet with me.

Between being talentless, skill-less fsckheads and only caring about protecting their own commissions, recruiters are absolutely, positively, worthless. In the late 90's when companies were clammoring for software developers and mainframe programmers (Y2K), companies did not have the manpower or knowledge to qualify and interview a prospect. So they went out and hired a firm who lacked the same qualities and paid them 10% to do it for them. Fscking brilliant. Now these scumsuckers are so seeded in the market that we can barely avoid them.

The key, newbies to IS/IT, is to network your ass off. Cultivate relationships like your life depends on it (because it does). That way if you ever need a job, you'll know plenty of people to talk to and can avoid having to deal with a recruiter. I haven't dealt with one in years because I've maintained excellent professional relationships with people who might need my expertise in the future.

It's also interesting to note that most interviews resulting from a third-party recruitment rarely result in a hire. I've landed every single job that I lined up personally with the company at which I was interviewing. I've only landed one (out of five) that was setup through a recruiter, and that turned out to be a miserable disaster and I quit after two weeks. The recruiter got pissed (because he lost his commission and his client fired him; I was the third failed hire in a row) and demanded to know why it didn't work. I told him it was because he sucked at his job and had no real knowledge that related to the skillsets of the people he sends off to interviews, nor does he have the education or experience to appreciate what his clients are asking of a candidate when they send him a job spec. He basically told me to pound sand up my ass and hung up on me. Thankfully, through my professional contacts, I was sitting at a desk in a nice job two days later. Granted, it was a rebound that I had lined up before I quit, but you need to cover your ass when working with recruiters. They can't cover their own asses, let alone yours.

Companies do finally seem to be coming around to the idea that if they want a quality hire then they're going to need to take a more active role in finding the prospects. Leaving it up to some schmuck in a cheap suit who has spent the majority of his life selling cars and thought it might be fun to sell people instead, is just stupid and the wrong approach to take.