The Recruiter Honeypot
ewherry.com>In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends!
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++!
No poaching agreements are not bullshit - you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are) and in exchange you're expecting them to use that information only for the purpose directed.
It's similar to an NDA. Nothing bullshit about it.
> you are giving them privileged information (who your best people are)
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.
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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.
"Between linked in, google, your company's about page, github and twitter accounts, you can already figure this out in ten minutes flat"
I don't think that's true at all. Some of the best engineers I've worked with have had very small online footprints (they're too busy building awesome things at their company to spend much time on Twitter etc). Now that I'm responsible for hiring, I consider knowledge of that kind of person to be incredibly important.
I have to agree here. Most of the best people I've worked with don't have much in the way of twitter and github accounts. Github and twitter only seems popular within a fairly narrow professional and cultural niche.
I understand using github/twitter a lot if you're a developer. When you work on something you might want to get some immediate feedback/testers on it.
Yet still, linkedin (even though useful) scares me away a little bit. Each single time I get back, I see more and more people inventing longer and more exotic job names and descriptions, pitching around with some void statements and uploading their pictures in suits.
My problem with LinkedIn is other people. People want me to say I know them when I don't (hey, networking!). People want me to recommend them when I have only seen them in the hallway and don't even know what they do.
I am very conservative about these things. Does LinkedIn's own model disagree? Does it push people towards larger networks, instead of smaller, higher-value ones?
Am I doing it wrong, or is (seemingly) everyone else?
There is quite a lot of recruiters/randoms just adding as many people as possible. Without any introductory message, I would just consider that as spam. However, if you know somebody in person but don't know him very well then I don't see a huge problem. I get quite a lot of invites from my former class mates that I had no real connection with. But hey, you never know where your life takes you. Those connections might accidentally come in very useful one day.
As for the recommendations - they've got nothing to loose really. In the worst case they won't get one.
I agree. Github is like a portfolio. But you don't need a portfolio if you're a great developer with a strong network.
This is really, really not true. Some of (perhaps even most of) the best engineers I've worked with had almost zero public profile, almost to the point of being publicity phobic.
In retrospect, I was being a little hyperbolic. I too know plenty of developers without an online presence.
Anyhow, my point was, who your best employees are is not privileged information.
care to elaborate exactly how you accomplish this in 10 min? or any other time period?
out of all the great developers i know, 1 has a technical blog (and he updates it very infrequently). Also, how do you gauge if someone is a star based on their twitter or linked in profiles?
A good 90% of the people I know have linked in profiles. You look at their titles. See who is a friend of the top cheese on facebook, sort by universities. Github is self explanatory, I hope.
Poaching is a myth. You assume the only reason your folks are working for you, is they don't know about a better deal elsewhere?
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.
Good post. Loyalty in the workplace is also nonsense. We're (mostly) all capitalists here we should act like it. Never ever stay at a company because you "love it" or some childish notion of "loyalty". You should be there because it's the best allocation of your resource of time/knowledge.
I don't care about the company I work for and I feel no more loyalty to them then I do an online electronics store. Having said that, my employment has two goals: making me money now and making me money later. This means that I won't leave the company I'm at if someone else offers me $2 more a year. There are a lot of factors that make up my market value and all of them have to be considered. I have left one company to work at another at lower pay because I knew that move would put me in a better position several years down the road, i.e. would increase my market value. I said before I didn't care about companies I work for. Emotionally that's true. Professionally, of course I want them to do well because them failing hurts the value of the time I spent there. I also want to stay long enough to accomplish big things that I can talk about to the next place I interview for.
If you go into a relationship where you are more emotionally attached to them then they are to you you're going to get hurt. And a company is just one downsizing away from letting you go no matter how much they make you feel like "family".
>Good post. Loyalty in the workplace is also nonsense. We're (mostly) all capitalists here we should act like it. Never ever stay at a company because you "love it" or some childish notion of "loyalty". You should be there because it's the best allocation of your resource of time/knowledge.
This is how I feel... and probably how most entrepreneurs feel. That's why we are striking out on our own.
This is not how many employees feel. One guy working for me (at wages I pay) felt actively guilty and apologized to me for interviewing with google. I mean, he'd have gotten a staggering raise if he got the job. (I think he's right on the edge of being good enough; I bet if he practised interviewing and tried a few times, he could make it. Fortunately for me, he failed the first interview, and like a lot of people, he finds interviewing uncomfortable.) I mean, if anything, I feel a little bit proud when my employees go on to much bigger and better things; I don't have money, so I hire people that are just starting, or that have been unemployed for a while and need to start over. I mean, I'd /like/ them to stay with me longer? But if you aren't capable of becoming google materiel, well, I try not to let you past the 'project-based contractor' stage, so it's just plain irrational for me to expect people to stick around for my low wages forever.
I absolutely don't understand this. I mean, I don't expect loyalty. (I mean, I expect honesty... but I don't expect anyone to stick around if someone else offers a lot more cash.) But, many employees really do feel something like Loyalty. As a owner, it would be in my interest to put some effort into making those sorts more comfortable.
Now, what to do? I don't really understand that feeling of loyalty, so I can't address it directly, but I can say "besides money, what makes these people comfortable/happy? that I can give them and google can't?" - like one benefit I give employees is extreme schedule flexibility. Another is being careful to have an environment where your employees don't feel like they will get fired. (yeah. I don't get this one, either. But it's huge. Normal people are terrified of getting let go. But, I guess large companies do this, too. Of course, instead of giving people severance, when I have to lay people off, I go pester all the recruiters I know and try to get them better jobs.)
but yeah. this is something, I think, that we, as entrepreneurs, should study. It's important to understand.
I think just letting your employees know that you go to these lengths to help them if you wind up with no other choice but to let them go will be at least as valuable as "job stability" (what ever that means these days).
Every boss talks like he's going to take care of you, and (I hope) it sounds like the bullshit it is to most people. (when I hear a boss saying he's going to take care of me, I hear "I want you to do more work for me for no additional compensation") But, if when you do fire someone you do get them a better job? that person will talk, and it won't be regarded as bullshit... and you can do a lot worse than hiring people recommended or evaluated by someone that you /know/ is good.
It is times like this that I wish for multi-upvotes.
its colusion and in some places ileagal it also voilates for on the Universal Human rights.
Well, a lot of recruiters present themselves to employers as helping with their recruitment problems, rather than exacerbating them.
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.
If a certain action would mean no one works with you then that action isn't rational, right?
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).
Everything you mention I kind of consider par for the course. How would you even know if your recruiter wasn't doing that? To expect otherwise, I think, is a little naive.
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.
I'm not in recruitment myself, and I agree that ideally you want your employees not to leave even when contacted by a recruiter!
I assume the idea behind refusing to work with recruiters who have been unethical in the past is to create a disincentive, in the hopes of reforming the economics of recruiting so you can get recruiters who will work with you rather than against you.
You'd imagine there would be some recruiters who would aim to behave ethically and to cultivate a reputation for being ethical, as that reputation would be valuable to a recruiter in terms of getting clients.
The one time I was job-hunting I saw some pretty unethical stuff - I once had a recruiter e-mail me a programming test along with a solution another candidate had submitted, and almost every recruiter asked for a summary of technical interview questions so they could brief other candidates. I would have thought using unethical recruiters would actively hinder your recruitment process - so there'd be no market for their services.
I mean, evidently it doesn't work that way, but I think that's the aim of refusing to work with certain recruiters.
I do not have any ideas on how to disrupt the head-hunting industry, but I have a historical anecdote that might be relevant.
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.
> I haven't had to make my life depend on employees as of yet
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.
An employee that leaves after a year has decided that they do not want to work for you. This employee is sacrificing a year's worth of work mastering your processes, environment, and code base in order to go start over somewhere else where they need to learn a new code base.
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.
I've employed people and hope to again soon and the conclusion to your post is 100% wrong. All the costs you mention are your problem. Finding talent is expensive. But it's expensive to everyone. You're spending all that money to find someone willing to invest their precious time and skill/knowledge with you instead of spending that value some other way. That doesn't make them your slave. You don't get any special rights because you spent money.
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.
And your creative interpretation of my post is 100% wrong.
This isn't about an unhappy employee leaving because the job is crappy. Of course not. If the job or the environment is crap I'd be the first one to say that they probably ought to leave.
I am also deeply offended by your use of the term "slave". Nobody has used this term. Not one person has even implied it. I certainly have not. It is a despicable and desperate measure to sensationalize something that has, in no way whatsoever, implied such a condition exist or is desirable.
My post, and the scenario that it referred to, was very narrowly focused on the case where an agency YOU HIRE to help you find talent turns-around and proceeds to attempt to poach the very talent they helped you find just a few months after they got onboard. That is scummy and, in my view at least, absolutely justifies a no-poaching agreement WITH THE AGENCY YOU HIRED TO HELP YOU FIND TALENT.
Other than that, if another company is going to reach out and offer your employees a better deal (whether that means more money, a more interesting project or better working conditions) so be it, that's the free market and nothing should impede that at all. Even if other agencies reach out and convince the employee to leave a week after he/she came onboard, that's OK.
Again, the point here is very narrowly defined around the issue of a head-hunter that YOU hired turning around and poaching employees you just got done paying them a fee to find. That is a very different issue, isn't it?
In order to fully illustrate the damage done I simply highlighted that there are huge costs involved in hiring and employing someone, particularly through a head-hunter, and that it is wrong for them (the head hunter) to then turn around and try to steal people away from you.
After a reasonable and mutually agreed-upon period they can do whatever they want. In the example given in the OP's article that period was 18 months. That's fine.
To be ultra-redundant: If someone other than the agency you hired manages to pull someone --anyone-- away from you, that's fair game. You can do that to others as well as they can do it to you. The issue here is with an agency that is supposed to be working for you.
> I am also deeply offended by your use of the term "slave". Nobody has used this term.
When I read slave I immediately jumped to 'Wage Slavery' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery and it happens all the time. People cannot leave their job or risk looking for a new one because they are living pay check to pay check.
That is what I took away from that statement.
Well, I'm glad you're at least reasonable about the employees rights (many people aren't!) but the issue is (as I referred to in another post): the agency you hire to help you find talent is in a field that can only make money with high volumes. What you and the article author are taking personal isn't. The agencies aren't going "muhahahaha! Now that we've placed Rockstar 275 at robomartin's company let's poach them!". They simply have the person they found for you in a database and when ever they get a new job or haven't filled an existing one within a certain amount of time they're going to connect with everyone that their DB report says matches the profile.
They don't know and they don't care who they've placed where (at least the part of the company that sends out these "poach" emails doesn't). A new employee isn't going to jump ship within a month of getting a new job unless a) they really hate the new job or b) the new offer blows them away to the point of being willing to burn bridges.
I suppose agencies could put some kind of filter in their DB to not let people under no-poaches show up in the results, but why bother? Every company probably has a different no-poach period and all kinds of bothersome clauses they want and it nearly never comes up anyway so it's not worth the effort to deal with the issue. It easier to worry about these things on an exception basis, e.g. employee answers back with interest. At this point we can check if there is any reason we shouldn't go forward. But they will be sending out so many emails, most of which will be ignored, there's just no point thinking about it until someone actually answers.
This is simply a classic case of assuming there is malice where in truth there is just laziness.
There are so many ways to look at this. Here's a dumb and imperfect example: You hire me to help you find a really good CFO. I charge you $40,000 to get that job done. After several weeks and two dozen interviews we find a candidate that is a great fit. You agree to pay her a very competitive salary, one that is certainly within the top level of what CFO's are getting paid in your industry. Everyone is happy. You pay me my $40K and she comes onboard.
Six month later I get pinged by a large corporation looking for a CFO. I remember the candidate I placed with you. She is definitely qualified. I email her directly and get her to jump ship. She didn't get paid any more. I simply convinced her that the large corporation was a better bet than your startup. I, of course, get to collect a fee from the large corp as well.
This is wrong. You hired me to help you build your team and paid me handsomely to do my job. If I then turn around and actually become your enemy, why am I serving? An even such as the one I just described is incredibly disruptive and costly beyond the obvious (I covered some of the costs in my prior post).
That why I will not work with any head-hunter who will not guarantee that they will not approach new hires with new opportunities for a reasonable period of time. As a business you don't derive a financial benefit out of hiring a new employee for months but there's a ton of upfront and ongoing investment.
This is really really good. For my sins a few years back I made a similar profile on linkedin[1] but made it as obviously fake as possible while still pretending to be real, it's an open secret in the UK infosec industry and still gets emails from recruiters.
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
I want to read his dissertation.
"Dissertation on dissassociative media reconstruction in information security: How hedgehogs and baby seals lead to infinite cybercrime opportunity (Russian)."
His other well known paper (Decoupling IPv7 from Replication in Link-Level Acknowledgements) is available from MIT[1]
[1] http://apps.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/scicache/867/scimakelatex.58686...
Haha, figure 1 is just awesome.
I liked "we deployed 00 Commodore 64s across the 10-node network, and tested our kernels accordingly"
For some reason Markov would score 'Seals' extremely high next to 'Baby'. The more it would pop up, the more people would put 'Baby Seals' into the IRC channel and it became a common signing off phrase.
Baby Seals, Steve
I don't know what any of that means, but I know it sounds like the best dissertation ever.
Could happen.
Brilliance:
"Activities and Societies: NKVD"
That will explain the unorthodox, but very effective, interviewing style then? ;-)
Please say it replied via markov chain.
Early on (this has been going on for years), I used to use the algorithm to generate replies. The problem is that most of what Markov creates is no good (he started as a bot on an IRC channel as someone quit IRC, so while not a replacement he was there as a substitute) but occasionally comes out with brilliant content. Sifting through that for content that almost makes sense to a recruiter is hard. The phone number used to be a real number too. If you called it you were played Rick Astley's never gonna give you up interspersed with a voice saying things like, "Connecting you to your extension","Please hold while we connect you","The person you are trying to reach is not here, redirecting to mobile" etc. and on loop every few minutes. Someone once connected for a good 15 minutes and about 3-4 full iterations of Never Gonna Give You Up.
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.
That is fantastic. Hat tip to you sir.
This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags.
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 mentioned the exact same thing to someone a couple of weeks ago - I think her name was Stella, and she's been posting for a startup recently. I'm not a professional contractor like many, but I do like doing freelance gigs to supplement my day-job income. However, finding suitable gigs, dealing with negotiations and chasing down deadbeat clients make it really unpleasant given what I really want to do is make some extra cash after hours. I don't want to deal with all the overhead of running my own business atop managing my own career and family.
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.
15 hours a week? Jesus... I spend half of that in meetings. I really need to reconfigure my schedule!
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.
Any wave of disruption cast towards recruiters is going to have to destroy consulting houses as proof of it's efficacy. The time and effort required to find work/workers that bartonfink mentions has to be expended by either the employer or the employee. In both cases this a poor use of time so the heavy-lifting of placing people is either done by recruiters or temp agencies. Anything that disrupts this has to make the process effortless, or nearly so, and generate better results so the employer/employee can by-pass the middle-men completely. An unlikely outcome but one which would be welcome almost universally, excluding the obvious casualties of this change.
But Hollywood stars sit on set 12 hours a day, for a 16 week shoot, as does the rest of the crew.
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
I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly as good.
My question and same to @bartonfink is still what is the work? If I am say design and build a rest backend for a company, and its say two months work at 45 hrs a week, doing 15 hrs a week telling them it will take six months cos I have other clients is a sure way not to get the gig
So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams,
I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself
thank you
the work is designing and building web applications. almost all coding, a small amount of training/consulting. generally i come into projects that were already built at least part way by someone else and need to be fixed up and have features added. though i am also doing one right now from the ground up with a small team. most of my projects involve small remote teams as well.
right now i work with 2 startups and 1 large company, as well as do occasional consulting with another large company (this is usually less than 5 hours every month). i'm all about simplicity and breaking things down into small pieces, so on all projects i am able to deliver and launch features regularly with 10-20 hrs of work a week on each. my total billable hours for the week usually are in the 40ish range.
i've found all the work through referrals pretty much, so i can't say exactly how to find it for others. i will say put as much as you can out in open source, that is the best "sales" technique i've had (often "referrals" have come from someone i've only interacted with in the open source community). also, be consistent with your deliveries, and open and honest about scheduling, as well as when something is going to take longer than you estimated. surprisingly few contractors are good at communication it seems. often i come into projects for people who were abandoned by a developer and even when they were working together only got spotty communication from that dev.
Thank you
good points on the communications side - something I can easily let slide
I think you've overlooked the point that I already have a job. I'm "on set" 10 hours a day already.
10X Management is trying to do this: http://www.10xmanagement.com/
Thanks for the shout-out, Hang!
Altay from 10x Management here. Yup, we're doing this, and ramping up quickly. Feel free to get in touch (email in profile) if you want to learn more.
Interesting. Doesn't look like they're up and running yet, but I'll keep my eye on them. Thanks for the link!
Last I heard, they were not quite ready to take on more clients at the moment so they closed signup until they could scale their services better.
Try http://www.evisors.com they match clients to consultants and take care of the payment side of things
I recently worked with a recruiting agency that operated like a talent agency. The receiiters were not paid on comission. Instead, a team worked with me, and each pitched different companies to me. They prepped me for interviews, analyzed my strengths and weaknesses, and reviewed my past work and projects.
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.
Where was this geographically (San Fran? In the US at all?)
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).
This was in Boston. But the company is national. My understanding is that they did try to build relationships with employers and would do a site visit with the employer before taking them on. (I had to go the receiiters office for a mock interview.) They have also been around for a long time.
Granted I am also relatively inexperienced. Self-taught and only worked in the field for 2 years. Maybe it would not work as well for someone with more experience. Their name was Jobspring btw.
I've often thought the same thing since becoming a full time freelancer, the talent agency model. The problem to overcome is that, much like most recruiters I've dealt with, it's hard to find someone who isn't a technical developer to understand how to fill a technical developer role. There's a lot more complexity to understanding the work from the outside than there is understanding the work of say an actor. I no more want someone representing me who's saying "ok I have a guy here who has HTML, PHP, Javascript, and CSS, and I see you have all of those on your job requirements, this is a match right?" than I like hearing the opposite from a recruiter. Essentially you're going to need to find developers who want to do sales, a tough find if I've ever heard one.
This is what we're doing at 10x Management (http://10xmanagement.com). I'm a YC alum and experienced web dev freelancer. I also play a lot of music so, through serendipitous connections in that world, met some music managers, and realized what they do for their music clients would be really useful for me as a freelance programmer.
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.
Non-developer recruiters who really want to understand technology can learn it. My girlfriend is one, I've got her this book - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004V9HC48/, which her boss since made mandatory for all recruiters in their company.
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.
So I think you have to look at why external recruiters are successful:
(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.
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.
That's actually an interesting idea. Please write it!
Well, my disruption idea is to break the entire recruiting process into a value chain, and create little markets for each piece. So a company can list a position on the site (or maybe even on an existing site). But, instead of either a recruitment agency doing everything, or the company doing everything, they can break down the process and take bids on each step.
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.
Who is going to glue all these pieces together? I think overhead of managing all these small steps would exceed time savings you get from outsourcing.
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 site manages the entire process. It's both workflow manager and marketplace in one. The process of filling a position is pretty generic - you could satisfy something like 90% of hirings with a standard process. Think of it like a series of boxes on a page. The choices are 'Do this myself' and 'outsource' this.
As the tasks get completed the next step happens, and the site manages the whole process.
The job seeker would not have to answer questions at each step of the way. The information would be saved in the system so that each person managing the step (whether internal or outsourced) can see the output from the previous step.
The steps are something like : write ad, sort responses, initial screening, organise interviews, interview, negotiate offers. The company would choose which of these they want to handle in-house, and which they want to outsource. You could come up with a few templates to cover a large proportion of hiring in industries.
Restricting access is just done with the same types of legal terms that existing recruitment agents use. The site would include a reputational factor, the same as any other online marketplace. So someone who wants to have a at-home job sorting through CVs isn't going to start leaking the information if they want to get more work from a client.
Ideally the jobs would be listed on the site itself, but there's no reason it can't be used to manage jobs that are listed on existing (and popular) sites. The idea would be to leverage the network effect of other sites while building a base of clients for the site itself. So initially listings would be on the site as well as other popular sites. Over time, a strategy would be devised to drive the popularity of the site itself as a place for jobseekers to find work.
So every participant would have to read information accumulated in previous steps? That's your overhead right there.
If so many users access your information - how do you know who leaked your sensitive data?
Outsourcing such small pieces could make sense only to the web site itself (which is fast, cheap, secure and reliable) - not to external human players.
Traditionally humans tend to manage computers, not the other way around.
4) waiting on the right bids when you just need to hire someone.
5) Outsourcing the DNA of the company to the lowest bidder.
If your idea or your management team suck a recruiter can only do so much. Once you are worth your salt you can hire one full time recruiter and be done with it.
Recruiting is more important, not less important. Commoditizing it means you don't know how to build a company.
Good points all.
On (4) this is a fatal flaw unless the market can provide enough liquidity that there is fast turnaround on bids. Overall I think it is a killer of the idea.
On your (5) I would say that many organisations have no DNA worth speaking of. This is the market I would be speaking to.
I have done contracting work for many different companies over my years. Rightly or wrongly, it's seen as a cost centre rather than a strategic issue in many cases (despite the rhetoric, of course).
Thats really sad. To me, the hiring process determines the day-in-day out culture and performance of the entire organization. Sure they have the right 'skills', but do they mesh well personality wise with the rest of the development team? This would be impossible for an out-sourced bidder to determine with any accuracy.
What you get then is a bunch of randomly selected people (essentially). They really could be random given the fact you could have many different "recruiters", without any true consistency on how they were chosen outside of process.
A hiring manager could use this service for a handful of hires. Individually all the employees look great on paper. But something weird will happen when you put them all on the same project, and you are going to wonder where you went wrong.
Personally, I wouldn't see a web application commoditizing the hiring process as disruptive (in any good sense, anyway). LinkedIn was already disruptive because it changed the recruiting industry and well-qualified highly-skilled people don't stay unemployed long because of it.
Recruiters jumped on LinkedIn because it was built correctly and it made their job easier. Trying to commoditize the process further is going to be difficult because any recruiter worth their salt isn't going to take a pay cut and fight for bids. Most recruiters I've worked with take a commission on the hiring salary anyway.
I understand that the concept is disruptive from a hiring managers point of view ("Great, I don't have to hire HR, recruiters, or pay out the ass!"), but my guess is its going to be difficult for them to take the jump into an untested service to literally have anonymous bidders ala ebay doing their hiring.
As a manager myself I wouldn't use such a service.
Had this idea as well. I assume this could work for highly sought after consultant/contractor profiles, more than pure developers. Might also be quite hard to scale this up to many people as the fees you can collect from agreements will be limited (as opposed to actors).
What is the contractual result for breaking a no-poach clause? Should companies inform their employees of no-poach agreements and request to be told when anyone is contacted by a recruiter from Company X? There is an on-going anti-trust lawsuit about no poach policies involving Google, Apple, Intel, Pixar, and more. How does that play into things?
The standard remedy for any breach of contract is a lawsuit for damages. You claim that the recruiter's breaking of the contract cost you X dollars, and you sue for X. If you think can convince the court the recruiter was especially naughty, ask for punitive damages too. http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/Damages
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.
Actually "no poach" aka "non-compete" clauses are void in California:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-compete_clause#Exceptions_-...
So she really had no grounds to demand and expect it.
Wait, it doesn't seem like a no poach contract with a recruiter would fall under the same laws. In California an employee is almost always free to quit and work for a direct competitor if that's what they want. However, if a recruiter signs a no poach contract stating they won't contact employees with other job opportunities for 18 months that's an entirely separate issue and doesn't seem like it would be covered by the same law.
That part of the article was nonsense. First of all, you're not buying a slave. No-poach agreements are collusion and should not even be legal.
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.
There is a significant flaw in the logic here.
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.
I was intrigued reading this to see what my inbox would say about Meebo's recruiting.
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.
"Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year."
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?
What he was doing was phone screening two people a day. Actual interviews were probably 1/20th that - so, approximately 400 Resumes = 100 Screens = 20 in person Interviews = 4 Hires. Which is a reasonable average over a year.
[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)
Depends on your pool. Small companies need to be absolutely brutal about only hiring the best people, with the best skills, and the best fit for the company. I went to a local university career fair looking for two different junior level folks. I took back over 40 resumes, made 3 follow-up phone screens, and 0 hires. 500 real interviews for 4 hires is a bit much, but in general I pass on people all the time.
I've done the same (50 resumes for two positions, phone interviews with 15-20, follow-up in-person interviews with 4). That's 10X interviews. But 100X? Assuming anyone he hires goes through multiple follow-up interviews, I don't see what information he's getting from these interviews that couldn't be handled by a subordinate or by email. Evaluating someone for "fit" is impossible in a short interview like that.
That's not uncommon, assuming that an initial phone screen counts as an interview.
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.
Each candidate probably had more than one interview. 100 interviews for each hire is not all that high, especially if you don't have a lot of intern conversion hires (that's why larger companies can hire more efficiently).
Depending on how you define interview. In my experience a rough funnel of 100 people (random people through a job board, not referrals) -> 20 phone screens -> 5-10 actual interviews. Generally at large organizations in the Valley a rate of 10 on campus interviews to one offer is considered inefficient (shoot for ~5 from an efficiency perspective). Too many in person interviews generally suggests a weak filter in an earlier step (you can learn quite a bit from a phone screen, for instance).
100 sounds roughly correct to me. There are a lot of awful developers out there.
*she
HireHand is trying to help solve this common problem. We screen your candidates using screeners with skills matching the position you are hiring for. Then we present you with the set of candidates that have the skills required, leaving you to interview for "fit". Check us out: http://www.hirehand.com
> In addition to pings from too-familiar recruiters, there were two cases that left me especially uneasy. In the first case, a former recruiting agency tried to poach Pete London and then 15 minutes later, wrote to me offering recruiting services! I was being pulled on both ends!
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.
Being a good external recruiter in Silicon Valley is a tricky balancing act. Everyone in the Valley wants the superstars, so competition is ridiculous. Additionally, cultural fit in small startups is of utmost importance, so you have to learn the culture of the company your engaged with. The culture is also highly insular and revolves around being a jedi master of code, so if you're a recruiter you're expected to have a deep understanding of the technical needs of the company in addition to the cultural ones. Plus most startups want people who have an active understanding of new languages/frameworks/methodologies, so you also have to have thorough knowledge of the bleeding edge of tech. Lastly, this person needs to have good in-person skills, network, and ability to sell a position against whatever the competition is offering.
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.
I wish there was a job search website where to actually advertise a position there were mandatory requirements like the company name and salary being displayed as part of the ad.
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.
> Whats the reasoning behind posting completely vague job descriptions (sometimes the location isn't even provided!).
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.
It can also be political. Companies want to hire cheap foreign labor but are forbidden to if they can find native workers (various EU countries have this) so they'll advertise a job with bad conditions and low pay and then after not being able to fill it for some time they show it as evidence of skill shortage.
Sort of like this? http://careers.joelonsoftware.com/jobs
Doesn't show salaries, but in many cases it's probably highly negotiable and dependent on experience.
> posting completely vague job descriptions
My favorite is sth like "Your responsibility will include writing software according to the provided technical spec."
How would job board enforce that?
Mandatory form fields? Is that what you mean?
What would prevent recruiter from putting fake data into these fields? For salary it could be "negotiable" or "competitive".
For company name it could be name of recruiting company (not actual employer) or just plain fake.
Besides, sometimes employers don't want to advertise their openings publicly (may be to avoid getting flooded by irrelevant applications or prevent panic among existing employees).
Everything would need to be vetted and approved manually.
There would be a sort of self-selection that would come in to play - the only companies that would advertise there would be companies that are comfortable being public with that sort of specific information.
The salary one would probably need to be a range - $60k-$75k, for example. This sets expectations on both sides, although it might not stop a lot of misfit submissions, but those aren't generally stopped now anyway.
Not really a problem. I've wasted my time on at least one interview for a non-existent job. If you are a candidate worth it's salt, then you do some research into the company. If it's a recruitment company, then I'd not go for job :-)
I'd have a "flag for false data" link.
Also, if you did this in Australia, then you could have an ABN number field that is mandatory to be filled in.
---
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.
It used to be a cool web based IM client. I used it on the fly when I wasn't at my computer but still wanted to talk online with friends.
Building IM client is an interesting approach to attract developers and train development team.
This only emphazises how different the world for programmers is in the USA (especially in the SF area) compared to the rest of the world. I only get three or four emails a year on linkedin, of them one's from Facebook, the other from Google, and the others are from local companies.
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.
You don't feel valued and sought after - more like spammed. It will quickly become very apparent that they haven't bothered reading or understanding your CV/resume and will say all sorts of stuff that obviously isn't true. The top of my CV/resume has a prominent "Note to recruiters" so it is trivial to tell if they did any work at all.
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.
That's about the level I get here in Dallas. All the pings I get from Seattle and SV are from the really big players, and I occasionally get a ping from a niche employer (Eaton and Idaho National Laboratory, for example) due to my EE and signal processing background.
If you envy our level of spam, change the address on your LinkedIn profile and/or make a new honeypot one. Like the original article, you can actually find out empirically!
Then write a blog post about it.
Only in how it shows the level of opportunities. But it's a good idea to experience it for myself.
We're attempting to fix the way freelancers are recruited at agencies / startups by changing the pricing model. At the moment with recruiters, the incentive is to place as many people as quickly as possible as you get a commission for each placement.
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
Rodeo -
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.
You won't have any trouble getting a tech job here. Huge demand at the moment, not enough talent. Email riley@dragonflylist.com if you want to chat more.
No problem, you can reach out to me on my homepage; http://www.richardson.co.nz
Have you guys checked out recruitloop.com.au? They're on the same road: ie. changing the industry by changing the incentives (their's is an hourly pay model).
Yea we've seen recruitloop. Anyone attempting to solve recruitment problems is a friend of ours. We're primarily looking at the needs of freelancers in creative and digital industries at this point.
Keen to meet the recruitloop team, we'll be in Sydney at the end of next month, do you know them?
Hi, yes, sorry. They are good dudes give Michael a ring. You should drop into Fishburners anyway :)
How many females were on the recruiting team? (i.e., how statistically significant was all of them getting pregnant in the same month...)?
Pregnancy is probably infectious.
Also having landed a job at a company that is doing well is a high risk factor for pregnancy.
I remember Google advertising themselves as family friendly in the mid 2000s as a recruiting strategy; I guess if people are coming back after even 6 months out, it could be a worthwhile strategy.
"No poaching" requirement is a mistake.
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.
> We had standard 18-month no-poach restrictions with all of our contractors that specified that those recruiters were not allowed to contact Meebo employees within 18 months of our contract expiring
Whoa, wasn't there just a lawsuit where no-poach deals were determined highly illegal?
Much different circumstance (more collusion) if you are thinking of the Google/Apple/Intel lawsuit: "Apple, Google, Intel fail to dismiss staff-poaching lawsuit | Reuters" http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/19/us-apple-poaching-...
Or Google: https://www.google.com/search?sugexp=chrome,mod=1&source...
Different circumstances, but still illegal in California because it restricts the freedom of employment of Meebo's employees.
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.
One of the best things I did was take down my LinkedIn account. I've gone from numerous recruiters contacting me to very few. But the ones who do contact me find me through my github account, my stackoverflow account or my website. These recruiters are of much higher quality, have much more compelling job opportunities and job opportunities that match me much better. I also no longer have to politely decline recruiters constantly.
The Kernel (UK) had a nice expose on recruiter tactics recently as well. http://www.kernelmag.com/topic/the-kernel-recruitment-report...
This raises the question of A/B testing fake LinkedIn profiles to optimize for the sort of leads you want.
I remember doing something similar to this after I graduated from college ('09) but a bit backwards.
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.
I friended Pete London on linkedin, because having connections with fictional recruiter honeypots is awesome.
Here's what I got here:
You and this LinkedIn user don’t know anyone in common You can only view the profiles of users within your network.
Try doing an advanced search for firstname: Pete lastname: London region: San Francisco Bay Area
"Lesson 1: Recruiters rely exclusively upon LinkedIn". You might be thinking, “Really? This is obvious!”
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.
Then you must be in a tiny minority. I get an LinkedIn message every other day, pretty much. I closed my Monster account years ago after getting e-mails of insanely inaccurate matches in cities thousands of miles away.
Yeah, LinkedIn is awesome, it's the future of finding a job second only to your "connections".
I actually disagree. All I've ever gotten from LinkedIn is recruiter spam.
Recruiting is difficult, especially for initial hires. Often time founders are hiring for skilled positions that they themselves are not familiar with. Thus, they turn to recruiters. However, with the good that recruiters bring, the bad comes as well. That's why I am starting HireHand. We are different than traditional recruiters and will assist by screening candidates for skilled positions using screeners will matching skills. You get a filtered set of candidates and can interview for "fit" rather than skill. We charge a small fee based on the number of candidates you have us screen, and do not charge a percentage of salary. Check us out: http://www.hirehand.com
>However, I also needed a recruiter who was smart enough not to poach a founder.
Could someone elaborate?
Anybody she was getting recruiting emails from was trying to poach her (a founder).
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".
Very interesting read full of good data and some interesting takeaways (especially about LinkedIn).
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?
If recruiters actually gave job seekers asserted information about what companies need, this recruiting business would be a desert.
And here I was thinking I was special because I was getting two (sometimes 3) recruiting emails a day on Linkedin ... smh.
the most idiotic move a recruiter does is sending emails to work email address. That's a big no no. It's easy to guess a work email address, but sending a job offer to it? that's stupid. Also same with calling the company switchboard and asking for my name and leaving job offer info in voice mail. crap!
I am a co-founder of a startup. My takeaways from this article are:
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.
Great article.
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?
dono what she was trying to say, but eh, a google recruiter emailed me tonight, and I was thinking of what a horrible employee I'd be for them. good founders generally make bad employees, unless by employee you really mean contractor; we make fine contractors. (not to say I'm a good founder... that, well, it has yet to be seen. But I'm certainly the type that would prefer to work for himself.)
She. Did you really read the article and not notice it was written by a woman? On a blog titled "Elaine Wherry"?
Yes, I meant she. It really was a typo.
(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.
Awesome post, but I'd like to see the backing data.
Is it only recruiters approaching people about work? I would have imagined many employers are directly approaching people in much the same manner as recruiters.
"JavaScript engineer", really?
Elaine is one of the founders of Meebo, so yes, JavaScript engineer.
The trend of calling someone an "engineer" for all sorts of things may puzzle people who live in places where the title of "engineer" is regulated.
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...