A while back I was chatting with a friend about recruitment and she told me a story of an email she received from a recruiter via LinkedIn for a completely unsuitable position. She asked the sender if they'd even bothered to read her CV to which she got the reply that he has too many to read all of them. Not only is it incredulous that a professional (and I use that term loosely) recruiter is essentially asking other people to do their job for them, but in this instance they obviously haven't done even the most basic of checks as that friend was Trisha Gee. For those who don't know Trish, she's exceedingly well known in the Java community, presents at conferences worldwide, an organiser at Devoxx and a JavaOne Rock Star! so there's no excuse for this behaviour.
More recently I had another recruiter approach (through a personal channel no less) wanting to work with us and insisting they had talent they absolutely knew would be suitable for us. The thing is, we're picky about the people we hire and look for very specific traits, and this company has no idea what they are. When pushed about how they could find exactly the people we want, the response was just the typical agency line about how they've been in the industry for years, it's what they do, yadda. Here's a little tip for any recruiter out there reading this - I've heard this before, everyone has heard this before, why don't you try telling me something I haven't heard before? How about telling me exactly how you'll match up the candidate to the role? How about telling me why they're the best person on the market*.
I think the worst of these I've ever seen was an unsolicited CV land in my inbox for "the best infrastructure guy in London". The funny thing is, that CV belongs to a friend of mine, who had no idea his CV was being sent to me, didn't want his CV sent to me (he's Windows, we're *nix) and certainly was not working exclusively with that agency. After I forwarded the email to him he wasn't working with that agency at all. As someone looking for a job, do you want an agency flinging your CV around like this?
At the beginning of this post I said that the reality of recruitment was a different story, usually. I say usually because there are /some/ recruiters who are actually good, and it's after you've dealt with them you see how the others are no better than car salesmen or estate agents (sorry guys, but you know exactly what you're like).
When I had Barry from RecWorks ask if I'd mind help them with their marketing by just sending out a tweet with a specific hashtag, I considered it a pleasure to do. RecWorks has recruited some of our best developers and if I was looking for a job I wouldn't use anyone else as they actually bother to figure out what everyone wants. They invested a fair amount of time finding out what kind of people we want to hire, the skills they need, what drives them and what's most important to us. They also do the same thing for their candidates and when the two align, then, and only then are we introduced. This isn't isolated to a single employee either, it's the company ethos. When we're not hiring we don't get annoying "checking in to see what your recruitment needs are" emails, and they don't try and poach staff for other companies.
No spam. Nobody unsuitable. That's how to do recruitment properly.
On a final note, if you've ever been to a LJC event, you have RecWorks to thank for that, they started it. How many recruitment agencies can say that?
* It's funny how all agencies seem to have an exclusive on the best guy on the market right now
More recently I had another recruiter approach (through a personal channel no less) wanting to work with us and insisting they had talent they absolutely knew would be suitable for us. The thing is, we're picky about the people we hire and look for very specific traits, and this company has no idea what they are. When pushed about how they could find exactly the people we want, the response was just the typical agency line about how they've been in the industry for years, it's what they do, yadda. Here's a little tip for any recruiter out there reading this - I've heard this before, everyone has heard this before, why don't you try telling me something I haven't heard before? How about telling me exactly how you'll match up the candidate to the role? How about telling me why they're the best person on the market*.
I think the worst of these I've ever seen was an unsolicited CV land in my inbox for "the best infrastructure guy in London". The funny thing is, that CV belongs to a friend of mine, who had no idea his CV was being sent to me, didn't want his CV sent to me (he's Windows, we're *nix) and certainly was not working exclusively with that agency. After I forwarded the email to him he wasn't working with that agency at all. As someone looking for a job, do you want an agency flinging your CV around like this?
At the beginning of this post I said that the reality of recruitment was a different story, usually. I say usually because there are /some/ recruiters who are actually good, and it's after you've dealt with them you see how the others are no better than car salesmen or estate agents (sorry guys, but you know exactly what you're like).
When I had Barry from RecWorks ask if I'd mind help them with their marketing by just sending out a tweet with a specific hashtag, I considered it a pleasure to do. RecWorks has recruited some of our best developers and if I was looking for a job I wouldn't use anyone else as they actually bother to figure out what everyone wants. They invested a fair amount of time finding out what kind of people we want to hire, the skills they need, what drives them and what's most important to us. They also do the same thing for their candidates and when the two align, then, and only then are we introduced. This isn't isolated to a single employee either, it's the company ethos. When we're not hiring we don't get annoying "checking in to see what your recruitment needs are" emails, and they don't try and poach staff for other companies.
No spam. Nobody unsuitable. That's how to do recruitment properly.
On a final note, if you've ever been to a LJC event, you have RecWorks to thank for that, they started it. How many recruitment agencies can say that?
* It's funny how all agencies seem to have an exclusive on the best guy on the market right now
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