For any job that requires skill, recruiting as a full-time job makes no sense. Staffing agencies advertise on their web sites that they find the most qualified candidates, but this is likely impossible. The only people qualified to vet qualified candidates are other people already qualified to do a job, and in the case of skilled jobs those other people would likely find more fulfillment in (and therefore already be doing) the job rather than spending 100% of their time recruiting for it.
Recruiters are basically salespeople selling a product they don’t understand. I suppose all salespeople do this. The person who sells a TV in an electronics store is not an electrical engineer (or a software developer in the case of the new TVs with the fancy menus and Internet connectivity). They can’t explain the details of how the product works, so they quote high-level features and appeal to the consumer’s emotions (the hiring manager being the consumer in the job case).
This is not an accurate way to find qualified candidates. Those high-level features in the case of a job candidate are the candidate’s abilities to do the job, but the only way a recruiter can understand those abilities is by matching crude resume buzz words and asking the candidate. This is unreliable because people can lie and exaggerate. Anyone can pretend to be good at anything. It’s just more salesmanship, appealing to people’s emotions (the recruiter’s emotions in this case).
The only real way to find a qualified candidate is to come up with some sort of simulated work exercise, to test that the candidate can do the job. (This test should be more sophisticated than a multiple-choice quiz.) What people say cannot be trusted, whether it’s a recruiter or a candidate. The only thing that matters is what people can do.
– In the entertainment industry, this simulated work exercise is called an “audition”. Unless his/her reputation is very well-known, an actor, singer, or dancer is not simply asked how good he/she is. He/she is asked to perform in order to get the part. It’s ironic that technical professions, where a job may be more critical, often use weaker screening processes. –
Recruiters aren’t bad people. They’re just doing a bad job. When a job serves no good purpose, the people doing it should find something else to do that does serve a purpose. Either that or the government should simply pay them to stay home and not interfere with other people who are trying to serve a purpose.
The honesty of welfare would be more noble than the illusion of the recruiting scam. Aside from its inaccuracy, which is bad for a company, there are two reasons I personally refuse to participate.
Firstly, it’s a pimp game. I find it insulting when hiring managers rely on recruiters, because it means they’d prefer to treat me as some sort of commodity to be traded, bought, and sold rather than as a person. Using a stranger as a means of introduction is not a friendly way to begin a relationship between two people who will be working together on a regular basis.
Secondly and more importantly, the only way to impress recruiters is to deliver an emotionally-charged sales pitch devoid of any technical merit, because that is all they are capable of understanding, but that is a form of dishonesty, which is something I oppose. I also would find it insulting to have my intelligence potentially misjudged on such a poor basis. If I succeed or fail at something, I want the success or failure to be real, not based on someone’s inability to comprehend what I can do.
