Recruitment Consultants Knightmare
pebble {code} is a pretty good candidate for using Recruitment Consultants. We are working on some long term projects that are growing fast and it is likely we’ll be adding further clients to our portfolio. For the vast majority of cases we use our network, community sites like Stack Overflow or find people through our own staff or peers. We have managed to find some great people this way. More recently we have been using a few recruitment companies with very mixed results.
In discussions with recruitment consultants to date there is an initial spray gun of words like ‘OO JavaScript’, ‘Big Data’, ‘Full Stack’. I’m often told that someone is going to ‘make my day’ or that ‘I’m in luck’. We have given Recruitment Companies a short, targeted brief of the type of person we are looking for. I’d estimate that two thirds of the CVs I have read that have come from Recruitment Consultants are not at all close to the skill set we are looking for. There is little curation of candidates, and a sketchy understanding of skill sets. I feel guilty but I am beginning to assume that recruitment consultants don’t understand the industry well enough and are so busy chasing commissions that they are not curating candidates as they should.
To be clear a service that I’m willing to pay good money for is
- A consultant that understands the market and skill sets
- A consultant that is proactive but knows when not to call
- A consultant that can curate candidates for my requirements
- A consultant that understands that reviewing code is as important as interviewing
The recent thread on the LRUG mailing list shows that many people in the industry feel the same.
I don’t want volume. I don’t even want particularly high speed. I certainly don’t want cold-calls or cold emails, ever.
Perhaps I am naive in the thought that recruitment consultants should make the process of recruiting some take less time than it would without them.
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