What's Wrong With The Recruiting Industry

1.) Transparency on financial interests & conflicts. 

Very few candidates realize how much they are worth to a recruiter if they just happen to respond to that InMail. They also don’t realize that a contingency recruiter might get paid different rates by different clients – and thus be incentivized to not disclose all prospective opportunities upfront, or to sell one opportunity harder than the other.

2.) Transparency on clients & the opportunity. 

A surprisingly large number of agency & contingency recruiters claim to work with companies that have never made a hire through them… Saying “I work with clients like AirBnB (or whatever)” usually means that they remove your contact information from your resume, and cold-email it to the Internal Recruiter or Hiring Manager there (see sample email here – Another Example Why Tech Recruiting is Broken.).

Likewise, a huge number of recruitment emails are unnecessarily vague on details about the company, the salary, the location, the team. It’s only after investing 30-minutes on a phone call that you learn that the “Senior iOS Engineer” position is actually a 6-month contract consulting for 3-person web design shop in Des Moines, Iowa…

The result? The good opportunities get tossed out with the bad, because the time cost of pursuing every lead is so massive.

3.) Intent filtering & centralization. 

Most technical sourcers play a guess & check game.

– I guess that this person might be open to new opportunities.
– I send them an inMail/Email/Private Message to check whether or not my guess is correct.

… 80% of the time you don’t even get a response, and when you do, most of the time the answer is “not interested right now”.

Thus, a massive amount of time, effort & manpower is spent simply uncovering people who might potentially have the skills for a particular position and are potentially interested in interviewing or at least learning more about an opportunity.

Even once all that hard work is done, the most common outcome that they don’t get hired (not a cultural fit, or didn’t pass our fizzbuzz programming challenge or they wanted too much money).

What if instead, the internal recruiters and hiring managers spent time contacting & talking to people who are open to opportunities vs. having to email 50-100 people to uncover a SINGLE prospect – who in all likelyhood is going to get rejected at the hiring stage anyway?