Are you in the UK? If so, I'm seriously surprised this doesn't ring true. To me it exactly matches my experience both as a contractor and as an employer.
As to who is being exploited here, it's the whole IT industry. They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they leech off our industry. They may not be sending children down mines, but that doesn't diminish the fact they are terrible companies and terrible people.
As a London based developer (VR these days), I have to say that I immediately recognise the hammed up picture this guy paints of IT recruiters in the UK.
I only ever found one recruitment company that I liked who I felt was consistently top notch when I was freelancing. They didn't ever call me unless I signaled I was looking for work and always negotiated better rates than I felt I was able to when I was first starting out. They were called Recruit Media, but they were later swallowed up by a larger company that I cannot vouch for.
Some former employees set up a new agency that continued in the same vein as Recruit Media - http://www.wearefutureheads.co.uk/. They focus on web and digital content creation specialists. They know what the acronyms mean as well as how to spell them properly. If you're looking for a no-bullshit web/digital recruiter in this in the UK then you could do a lot worse.
Disclaimer: I have never worked as a recruiter and I have no links with Futureheads beyond being placed by some of their staff and also using them to recruit freelancers for projects I have led.
Obviously it goes without saying that you're much better off developing your professional network, negotiating a good rate and going direct if you can.
Just felt compelled to write this to illustrate that not all of them are bad. Sadly I'd estimate that at least 99% of the firms here in the UK are complete time wasters.
I think it sticks out because, in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces. And in the recruitment business it seems to happen a lot.
(Omission, elision and euphemism is the British way!)
As an aside, is it not fraudulent to lie in this way? For instance, altering resumes without permission, or promising a perk and a salary which the recruiter does not know exist or apply.
It probably is and there's all sorts of Data Protection rules being broken (that's even if they've registered with the Data Protection Registrar). But it's a mammoth and futile task to report possible violations and by the time it's looked into said recruiter has folded and started some other scam. I've tried this and failed miserably.
Fortunately I've not had to look for a job since 2003, happy where I am mostly, so my old CV's are probably long gone in disk crashes, failed backups or other purges. I've not been contacted by a recruiter for ~6 years now.
> in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces
Ahem, speak for yourself. Go check out your local newsagent's daily national press shelves. Pages upon pages of lies and spin.
Hell, the Scottish versions of The Times, Express, Mail and Mirror group papers print contradicting headlines, one version for Scotland and one for England and Wales.
I hate to do the "we're less gullible in Scotland now" thing, but since the referendum we can spot bullshit from a mile off now.
As a ""cybernat"" and Wings reader, I very much agree - but that's more a sort of impersonal bulk lying, not someone calling you up personally by name and lying about job opportunities or the qualifications of candidates.
I worked in Germany and in the US.
The only time that recruiters got a tad annoying was when I was working in Germany and got 2-3 UK agencies.
By far not as bad as the post makes it seem, but some slightly annoying things such as calling me on a Sunday evening, trying to give me prep speeches and overusing my name, script reading, trying to not tell me the client name, mispronouncing the skills they were looking for, ...
In the US, the recruiter eMails are more frequent, but usually pretty civilized.
Especially the bigger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google) that have their own in-house recruiters tend to be pleasant to work with.
Generally speaking, I've never had an issue with in-house recruiters.
But I've experienced many of the things this guy is complaining about from 3rd party tech recruiters (I'm in the US), including being lied to (and not coming clean until it came up a few months into the contract), aggressively being contacted, dodging questions about company details, not providing job descriptions, lying about what the company needed so I was unprepared for interviews, not telling me anything about interviews, scheduling an interview for me for THE NEXT DAY at 7 pm that was a 3 hour drive away so I had no choice but to take a sudden personal day to go to the interview (I normally wouldn't do that, but I had two friends working there, and really wanted to check it out), etc.
One agency has been sending me emails and calling me multiple times and LinkedIn connection requests from four people in the company these past couple of weeks. They've attempted to contact me at least 12 times in two weeks, and the most they'll tell me in the messages is "an iOS Developer opportunity". With no information you are not going to make me want to get in touch with you, especially when I'm not looking for a new job.
BUUUUT.... I have had a couple good experiences with external recruiters, in fact my most recent experience was very positive and they negotiated better than I would have for the first salary in my career that I've been satisfied with.
When I was a freelancer in Germany (i.e. up to last year) most "recruiters" were scum. I can't speak about the ones that focus on permanent positions but nearly all of the "Projektvermittler" (i.e. glorified temp agencies) were trying to guilt me into lowering my rates for them (because they'd charge the client 2-3x on top of that), tried to get me to sign NCAs far beyond the scope of the project (which is legally unenforceable but backed up with serious threats that would make anyone think twice) and were about as dishonest and intransparent about the entire process as humanly possible.
Oh, and of course they would keep bombarding me with Java/XML projects just because my CV (which they doctored and redacted before sending it to the client) mentioned that I had once worked on a Java project (but specialised in something entirely different since).
The one project I actually followed through on turned out to be a total disaster. Other than that, all my work had been directly for clients without a third party -- and that worked out far better.
If you're an inexperienced solo freelancer and want to work for big corporations, sure, recruiters are the way to go. Other than that, IMO you're nearly always better off skipping the middle man and taking the entrepreneurial risk (which is fairly manageable if you don't allow the client to build up several months worth of outstanding payments).
They charged 3 times your rate? I hope that's hyperbole, because that's pretty insane. I get disgusted when a recruiter charges more than 15%. (The best stay below 5% for doing an excellent job, the worst piece of shit I've ever wasted time on turned out to charge over 30% for not doing his job.)
I live in Netherland, but I'm surprised how often I'm contacted by UK recruiters for Dutch jobs. Apparently they've been expanding their market. I don't have any terrible experiences with them as far as I recall, but I never remember their names and haven't gotten any jobs through them.
I have had some pretty awful experiences with Dutch recruiters, but also some pretty good ones.
I'm having very mixed feelings about the recruiter that got me my current gig: on the one hand, she was way too pushy and I'm pretty sure she lied to me, and their rate is higher than what the client allows (they're got some cumbersome way to work around that), but on the other hand, what I get is significantly higher than what I got the previous time I worked for the same client (though one of the best and most professional recruiters I've met), so she pushed them even harder than she pushed me, and that's paying off for me too. And it is a really nice gig. The one getting screwed here is not me, and the client is a major bank, so I'm not feeling terribly sorry for them (though I do wonder if I should inform them of the recruiter's overly high rate; is that honest or vindictive?).
Still, it'd be nice if we could do without them. Shouldn't the internet help us cut out all those middlemen?
In the UK in ~2000, the last time I was looking for a job without a reliable network, I had an awful experience due to recruiters.
I'd synched up with a recruiter, they scheduled me for a job interview at a swanky gentlemans club (not a strip bar, literally a club for men), in London. I don my old school uniform, for aged 18 I had not yet bought a suit, and printed some resumes at my Mums office and headed over to St James Place in a cab. I check in for the interview and get led into a room filled with desks, some occupied and others not. I take a seat and wait patiently for whatever comes next... ... ...
... The seats are all pretty much full now, and a man stands at the front of the room and gives a 3 slide presentation along the lines of: we can't tell you who our client is, you'll take a test, the top 10 will be offered a job with the client.
Being 18, I was great at tests! Everyone around me was in their mid 20-30's -- I'd been hacking for 3 years at this point, Linux user for ~18mo - I was ready. The test papers are laid in front of us, the presenter orders us to start, I'm done in the first 18 minutes, and sit patiently for the next 12 when the presenter says: "for those of you who have finished please walk your paper up here, for the rest you've 15 more minutes. Myself and two others rise, take our papers to the front and leave through the door and are directed to a lounge (let me tell you, gentle mans clubs are really fancy -- I don't take the gin and tonic offered to me).
Eventually the room is filled with the other test takers, probably 50 of us in total, and we mill around. I was too insecure to talk to anyone, everyone else was probably a little weirded out by the boy in the school uniform!
Some 20 minutes later the presenter enters the room and announces 11 names to stay behind, I was one of them! (What kind of story would this be were I not;)) it was explained to us that we'd be given a short interview. These were conducted three at a time, the presenter and his two associates would take an interview each.
I was in the second three and I had observed that the first three had short conversations, signed some papers, shook hands with their interviewer and then left the room. My interviewer was the presenter. I can't recall the questions, they were about my test paper, but after a couple of them he laid the paper down and looked at me and asked: "did you cheat?", I answered: "no", and he went on to explain that I got a perfect score, the next highest had received about 80% (if memory serves there were ~50 multiple choice questions and ~5 questions where we had to write out commands: how to compile Linux kernels, etc). He shook my hand and led me out, no papers were signed.
And that was it.
I went back to the legal office my mum worked at, recounted the story, and she became so furious -- she believed I'd been subjected to ageism.
I certainly do not mean to suggest all recruiters are this short sighted, and I'm
very proud of where my life has taken me thus far (early yc alum, early leader at twitch, amongst other things), but this experience was so negative that I reasoned to avoid recruiters at all costs. Now, I know the way you find a job is to watch the companies you think are doing a great job, working on tech you care about, and reach out directly to them to find out how you can help.
We can kill the predatory recruiters by starving them!
I would suspect more "we don't want to hire someone who thinks it's appropriate to show up in a literal school uniform to a professional interview" more than ageism, per se.
It's easier to train a professional and prepared candidate in some fraction of job skills than is it to train a very skilled candidate in business proprieties, especially for an interview that starts with a multiple-choice test.
Actually your CV can be hijacked by a recruiter, effectively keeping you out of a job.
Imagine this scenario: You get a call from a recruiter. They seem to have an interesting position/client/network so you send over your CV. A couple of months later you are actively looking for a job, so you make a list of cool startups in your area and send your CV and a customized cover letter. They all answer that they got your CV from the recruiter and that they can't afford the recruiter's fee. They can't hire you for 6 months/2 years/indefinitely, depending on the recruiters terms.
Every place I've ever worked where I had any visibility into hiring, at the start of the search the company makes a decision as to who they want to deal with: hire an inside recruiter, retain a single outside recruiter (or several), or accept referrals from all outside recruiters. Once they've made that decision, when a recruiter sends them a resume, either the recruiter they're willing to work with and whose fee they've already decided they're willing to pay, or it isn't. In the latter case, they respond saying "we've got our own recruiting arrangements, thanks" and toss the resume. In that case, if the same resume comes in through a different channel later, they're under no obligation to the recruiter, and they'd be perfectly happy to hire you.
I suppose if they were working with a recruiter, and later ended the relationship, that could cause the problem you describe, but I haven't seen it happen (as a job seeker, a member of many interview panels, and as a hiring manager a couple times).
In theory, the recruiter isn't supposed to send resumes without the job seeker's approval, which means that when they do so, they've probably broken any agreement they have with the hiring company, so the company probably isn't bound by that agreement any longer. Whether you'd be able to convince the hiring company to take the risk of a lawsuit (that they'd presumably win) is another question, of course.
That scenario could easily play out. However, if the employer genuinely has no connection to the candidate (other than having received their CV a couple of times, in different incarnations) then I don't see why they wouldn't pursue the candidate without the recruiter being in the loop.
I can tell you why...at my
Last firm, the "first submitting agency" was tied to your name on FieldGlass. You could not get around it. It was the only system you could hire thru firmwide.
The firm that said they had already received the CV and couldn't contract has all the evidence that is needed. Surely a firm would unite with a potential candidate to bring down scum recruiters?
1. Job advertised doesn't have the name of the company
2. Recruiter is CV harvesting with fake job ads - experienced that
3. Recruiter bait and switches - job is real but is an excuse to get you for something else
4. Recruiter gets wind of big company or gov organisation recruiting via competition, posts the same job spec then uses it to try and undercut while passing themselves off as the "official" recruiter. Had this with a NHS development role where the job I responded to turns out they had no business advertising for.
5. If the company is named then it's usually because said company only wants to use a recruiter. I've had this a couple of times where I've contacted a company directly but been asked to file my application with their official outsourced recruitment service.
6. Recruiter threatens "you'll never work in this town again" if you do somehow get to know who the company is simply because you ask.
Ninety nine percent of all recruiters I have dealt with have been the scum of the earth, even the so called reputable ones.
I truly hope Stackoverflow Careers destroys these businesses.
The same nothing that does not stop the companies actually seeking their own employees also does not stop 300 recruiters from copying their posted text, stripping out the original company-identifying information, and re-posting.
The noise added to the signal does make it significantly more difficult.
So rather than searching a central repository of job ads for opportunities specifically relevant to you, you have to visit individual company websites, find the "careers" or "jobs" section, and look for leads in a thousand different places.
I consider a no-recruiters policy to be absolutely essential for a job advertisements boards now. Everywhere else, you have to filter out key phrases like "recruiting", "our client", or "resume in Word format" just to find anything useful.
Actually if the company hired a recruiter there may indeed be reasons you can't apply directly and they can't post job ads themselves. I've seen companies make the mistake of accepting absurd NCAs giving recruiting agencies a quasi-exclusive right to applicants. It's not universally common but depending on the kind of contract you enter (and for some of them it's possible to do so informally just by giving them the go-ahead via e-mail) you can tie your hands.
Do you know how agencies work? You do understand that employers contact them and ask them to find people, to organise their payroll, do relevant checks e.g. confirm right to work, security, skills etc. And these companies know they will be paying a % to the agency and this is because they dont want to do that work themselves they just want a competent worker in place asap.
Those same employers could spend their time searching job boards for suitable candidates but they don't want to so they outsource.
As for the OP saying they are taking 15% of his money. That's not the case. In most cases the Employer will agree a rate with the agency, so they will be a maximum of e.g £250 a day for the contractor and a 15% fee to the agency. So they are paying out around £290 per day to the agency. If the contractor was located directly do you think they would pay him/her £290 per day? No they would pay £250 as they know that is the going rate. they pay the agency fee so they dont have to go through the recruitment process e.g. post adverts, interview people (phone), interview (in person) skill check, right to work check etc.
It's funny to read complaints about rent-seeking and someone taking a percentage off the top on a tech forum, where that is the business model of a large portion of tech companies themselves. When authors complain about Amazon being rent-seekers "stealing" a percentage of authors' income, they don't tend to get a lot of sympathy here.
Rent seeking means taking a percentage without bringing any value. I'm on board with many of the complaints about Amazon, but it's clearly not the case to say they don't add value.
Of course many/most recruiters will also bring value, but it's a question of degree. If someone is recruiting for a technical position and they don't have the technical understanding to make any meaningful judgment of the candidate, it's reasonable to ask whether they are worth their fee. Obviously the extent to which that applies depends on the individual, the company, and the local business culture.
