How to Vet a Recruiter: Candidate Edition

Recently someone on a tech Slack team I frequent asked for help:

Miles’ question seemed a useful one and something I thought I could expand on as a recruiter. I’ve worked at big agencies, bad agencies, one pretty decent agency, as an internal tech scout, and now I run my own recruiting company. I’ve recruited just about every way you can and I’ve helped hire over 120 software engineers in Chicago.

If you’re talking to a recruiter, there’s probably 80% or better odds they’re relatively new to the field. There’s a ton of churn and the big agencies are little more than pyramid schemes packed with cubicles and fresh grads with very little experience. Odds are that recruiter you’re talking to hasn’t even placed anyone at a new job yet. You might be their first attempt at “faking it ’til they make it”.

I was there. Everybody is a beginner at the beginning. I was really lucky that I had a good mentor who taught me “the candidate is the client…you work for them no matter who’s paying you”. I took my mentor’s creed and put my own “just be a human” spin on my practice and now I run www.re-factor.co with a former hiring-client-and-software-engineer-turned-partner.

Here’s some good questions to ask any recruiter you might be thinking of working with:

1. How many [insert your job title here{in my case software engineers}] have you placed in your career? →This tells you how accomplished they are and helps you avoid “faking it ’til they make it”.
2. How many this year? → This tells you how healthy their current roster is.
3. I’m a [Ruby] engineer: how many of those folks have you placed? →This tells you how good their market fit is for your experience.
4. How do you develop your client roster? Do you have a focus? [for example, we only work with growth-focused companies with $10M+ in funding so we can be more confident of viability if we’re landing folks jobs there] →This tells you they have a plan and care how healthy their landing spots are.
5. Are you local or national? [Local recruiters almost always have more context and are more tied to their “community”] →This tells you how well they know the market you’re interested in.
6. When discussing a particular client, how well do you know this company? Have you placed anyone here? Have you previously hired for any of the managers here? →This tells you how well they know what your day will look like.

Recruiter fees range from 15–33.3% of a candidate’s first year salary so they’re making you a more expensive hire; only bother if you find a good one (and don’t bother if this is your first job…but that’s another blog post). Good recruiters are an excellent way to break into a company with more context and a better “candidate experience”. They should help you avoid surprises, get an offer that matches the expectations your new company has attached to your work, and give you way more context than you could get on your own. A good recruiter should help you vet your company the same way a dietician might help you vet a diet or a realtor might help you vet a home. The very best recruiters aren’t self-interested and won’t resort to short-term, sales-driven tactics because they know that, if they help folks, word will get out and they’ll do well when they’re remembered as a useful contributor to a community.