Do Recruiters Deserve Credit?
A controversial topic, but when you climb the fence you can clearly see both sides.
We software engineers have a somewhat love-hate relationship with the recruitment industry. Make of that what you will.
On the one hand they help us not have to apply to each job vacancy individually but on the other they really do just get in the way of what should be a reasonably simple process by making it convoluted, ill defined, and hideously expensive in terms of both time and money for both involved parties.
Let’s consider a few salient points to try to ascertain their worth. At this point, we’d better put on our flame proof protective garments too.
Usually companies would go to them with a bizarre haphazard list of nebulous requirements¹ which they then subsequently copy/paste onto LinkedIn², send on a raft of unsuitable cold messages to random individuals, and then remove all traces of remuneration from specifications and effectively put them behind their own ‘paywall’ of “let’s have a chat” before sending them on to interested parties.
Then, us software engineers go on to do the actual work of looking through ill prepared badly formatted job specifications (if we can get a hold of them without “the chat”), do background searches on the companies (if they’re even mentioned on the specification), find…
