The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

clively · 2013-11-12 Reply Admin

What I find funny is the number of people complaining about bad recruiters.
Recruiters are not skilled in our profession. If they were, they wouldn't be recruiters as even tech support guys are likely to make more money than them.

So what we have is a situation in which a person, who has no clue about tech things, trying to find people to fill tech roles. The best they can ever hope to do is try word matching; and even then some job requirements defy reasoning.

So, what would you do in their position? The smart ones are going to figure out pretty quickly that its a numbers game. Essentially the more resumes they put in front of a hiring manager the more likely one of their guys will get hired.

The only way to view a recruiter is as someone that can find a group of people looking for a job, hopefully in the general field of the position you are trying to fill. Anything beyond that is simply asking too much of them. From a seeker perspective, a recruiter knows who is hiring and it's up to you to see if you meet the requirements before going on the interview.

2013-11-12 Reply Admin

Been there...but with the added twist that my former employer copied my description of my duties from my resume to describe the position itself (word for word. Didn't even change the pronouns from first-person to third-person). So of course I was a perfect match.

I had the recruiter submit my resmue anyway, just to let my former employer know I knew what they did.

2013-11-12 Reply Admin

clively:
What I find funny is the number of people complaining about bad recruiters. Recruiters are not skilled in our profession. If they were, they wouldn't be recruiters as even tech support guys are likely to make more money than them.
So what we have is a situation in which a person, who has no clue about tech things, trying to find people to fill tech roles. The best they can ever hope to do is try word matching; and even then some job requirements defy reasoning.

So, what would you do in their position? The smart ones are going to figure out pretty quickly that its a numbers game. Essentially the more resumes they put in front of a hiring manager the more likely one of their guys will get hired.

The only way to view a recruiter is as someone that can find a group of people looking for a job, hopefully in the general field of the position you are trying to fill. Anything beyond that is simply asking too much of them. From a seeker perspective, a recruiter knows who is hiring and it's up to you to see if you meet the requirements before going on the interview.

If you are looking for people, your current employees are your best resource. If they are not feeding the lead to any of their friends or previous colleagues, it's probably because they don't want to recommend working for you to their friends.

If you are looking for a job, and your friends and previous colleagues are not recommending you for open positions at their company, it's probably because they don't want to recommend you to their company.

Hence, it's up to the matchmakers^H^H^H^H^H^H recruiters to put some lipstick on a pig and seal the deal.

2013-11-12 Reply Admin

I agree with most of your points, really. Especially the word matching. I believe that the complaints we are having is that they are not doing even that. So very often I get requests for technologies that I do not know.

Thing is, I am surprised that a piece of software has not been written for them where they enter one or more terms you want to search and then select a folder for resumes. It would then list the resumes in order of which ones have the most hits. Then the recruiter could actually read the resume before contacting the developer. Seems rather simple. Not sarcasm, I'm really surprised by the massive lack of ability with the recruiters.

After all, the time the recruiter spends talking with me when i am not interested in the position outside my abilities or desires is money lost for them.

2013-11-12 Reply Admin

Happened to me once. HR drone in the company I worked for came across my few-years-old CV on some obscure job board scrapping website and called my mobile number.

"Hi, It's Josh from Initrode, we have a perfect position for a candidate like you blah blah blah blah blah." "Ugh, okay, Josh, why don't you just pop up to level 5 so we could discuss it in person?" "...."

rekoil · 2013-11-12 Reply Admin

MP79:
Hardly the first time someone's been recruited to their own position. I think I remember snoofle talking about it happening once. Of course the obligatory BOFH reference should be mentioned as well :)

Happened to me at Yahoo! once. Got recruiter spam through LinkedIn, replied with a link to my entry in the employee directory. Oh, and I looked up the recruiter's manager and cc:ed the manager as well.

(Yes, I was about to quit, why do you ask?)

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

Paul Neumann:
Valerion:
The company I work for got so fed up with useless recruitment agencies sending absolute dross through to us that they actually started their own agency that concentrated on hiring for us, but did work for others too.
Eventually, they shut it down because they too were shit.

There are only 2 logical conclusions to this:

1 - All recruiters are shit. 2 - Most candidates are also shit.
Prey tell, which conclusion is correct?

They both are, and I say this as someone who does a lot of contract work. Me getting hired is always a WTF - "Yeah, I can do whatever that thing you said was."

Years ago Joel Spolsky wrote an article pointing out that most people you interview are the losers who can't get a job - any one good already has one.

So yeah, nearly all of the candidates are shit.

The recruiters are too, but that's a given.

Roby McAndrew · 2013-11-13 Reply Admin

My favourite was a "technical" recruitment consultant who edited our job spec and ended up advertising for someone with "Red Hot Linux experience". How we laughed...

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

This black screen with white text on the main page got VERY old by now... focks up the site.

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

Paul Neumann:
anonymous:
Paul Neumann:
Valerion:
The company I work for got so fed up with useless recruitment agencies sending absolute dross through to us that they actually started their own agency that concentrated on hiring for us, but did work for others too.
Eventually, they shut it down because they too were shit.

There are only 2 logical conclusions to this:

1 - All recruiters are shit. 2 - Most candidates are also shit.
Prey tell, which conclusion is correct?
Where did he say that one of them wasn't?
Where did I say he said that neither which werent't?

Where did I say that you said that neither which weren't? I said that you said that one wasn't.

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

Calli Arcale:
Why? As stupid as stories like this are, there's nothing inherently wrong with requiring your employees use particular agencies for recruitment.

In practice, though, that decision isn't generally made for the best of reasons. When I worked for a "Baby Bell" phone company a decade ago, we were given that mandate - to deal only with the approved recruiter - and the candidates they sent us were utter dross. We expressed that sentiment to HR, yet they informed us the "approved vendor" knew what they were doing... we had to start administering a written test to candidates to prove they were unqualified, and keep these on file forever to show to HR.

In one case we already knew who we wanted to hire - someone who'd worked on our team years before as a contractor - but he had to go through the recruiter to get considered. So, we interviewed the guy who was going to get the job, plus two candidates that were never seriously being considered, because the recruiter insisted on sending them as well.

Yeah, I felt guilty about interviewing someone who wasn't really being considered, but it wasn't our group that had put them in that situation...

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

Tom:
Been there...but with the added twist that my former employer copied my description of my duties from my resume to describe the position itself (word for word. Didn't even change the pronouns from first-person to third-person). So of course I was a perfect match.
I had the recruiter submit my resmue anyway, just to let my former employer know I knew what they did.

Ultimately what my employer would need is "A replacement for QJo -- with all his faults he can do the damn job and that's all we need -- someone who can do his damn job. Dear Mister Recruiter: can you find someone like him?"

The exact detail of QJo's skillset is to a certain extent irrelevant, because nobody in any position is using everything they know. Best you can hope for is someone who's got a sufficiently wide range of general stuff on their CV that it's clear this person is able to pick up new stuff. And picking up new stuff is all that person is going to be able to do in a new position anyway, even if it's just transferring from using Outlook to Lotus Notes; from CVS to ClearCase; from SpiraTeam to QualityCenter, and so on. And all that's before you approach the problem of what the guy can do in the course of doing his actual job.

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

Mr.Bob:
If you are looking for a job, and your friends and previous colleagues are not recommending you for open positions at their company, it's probably because they don't want to recommend you to their company.

Which, for the record, could happen for 2 reasons:

They don't think you're a good potential employee.
They like you too much to give you job in a bad company.

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

clively:
So what we have is a situation in which a person, who has no clue about tech things, trying to find people to fill tech roles. The best they can ever hope to do is try word matching; and even then some job requirements defy reasoning.

Recruiters have a way of ignoring information that falls right in their lap, such as an applicant submitting a tailored resume for a specific job ad they have posted. Who cares, it just goes into the keyword cruncher and you get a call about some job that you wouldn't have considered in a million years, often on the other side of the country.

2013-11-13 Reply Admin

anonymous:
Paul Neumann:
anonymous:
Paul Neumann:
Valerion:
The company I work for got so fed up with useless recruitment agencies sending absolute dross through to us that they actually started their own agency that concentrated on hiring for us, but did work for others too.
Eventually, they shut it down because they too were shit.

There are only 2 logical conclusions to this:

1 - All recruiters are shit. 2 - Most candidates are also shit.
Prey tell, which conclusion is correct?
Where did he say that one of them wasn't?
Where did I say he said that neither which werent't?
Where did I say that you said that neither which weren't? I said that you said that one wasn't.

?TOO MANY UNKNOWN UNKNOWNS ERROR

clively · 2013-11-13 Reply Admin

James Rose:
Thing is, I am surprised that a piece of software has not been written for them where they enter one or more terms you want to search and then select a folder for resumes. It would then list the resumes in order of which ones have the most hits. Then the recruiter could actually read the resume before contacting the developer. Seems rather simple. Not sarcasm, I'm really surprised by the massive lack of ability with the recruiters.

Interestingly, I worked on just such a software package for a pretty large recruiting company about 15 years ago. I was there one whole week before leaving because their developers were so f*cking dumb I couldn't stand it.

Prime examples:

Their "DB administrator" had spent a month trying to make several of their queries more performant. They were simple selects with maybe 2 joins. I casually asked if the relevant columns had indexes, he said no then ran off to add them. A few minutes later he told everyone that the queries were now 99% faster...that was the first 30 minutes of day 1. (during the introductions)

After I made it to my desk they handed me a task which had fallen through 5 other devs on the team which all of them said was "impossible". This was the late 90s, and management wanted a background image added to the main form in an MDI app. 20 minutes later, the code was checked in as done.

In my first 2 days, I knocked 20 "incredibly hard/impossible tasks" off of their list. Tasks the other 10 guys had failed to deliver on. The next 3 days I spent sitting quietly in my cube as my manager had no idea what to give me. Honestly, I think I embarrassed the crap out of everyone and he couldn't afford to have me continuing to do so. That Friday I quit and never looked back.

Maybe they used their own recruiters to find those guys...

2013-11-14 Reply Admin

clively:
Interestingly, I worked on just such a software package for a pretty large recruiting company about 15 years ago. I was there one whole week before leaving because their developers were so f*cking dumb I couldn't stand it.
Prime examples:

Their "DB administrator" had spent a month trying to make several of their queries more performant. They were simple selects with maybe 2 joins. I casually asked if the relevant columns had indexes, he said no then ran off to add them. A few minutes later he told everyone that the queries were now 99% faster...that was the first 30 minutes of day 1. (during the introductions)

After I made it to my desk they handed me a task which had fallen through 5 other devs on the team which all of them said was "impossible". This was the late 90s, and management wanted a background image added to the main form in an MDI app. 20 minutes later, the code was checked in as done.

In my first 2 days, I knocked 20 "incredibly hard/impossible tasks" off of their list. Tasks the other 10 guys had failed to deliver on. The next 3 days I spent sitting quietly in my cube as my manager had no idea what to give me. Honestly, I think I embarrassed the crap out of everyone and he couldn't afford to have me continuing to do so. That Friday I quit and never looked back.

Maybe they used their own recruiters to find those guys...

I have been doing this for 20 years, and while I know there is a lot I still don't know, it's these situations that always amaze me.

I think my fav WTF was my last contract in Seattle before I moved to NYC. The "developer" was coding against the production servers. There was no development or test systems.

Maybe with a little luck I can work with you, or at least someone as good as you someday. (this is the reason I guit my latest job, just too much bad)

Have a great weekend.

2013-11-15 Reply Admin

I dunno, I've actually had pretty sharp recruiters on the east coast contact me...the problem is they simply WAAAY overshoot the salary (since most get paid a percentage of salary), make the potential employer nervous, and then screw up the whole thing. Just for kicks i went on an interview recently (that i had absolutely no intention of taking) and i saw the CEO sweating at the thought of paying me $125,000/year + whatever they were paying the recruiter (I make $105,000/year at my current job.) In the end i was told i didn't fit their culture (even though i actually made friends with their dev team, and have had lunch with them a couple of times since then). The recruiter was suddenly and mysteriously 'fired' and 6 months later went bankrupt...only to get replaced by another recruiter, which managed to obtain my resume...which restarted the process...

2013-11-24 Reply Admin

This didn't happen in the US, and yes, my resumé most certainly had my name on it, so I'd assume the latter; general recruiter laziness.

2013-11-24 Reply Admin

Correct!

2013-11-24 Reply Admin

You do understand how much editorial gets attached to the original stories here, right?

2014-02-19 Reply Admin

^^^ What he said ^^^

When you've seen the same recruiter goof up the same way several times in a row, the onus isn't on you to keep correcting them or enabling their incompetence by giving them another chance indefinitely. Besides, I've seen enough repeated 'mistakes' by recruiters to have come to the conclusion that their behaviour isn't always down to mere incompetence. Often it's simply a passive-aggressive sales tactic, to give you a reason to call them so they can waste even more of your time on their lousy sales pitch.

2014-02-19 Reply Admin

clively:
Interestingly, I worked on just such a software package for a pretty large recruiting company about 15 years ago. I was there one whole week before leaving because their developers were so f*cking dumb I couldn't stand it.
Prime examples:

Their "DB administrator" had spent a month trying to make several of their queries more performant. They were simple selects with maybe 2 joins. I casually asked if the relevant columns had indexes, he said no then ran off to add them. A few minutes later he told everyone that the queries were now 99% faster...that was the first 30 minutes of day 1. (during the introductions)

After I made it to my desk they handed me a task which had fallen through 5 other devs on the team which all of them said was "impossible". This was the late 90s, and management wanted a background image added to the main form in an MDI app. 20 minutes later, the code was checked in as done.

In my first 2 days, I knocked 20 "incredibly hard/impossible tasks" off of their list. Tasks the other 10 guys had failed to deliver on. The next 3 days I spent sitting quietly in my cube as my manager had no idea what to give me. Honestly, I think I embarrassed the crap out of everyone and he couldn't afford to have me continuing to do so. That Friday I quit and never looked back.

Maybe they used their own recruiters to find those guys...

This must be some definition of the word "interestingly" I was previously unaware of. Never brag, bluster, blush or bullshit. Especially on the internet. I mean, what's the actual point of bigging yourself up to strangers that don't even know you, over things that happened in the last millennium, if indeed they happened at all?

Eric Cartman · 2022-10-14 Reply Admin

I aspire to work for a company like Leadwerks Software in general. I've previously submitted my resume and a resume from a software engineer at https://resumewritinglab.com/software-engineer-resume-writing-service/ . can increase their chances of success since they are less likely to be employed by a company without expertise after taking programming courses.

Addendum 2022-10-14 13:11: I aspire to work for a company like Leadwerks Software in general. I've previously submitted my resume and a resume from a software engineer at https://resumewritinglab.com/software-engineer-resume-writing-service/ . can increase their chances of success since they are less likely to be employed by a company without expertise after taking programming courses.

2023-11-17 Reply Admin

In the realm of recruiting, encountering challenges with candidates or recruiters can be daunting. Just as RJ faced a hurdle with a recruiter, ensuring your resume stands out amidst competition requires finesse and strategy. Seeking guidance on crafting a persuasive resume? Explore https://resumeperk.com/blog/how-to-write-a-persuasive-resume-advisor for expert insights and tips. Similar to RJ's decision to directly engage with Brandon, taking proactive steps to refine your resume can make a significant difference. Expert advice, much like RJ's direct call to rectify the situation, can elevate your resume's persuasiveness, ensuring it effectively communicates your skills and experiences to potential employers.

Recursive Recruiting

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