Here is a new business for you - I’ve even given you the tagline. Please, someone start this. With the pool of talented programmers running dry these days in San Francisco, I’ve resorted to working with recruiters to help find qualified and skilled candidates. The fees are hefty - 20-30% of the employee’s first year base salary plus many of them even want stock in the startup - sometimes as much as the employee they place gets! Recruiters are very easy to find these days. In fact, they seem to find you even when you’re explicitly not looking for one. For instance, Craigslist has a box you can check that says “please, no recruiters”, yet the majority of responses I get from the ad are from recruiters. I’ve decided to allow about some of these recruiters to send me resumes. After all, they all work on contingency so I only pay if they place someone.

Some recruiters will want to come out to your office and soak up hours of time chatting about your “culture” and what you are looking for in a developer (as if “LAMP” skills needed more explanation).   Although the face-to-face does add some value to the process, I think this is mostly a networking play on their part to forge a relationship and make sure their future unsolicited email to you will at least be opened. Many of the recruiters we’ve had come by the office wrote vigorously on their notepads as we described the very basic skills we were looking for (I got the distinct feeling they hadn’t heard of PHP or MySQL before). Others (mainly the ones from Craigslist) will just start showering you with resumes once you’ve given them permission.

Both groups send plenty of unqualified candidates - obviously more from the ones that don’t stop by in person. I have some great and rather embarrassing stories about many of these recruiters already just after a few weeks of working with them. I have yet to see any “hireable” candidates through this channel.

I wish there were some sort of a directory I could reference each time a recruiter contacted me to see what the community thinks of his or her performance. I’d like to know:

• What kind of luck other employers have had with the recruiter.
  • What is the ratio of good resumes to bad ones?
  • Do they do ridiculous things like send candidates who aren’t willing to commute to your office after you’d been clear about the fact that you need someone in-office?
  • How many actual hires have come from the recruiter?
• What the candidates think of the recruiter.
  • Does the recruiter thoroughly test and get to know the candidate to ensure more efficient placement?
  • Is the recruiter responsive to calls and emails?
  • Does the recruiter provide feedback when an opportunity is not right so the candidate may learn and improve their skill set?

It’d be nice to have all of this information in a publicly viewable, yelp-style site. If the site got enough audience it could probably get into the job listings business itself! But remember (see previous post about job boards) - keep the listings free!

RecruiterWatch.com (taken w/ no site)
RecruiterWatch.net (available)