Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Recruiters

When we started looking into recruiters last April, I was surprised by the complete lack of information regarding anything recruiter.

Funding, hiring, operations, development, you can probably think of more than 1 solid blog posts on all these. Recruiters... nothing.

Even something as simple as the different kinds of startup recruiters was nowhere to be found.

Fast forward 12 months and 10 recruiters from all different walks of life and it's time I pay it forward.

I thought I'd start with a simple breakdown of how I classify two main types of recruiter a startup might encounter. I've worked with both.

Contingency Recruiters

These types of recruiters typically work for a firm and are compensated only when they place a candidate.

Their compensation is a % (anywhere from 20 - 35%) of the candidates yearly salary. Sometime you can also negotiate a flat fee per hire.

The trouble with these kinds of recruiters is they don't work for you, they work for their firm and their candidates. 

It's in the recruiters best interest to bring as many companies to the watering hole as possible. More interested parties = more demand = higher employment offers = higher commission on the placement.

I mean, how more misaligned can the interests get?

Another drawback to this kind of recruiter is they will pound your inbox with resume spam, one candidate after the other.

So if you don't have the bandwidth to manage that, definitely not recommend. Also who looks at resumes anymore? Github, Dribble, social accounts, real product are the mantra of the day.

And to make matters worse in the unlikely event you actually are interested in a candidate you have to realize that they've been seeding this candidate to 50 other interested parties. Win!

I don't many other ways to waste time and money so effectively in the name of making progress.

Here's a except I wrote in July 2010 - titled thoughts-on-recruiting.txt - hashing out my, then current, experience working with several contigency recruiters.

Recruiting is an absolute bitch. Head hunters are terrible. Remember they work for the candidate not for you. They get paid when they place a candidate and the more the candidate get paid they more they make. Wow the incentives couldn't be more fucked.

Never have several recruiters report to you. You should only have 1 main person report to your re: recruiting and have everyone else funnel through them. I'm trying this with a contract recruiter currently.

If all of a sudden you have 5 contingency recruiters you have 5 hot and heavy sales people ready to push product on you everyday - you will not get anything done.

Contract Recruiters

This is the type of recruiter Paul English, Co-Founder and CTO of Kayak.com, talks about his his blog post Hiring Religion.

The biggest difference with this type is that they work for you and you alone. Therefore they're not seeding a candidate to 50 companies.

They are compensated by the hour and in some cases get a cash and/or equity bonus per candidate placed.

Now the challenge here is if your contract recruiter doesn't have deep connections in certain areas of expertise then they become a high priced secretary.

What I mean is, if you have to give the contract recruiter their leads, lists, pockets of people and they bring none of this to the table, you might as well hire an intern or someone fresh out of college that has 2 key abilities: selling and keeping track of multiple schedules.

Depending how many great hires (great as in they stick around, which you don't know until you know) are made, this kind of recruiter can get really expensive really fast.