Recruiting is Broken: The $2400 Face to Face Interview

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I lost a week of billable last week. That’s how much it costs if you go all out and turn on the recruiter fire hose.

I got a face to face interview today. It was my $2400 face to face interview and I had to just turn it down because of the back log.

Right now my clients are less than happy, and now it’s a serious difficult march to get stuff done.

Now it’s great to be wanted, but to have that cost you money is pretty ridiculous. As a buyer, I shouldn’t have to spend money to buy what I want.

Recruiting is seriously broken. Only one recruiter really served my needs. The rest of them seriously wasted my time and their clients’ time.

What we need is technology to disrupt recruiting.

Who is in?

Comments

4 responses to “Recruiting is Broken: The $2400 Face to Face Interview”

June 13, 2011

Michael Pope

You are correct that recruiting is broken. However, you probably don’t realize that you unintentionally aggravated the problem by talking to so many recruiters.

There is strong demand and short supply for talented people like yourself. Those who need you and don’t have you will fight to control your interview schedule. No technology product will increase the supply of you. If you really want to solve the problem, start a program that trains engineers.
June 13, 2011

Nichobot

I’ve wasted a lot of time and energy in the last three weeks dealing with recruiters who act like car salesmen. I’m totally down to disrupt some bad recruiting.
June 13, 2011

Dave Doolin

For the most part, I’ve stopped talking to or responding to recruiters. As you note, it’s very expensive to do a face-to-face, and that’s time I could be either doing billable work or looking for billable work. Or sharpening my skill set.

I saw a statistic today, forget where, 40% of companies who are hiring have been looking for 6 months or more to fill positions. This makes no sense. If these positions *really* needed filling, they would fill them. What’s going to happen to many of them is the market is simply going to pass these companies by, and they won’t have the project done, nor will they have any in-house talent to take on the next project.
June 13, 2011

Jing Feung

I’ve been unemployed for A LONG TIME and deliberately stay away from recruiters who, from the outset, sound and ‘feel as if’ they are going to waste my time. You all know the ones: people who call from an out of town area code for a position in your own city; people who describe the position in a way that is not consistent with the job title; people who cull from a website that you posted on in the past but have not kept with it (i.e. resume that you posted when you were once a system admin but are now programmin in Ruby full time).