Software engineers tend to be skeptical of recruiters and hiring processes. We see spammy messages, bad job descriptions, limited communication, and terrible interviews. These are bad enough on their own, but the fact is that job seeking can be a very emotional experience. It's a major life change, stressful and uncertain, and can lead to feelings of rejection and inadequacy.
The recruiter is the interface between us and this whole negative experience, so it is only natural that many of us start to blame the recruiters. It becomes easy to see recruiters as gatekeepers. If only they gave me a chance! If only we could talk to the engineers they would see our value!
But it is never that simple.
Let’s discuss the typical responsibilities of a recruiting team and the different types of recruiters. Understanding the role of recruiters can help you see the method behind the madness. Whether looking for a new job or trying to build a talented team, this can help you achieve your goals more effectively.
Recruiting Responsibilities
There are six major responsibilities of the recruiting team. Half focus on individual roles and half focus on the broader business.
Individual Roles
Source Candidates
Recruiters must identify candidates for an open role. Searching LinkedIn and reviewing past applicants is an obvious approach. There are also many other approaches, especially for niche or competitive talent. Recruiters may search social networks, user profiles on relevant sites (GitHub, Kaggle), conference speaker lists, research papers, patent applications, or many other sources. They might use tools that attempt to aggregate this information (SeekOut, HireEZ).
Once found, recruiters must engage with candidates and convince them to apply for the open role. In our industry, first contact is almost always via LinkedIn message or email. Many recruiters use "drip campaigns", a set of emails automatically sent a few days apart. Many things can go wrong with cold messages and much of our collective angst stems from spammy or poorly-targeted messaging.
Screen Candidates
For a software engineer position, there are two screens the recruiter may conduct.
The resume screen compares your resume to the job description to assess for a skillset match. For some roles, the recruiter performs this screen. For other roles, the hiring manager handles it.
We'll devote some other week to resumes, but I can’t say this enough: your resume is a marketing document. It must express the value of your skills that are listed in the job description.
The recruiter screen is usually a 15-30 minute phone call. They ask some questions. They answer some questions. Then, after the conversation, the recruiter is going to try to answer questions of their own, such as:
Do you have acceptable communication skills?
Are you actually interested and available for this role?
Do you potentially have the skillset the Hiring Manager is looking for?
Are your compensation expectations within the company's range for the role?
The goal is to cut anyone who is obviously not going to get (or accept) an offer, thus saving the team time.
Manage the Hiring Process
Recruiters act as the main point of contact for candidates. Besides communicating back and forth with you, they do a ton of work behind the scenes:
Communicating with the hiring manager and interviewers
Scheduling and coordinating interviews
Chasing feedback from recalcitrant interviewers
Seriously, the amount of effort spent trying to get interviewers to put their feedback in the system is ridiculous.
Providing feedback to the various parties
Managing negotiation and acceptance of offers.
They have to keep everything moving.
Broader Business
Build relationships
Recruiters need to spend time building and maintaining relationships. Who they build relationships with depends on the type of recruiter, but might include:
Candidates
Hiring Managers
Interviewers
Other Recruiters
HR management
Client companies
They need to establish trust and credibility so that they can do their job well. A candidate or hiring manager who doesn’t trust the recruiter and tries to work around them can cause all kinds of problems. Being trusted is also a prerequisite to the next responsibility:
Provide Guidance
A trusted recruiter can provide guidance to both candidates and teams. They might set expectations, coach on best practices, or provide feedback.
A recruiter can have incentives to show their candidates in the most positive light. These recruiters might help with interview preparation or provide salary and negotiation advice.
A recruiter can act as a talent advisor to a hiring manager. These recruiters will be a valuable resource on job descriptions, talent trends, appropriate compensation, and optimizing the hiring process.
Tracking metrics
Engineering teams often track metrics for the software development process. Recruiters do the same for the hiring process. They use these metrics to assess recruiter performance, identify areas for improvement, or justify changes to management. Some common metrics might be:
Time to fill: Days between a position being posted to an offer being accepted.
Offer acceptance rate: Percentage of candidates who accept extended job offers.
Candidate experience: Quality of experience, measured by surveys and feedback.
Hiring funnel: The dropoff at each stage of the process, possibly sliced by demographic data.
Types of Recruiter
The recruiting team overall has those six responsibilities, but individual recruiters may not be involved in each one. Consider software engineering - roles focus on different parts of the tech stack (eg. frontend) and can have different relationships with the company (eg. dev shop). The same is true for recruiters.
Recruiting Titles
Sourcer
A sourcer, unsurpisingly, focuses on the Source Candidates responsibility. They find candidates, make first contact, and engage until the candidate applies for the role. At that point, a different recruiter takes over to manage the rest of the hiring process.
Recruiting Coordinator
A recruiting coordinator focuses on the Manage the Hiring Process responsibility. They schedule interviews, serve as the first point of contact for in-person candidates, and handle administrative tasks. They work closely with recruiters to ensure a smooth and efficient hiring process.
Recruiter
A recruiter may manage the entire responsibility set. These are often referred to as "full desk" recruiters. A recruiter may instead hand off sourcing responsibilities to colleagues. These are "split desk" recruiters. Either way, they may have support from a recruiting coordinator. A “technical recruiter” focuses on technical roles, and may have a technical background.
This title is quite broad and the actual responsibilities vary widely by company and individual recruiter.
Company Relationships
In-House
An in-house recruiter is an employee of the company they are hiring for, either full-time or contract. They receive a base salary and, in tech, often equity. They may also receive a commission for hires or a bonus for meeting their goals. At any given time they will be juggling multiple roles across different teams.
Retained
A retained recruiter works for a recruiting firm. The company they are hiring for is their customer. You are their product. They receive a retainer fee, even if their candidates are not hired. They may also receive a commission for hires or a bonus for meeting hiring goals. At any given time they will be juggling multiple roles across multiple companies.
Contingent
A contingent recruiter works for a recruiting firm. They receive no guaranteed income and are only paid when a company hires their candidate. The commission is often 15 - 25% of the candidate's first year salary. (Usually with a clause that the candidate needs to stay at least 6 months). Unlike a retained firm, it is also possible that the contingent recruiter may have no relationship with the hiring company.
A paraphrased version of the scenario might play out like this. The recruiter sends a resume with the name and contact info redacted. They say "Look what a great match this candidate is for your role. We'll connect you with this candidate if you agree to pay a 15% finders fee should you hire them."
A contingent recruiter will be juggling many more roles across many more companies. They aren't focused so much on specific roles as on finding candidates that they can fit into any role that is available.
Understanding Incentives
Once you have a basic understanding of the responsibilities and business models of recruiting, some of the actions begin to make more sense.
Do multiple recruiters message you about the same role? Those are contingent recruiters jockeying to get that 15% finders fee. None of them know about the others.
Does a recruiter go silent after an interview? They may be waiting for the hiring manager to make a decision. Or the decision was "No" and they don't have any incentive to inform you. Ping them for an update.
A non-technical recruiter asks you to describe a project you've worked on? They are looking for your ability to communicate a technical topic and for keywords the hiring manager gave them. Don't be dismissive or go into deep detail. Discuss a project relevant to the job description, at a high level, including keywords as you go.
As engineers, sometimes we fancy that improved tools or processes could make the hiring process so much smoother. While I believe there is a lot we could do to make things better, I also believe that jobseeking will always be hard. The problem of how individuals and companies find and evaluate each other is just so, so complex!
But understanding why things are the way they are can go a long way toward making your own experiences much less painful.
Everyone has at least one terrible hiring story. Feel free to share in a comment or email reply. Especially for those currently looking, it can do a world of good to know that you are not alone.