Recruiters 36

I’m “working” with a recruiter for a solutions marketing position with an ad tech company here in the Valley they call Silicon.

Well, by “working” I mean she contacted me initially, couldn’t manage the schedule of the phone conversation she dictated, and when I did reach her, she neither gave nor solicited information.

If you don’t know, the recruiter’s job is much like a matchmaker’s: gather all relevant information from the hiring company/hiring manager about the company, the department, corporate/divisional goals, job requirements, what they’re looking for by way of background and personality, compensation budget, etc. Thereupon s/he trawls the jobseeker pool to find candidates that at least match the basic requirements.

But there’s more—now the job is to supplement the information on a prospect’s CV, find out where this person came from, where s/he wants to go; and determine whether there’s enough of a fit to pass on the credentials to the hiring manager.

(This obviously doesn’t apply in the contractor/body shop sphere, where all the recruiters care about is flinging CVs with some of the job listing’s buzzwords on them at clients, and hope that out of 50 one may stick. And that they can pay that person as little as possible.)

But this chick—oh, I’ll call her Myra—was having none of that. In the 12 minutes I spoke with her (these conversations usually last a minimum of half an hour) she asked me no questions about my background, what I’ve been doing or what I’m looking for. And when I asked about the corporate culture and what they’re looking for in the candidate, her answer was (and I am not making this up), “Well, I don’t live there, so I don’t know.”

She also said, “I don’t negotiate salaries”, which is interesting because generally recruiters for this kind of search get paid a percentage based on the offer salary, so it’s in their interests to try to get you as much as possible.

But, as I’ve noted in these pages in the past (just search on “Recruiters”), I long since gave up the notion that I could make sense out of these people. I just hope to God that the hiring manager has more skin in the game than Myra.