DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Bad news sells — it is rare that I read something in the newspaper that makes me smile, much less laugh aloud.

So I have to tell you that today I felt joy. The cause of my elation? A story in the Chron about how headhunters in the Bay Area are all losing their jobs.

I’ve suffered from the existence of recruiters for over 10 years. As a jobseeker, I was promised opportunities that never materialized. Recruiters sent me to interview for jobs that met none of my criteria, lying to me to get me to go. With one exception, an honorable guy who I trust has not been caught by the forces documented in today’s story, I have found recruiters to be the most duplicitous pack of weasels on the planet.

As a hiring manager, I learned that most recruiters do their sourcing at dice.com, which I was subscribing to at the same time. This means that the recruiters planned to charge me $15,000-$25,000 for forwarding the résumé of a candidate they’d never met. That’s good money for doing a keyword search at a résumé website.

At one point I did some contract engineering work for an ex-recruiter (who went on to stiff me for $800… go figure). He described the standard recruiter tactic of selling a candidate to the employer, by fabricating stories of other offers that were coming in for the candidate, to force a quick hiring decision. He described how he’d tell employers that they’d have to pay a premium if they hoped to have their offer accepted. This would drive the candidate’s salary (and therefore the recruiter’s commission) higher.

Most recruiting agencies have a no-return policy, too… if you hire someone who doesn’t work out, you don’t get your fee back. Instead you have to let the recruiter find a replacement, as if they could do a better job the second time around.

In the Chron article, the founder of a job-networking firm describes his experiences with the post-crash recruiting profession: “A guy in the Bay Area told me he was working part time at a dry cleaner… In Denver, I met a couple of (recruiters) working in food service, waiting tables…” Heh.

To be fair, recruiting was probably a less dishonest career prior to the dot-com days, which brought such a demand for workers that any idiot could get a job working on a website — or, failing that, recruiting other idiots to work on websites. Fortunately, one of the characteristics of a shakeout is that all the rotten fruit falls first.