In my career I've come full circle on recruiters.
When I started, the only recruiters I knew of were the ones that went to college career fairs. I appreciated them as my first contact to a potential opportunity.
Later, when I started contracting, I would take a more adversarial perception of them as they often were my contact points at consulting firms (a stretch, as some of those companies should have been called body shops rather than consulting firms). These agents seemed less on my side than the recruiters I'd known before. They were in a way related to account management and were being paid by how much they could lowball your compensation. If you were being billed out for $80/hr, they wanted to you make $40/hr or even less, because they'd keep the difference. I met some real bastards here. I discussed this years ago on this blog when I was commenting on the H1B visa workers who were similarly getting raw deals by firms like Accenture and that ilk.
My derision for "recruiters" lasted for a long time while I contracted. But when I recently looked for work in the age of social media and AI, recruiters proved they were more valuable than ever before.
Tell me if you've seen this one before: you find a job listing on LinkedIn or Dice or Indeed that fits you well. Your heart starts to beat faster. You get excited and start thinking about how you could help this employer. Then you look at the little note beside the listing that says, "1000 people have already applied for this job."
Sucks, doesn't it? You're not getting that job. If you apply now, your chances are extremely low that a human being will even look at your application. Want it to suck more? Get this, a fair percentage of the 1000 that already applied aren't qualified and some of them might not even be human.
Yep, social media and AI have made job hunting an exercise in futility.
Here's where recruiters are valuable. Assuming you've made contact with one that's a human, that recruiter will email you directly. That recruiter will talk to you directly on the phone. That recruiter also has a relationship with a real human at a potential employer with whom the recruiter also emails and phones directly. And that connection is the most powerful shield against a harsh and cruel world of social media and AI. There could be 1000 resumes on the hiring manager's desk send from a job site, but that hiring manager talks to your recruiter personally and that's why you have a chance; it's because of that recruiter.
This is not to say that all recruiters are great. They're like anyone else, some are better than others. But as the old ways of communication haven't died off, there is still something AI can't replicate, and that's human interaction. It's trying, and some weirdos that watched too many bad SF movies with Robin Williams in them have tried to help by marrying AI personalities, but we all know that's bullshit. When it comes to getting in touch with a real person, you do it through a real person. All the AI submitted resumes in the world can't compete with a recruiter that has a real line on a real job with a real hiring manager.
So to all the recruiters that I ever thought negative things about, I apologize. Unless you were truly one of bad ones.
