I get the general gist of the article - Recruiters/Head Hunters are a drain on the industry, and their fees are ridiculous.
One thing the author should know is that recruiter commissions are highly negotiable. What started as "1/3rd of first years salary, paid on day 1 regardless of whether the employee works out or not" can easily be negotiated into "We'll pay you a flat rate of $10K after a 6 month probationary period where we determine if the employee is a good fit or not."
Recruiters do have a large database of resumes, but more often than not I suppose people are using LinkedIn to find jobs, so recruiters are becoming irrelevant. If you're having a hard time finding someone with the right experience though, a good recruiter can come in handy. It's just hard to find a recruiter that actually knows the industry and isn't a trained monkey that rattles off acronyms.
How are recruiters a drain on the industry? I've never seen a place that used recruiters that didn't have a direct path for candidates to get into the hiring process.
People here seem to be shocked, shocked at the fees recruiters charge employers. I presume, unfairly perhaps, that those people have never had to scale hiring. The fully loaded drag of an employee --- including their fully loaded cost and the lost productivity across the team to ramp them up and the risk-adjusted cost of lost productivity in the months leading up to you firing them --- that drag is huge. Recruiters are expensive, even in comparison to that cost, but they're not ridiculous; they're priced roughly where the on-paper value they bring to the process says they should be.
(We don't use recruiters, but that's not because of ideology).
Recruiters work when the most suitable candidates don't know who you are (or wouldn't consider applying for any jobs you might have)
Otherwise any value they might bring to the screening process is limited by their desire to send the number of possibly suitable candidates that maximises their chances of getting paid (which unless they really know their stuff or know they're a preferred supplier means lots).
I really like the idea of LinkedIn and other forms of social media (and, honestly self-promotion) making recruiters less relevant, if not entirely irrelevant.
One thing the author should know is that recruiter commissions are highly negotiable. What started as "1/3rd of first years salary, paid on day 1 regardless of whether the employee works out or not" can easily be negotiated into "We'll pay you a flat rate of $10K after a 6 month probationary period where we determine if the employee is a good fit or not."
Recruiters do have a large database of resumes, but more often than not I suppose people are using LinkedIn to find jobs, so recruiters are becoming irrelevant. If you're having a hard time finding someone with the right experience though, a good recruiter can come in handy. It's just hard to find a recruiter that actually knows the industry and isn't a trained monkey that rattles off acronyms.