Starve out the recruiters!

My LinkedIn feed and my brain are filled with misappropriated eye-candy videos and rich people quoting themselves in motivational photos, but still, I don’t know anything more cringe-worthy than recruiters and sourcing agents sharing *programming memes* on LinkedIn. These underline exactly how little they really understand from the world they’re hiring for, and in their own nature, the most genuinely ironic thing they can do to entertain.

Wonder why we’re not responding to the position to the highly secretive but very interesting new client you’re hiring for? Because:

• you (plural, not you personally, but a blanket you) can’t tell javascript from java
• you can’t tell a language from a framework, or from a product
• and for all you care, I can be a potato farmer so long as I can go for an interview.

Yet, I’ve also fallen victim to a shiny new offer before, but we all learn through mistakes, don’t we?
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Companies, on the other end of it, are losing engineers, who are lulled (like I was) into a very promising opportunity by a charmingly-British recruiter, who knows the game of moving people effectively, but not the game of building software — which they’re trying to help by hiring, ironically.

Imagine all the millions of $ poured into the recruitment industry by companies desperate to find staff, while everyone is always understaffed.
Imagine all the time and money companies have to suck up and pay out for re-training the ever-rotating personnel, while noone really understands what they’re working on.
Imagine all the crap code that’s been written, where the author knew, the next time this needs to be changed, they’d be learning the ropes at a different company for more money.

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I’m not sure if I should blame the recruiters.

It’s a definite need they fill. They find people for companies where there’s money and they help engineers get the 20% salary bump, they could have gotten at their previous jobs. I also can’t blame the engineers — for I am one, and I also wouldn’t like to stay at a company, that offers the money only when I try to leave, the wage they could have paid months ago, but I never asked for it. I can always do the same mind-melting job at a different place with no history of getting tricked. So the only one left in the blame game is the company.

But don’t you find it absurd, that loyalty is rewarded by late-to-the-party counter-offers, and not caring for your company seems to pay off? I do.

I think the problem is that recruitment wedged itself immovably into the IT industry, and made itself a game where if you don’t pay up, you’re left behind. But if you pay, you’re just feeding the same machine that keeps re-shuffling the engineers between companies to everyone’s detriment.

I think the solution is to stop paying them. Starve out the recruiters!

Pay your engineers instead to de-register from LinkedIn, or pay them for each rejected reach-out. Pay internal HR personnel, to get the salary raises within the company. Pay a robot, to send nice and accurate e-mails to your people complimenting their skills, but not to tempt, and not to share tacky memes.

Stop incentivizing this constant cross-poaching, and incentivize them learning programming. After all, there’s a shortage in engineering, and not in recruitment.

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If you’ve gotten this far, and you have any say over salaries and hiring, consider paying your engineers fairly, not to deter them if they threaten to leave, but to reward that they stayed. But do starve out the recruiters who won’t even bother to fact-check a meme before sharing in between two unsolicited mails, let alone find a real worthwhile upgrade for your engineer.

(This was an original post on LinkedIn, but who the heck reads Linkedin posts anyway. We go there for positive reaffirmation on our horrible nature, poor memes, and to see if any recruiter hotties checked our profile in the past 24 hours)