Don’t use Recruiters to hire Engineers
A job or two ago, I was under pressure to hire up a team of engineers, but the CEO wouldn’t let me use a recruiter. While there was some short term pain associated with that directive, it was the best move in the long term. Once I learned to recruit on my own, I found better candidates and I found plenty of them. My CEO was right. He made me break my recruiter-habit and I’ll never look back.
Recruiters for a software engineering opening will charge your company 15-25% of your new hire’s annual salary. If the new hire is at your company after 3 months, even if doesn’t stay at your company after that, you still have to pay. How much of your time is worth an extra $20k in burn? Even the best paid founders would have to spend 200 hours recruiting a single engineer to match a recruiter fee for that engineer.
I’ve never worked with a recruiter who has given me more than 1 qualified candidate for every 3 resumes they send me. Most of the time, a recruiters ‘network’ is just doing keyword-based searches on LinkedIn. And worse, they are shopping each candidate around to multiple companies — limiting the amount of resources they spend on your opening. For a recruiter, candidate flow is a numbers game and not a quality game.
