September 26, 2024

 There is a topic which I need to vent about- that I have been putting off for a while. Maybe I have mentioned it in passing before, but it needs to be elaborated. I have been defeated by this hitherto innocuous professional community known as Recruiters. They have often contacted me out of the blue via linkedin inquiring about my interest in a role- giving precious little information to lure me in. And each time, I get drawn in and engage them. They ask for more information- and each time I drip feed them additional documents- for example my updated CV. None of them ever get back to me. So they are simply fishing to build some sort of internal database or worse, simply to tick some box so that they can prove to their superiors that they are not simply stealing their salaries. Each time I tell myself that I will not fall for them. But something inside me still hopes some that some of them maybe be genuine seekers of candidates who happen to consider me for a role. This is a curious phenomenon. It speaks volumes about a fundamental human condition which is that we are programmed at some innate level to live in hope. No matter how vile the ecosystem may seem to be, something tells us deep within that not everyone is bad. Infact, I got quite mad at the last recruiter who pinged me. She exchanged a number of notes, even asked me how long I worked in the USA- and then asked me for my phone number to schedule a call. I obliged- and never heard back.  I am now thinking whether it was a bot that was planted to phish my number- and not a recruiter at all. Although when I exchanged notes with the person, it did not seem to me to be a fake person. So many people are on linkedin. Who can know who is for real? And yet this is not a new phenomenon. I have even spoken to recruiters at length only to be ghosted by them subsequently. By all accounts, and based on my experience over years, there really should be no reason for me to entertain these types of reach-outs on linkedin.  And yet I do. We are thus, not designed to paint everyone with the same brush, no matter how much we try. Even in our most hopeless moments, we are designed to not give up hope. Therefore, when you hear of people who have thrown in the towel, even in the extreme taken their own lives, it makes you wonder. It is clear that in these cases, the innate humanity has ceased to exist. Which also means, that they are dead anyway. Formally ending the life is simply that. A formality.

Aside of the morbid example, one also wonders about other more fundamental issues. Who are Recruiters? How do they operate? Who needs them anymore and why? In fact, Executive Search, overall, seems to me to be an odd profession- and one that really should already have been disrupted by technology. If the idea is to contact credible people for hiring opportunities- the HR department can do that. Outsourcing this heavy lifting to a search firm seems like a back-office move- one that is usually done to avoid cost. And yet Executive Search firms are fairly high profile companies, many times higher in profile than the hiring company- and the folks in these places are heavily networked, not to mentioned very well paid. Their recommendation of a candidate has some weight- beyond the candidate’s resume itself. They are supposed to speak to these candidates personally, not once but in many cases several times and almost maintain an ongoing business relationship with the. Mainly to ascertain that they actually exist and are indeed atleast somehwat as well turned-out as their resumes suggest.  Well, we can create a portal wherein prospective candidates can video record themselves in such a way that this check could well be completed. Databases of candidates are already available on linkedin. Further search queries can create deeper and narrower databases as required. Where is the need to pay some headhunter a massive sum based on any of this.  I recently saw the contract of an Executive Search firm that we have employed at my workplace too. The commercial model is a cut off the salary offered, or a fixed price per succesfully hired candidate. And yet if the candidate leaves within the year, there is not much to lose for the search firm. Also in any case it is impossible for the search firm to gurantee that the candidate will remain. If it did, it would be moving towards the realms of the insurance industry.

Yet these companies are a thing. People that work in them are not just immensely well paid but they strut around as if they add some deep value to the universe. And at the lower levels, they employ “Recruiters” that jerk people around at their will. Real people, that add real value to the universe. The world is not perfect- but some imperfections can be tolerated and others cannot. There is a class of imperfections that have manifested themselves on account of the largeness and complexity of the capitalist world- wherein you simply need middle-men to be involved to create efficiency. Over time many of these middle-men archetypes become value-centers on their own- like Amazon.com. They are valuable because they have data. As mentioned before, to me the entire archetype of these types of entities shall be bulldozed by Tech- but when it comes to hiring Executives, there seems to be a certain tactile dimension that resists this- given the product is a human being, an able and confident one at that and one that technically could improve the money -in for the hiring company in a significant way. If anything, this is crucial enough for the firm to be deeply involved in this process in totality and not leave any part of it to a search firm. Either that or trust the might of technology and have it completely distrupted. The recruting route that is in vogue today is neither here nor there.