Four reasons why do developers dislike IT recruiters

Based on our countless discussions with developers over the years, there are these reasons why they look down at recruiters. Learn what can you change to become a recruiter developers love working with.

As a CTO of a fast-growing startup, I haven’t ever used an external recruitment agency.

Although my colleagues and I have been super exhausted daily, I didn’t want to outsource recruitment.

The reason was simple: Anytime an external technical recruiter approached me, I could within a few minutes see he or she knows nothing about the technical stack, about the technologies and the roles we wanted to hire.

I didn’t see the added value!

Recently, I talked to some of my friends, mostly developers and technical leaders, and I realized there are several reasons why developers don’t like working with recruiters in IT.

Let’s review the most significant four reasons:

1. Recruiters don’t have knowledge about the technology.

2. Recruiters don’t disclose enough information about the position/company.

3. Recruiters send out mass emails/InMails with little to no personalization.

4. Recruiters don’t research the candidate (their skills or location).

1. Lack of technical knowledge

First, recruiters don’t have the technical knowledge.

Just compare it to a person like a CTO or a hiring manager who has a strong technical background. For such a person, it is effortless to find developers in professional communities, on meetups, talk to them face to face or kick off a conversation.

It’s easy to interview them and assess them because they can personalize the communication, right?

But for a technical recruiter who lacks this sort of technical knowledge, it is challenging. And developers can sense it immediately.

2. Don’t reveal enough information

Second, they usually don’t reveal enough information.

Let’s compare it again with a CTO who proudly talks about the company, about the team. Every developer wants to know what kind of a peer group he or she will join, right?

They want to know whether the team is going to be a superstar team.

What kind of best practices have they adopted?

Where they are sitting, who will be the guy sitting next to the developer?

So these are interesting things, but usually, recruiters don’t reveal this information.

3. Mass emails

The third complaint I usually hear from developers is that technical recruiters send mass emails, and this is annoying.

Just imagine you get 10-20 mass emails per week as a developer.

Usually, a recruiter mixes technologies in a job description.

No personalization at all!

It is just a mass email.

Who likes that?

Let’s compare it to a technical leader who can go to, for example, a GitHub profile and derive some value from what he or she can see in the code in the repository and then personalize the message to that developer on LinkedIn or in an email.

It’s completely different, would you agree?

4. Lack of research

And the fourth complain I usually hear is that the recruiter doesn’t research before approaching the developer.

Where is he or she located?

What kind of skills does he or she have?

Let’s do proper research!

These are the four significant complaints I hear from developers all over. And actually, the reason Geekruiter is here is to help technical recruiters who still lack some of these areas, who are not strong in technology yet.

So we help them adopt some of those technologies to learn how to hire developers, how to personalize messages, how to look through a GitHub repository and learn something from it.

So they can approach a developer in a personal way.

I hope you will become a recruiter the developers love working with.

That’s why we are here!

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