Re:Ask HN: Do I have to go through recruiters nowadays, how ...
by gorbachev on Wednesday May 11, 2016 @02:09PM
(#11677732)
It's pretty easy to filter out the bad recruiters (I call them keyword monkeys), though.
I have about half a dozen recruiters I trust. All of them contacted me with a cold call email after finding me in LinkedIn or elsewhere.
Yes, the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad, but you can essentially pattern match the good from the bad really easily based on the emails they're sending out. The bad ones look like templated emails. The good ones send personal emails clearly not sent to anyone else.
So from a candidates pov, it's very hard to see if the recruiter even has a relationship with the companies they are passing to. If you have a way to ascertain a good recruiter from a bad (maybe through personal recommendations) then sure go ahead. But I don't think it's useful to use cold call emails.
As another datapoint, I've had several friends go through the job hunt where we each applied to 20+ companies. All of us independently stopped using recruiters when we saw that it was more efficient to work directly with companies.
This is my experience as a junior dev. Ymmv with other roles but I find that the SNR is too low to get any benefit from recruiters.