Phoning it in means giving up on doing a good job, and just putting in the bare minimum effort to get the job done. It comes from the idea of phoning in rather than putting in the effort to show up in person.

So in this case, they don't actually care about finding good (or underpriced) candidates, they're just spamming a basic resume match.

+1

By way of example from the other side of the fence - my LinkedIn profile asks recruiters to state that they've read my pre-requisites for a role when they contact me. 90% don't do that (and clearly haven't).

The kind of recruiter that doesn't bother to read the candidate's profile is "phoning it in"

I delete all of those - the remaining recruiters are generally ok, though they're often offering roles that are trivially discoverable to anyone actively job hunting.

I think there is more to the original comment than this though. I'm interested to know how they measure diversity when reading a CV and how they judge a recruiter to be "phoning it in" or not. I know what the phrase means - I just don't understand the meaning in this context.

I mean if all the candidates are only from big companies or went to the same school or are all white men (this part I only figure out on videocalls), then I assume the recruiter isn’t fishing very many recruiting pools. I want recruiters who do more than search LinkedIn. They should be tapped in to local technology groups, alumni associations, professional groups, etc.

Thanks that makes sense.

I don't know if this is what they meant, but I assumed they were getting at the idea that a good recruiter will find you candidates who are better than they appear on their CV (because they'll be cheaper relative to their ability), and it would also show they weren't just spamming for a match to the template.

verb gerund or present participle: phoning

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INFORMAL work or perform without much effort, interest, or enthusiasm. "I think of my playing as committed—I can't remember ever phoning it in at any performance"