It's weird to imagine devious hidden motives like this, when recruiters already have obvious natural reasons to want to do a phone call.

Example 1: they need to get a rough idea of whether you're a jerk, whether you can communicate in the required language, whether your resume is BS, etc. Remember, nobody's paying the recruiter to find you a job - somebody's paying them to find high-quality candidates. Their job is to sell you, so naturally they want to know what they're selling.

Example 2: simple context switching. If your job required you to be involved in dozens or hundreds of simultaneous ongoing negotiations, wouldn't you find it more efficient to block out 30-minute calls with each stakeholder, rather than jumping around between a hundred different email threads full of single-question emails?

One could probably come up with more straightforward reasons. As a general rule though, nobody is ever consciously trying to waste your time. They're trying not to waste their own.

Another element to a phone call is commitment. If you are casually looking and only entertaining emails then you're probably not an active candidate and are a waste of their time. I don't even respond to recruiter emails anymore since I assume they are email bots.

Side discussion: Why is it that they have to find someone for the company? Why can't I instead have an agent that goes around and sells me to potential companies?

Right now recruiting is Yet Another Dysfunctional Industry with non-optimal behavior that favors job creation and useless busy-work instead of finding optimal solutions.

The value that recruiters offer is delivering good candidates. If you convince a recruiter that you're a good candidate, then they will run around selling you to companies! And companies will listen, because the recruiter has build a reputation by delivering good candidates in the past - that's how recruiting works.

But if you just pay an agent to run around selling you, there's no longer any value being added. Why would companies listen to a recruiter that just refers any old candidate that pays them?

I mean you could if you wanted. But why would you want to pay someone to line up interviews for you? Agents don’t get you jobs. They get you visibility.

In particular, scheduling over the phone avoids a lot of back-and-forth about which time works for whom.

There is also a legal concern - phone calls often times cannot be recorded so one can be more loose with their language.

I would tend to agree. My intuition is also that (1) some headhunters might use time-spent-on-the-phone as a metric linked to bonuses (think: click as a proxy for sales in online advertising) and (2) the phone lets headhunter gather intel that you end up leaking in the discussion and that you would not leak via email. Some have great tactics to make you speak “now that you’re on the call”.

I think the time on the phone metric is a big thing, especially when the recruiters were working in office. I've been in the offices of recruiters and it's very much a bullpen-type situation and there's a manager on the side somewhere who's watching and will view those not on the phone as not working.

Thinking about my most recent job search (in 2021), I think that this is very much the case—I had a lot more email and text-based interactions this time around than anytime before.

The latter is a negotiation tactic given in "Never Split the Difference". Essentially communicating over text/email allows you to carefully think about your words, whereas over a call or video call you can read tone of voice, body language, etc. and throw people off balance and reveal info.

I’ve seen recruiters “leak” a lot of “confidential” information from their clients saying “I’ve been asked not to share this but…”. I’ve always taken such messages with a pinch of cynicism but typically such messages are corresponded by phone where an audit trail is less more easily deniable.

So I definitely think phones are used because it allows the rules to be bent in a multitude of ways with a lower risk of consequence.

Plus it’s easier to pressure people when you’re on the phone than it is when they’re emailing.

Yes this. I see a lot of elaborate ideas about why recruiters prefer the phone, but it's simply playing to their strengths. It doesn't even need to be nefarious, everyone in the world plays to their own strengths in life.

I think this is an unnecessarily cynical view. A phone call is just warmer, and recruiters probably close more often by going to a phone call.

You're saying the same thing in different words. "Warmer" in sales means "more influence on the recipient to agree".

Too cynical. Having been through dozens of these over the last couple years, it genuinely seems like most are just trying to make sure they aren't referring an asshole. One of the many personality filters.

I don't think assholes are common enough to warrant a blanket filtering process. I think this is just a common way to justify closer contact, whether it be phone or video. It really is just sales, and the more personal, the better.

You will be surprised. The absolute worst candidates can stay very long in market and appear everywhere. Someone can look good on paper but a short call can tell you right away that you do not want to deal with them.

Ok, remove any cynicism. I just don't want the phone call, I don't care how 'warm' the other party finds it.

Up-thread they said they explicitly asked for email instead after taking the cold-call. What's the good faith reason for insisting on a warm phone call when it's not wanted?

A 'warmer' (aka 'qualification') means finding out if there is likely a material, beneficial connection between the parties.

In almost 100% of the cases, if a Recruiter is able to get someone a job, it's immensely beneficial to the new employee, far more so than for the recruiter.

While that may be true, the recruiter doesn't get paid if you don't get hired. And even if it is a bad match for you, they still want you to get hired so they get paid.

There is no such thing as a perfect alignment of incentives but there is such a thing as 'no alignment of incentives' and it's better for parties to know that straight up.

It's a bit more complex than that in my experience, think Dale Carnegie's tactics. They want to build "rapport" by making you to talk about yourself and then use that to make you to commit. It probably worked much better 20 years ago, when people actually talked to their friends on the phone but, I guess, they still get bites since they stick to this so hard.

Human connection counts for something, for some people more consciously than others.

When you know the name and fact of the person you are working with, you're much more likely to have it stand out in your thoughts as something material.

Sometimes that might feel a bit odd with our view of efficiency and rightly so by some measures ... but it's a bit cynical to wrap everything up in a 'sales tactic'.

If recruiters didn't show value I don't think they would be used so they're not just 'selling' something, they are ostensibly 'providing' something.

It's been a while since I've worked on that front, but I do remember job hunting as a lot of 'empty time' I wonder if it's worth contemplating those direct connections as being material to the mechanics of the system overall.

I don’t think it’s so complicated. It’s more that everyone in a sales oriented profession knows that phone calls are where deals get done. Almost impossible to close a deal over email.

In tech a lot of deals get done over email and text

Details get hashed out that way. But I've never seen a multi-million dollar deal closed anywhere but in the crypto space without at least a call, and much more often a video call.

Thats a multimillion dollar deal, not the intermediary for a hiring deal who gets a low %age.

You must not do a lot of large deals.

If a large deal ($25,000+), this is only the case with the largest tech companies (most customers would order $25k of Apple products online but not buy new expense management software without a call).

Yeah this is a backwards way to think about things. The vast majority of "deals" that I do on the buy side are done with significantly less friction than even email, and I place a high premium on that convenience. If every newsletter I subscribed to required a phone call to close the deal with me, none of them would have my business.

Yes but those are small deals. Most people will not buy a car or a house this way, although that is changing slowly.

Are you going to go work a job without ever talking face to face with someone there?

If not, then getting you on the phone is an absolute necessity along the path to you accepting an offer. It's also practical for covering items like salary expectations, how serious you are about job hunting, outlining the role, etc.

All of those items can be accomplished over email. I think the recruiter/employer might have more of an advantage of discussing items like salary over the phone but that's all the more reason to prefer email as the potential employee.

Nevertheless, every step prior to discussing salary and interview with the actual employer/team can be done over email. Recruiters are typically less informed on the tech side anyway so there's really little reason to phone call type interviews/discussions.

I'm happy to spend a lot of time talking interactively with hiring managers and prospective teams. Recruiters aren't hiring managers and I think the entirety of my interactions with them can be managed successfully and efficiently asynchronously.

It's true, you would want to talk to some people eventually but the current state of the affairs is that the recruiters insist on communicating over the phone only. E.g. you get a message on Linked in "Hi, I have a software engineer job, interested? Let's hop on a quick call!", if you reply with something like: where is this job? what kind of industry? what is the compensation? etc. 90% of the times will be "Let's schedule a call". If you insist - they will either keep replying the same or disappear.

Exactly what this is. Also the more you’re spending time on them the less you have left for the competition

> falls victim to the sunk cost fallacy.

I think I did this in reverse with a recruiter when I turned down a job with JP Morgan. He didn't like my reason for turning the job down and kept trying to give me a proper answer and kept calling several times as well as others in the firm calling.

What was the “bad” reason you turned them down?

It was an application support position with shifts and I was looking for a software dev position and I just didn’t feel any good vibes in the interview. It didn’t seem like the kind of place I wanted to work.

only very smart recruiters would think to do this, most are likely just trying to expedite the process against competition (other recruiters, other candidates represented by those recruiters)

however, not an unknown tactic!