Why Do Corporate Headhunters…?

…come up with ridiculous skill/experience mismatches with positions? I used to get calls when I was working advanced space programs in Downey from headhunters looking for me to do things like avionics spec development for Navy fighters at Point Mugu. There was nothing on my resume to indicate either experience or interest in such a thing. My theory, then and now, is that corporate headhunters are both desperate for fresh meat (though that’s less of a problem in this economy) and clueless about technical jobs.

13 thoughts on “Why Do Corporate Headhunters…?”

  1. Clueless, certainly. I used to work for a headhunter (as a technical services manager, supervising technicians and as a sales engineer) and the sales people were just clueless…they didn’t know code from cocaine.

  2. You USED to get?

    I’ve been disabled since roughly mid 1998, haven’t tried to work since 1999. Sent my last resume sometime in there.

    I was looking for corporate and field training positions, both national / international, or something in computer repair, field stuff, locally, power generation I & C where ever…I just wanted to try working one more time before I hacked it in health wise. My resume was pretty broad and I could do and had done all that. I still avg one or two phone calls a month, asking me if I’m “looking”. I’ll go months without one, then get three in a month.

    I can’t imagine that there aren’t folks looking for gigs who are available, with much more current work experience.

    I got a call a few years ago from a local guy trying to fill a position of someone to design, install and get running a water treatment plant at a local phram corp. They had electrical types in house for the power supply design. What they were looking for I could have ordered (almost) off the shelf from places I’d worked with before. I was tempted, but passed then gave him a few names of guys I knew who could do the job.

    We know a research chemist type at this particular place. Story has it that they’ve had trouble with the system that was put in. They went to France, to get an engineer, who had water / pham experience. But he spoke almost no English, wrote less and they hired a (non-technical) translator to help complete the job. I guess something must have gotten lost in the translations.

    I still have trouble thinking the best hiring pecking order went from ME, to a non-English speaking engineer, in France!!

    (It can get weirder than hiring practices. The last F/T, permanent position I had, was from 1994 to 1998. I left that entire industry. Never ever talked to anyone on purpose again, customer, employer or co-worker. The company was sold to a multi-national company and I’ve moved three times. Twice last fall just before turkey day, and once since New Years Day, I’ve had calls from my old customers. They tracked me down to see if I could answer questions about the equipment I installed and trained them on.)

  3. It’s all keyword search. I argued with a recruiter on the phone for 10 minutes years ago. I had worked a short contract as a HW break fix tech for Unisys Corporation around 3 years earlier. Her system spit out my resume as a Unisys Mainframe programmer. She insisted that since the system spit out the resume I was a programmer and had the requisite experience. She even agreed that ‘programing’ was not listed anywhere on the resume.

    At least it wasn’t HR wanting 12 years of experience with a 4 year old technology.

  4. Yup… I “fondly” remember graduating in 2002 and seeing positions advertised with the requirement for 5+ years of experience on Windows 2000. Thank goodness I am now in the position that people find me directly via LinkedIn or similar services, so they can see what my actual skills and experience are.

  5. Methinks there’s a little bit of wishful thinking involved too, Rand. The headhunters see a buzzword, glom onto it and then expand it to fit all imaginable job descriptions (and they have very good imaginations) in order to fill their quotas. When you’re out of work long enough, this even starts to look reasonable (I know from personal experience…).

    Of course, the reasonableness disappears if the job actually requires a skill or a background or a desire that the job seeker doesn’t have.

  6. Back in the early 1980’s I worked in a Univac shop. JCL and BAL are absolutely identical to IBM’s but since it wasn’t on my resume they wouldn’t consider me for a position. Headhunters are idiots.

  7. Last experience I had with a headhunter was one asking me to falsify my resume and add skills that I didn’t have so that I could get a position they had listed.

    For recruiter/headhunters, it’s all about the total hours that they can bill for and claim, and they seem to care less about making good matches than they do about meeting their quota for the month.

  8. In order to alleviate many of the difficulties mentioned above, I a try to deal only with recruiters who are hiring for a temporary contract position rather than a direct placement. That way they are looking at me as a potential employee of their own company rather than the client’s company. That way I end up as a contract employee rather than a permanent employee as well.

  9. I’ld vote for desperation to find SOMEBODY, and cluelessnes. Leaving NASA HQ, I got a string of calls for Army systems dev programs. Ok, I did develop systems – but there are a few differences between space craft adn support systems, adn artilary and tank systems?

    Other cases the term “Systems engineer” to them ment computer software adn hardware nitegrator – not requirements analyst etc.

    Though to be fair — how can they know you wuoldn’t be intersted without asking? Just because yuo haven’t done it – doesn’t mean yuo wuoldn’t give it a try. (I got a lot of kudos no one Army artilury system program and a attack helicopter program.)

    😉

  10. With respect to Mr. Duston’s comments about preferring to deal with recruiters who are hiring for a temp position, even they can’t seem to get it correct. Recruiters often contact me about software packages that I don’t list on my resume, and don’t know how to use. Too many of them ask me to “modify” my resume and put on things that I haven’t done.
    The most fun comes when a potential client calls me out of the blue, referred to me by a bottom feeder agency, who asks me about something I have never done, not on resume, etc. “I’d like to discuss your 10 years experience in empennage design on B_____ wide bodied airliners.” said one engineering manager. This wastes everyone’s time, and I hope that I don’t end up on a blacklist somewhere.
    This is NOT a blanket condemnation of recruiters. I have worked with some outstanding recruiters at the national and local levels. But there are a few distinctly rotten apples in the bushel, especially with this miserable economy.

  11. I have had plenty of calls from recruiters who are looking for people to do Windows development. No Windows experience anywhere. Everything’s Unix of one flavor or another (including Linux). But they see C++. I just tell them I don’t do Windows.

    What’s worse in the software industry are all the recruiters who can’t speak comprehensible English on the phone.

  12. I work as in-house IT for a staffing firm, and I think I can give some insight regarding recruiters and well as correct of some misconceptions and unrealistic expectations presented in the comments here.

    Most recruiters — and all the good ones — do their damnedest to try to understand the industry and position they are trying to fill. That said, they cannot and *cannot be expected to* understand the details of all of your skills nor the details of what exactly you do to the extent that you do, or even close to it. If they did, they’d be doing your job for a living.

    Most recruiters work across a broad variety of industries and positions. So while you think it is nuts that after your decades at NASA that a recruiter would contact you about a related position in the military, it makes complete sense that they would do so.

    What we love are the arrogant engineer/IT/technical prospects who when contacted act insulted and are condescending to some recruiter who is doing their best to match them with an opening. It’s a typical inmmature geek response, lording your superiority over people who don’t have your knowledge in some niche area. Get over yourself.

    Recruiters are matchmakers. They have to answer to you AND the client, which often has just as unrealistic expectations.
    Recruiters typically have much broader industry knowledge than you do, but their knowledge is vastly shallower. It has to be this way, unless they for some dumb reason have you are a recruiter with killer technical skills but decided to become a recruiter instead.

    They might be working on finding a Structural/Stress Analyst for a satellite program one day, and then seeking an Audio Subsystem Software Developer for a chipset manufacturer the next. Not every region of the country has enough work to allow a recruiter to become a specialist in one particular industry.

    Anyway, the “recruiters all suck and don’t have enough programming experience to understand what I do” approach is tiresome. Of course they don’t. Develop your personnel skills and try to work with the decent recruiters to help them understand what position you want and how your skills do or don’t match a particular opening. A good recruiter is worth, well, possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars to you.

    You can take the arrogant approach at your peril. I know of plenty of prospects in our system who are highly skilled but such jerks that nobody will bother contacting them, even for money.

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