All that you wanted, but were afraid to ask an IT recruiter

I work as an IT recruiter (to be honest, more recently, less than six months), but even for this short period I often had to deal with a negative attitude towards recruiters from the IT community.
Even in close surroundings, IT people who are familiar with my work firsthand, sometimes wonder what the essence of the work of a recruiter is, why is it difficult and terribly interesting?
Who are recruiters and what do they eat with? Do I need to be friends with them? Are they able to help the employee and the employer find each other?
Earlier I asked the habrasociety to ask my questions to the recruiter.
Today I am returning with answers.

As already mentioned, I have little experience in recruiting. There are some search practices and successful employment of a little more than a dozen candidates for various positions in IT, so I will answer some questions based on my understanding of the situation. But the habrayuzers also asked such questions, the answers to which require more experience in HR in general and in recruiting in particular. In such cases, I will be guided by the cumulative experience of my colleagues so that the answer is as complete and professional as possible.


To begin with, I propose to take a closer look at the recruiter's work schemes. This will help to understand what the cost of recruitment services for the customer is made up of in a particular case.
There are three types:

1. Recruiter “in house”.

He works in the staff of the company and is engaged in the search for specialists only for this company. The customers for such recruiters are the heads of departments and projects in which the vacancy is open. Sometimes it can be directly the CEO of the company. In house recruiter income is a salary. As a rule, the size of the salary depends on the professionalism of the recruiter and the capabilities of the company.

In addition to the salary, there are bonuses. The scheme for constructing a bonus scheme in a company is determined by the wishes of the management, their experience and certain ideas about justice. The situation is quite common in which there is a plan for the selection of personnel for a certain period, for example, for a year. Further, this plan is divided into quarters and months, taking into account the influence of seasonal factors (in September, people are more likely to change jobs than at the end of December). Depending on how many percent the plan is completed, the recruiter receives a bonus. There are situations when the work of the entire recruiting department is awarded in general, without taking into account the efforts of each individual person.
As a rule, the “cooler” the company, the more cool and experienced recruiters work in it. And of course, experience and skills in this profession directly affect the level of income.

2. Recruiter in a recruitment agency.

Is there no recruiter in the state? A lot of urgent vacancies? The company's recruiters specialize in banking recruiting, but do you need an IT specialist? Are you looking for a top manager or a person of very rare specialization?

The recruitment agencies and the recruiters working in them are always ready to help in difficult situations when maximum coverage, quality and speed of search in various segments of the labor market are required.
The professionalism of recruiters in agencies is quite high, because often they work on complex vacancies and search for a specialist in a fairly short time.
The employer pays for the work of the recruiter in the agency, in no case is the candidate.

The amounts for one vacancy vary from one monthly salary of the sought-after specialist to 25% of his annual (!) Income. The suspicious low cost of recruiting agency services should alert, because recruiters need a lot of money to maintain an office, pay for access to resume databases and salary.
If the agency takes 1-1.5 salaries, then it is likely that the recruiters there are half-starved and not very highly qualified, and a comfortable office exists only on paper.
An excessively high commission (20-25% of the annual income of the found specialist) appears when a search for a complex job is carried out by a very large agency with top-class professionals.
It happens that to recruiters, by analogy with sales managers, they apply the “minimum salary and big bonuses” scheme, or they appoint a salary quite comfortable for life, adding to it smaller bonuses for closing positions. With different schemes of work of recruitment agencies, the size of the recruiter's bonus can vary from 4 to 25% of the fee.

3. Recruiter in free flight. Freelance

Freelance in recruiting has its pros and cons both for the customer and for the recruiter himself.
Of the minuses: the customer does not have the opportunity to conclude a contract with the recruiter (individual) that will have legal force. The freelancer does not provide any guarantees of his work and often does not even have paid access to resume databases on the same HeadHunter, which can significantly reduce the effectiveness of the freelancer.
The advantages for the customer include the relatively low cost of the freelancer: from 0.7 to 1.5 salaries of the desired specialist.
What pros and cons can a recruiter find in freelance?
Pros: a fairly large fee (with successful closing of the vacancy), a free work schedule.
Of the minuses, it is worth noting that the lack of a contract with the customer can play a cruel joke with a recruiter who simply will not be paid for the work. In addition, the recruiter freelancer is also forced to engage in the search for clients on his own, and, I must say, this is not always successful. Not all recruiters have the necessary knowledge and experience in the field of sales to competently sell their services.

At the moment I work in an agency, specializing in the search for IT specialists both for large international companies and for cozy startup teams. I am actively gaining experience working on complex vacancies surrounded by colleagues with extensive professional experience.

Having talked about how the career history of a recruiter can turn out, we turn to the answers to questions from Habr:

- What was the professional path of the recruiter, why did he become one - a vocation or didn’t work out anyway? If a vocation is what it is specific about and how he understood it.

This question can be asked to each recruiter and, I am sure, the answers in each case will be different.
Together with me are those who came to IT recruiting, having experience in the selection of personnel in other areas, and there are also those who have been involved in development for some time, and as a result, they are well versed in technology.
Is there any real benefit from specialized education in the HR sphere? Among my colleagues there are graduates - HR managers. But I can definitely say that this or that education is not a “panacea” and something, but you have to learn already in the process of work. Techies have to pump communication skills, and humanities - to get comfortable in IT terminology.

- Do recruiters have a specialization?

Yes, recruiters have specialization, because the selection of specialists in various fields implies the presence of certain knowledge about the internal structure of this field.

I will list the main specializations:
- Industrial - selection of highly qualified personnel for industrial production.
- IT sphere is the native sphere of the habrosociety. It also requires a certain knowledge of the structure and understanding of terminology.
- Banking - high-quality selection requires an understanding of the mechanisms of banking.
- Mass selection - this area of ​​recruiting involves the search and conduct of many interviews for low-skilled positions. Developed intuition, psychological stability and excellent knowledge of migration legislation are the three pillars of this specialization.

- The next question was about “priorities at the meetings”. Meetings in our case are understood as a face-to-face interview.

In one way or another, an interview is always an exam and most importantly your professional skills. A competent interview in a specialty begins with the basics. Further, when the employer understands for himself that you are guided in basic concepts, he goes on to the information from the resume. You will definitely be asked about the experience with the technologies that you indicated in your CV (from this you can make an important conclusion: do not lie in the resume, write only what you really worked with and what you can talk about).

If we talk about personal qualities and appearance at the interview - then, of course, your professional level is more important. But, you must admit, a good project manager always thinks about how a new employee will fit into the team, and whether there is now at least someone in the team with whom, having come to a new job, you could make friends. Remember that a candidate is not evaluated as a “code-writing machine,” but as a future colleague, part of a team, and simply as a person.
The human factor and sympathy, however, as well as antipathy, has not yet been canceled.
Speak honestly and openly about yourself at the interview, do not be rude, keep a positive attitude, and the meeting will be excellent!

- Tell us what you think about the test items?

Test tasks - a moot point. Candidates sometimes perceive the test task as additional labor and time costs. By agreeing to test ones and fulfilling them on time, anyway, the candidate would prefer to be hired only on the basis of a story about himself and examples of work.
Rarely, but there are situations when good developers themselves ask to give them a test if they do not have code examples (closed repositories or a project are the property of the current employer).
For the employer company, test tasks are definitely a great blessing, because they help to save a lot of time by identifying those specialists who are most likely to apply for a vacancy.

As a recruiter, I see both the pros and cons in the test tasks: of course, the test helps determine the technical level of the candidate even before the interview and understand whether it is worth the interview with him at all? On the other hand, there is a shortage of professionals in the market of candidates in the IT sector, so a good specialist will instantly get a job before he can complete test tasks from other potential employers.

I believe that it’s more correct to ask the candidate to complete the test task after the interview, because in this case the candidate is either motivated to do this (if he liked the tasks of the project and the company at the meeting), or will completely refuse and save the employer time for checking the task.

- Tell us about the top IT specialties of CIO, CTO (I'm interested).

The question was asked quite general, so in the answer I will say about the difference between CIO and CTO, if you are interested in any specific things - ask in the comments, I will answer with pleasure.
So:
CIO (Chief Information Officer) - information manager, director of information technology. He is an employee of the corporation, a top-ranking executor, responsible for introducing new IT solutions in the company, acquiring computer and server equipment and managing information resources.

CTO (Chief Technical Officer) - Technical Director. One of the leaders responsible for the development of new products and the development of the company. He controls all technologies (not just IT).

It is believed that if CIO more and more will plunge into technical details, eventually becoming a service station, then there is a danger of becoming a hostage of those information technologies and solutions that are used in its organization. In this case, his knowledge will not be fully demanded anywhere else, since technological solutions are always unique to some extent (it is difficult to find two enterprises that would use the same solutions deployed in the same technology infrastructures). Therefore, it is important for CIO not to narrow the technical horizons.

This is the first part of the post. In order not to overload the readers, I will publish the remaining answers in the coming days.