One advantage of recruiters is that it allows "illegal filtering". You can give the recruiter instructions "No candidates over 40 years old!", and then it's almost impossible to prove that you did something illegal.

Aha!

BTW, are you the FSK of "FSK's Guide to Reality"? If so, please count me in as a huge fan.

Yes. My blog moved to "realfreemarket.org" now. I've been falling behind on posting lately, but getting back into it.

A lot of the best people a company wants to hire are the people who are happily employed, whose employer wants to keep them, and need to be talked into applying - especially if a candidate might be in a different city and would need to relocate, etc.

Even if someone is already applying for jobs, if your resume goes through a recruiter, they can talk you into at least interviewing at a place you otherwise might not, which gives the company a chance to sell themselves to you (for instance, there are a lot of extremely talented and exciting teams and projects in otherwise boring companies that you might not be aware of).

A recruiter can often do some level of assessing candidates before their resume gets to an engineering manager, saving a LOT of time for someone who's already very busy.

On some level, it's the idea of outsourcing things that someone else can do better. If you find someone who can bring in great candidates for interviews better than you can, why wouldn't you hire them, so you get better results and can focus on what you do better?

One reason not mentioned already is that HR does not have the technical expertise to understand if someone is a good candidate. Also HR may be busy with other responsibilities.

Finally, many positions are difficult to fill especially if the company isn't well-known in technical circles. The easiest way to get candidates is to go through recruiters

> One reason not mentioned already is that HR does not have the technical expertise to understand if someone is a good candidate

This may be true, but it's often doubly true for recruiters. The best recruiters I've spoken to admit that they know very little about the subject.

No matter what, the candidate always has to be judged by someone who does have the required expertise, which means someone who's not HR or a recruiter.

I'm no fan of recruiters, but the good news here is that recruiters who have the exclusive right to offer candidates to a company, tend to be the better ones: not too expensive, not getting in the way too much, contracts without non-compete clause (because they have this exclusive deal anyway), and they really try to add some real value, because otherwise they might lose this exclusivity deal.

The real problem are the recruiters who try to get in front of those exclusive recruiters: they take the job descriptions from the exclusive recruiters and spread those all over the place, including in our mailbox. They have a much higher rate, often taking $10 off our hourly rate (for freelancers at least), insist on non-compete clauses that limit your job opportunities later, and try to make as much money with as little work as possible by simply shoveling piles of CVs towards anyone who might be looking. And they get in the way of communication between candidate and company, though that effect is unintentional.

> The best recruiters I've spoken to admit that they know very little about the subject.

From my own experiences, this is very true. Some didn't know the difference between JavaScript and Eclipse which made me very skeptical about their ability to assess my skillset.

The jobs on the job boards are the ones that cannot be filled by referrals, career pages, etc...It's really a last resort.

If you post a job to a semi popular job board, you get a glut of CVs, most of which are completely irrelevant. You hire a recruiter to protect you from that.

I can understand the case for hiring a recruiter for a small business (what I would consider less than 50 employees), where a HR department might not be a permanent fixture. But when I see recruiters for Fortune 500/50 etc companies, I do wonder what's going on there.

It is not any less of an issue for bigger companies. They have proportionally more positions open.

network. their whole value is they (and their contacts) know more talented people than you (and your contacts). if they don't, then you're paying for a glorified scheduler / Linkedin message sender.