About recruitment consultant/recruiter

ng.aniki

I am currently looking for a job, and I contacted some Recruitment Consultant / Resourcer after finding some interesting job offers that they were posting on big job websites.

I just started so I cannot tell how efficient this is, how much they can help to find a job, but it made me think about it and I wonder what you guys are thinking about it. Maybe there are some team leaders from video game companies or HR that can give us their own opinion ? Or maybe there even is a recruiter passing by that want to give his own opinion ?


I was wondering if in some cases they can be less beneficial to the job seeker. For example, I guess that their company will get paid by the hiring company once they find a candidate that match what they are looking for. For a company with limited budgets, wouldn't they prefer hiring someone that sent his application on their website than someone helped by a recruiter ?

I also just found out that two recruiters were displaying the same job opening, I guess this could lead to some messy situations...

Finally there is some things that I am discovering and that surprised me, in the way those companies work. Like for example, even if it makes sense because they wouldn't want the hiring company to go behind their back, but I have been asked to remove reference to my websites on some pictures of a portfolio pdf that they would send to their clients. (I was for example mentioning that they could find on my website some breakdown pictures and a video of the scene displayed in the portfolio)

This need to hide informations about the hiring company and the job seeker leads to some other problems, for example their job descriptions are often lacking information to keep us from finding the company name and website. Therefor also keeping from us a lot of information about the hiring company. And I guess this is also applying the other way around, what information about the job seeker are they hiding from the hiring company, and could this be disadvantageous for him ?

Don't mistaken me, until now the people I have been in contact with have been really nice and helpful, providing me with some comments to improve my CV and things like that. I also guess that they probably are the firsts to know when new job openings are on the market.
But I was just wondering what you guys were thinking about it, if you had positive/negative experience with recruitment companies, and I was hoping that maybe some HR/Team leaders that are in contact with recruiters on the other side could give their opinions.

Thank you very much for reading !
Julien.

ambershee

I try to avoid recruiters when possible, as a lot of them are utterly feckless, especially in games. Some are very good, but it's hard to find them.

ng.aniki wrote: »

I was wondering if in some cases they can be less beneficial to the job seeker. For example, I guess that their company will get paid by the hiring company once they find a candidate that match what they are looking for. For a company with limited budgets, wouldn't they prefer hiring someone that sent his application on their website than someone helped by a recruiter ?

Many studios will actively refuse to work with recruiters (and will say so on their website). This can be problematic as a lot of recruiters ignore this (they don't do their research) - if they put you forwards as a candidate to a company that does not use recruiters, they have just prevented you from getting that job - though arguably you may not have otherwise known about it anyway.

ng.aniki wrote: »

I also just found out that two recruiters were displaying the same job opening, I guess this could lead to some messy situations...

This is because most recruiters only advertise what they have found in a thirty minute google search. Most recruiters are advertising the exact same jobs. Some will have exclusive stuff that only they known about - this is extremely rare.

ng.aniki wrote: »

This need to hide informations about the hiring company and the job seeker leads to some other problems, for example their job descriptions are often lacking information to keep us from finding the company name and website. Therefor also keeping from us a lot of information about the hiring company. And I guess this is also applying the other way around, what information about the job seeker are they hiding from the hiring company, and could this be disadvantageous for him ?

I've had instances where recruiters wouldn't even tell me the name of the company if I were to apply for it through them. I'm not kidding. I had one yesterday that took four or five one/two sentence e-mails back and forth to just get a job description out of them - that revealed that the job was a) completely out of my discipline, b) for three months and c) at half my current pay rate. This is just coming back to some being utterly feckless. Not all are like this and many will tell you who it is up front and what the requirements are (as it should be).

Unscrupulous recruiters will deliberately omit details about you in order to promote you as something you are not. This can mean you'll potentially land an interview, or even a job that isn't actually suited for you or the company - the recruiter doesn't care because if you get hired, they still get their fee, and if you don't, the only thing they have wasted is half an hour on the phone. This isn't common to my knowledge, thankfully.




Nevertheless, despite my negativity, two of my five previous jobs have been taken through recruiters. They can be a necessary evil. My advice though is to spend plenty of time in google looking for work and just fobbing off recruiters that are doing something annoying or are offering you an easily googleable position. One trick I've noticed is that many just copy and paste a company's original advert to job boards under their own name (yes really), so you can easily find it in google. I saw one instance about three weeks ago where they'd pasted that their client was looking for XYZ on a job board, and the original company advert was the one immediately below....

Kwramm

There used to be a couple of threads about recruiters. I worked with recruiters in the past, got my current job via a recruiter. But 9 out of 10 are rather useless. Do yourself a favor and limit the amount of recruiters you work with. The bad ones will just waste your time. Use the recruiter as additional source for jobs, next to your own job hunting. Don't let the recruiter be your primary source for jobs.

The most obvious clue is if the recruiter has time to listen to you and tries to work with you. E.g. give tips about resume, asks you for permission if they want to change your resume, etc. There really has to be a dialogue. Keep in mind, that you both have to update each other about your job searching effort. Recruiters too are busy people so you too have to become active sometimes to get status reports about a particular application.

Good advice from Ambershee, btw.

Torch

Yeah I have to agree, most of the recruiters I used are absolute wank, some of them would even forget who you were when calling up a second time. You're much better off looking up studios on something like game dev map and sending out applications personally.

ng.aniki

Okay, that is kind of what I was suspecting.
Thanks for your inputs everyone, I now have a broader view of all this !