I dislike recruiters. I am I suppose lucky to have a job that’s in demand, so with a couple of decades of experience I can call more shots. It was t like that when I started out - even with a PhD I found it hard to get a foot in the door (graduated into a recession) so I found feel for you.
It is frustrating, and it’s a waste of talent. For a while a few years ago I was one of the people interviewing and it drove me nuts. I had a few people I’d worked with before and I’d passed their cvs along. Not a single one got hired, and instead he gave us utterly useless bastards. I kept pushing and asking why this girl or that guy hadn’t got an interview when they were exactly what we were after (obviously I was recused from actually interviewing them) and the hr answer was ‘not a good fit.’ Which was a total lie.
Hr were never able to justify their picks, and never passed on all cvs for the people who actually know the job to assess.
And that was before the dei stuff so god knows how bad it is now.
I've had positive experiences with recruiters over a 30-year career. Most of my positions after a certain point have been through connections/ someone calling me up to see if I'd want to come and do X, but both when I was in high demand earlier in my career, and later when I'd taken some time away and was thinking yeah, better get back to work, I've gotten multiple and competing job offers through recruiters. Highly industry-specific, maybe.
And DEI is dead in the US.
Anything more than a pre-screening call and one in-person interview is just busywork for them to see if you'll jump through certain hoops.
I guess if they actually really want you, they won't bother making you go through such a terrible process.
Wholly dependent on industry, level, place, immediate past history, and connections. These days, in my world, if it's a company of any size and you don't have a powerful in (or even if you do) you typically have to go through at least some approximation of the full HR process. Again in my world/ level, it's common to have multiple interviews with various levels of people. Sometimes, if your in is strong enough, those are somewhat documentation/ make a good impression/ sanity checks that no one hates you viscerally.
Sometimes. Oftentimes, even if you have an in and are heavily favored, you are still put in competition in many cases, and you can blow it. In my current position, I was favored, but I put my ego aside and jumped through the hoops, took it seriously, and danced for the behavioral panel*, because the competition was a few hundred well-qualified people, many with "ins," and squandering my opportunity would be stupid. And my "in" was the hiring manager, but without a C in front of their name, that guaranteed nothing.
* god, I fucking hate those things. But I will admit it was a good exercise and got me thinking about things in a different way- and to this day I keep notes of
how I do things successfully, not just
what succeeds.
