On Tuesday 17 May 2016 16:18, Marko Rauhamaa wrote: > Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info>: >> Personally, I think that advertising a job position without saying who >> you are, what you do, and offering at least an indicative salary >> range, are *astonishingly* rude > > I don't believe they care. > >> (to say nothing of counter-productive). > > Maybe, maybe not. > > > I bet the zebras on the savannah consider the lions astonishingly rude > and their strategy counter-productive. The savannah would be a nicer > place if the lions ate grass like everybody else.
A strange analogy. Employers and potential employees are not really in a predator/prey relationship. (Employers and *actual* employees sometimes are, but that's a sign of a really dysfunctional business culture.) The problem is that recruiter's best interests do not align neatly with either potential employees *or* employers. They're like real estate agents. The incentives for a recruiter is to find a barely acceptable hire as quickly as possible for the least amount of effort possible. There's no point in doing extra work to find the best new hire, if the employer is willing to take a so- so hire. Since the employer is only seeing potentials that the recruiter passes on, the employer has no way of telling what the pool of would-be employees is really like. I'm not saying that all recruiters are unscrupulous or are intentionally deceiving the other parties, but the incentives are such that: - recruiters will take a bit less care to choose the right employee for the job; - they'll take a bit less care worrying about attracting the right people, because their relationship with the parties is (on average) quite short; - they're more likely The worst part of this is the vicious circle aspect. The less care recruiters put into targeting their positions, the more they get inundated with poor quality applicants. This trains applicants to carpet bomb recruiters and employers (since they're trained to expect that all job ads are misleading, and also because the unemployment office requires them to apply to X positions a week, whether X suitable positions exist or not), which gives employers an incentive to use recruiters (rather than deal with the carpet bombing of applicants). -- Steve -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list