Recruiting the Recruiter: Lost in your own backyard

For the past few months I've been looking for a recruiter to join my team. While I did have the chance to interview quite a number of strong recruiters, I was taken by the number of recruiters who gave me no indication of their ability to actually recruit hard-to-find technical talent. I noticed that the recruiters didn't seem to think it was important to demonstrate their research prowess, something that I highly prize and believe is essential for any solid recruiter.

For instance, after many face-to-face interviews, I came across only 2 recruiters who actually took the time to learn about my company. I'm not talking about in-depth analysis here. I'm talking about the bare-bones basics. This is just shocking technical recruiters! How am I to trust that you'll have the guts and gumption to find those elusive technical geeks if you can't even investigate the company that you're interviewing with! I'd expect you to run NetCraft "What's that site running..." screens on my company's domain name to determine what server we're using and perhaps our underlying technology (e.g., mod_perl on linux). I'd expect you to look up and learn all of our technology job postings so you'll have a sense of what kind of talent we need, where our main technology centers are, and what makes us "tick" as an organization. I'd like you to hunt down and provide me with some names of core members of my team! Instead, there was little pre-interview preparation at all.

I realize that these are heady days again for technical recruiters and recruiters in general but remember, the market will shift again as it always does and it just makes good sense to build your reputation any time you can.

Just a thought.