Lying recruiters really make my shit itch.

A couple of months ago a recruiter got in touch on linked in as he’d seen my cv on Indeed or somewhere.

He asks what I’m looking for and I tell him I want to move to a more development focused role rather than mosh mash of support, admin and Dev that I do at the moment.

He’s says he’s got just the role at a fairly local software company, and that the role would be at least 90% development blah blah blah.

So I set up a video call, and it immediately becomes clear that they want someone to do support/admin who might get to do a tiny bit of dev (they mainly asked about my experience with HTML) and I could tell they lost interest when I said I was more interested in backend development etc.

They didn’t want to progress the application as I wasn’t what they were looking for, which is fair enough they weren’t what I was looking for either.

But, do recruiters intentionally set out to lie to applicants about what a job is/entails or do they either get duff info from clients, or just not understand the job specs they are given?

I mean it wasted my lunch break (not including calls with the recruiter) and an hour of time for the CEO and Dev from the company.

Even prophets get pissed with recruiters...

Ours don't 🤷🏻‍♂️ But the recruitment branch is generally really shitty.

I assume the issue is more with recruitment agencies, who just want to get as many people as possible so they have a better chance on getting their commission.

I guess internal recruitment teams would have a better handle on what they are recruiting for (possibly).

Good recruiters will take the time to understand what you're looking for, match you with something they have that's suitable, and then fight for you to get the highest salary. That used to be what it was all about.

These days the "old school" recruiters are few and far between. The new model of recruitment is just to spam masses of people on LinkedIn, if they reply then throw some random crap at them, get them to apply, if it doesn't work then nothing lost, if it does then it's free commission. So yeah, it's perfectly normal, and a very good reason to never pick anything up off LinkedIn or similar unless you can verify it's exactly what you're after.

Had a similar incident with an english recruitment agency 3 years ago before I switched to my current work.

They just as in your case called based on linked in and apparently they where hired by a company looking for more developers.

They presented a position and I stated my expectations and goals, and after looking into the company added some extra questions as i was hesitant if they really could offer what I wanted.

The agency explained that this was fir a new project the company was working on and I accepted to do an interview.

It took all but 5 minutes, which was mostly spent drinking a cup of tea to realize that not only was this new project an existing internal system that was just being maintained, but it was also not something they needed more people on since it only had a 1/4 full time employee for that and that position was not vacant.

So we both agreed to not prolong the interview.

Luckily I managed to fit it all in during lunch and it was within walking distance from my work at the time so no loss for me.

But the agency had been outright lying about the position, apparently because they had a contract to provide a minimum number of applicants.

I told the hiring company all about the lies the agency had told me and later when i tried to call the agency they very angrily said the recruiter was busy.

Guess they got an angry call from a dissatisfied customer. ;)

Do like @Voxera, that's the only way to hold them accountable.

@NoMad I downvoted you so you get holy number of ++s

@Voxera wait, he was recruiting for a position that was already filled???? That explains why job ads still stick around long after a company rejects me saying they moved on with other candidates..lying assholes wasting my time. I always wondered who those other candidates  really are....

@TeachMeCode no, they wanted more consultants. The recruiter just lied about the internal project to score another interview, probably to fill their contracted quota. Once they found out what I had been told we both agreed to stop the interview since it was not a good match for either of us.

@Voxera wow. Still, I’m not sure if some of these recruiters are recruiting for actual positions. I’ve had FAANG recruiters say they’re recruiting for a position at company x but mention it isn’t for a specific role or id be working on a wide variety of products. Then it’s the usual sequence of events where they say they’ve chosen another candidate and half a month later, the job is posted again.

@TeachMeCode No idea. I do think they assume that people will generally be more willing to change jobs than I am ;).

But I was particularly picky since I was in no real hurry to switch.

And I have only ever been turned down two times in the last 10 years, the rest of the offers was me backing out.

One case was because it was in another country and I set my salary requirements quite a bit above average if I was to move ;).

The other was that when we where two left the other person had documented experience with the exact project type which I did not so quite a reasonable cause :)

@Voxera fuck, only two times in the past ten years?? You’re badass