Why using recruiters disobeys the laws of economics

You know what really grinds my gears? People that blog about "job success". That's ironic because when these posts come from people that post this fluff exclusively (a quick back of the envelope estimate shows that the odds are around 100%), they must clearly have no job of their own.

So far, my blogging career has spanned three years and nearly 200 posts. I have the most interesting blog that I am aware of, with the exception of Things My Girlfriend and  Argue About, which is the only other blog that I am aware of. (Corollary: my blog is the least interesting blog that I know). However, I have not yet figured out how to turn my blog into money.

And yet I am now aware of an entire demographic of professionals (as defined by "wears shirt with buttons at Starbucks") that spend all day writing blogs with names like "Six key things to include on your CV" or "Mistakes that you can avoid in the job interview".

In my mind, that's like taking modesty advice from someone wearing a cowboy hat.

How, pray tell, can a person that trolls the internet all day searching for people be considered an expert in job finding? I always think of my friend (who will hopefully read this and comment) who submitted an application for an engineering job with a recruiting company. The recruiting company had no engineering jobs, but DID have a recruiter position available for him! That's like a car dealership with an empty showroom hiring salesmen.

Except there's one obvious difference: building cars costs money. The automobile industry has enormous overhead associated with manufacturing and selling their products. Whereas recruiters just troll the internet and look at funny pictures of cats (I imagine) until luck and cold calling reveals just one person that might be willing to switch companies. That one placement must bring in $10 bazillion for a recruitment firm, if basic economics can be trusted.

Digression: I once had the folly to trust a recruiter in finding me a job that he called me for. He kept me hanging for ohh three months, promising the world, putting stars in my eyes before he told me that his client wasn't interested. But then he said "ok, just send me a list of 5 companies that you'd like to work for, and I'll arrange a meeting". So I thought "Sorry, what do you get paid to do?".

Because really, what he was asking me to do is to find a company that would pay him a (HUGE) recruiting fee to hire me. Stunning. And what's more interesting is that he's the vice president of a firm that has somewhat prestigious downtown offices.

Companies of Toronto! Stop paying these people such ridiculous amounts of money to do work that you are more capable of doing anyway. It cannot possibly be in your best interest to hire someone that has the incentive to inflate his recruit's salary as high as possible. Someone has already proved it beyond a shadown of (your ability to) doubt. It is very much like the market for used cars, which is well-known to be the most impossibly one-sided market, economically speaking. That idea won a freaking Nobel Prize. You should know about it, and how hiring a recruiter to fill your office full of lemons will negatively affect your bottom line.

It's like hiring a used car salesman to build you a large fleet of delivery vehicles, with his commission tied to the price of the vehicles and the price of the vehicles being determined by him, the salesman. And you will be a junkyard of recruiter debris. You will just trade employees with other recruiter-oriented companies. And if you do any real work, that work will not get done very well. Unless you are a recruitment company. Then you will somehow be rich.

If that's not irony I don't know what is (and it's not 10,000 spoons when all I need is a knife).