Should I go to an interview with a recruiter?

I work as a recruiter in the agency relatively recently. The team is purely female, psychology and humanitarian, so I, with my technical education and kuei courses, deal with all the technical vacancies. I want to share my view from the “other side” at some points.

1. "I do not want me to be judged by appearance"

Many IT specialists do not want to go to HR interviews, because they believe that assessing their technical skills is quite enough to make a decision. For some companies this is true. It is enough to go through those interviews or perform a test task, and then look into the eyes of the team and the matter with the hat. But not everyone works like this. Most companies have recruiters and they sit there for a reason. And the job of the recruiter is not only in the "assessment of appearance."
Let's look at a specific example. There is a company X. The team is small, the turnover is small. Keep a regular recruiter unprofitable. Company X hires agency Y. A technical interview takes place after an HR interview, in which candidates communicate with a series of leads and a manager. It takes about one and a half hours and distracts all of the above from work. Accordingly, company X wants agency Y to perform the following functions:

1. Search for candidates

2. Personality assessment

Imagine that this item was not fulfilled. Reason: the candidate did not want to come to the HR interview and the recruiter, at his own risk and risk, recommended him without a meeting. What then? You saved 40 minutes on unobtrusive communication with a recruiter and came to those interviews. We communicated with three specialists, answered difficult questions, then met with the manager and everything is fine, but! It turns out that the manager cares about his team being a friendly, cohesive team. And you, being a good specialist and a great person, you can simply not fit into this team. Bottom line: you spent more time and effort, and the manager loses her heart, because the key roles in the team were distracted in vain.

3. Test of technical knowledge

A good recruiter in any case should dig in this direction. If he does not know something, then he must at least try to figure it out and have some idea. And believe me, approximately understand the level of compliance can and should be. Elementary, some people write in the resume what they didn’t actually do and don’t know, or met indirectly some time ago, but in fact they cannot work with it. Example: QA Team Lead came to me the other day. We need a good manager who is also good at the technical side. Especially SQL. The man says that he has everything tied to the database and they have to deal with SQL every day; knowledge is very good. Moreover, in the team he has 3 Jun and 1 Middle. So he engages in technical issues every day and many things. I give a simple DB and ask to write a simple query. Well, I think it is even a shame to ask such simple things to do such a tough one. He issues a query:
Select * where price <500 and 'model' or 'cd' or 'hd'
This is despite the fact that in the task it was written “Display model, cd, hd” also from only one table! What would happen if I sent him one resume only?
')

4. Identification of candidate's interests

It also saves the manager’s time, because based on the preferences of the candidate, you can tell whether his project and the company will interest him or not. This item can be fully implemented in a telephone conversation.

So, all of the above is that for which the recruiter receives money and this is the time of his employees, which the manager in the company wants to save. The largest picture gives a personal meeting, less Skype and gives very little telephone conversation.
PS I recently had a PM interview with me and said that I never dismissed people because of technical knowledge. But because of inadequacy or conflict situations with the team quite often.

2. To go or not to go? That is the question!

Question about +1 interview. After all, not everyone uses recruiting and you can save one interview - go through the technical and voila! Yes, you can do that. But we never know in advance where the best option lies. Maybe he is exactly where the recruiter wants to steal your time? Having spent an extra hour you can get more sn, more interesting project, better social package and a more professional team for the next 2 years! Who knows Everyone makes their choice.

3. Why not immediately admit what the maximum amount I can give?

Why not immediately confess how much I get now and how much I want? Same as a matter of fact. The employer wants to save money and give zp back to back, so that a person works and is satisfied even when he can give more, and the candidate wants to grab as much as possible a piece. + The employer rarely wants to disclose their budgets. The candidate knows how much he wants for his job, and the employer knows how much he can offer. Both that and that does not want to go in all-in preflop. It remains only to agree.

4. Will a cool specialist who knows his worth come to HR-y?

I heard the opinion that if a person agreed to come to an interview with HR-y, then he is not a great specialist and most likely will pull at midla at best. It's short here, it's a myth. For interviews come from bottom to top. In addition, an example: Senior .NET Developer did not disdain to come to me for an interview, later he did not like the company “from the inside” and he rejected the offer. Later, my company started working with a German company, which had a lot of vacancies and rates on average from 30 to 80K EUR. And then I remembered that very cool guy and sent his resume to Germany. Personal contacts are never redundant. Today, after talking with a recruiter, you can get a great offer tomorrow!

Yes, the shortage of IT specialists gives the right to choose which interviews to attend, and which invitations to refuse, but one should not forget about simple human relations and business ethics.