I’ve spoken to a handful of recruiters who know their stuff but from what I’ve seen there’s a lot of mediocre people in that industry. I’d rather take my chances without one.
Have people been able to find a job by applying through job portals? or am i going to have to swallow my pride and message one of them.
Why not use both ways and double the chances?
I think you need them as some jobs aren’t posted online…but I get the point, like all positions theres good ones and not so good..
If you’re going to use recruiters, be highly selective. It’s not a numbers game and imo success is inversely related to the number of recruiters who are pushing your CV round
With the friends I have in the recruiting process - some use recruiters, some don’t.
Neither group of people have received convincing job offers since they started looking.
Some are worth their weight in gold, they have access to off market roles and really do their best to make sure you’re only getting relevant roles
Some are more useless than a blind guide dog
Getting to know a good recruiter can be more important than your job performance to be honest.
Actually job boards can be really good ways of finding the right recruiters as well. If someone is posting a role relevant to you, they likely will have many more that comes across their desk.
What is your favourite jobs board in FS?
Take a guess 
wot a surprise
Try that:
At first it will blow your mind, but after two weeks you’ll see it as actually toothless.
Humans are very much under rated. Disclosure: I’m not a recruiter.
There is probably a lot of mediocre candidates on the other side.
@tSeFTYPT thanks for sharing your experience. Its seem they have unlimited marketing budget 
Are recruiters overrated? In times where vacancies are high, I’d say there’s way too many cowboys who spray and pray. In times where vacancies are more scarce (like now), the best recruiters hold onto the best relationships and know their stuff.
They’ll also know a future placement when they see it so will always engage with candidates they know they can place better than those they don’t. Hence why we see so much negativity from candidates on feedback right now.
Some interesting observations on this from Giuseppe Paleologo (Balyasny quant research head) on Twitter today. He says:
Don’t disdain external recruiters. Get a couple of referrals. Personally, I swipe left at most recruiters, and yet, recruiters contacted me out of the blue for jobs at Citadel, HRT, and MLP, which I didn’t know existed. So maybe I am an ungrateful b*stard.
This is a total nightmare of a site for me. I’m antisocial at the best of times so being forced to talk with a robot (with no text chat option) is mortifying.
(He also reminds me of the Spotify AI DJ whose voice is also very annoying)
Spotify AI DJ is out of the realms of both my imagination and my world, thanks for broadening my consciousness
On Jack&Jill, fortunately if you try it you’ll only need to talk to their AI once, then it’s only mail-based – but it can be so talkative that you wish at times it cost more to them to generate that slop.
I like your style. Please give me a job
Speak to as many as you can and decide which ones are good and pro-active, they have colour on staffing needs, current pay, competitor pnl etc all of which is useful for you, vacancies now get millions applications per second if you want to move around in FO roles (banking/S&T) good visibility with recruiters is a must to get in front of key people
My experience is that the more specialized the niche a recruiter handles the more likely they are to add value. For example, I worked with one specialized equity derivatives sales and trading rules, mostly trading, and he was in touch with every desk that mattered and very able to put you in front of people when it made sense. There’s another guy I know who specializes in quantitative developers. Same deal. He has placed a few people that I know in off-market roles at top firms, with large comp.
In contrast, I have found the big name executive search firms to be absolutely useless except at delivering candidates currently employed at peer companies with titles identical to the one they’re hiring for. My sense is that much of the time they are retained by people who need to fill a role that they know nothing about, or where there are one or two internal candidates and for some political/regulatory reason, there is a need to demonstrate that a full slate has been evaluated before hiring internally.
