Are CyberCoders or ZipRecruiter scams?

July 9, 2013 4:05 PM

Have you ever used CyberCoders or ZipRecruiter to get a job? Do you know someone who has? Please share your experience.

It seems like half the jobs posted to Indeed.com and LinkedIn Jobs are from CyberCoders or ZipRecruiter. I've tried to do some Googling to see if they are scams, but I can't seem to find any definitive answers.

So I figured I'd turn to the Green and see if anyone here has had any experience with either of these two entities. Good, bad, meh. Please share.

posted by zooropa to Work & Money (9 answers total)

I've never heard of ZipRecruiter, but CyberCoders is not, to my knowledge, a scam. They are, however, on the really shitty and slimy end of recruiting, and that's saying something. I worked for a trainwreck of a company that was attempting to hire through CyberCoders, so there is at least a company on the other end of their recruiting. However, based on the recruitment emails I get from them, they do really lazy broad canvasing and most of the candidates they presented were not worth the time it took to read their resumes, which makes me doubt that any good companies are using them. I'd keep looking if you have other options.
posted by duien at 4:15 PM on July 9, 2013 [2 favorites]

Cybercoders is at least scam-ish. I'm not convinced most of the jobs they post exist, in that I never see them posted elsewhere, and they always sound like a generic set of keywords designed to ensnare me into sending my resume.
posted by drjimmy11 at 4:16 PM on July 9, 2013 [2 favorites]

I avoid them (as well as Jobvite, Sourcery/Captain Recruiter, et al), but then again I'm still unemployed so this may change.
posted by rhizome at 4:32 PM on July 9, 2013

I've been on the other side of this. I filled an executive technology position through Cybercoders. It was expensive but worked out well; the guy we hired is a total badass. At times during the process I did have doubts; the recruiter I worked with was good, but kinda smarmy. He pushed really hard for some candidates that totally weren't a good fit, but I was able to still get a bunch of good candidates in the end.
posted by txsebastien at 4:42 PM on July 9, 2013

(One thing I do is paste bits of the job description into google in quotes and see if anything comes up. If it's real, usually other recruiters or the actual hiring company will have posted it too- they don't rewrite the req for every recruiter they use. When I do this with Cybercoders I never get any results except ones that came from Cybercoders.)
posted by drjimmy11 at 4:44 PM on July 9, 2013

drjimmy11: Cybercoders discouraged us from listing the position anywhere else or using another recruiting firm for the same position, which may be why you don't see hits for their job postings in other places. (It felt pretty dicey, but hey, I got results.)
posted by txsebastien at 4:52 PM on July 9, 2013

I worked for a small local staffing firm; the permanent (ie: NOT temp job) division) used zip recruiters for posting real jobs. The only other place they posted ads was Craigslist. I seem to recall that the perm team liked that their ads would get picked up by Indeed, etc.
posted by waterisfinite at 5:08 PM on July 9, 2013

Not scams. They are real contingent recruiting agencies.

Companies use them to find talent and normally pay them with some percentage of the salary of the placement. Companies do not always have the time, resources, or know how to effectively find available talent or poach talent from other relevant places. It is an inefficiency in a market (I am not convinced that they add a great deal of value to the ecosystem) but not a scam.

JobVite from above (rhizome mentioned it) is an entirely different offering (also not a scam) they give an internal team useful tools to track candidates, hiring, and open requisitions. They also aggregate that kind of information if they have permission and can be a resource in that respect as well.

Regarding DrJimmy11 and txsebastien, the reason why those reqs often do not show up outside of the recruiters posting is a consequence of the contract they sign together. The recruiter gets paid when the role is filled by them. If the placement spots a recruiter's post then circumvents them (which many try to do) the client company can try to avoid paying the contingent recruiter. The whole issue is avoided if the recruiter is the exclusive funnel for the placement. They are an intermediary (a relatively inefficient one) so bypassing almost always seems attractive to either side.

If you have valuable skills, try to get in front of an actual person at a place like CyberCoders... believe me, they will try to place you. They only get paid when they fill a spot...
posted by milqman at 8:49 PM on July 9, 2013 [1 favorite]

Longtime MeFi lurker and current ZipRecruiter employee here. We're not a recruiting agency and don't employ any recruiters, so we don't make money by placing candidates. Rather, we're a job board distribution service/job board and make money from companies who pay us to get their job listings in front of as many people as possible in order to find good employees. As waterisfinite mentions, the core of our service is that when you post your job with us, we'll also crosspost it to many of the largest job boards out there.

As a job seeker, we'll never charge you for anything. If you find scammy jobs on our site, please let us know. We take our listing quality seriously and have a crack customer service team actively beating back the scams that inevitably are drawn to websites around hiring.

Good luck with your job search, and if you happen to be a Perl or Python developer, we are hiring!
posted by Gimpson at 3:46 PM on July 11, 2013