Hiring developers through a staffing agency?

Question

Personnel Management

Due to the difficulty of hiring developers (they do not come for interviews or are not satisfied with the quality), the company came up with the idea to outsource recruitment to a recruitment agency. Yes, I know that our salaries are not the highest in the market, but we have what we have.
Who has had this experience? How did the agency do? Did the quality of the people who passed the agency suit you? How does the agency in this case weed out incompetent staff (web programmers who do not know HTML for example)? Does the company provide them with some kind of tests that they run with their candidates?

Answer 1

From personal experience (as a job seeker and just from communicating with them), recruitment agencies and freelance headhunters often have the following problems:
1. They look at keywords, but they don’t see the context in which they are used point-blank. If you write “I have some experience with PHP” in the resume of the front-end developer, they may well invite you to interview for a vacancy where they are looking for a senior-backender.
2. They can cut off good specialists because they didn’t hear the right keyword . This is clearly seen when they have a list of "synonyms" - similar tools, but the one that the applicant said about was not on the list.
3. Cannot correctly evaluate answers to questions. This also applies to online tests and questions by phone. Answers are checked against lists of "correct" answers, so that a factually correct answer that is not included in the list of formally correct answers is not correct.
4. Hide information about the company , so that it is difficult to contact directly, without their participation. As a result, the applicant, who understands that the vacancy is interesting, cannot contact the company in any way in a situation where the agency rejects him due to the aforementioned problems.
5. Can't negotiate. This is not so much a problem as a feature. Let's say you have, as you say, not the highest salary. But you, as a representative of the final company, can bargain. Reduce the initial (higher, inaccessible to you at the moment) expectations of the candidate by offering partially remote work, part-time work (I know people who are ready to work for less money, but conditionally from 9.00 to 15.00), some other goodies that are important for him . Thus, everyone will be fine - you will meet the budget, get a more expensive specialist, and he will be satisfied with good conditions. The agency cannot conduct such negotiations and will not consider this specialist at all.

Answer 2

Some technical selection can be made by specialists who specialize specifically in IT developers.
In particular, there are similar Ukrainian freelance personnel officers. European agencies exist.
Non-specializing agencies can only ruin everything. Ivan Bogachev described here side by side in detail how.
The maximum that non-specialized people can do is simply replace the bulletin board for you. They should not do any screening.