Ask HN: How do you find a good corp-to-corp tech recruiter?

For what it's worth, the few good recruiters I've seen aren't professional recruiters. They are ex-bankers recruiting bankers, ex-consultants recruiting consultants, and ex-salespeople recruiting salespeople.

Very few developers go into recruiting (hint: market opportunity) which is one reason so many tech recruiters are garbage. (90+% of non-tech recruiters are garbage too)

I think this is very key. The one recruiting/consulting firm I thought was worth a damn and that I worked with at my 2nd big corporate job was started by an ex-developer who used his industry experience to vet a pool of quality developers. It was very specialized and niche, which made his value-add vetting even more valuable.

Later, I ended up working as a consultant for that firm. However, as the niche market dried up, the quality of this firm did seem to go downhill. (The market had spoken.)

People who have done the job before can both understand the needs of the position, and properly vet the candidates.

Unfortunately the industry economics encourage short-termism so it can be hard to sort through the sleazeballs, and the honest ones can find themselves out of work in a down market.

Agreed! Although I've never used their services, I know a (non-tech) recruiter who left its recruiting job at a big tech company to start this: https://karat.io/

It seems to be: "As non tech recruiter we are not good at finding talents, let's instead find skilled Engineers who are willing to do the recruitment for us"

The idea looks good, and there's probably other recruitment companies doing this, but I personally haven't heard of it before.

Nice idea. Headline message is a bit confusing. Perhaps it should be:

"Need to hire techies? We can help. Our interviewers are experienced in interviewing technical candidates. We'll make sure you only hire the best engineers."

Do such recruiters exist?

My sense at this point is that they basically don't. My experience has been that while there have always been recruiters who were shady and/or flakey, until about 5 years ago a significant enough minority were at least borderline competent at the task they were nominally intended for (to wit: provide ballpark vetting of candidates + finessing the negotiation and relationship, generally). And up until then, they (also) seemed to be in it for the longer haul -- and to at least intuitively understand that referrals and repeat business actually matter, and hence, that one's reputation is extremely important (and not to be jeopardized by flakiness, shabby behavior generally).

That is: I never used to particularly like dealing with them... but there seemed to be about 15% or so of their lot who seemed to be basically honest, and if not particularly gifted at the vetting and relationship-building part, they did manage to create value once in a while. Also, there wasn't nearly the stigma against them (among both companies and developers) like there is now.

By now, though -- it seems this 15% has basically dried up. Now, it's not just fake chumminess (and the considerable slice out of our paychecks), and occasional lies we have to expect in dealing with them -- nowadays, they routinely lie, and routinely blow you off the minute they don't see a commission coming. They blatantly don't care about repeat business with you, or their reputation, at all.

There might be one or two out holdouts from the older, by no means "golden" more more pragmatic, business-oriented days of this profession -- but if there are, I don't see any significant chance that I might run into one.

I sincerely hope that you're wrong, but I suspect that you are not. I would love to be able to outsource the task of searching for new work and to stay focused on the needs of my clients and learning new skills. Perhaps I'm dreaming. :-)

I think that you are saying you need a salesperson, someone who sells your services to potential clients. That is not the same as a recruiter. A recruiter is paid by a company to find people to hire, whereas you pay a salesperson to find people to pay you.

That's an interesting way to put it.

It partly depends on scale. At the individual freelancer level it is hard to think about or justify paying a salesperson to sell your services. It often becomes clear when you have grown your freelance business into a small consultancy with 4 or 5 consultants that you need to keep busy. Now it becomes clear that what you need is a salesperson whom you pay and whose expertise and interests are aligned with yours.

Another thing to consider is mutual commission arrangements with consultants whose skills and services are complementary to your own. I have this arrangement with a friend 10% commission on referred projects.

It hasn't been a great steady source but a project here and there comes my way.

I believe the word you are looking for is agent.

Why can't you seek new employee through projects/social media? Honest question. It seems the last couple of contractors at my current work place have made they mark enough to be noticed and welcomed.

You're not dreaming. Outsourcing sales is nothing new. I've seen a lot of failure with this approach. If the cost is low enough and you're not too picky, it's worth it, but if you'd like Clojure work and someone keeps finding you Scala jobs, you're wasting . At that point, you may as well either bring it in-house or do it yourself.

Maybe some of us are thinking about this wrong. Do you know who actually talks to the hiring manager? 9 times out of 10 it is the Account Executive...the sales person that speaks to the hiring manager not the recruiter. An epiphany for me at least.

Perhaps we're looking at recruiters as a means to get to the goal, when it really should be us reaching out to the Account Executives as they are the most necessary person in that chain. Consider hoe valuable and AE is to the recruiting company, and to us. Interestingly, when I ask a recruiter if I can talk to the Account Executive working the account I am usually politely told "No." The reason I have asked is because it was obvious the recruiter was reading a poorly worded position description to me without understanding the client's actual needs. However, I have only spoken to a handful of AEs and that was usually due to client requirements that required more resources than originally anticipated.

Thanks to all of the recruiters that are also AEs and also technical and are in this thread.

What you need is a partner to handle sales and operational tasks while you do the consulting. From there you can grow. I know plenty 100+ people companies that started similarly. Two people are key, just like in startups. Way too much work for one to deal with.

Recruiter here: I challenge you to look at what the demands are of each tech company today. Everyone from Google, Facebook, and little consulting firms don't care about people either. The reason why so many recruiters suck is because so many of the organizations do not get recruiting and have put "top of the funnel" sales metrics to help solve their problems. If you want your recruiter to care about long term relationships and reputation maybe tech companies need to do the same.

While on the one hand I agree with you, Google, Facebook and most consulting firms (I doubt they're that little) don't need you to fill their recruiting pipeline. You know they pay well, so obviously you're more likely to want to place with them.

When my small team went for our last engineering hire (a senior), we had to actually seek out a recruiter on our own to find someone for us. We posted in all of the usual places and went to meetups to network -- recruiters just didn't bother to connect with us until we cold-called them going "we're offering this much money". Only two of the ten or so we spoke to would we consider using again.

I'm sorry, but your profession is generally lazy.

Not as much lazy as following incentives. They would rather invest their time (and network) on higher paying jobs that are likely to close.

Scenario 1: A larger company can pay 20% * 120K on a hire, that's $24,000. Let's say that there's a 1/3 chance that the headhunter can fill it. Expected value is $8K. Let's say it takes 100 hours of work, then it's $80/hour.

Scenario 2: A smaller company won't pay as much, will take more work finding people interested, and they may not agree to take the job. Then it could be 20% * 100K = 20K. Perhaps a 1/4 chance of closing the deal = 5K expected value. 200 hours to find someone = $25/hour.

The recruiter would rather do the first rather than the second.

Everyone from Google, Facebook, and little consulting firms don't care about people either.

Agreed - internal recruiters are about 99.99% as bad (and useless, and often counterproductive) as the external kind. Just there's a huge bubble going on right now, whereby many companies (particularly startups) are completely oblivious t this fact.

You are right about the long term relationship needs to be a two way street. Tangentially, not all recruiters are as good as you. Over 90% of the recruiter calls I get are from middle eastern/Indian/Pakistan native-speaking people that work for recruiting companies that are basically spam calling every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Minor issues with that, but more importantly they are another [unnecessary] layer. For instance, Tata Consulting, a very large Indian-based company, is looking for a SharePoint consultant to work full-time FTE for them...I got a call from a recruiter that was basically the fourth middleman in the transaction...his company was to be paid $x%, the company that brought his company in was supposed to get $x%, and so forth...all promised to be paid from my work. Fee-splitting should be banned if it is more than two layers between hiring company and contractor. Further, these types of companies have no direct relationship with the end client so there are multiple translation layers (opportunities for mistakes) before my resume gets in front of the client, if it does at all. Also, I typically don't contract with out-of-state third party recruiters due to laws and jurisdiction (company must/should have nexus in the state the work is performed in).

In my humble experience, the real issue is some/most internal HR folks need to be trained on technology and how not to pass on a resume that doesn't have a keyword they don't understand even though it is included in another keyword they don't understand (looking for someone that has javascript experience but passed because Node.js and jQuery were listed more times than javascript).

Hiring/finding contractors is broken, but it doesn't have to be.

Yes, good recruiters exist just got to ask around for referrals.

I'm a software engineer that is currently bootstrapping my technical recruiting business. Companies say they like working with me because:

1) my candidates are experienced (I do the vetting and they are all a part of my network which I continue to build every day)

2) I spend a lot time finding what a candidate wants and what companies want (so far 80% rate of engineers getting offers when I match albeit low sample size)

3) I don't spam (candidates or companies- generally only make 1-2 matches per company per month)

The reason so many bad recruiters exist is because the contingency payment model really makes it so that spamming seems beneficial in the short-term and makes the whole recruiting game very transactional (see real estate agents). And contingency agreements are much easier to get (vs retained search).

I'm working on finding more creative ways to align incentives better and building better sourcing tools.

I've done a fair amount of matchmaking between companies and engineers myself. I've occasionally gotten recruiting fees out of this but sometimes companies have given me the runaround trying to collect. Often I'm just helping my friends get work and I get paid in plane tickets and/or beer, so it's fine, but it takes enough of my time now that I want cold hard cash.

How positive do you feel about this business and and how do you make sure you get paid?

Need a contingency agreement to get paid anything significant. Doesn't make much sense since a good referral is worth a lot no matter what source it comes from.

Right now I find out as much as I can about a company and if I like them I try to get an agreement. If I can't and a candidate seems like a perfect match I'll still refer them just bc I'm trying to build out relationships with the hopes of getting an agreement for the next one.

As I build out my sourcing tools I'm using and automating more of my business I will either sell my tools, get agreements with everyone, experiment with all alternative payment methods (retained agreements, SaaS model, etc), or all of the above.

I like the outlook in the industry though. Lots of players but lots of room for growth esp. b/c looking at eng- lots of future demand for jobs, lots of companies moving between stages (startup to big co), and lots of companies bad at retaining employees.

instanceof(recruiter,engineer) == holy grail

Are you based in the Bay Area by any chance? Feel free to email me if so (it's in my profile).

I am bicoastal (SF & NYC). Building up Seattle too. Will shoot you an email.

I'll take this opportunity to shine a light on the company I work for, Independent Software. We are in a similar space and value many of the things you do.

We run a program called Apprentice100 (A100). A100 is a 12-week program designed to teach emerging computer science students the real-world skills they need to be junior developers, connect them to the local development community, and match them with jobs. We're not a bootcamp - we work with students that have a formal academic background in CS. We're also not a recruiter - we provide training and we value our community. We build relationships with all the students and companies we work with. We hold events to bring people in our network together and cultivate good Apprentice/company matches.

We do charge a flat fee to hire an Apprentice and in return the hiring company is eligible for a 70% refund on that fee and 50% wage reimbursement for 1 year. This week we became the first software apprenticeship program in the nation to be formally recognized by the DOL and DOE.

In addition to A100 we have been working more and more with mid and senior level developers.

I chime in here not only to spread the word of A100 specifically but also to say that some of us out there are trying to do job matching in a way that is good for everyone. It seems like dsk139 and other responders in this thread are doing the same.

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My apologies if this message is scattered or littered with errors. I am typing into a very small comment box from a very noisy train.

Cool model, think roughly this makes sense. Can you give some idea of average fee. My guess is about $20k or 30% of starting salary, then with the reimbursement factors that you mention? Also, while they are in the 12 weeks i assume the startups they are helping / learning with building probably pay you total of $5-10k per 12 week session? If you can't share totally I get it, but there are multiple code schools i know in my area and may want to share some of these ideas with their leaders / founders that I know. Thanks

I'm really happy to hear about this. I hope this model becomes widespread and standard practice.

I've done recruiting as part of my (data science) consultancy. Aka, I build out a solution for a customer, then staff it for them. My pipeline was a large personal network, including several academics who pitched promising students at me, and a private forum where excellent examples of such people could be found. Though I have a bias in saying so, that worked reasonably well.

Recruiters do have a principal agent problem that I didn't. Then again, hiring managers are often insane. "I want a world class DS guy for $90k a year" is not realistic.

I'd like to think I qualify, but I really identify as a software consultant (coder/manager type) who also does recruiting/contracting. I'm happy to answer any questions about this.

I got into this because I'm very personable and have a large professional network. This is from running the largest Java User Group in SoCal, and now a tech interview meetup, plus attending many others. I'd been hearing (and experiencing) what you described for years, so I figured I could be the best recruiter in the area - kind of like the world's tallest halfling. To be honest, it's harder than I thought.

Obviously, most recruiters don't know anything about technology. They rely entirely on the candidate qualifying themselves and the hiring manager giving helpful feedback. So at a minimum, they should have a good relationship with the hiring manager. Internal recruiters are competing with you and may try to block access. I simply dropped a client that did that, but usually it's the hiring manager who brings me in.

I also don't know how recruiters do this for other cities, much less halfway around the world like the offshore recruiters. First thing I did was check to see if you listed a location, because unless I have a client who allows remote work (rare) it's hard to help.

Again, happy to answer any specific questions.

I once was offered a position for Java, passed the technical tests and all, turns out the job was all using C# and .NET, thankfully i was skilled enough to get the hang of it in a few days but it was very weird; how can people like this get paid for such terrible performance.

In every .NET shop I've seen they will take Java experience & vice versa. There just isn't enough difference not too.

Recruiters are pretty uniformly bad but this seems a weird example of it.

If someone coming to this thread is looking for a recruiter in Ireland or the UK, I have two people I have been meaning to write recommendations for:

Michael Diver <mdiver@softwareplacements.ie>

Julietta Contoguris <julietta@campbell-north.com>

As an American who was looking for a visa-sponsoring job abroad, they were both super helpful, communicative, non-pushy, and knowledgable.

Yes, they do exist. My experience:

They do tend to be lone wolves, happy to fill just 1-2 vacancies per month. 2 would be a good month, and cause them to slow down.

They're often from the field they specialise in, and recruit at senior levels, as they've knocked up 10-20 years' experience in the field themselves, and anything lower in the chain would not be worth their time.

How to get to know them? Know someone they know, that's the easiest way.

For non-senior roles, as above:

There are 2 problems:

Finding: Actual souls that exist purporting some skill-set.

Filtering: Who is actually competent at this skill-set.

(Perhaps a third: Fit, but that's fuzzy)

Finding: Go cheap. Let them trawl databases and send you 50 CVs per day, anything counts, because their judgement is not as good as yours. Filter: Takes less than 2 minutes to read a CV and put it in 'reject' or 'read more'.

I went through quite a few recruiters before finding someone I really liked and trusted and sent me good candidates.

What I've learned is that it really comes down to the recruiting firm. The person I ended up using, their firm has incentivized them to stay and build relationships, not just go for the quick sell. They are the only person I know who has stayed at the same firm for years.

All the other recruiters I've tried have basically jumped to a new firm every 6 months to a year, they are just chasing the money.

So I would say ask talk to the recruiters/firm. Ask them how long they've been in that company, what's the average tenure.

We found a "build relationships" type recruiter, but he keeps trying to take us out to basketball games, etc. That's fine but uncomfortable because we can't guarantee him any new business. We haven't hired anyone since the last placement and aren't likely to soon.

They do exist but they don't work for commission.

I've worked with some amazing recruiters who would only send me people that were at least in the right ballpark. But they were all in house recruiters who had a salary and were not evaluated on how many of their candidates were hired, but instead on how well they sourced and brought people in for interviews.

So I guess my advice to you is, if you can afford it, bring someone on full time, in which case they would be more of a bizdev person for you than a recruiter.

> I would love to build a meaningful relationship with one who can get to know me, get to know my skills, seek high quality matches from companies who also value this person's selectiveness and talent pool.

The Profile of the recruiter that you're looking for is woefully Old School. Yes, a few still exist. Look for the seasoned players, the gray haired GenX/Boomer guys.

Understand that his clients often take dim view of 'consulting/contrator' talent (you) as mercenaries. Sadly, this perception infects the broader talent marketplace.

As for the path to building any relationships, Dale Carnegie put it best - “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

In a 25 year career I concluded they basically don't exist. 99.9% are professional salespeople - commission driven, and nothing much else matters.

Understanding that clarified much of the cliche recruiter behaviour. Your needs are secondary to their commission and sales funnel.

The couple of exceptions who were truly professionl and mde real efforts on the candidates side were in one case a guy with some dev experience too, at an agency that also had an IT division. The other was an extremely niche firm, tightly focussed on a specific area of banking, started by an ex developer.

Having also had experience of dealing with agencies and recruiters from the employer side I ended up having no idea at all of the attraction of using them. They didn't save time, they didn't achieve any better candidates, and some were basically dishonest.

Right now a guy is sending me a mix of medical, software and truck driving job openings around the country. I guess he talked to me, then randomly poked buttons on his computer. I do embedded software. Some New York firm of recruiters.

I get many calls from third party recruiters and some directly from Hiring Managers or internal HR...all from posting my resume on job boards and LinkedIn. Most of the third party recruiters are unfortunately worthless and from New Jersey...I have no idea why, I live in Portland, OR. I am a Sr. SharePoint Consultant/Architect/Admin/Dev with over 20 years of IT experience and 8+ years of SharePoint experience. I now run my own consulting company and utilize the job boards only to get corp-to-corp or direct contracts with companies. Of the many of thousands of third party recruiters only two have really stood out to me. I am not otherwise affiliated with them or their companies (though I have worked with them):

Lisa Matar, founder and owner of Collaborative Vision http://cvhires.com, a boutique third party recruiting firm based in Portland, OR has fostered a positive relationship with me and with the companies that she works with. I had a question about a corp-to-corp SharePoint migration contract I learned of from a different recruiting company. Lisa reached out to the CTO of a large Healthcare company most of us have heard of within minutes and provided the information I needed. While the role was cancelled due to a long story, I was blown away by her execution. She is also very competent with current technologies, though she is not a developer or admin. Lisa really understood my background and experience and has proactively pinged me about positions and sometimes for my feedback. She is also very willing to place consultants corp-to-corp if the end client allows it. Thank you Lisa, you are the best.

Another recruiter is Susan Schmidt at InfoGroup Northwest with offices in Portland and other cities. Susan called me, I aced the interview same day, got the ball rolling, let me sign the paperwork electronically, and had me in a client-paid-for hotel room in a different city the same day, working the next day on a contract (it was kind of urgent for the company and me at the time). Unfortunately my recent experiences with InfoGroup have been negative...no feedback, no pings, I'm just a wet bag of meat that has potential to put money in their hands from my work. Chris R, the owner of InfoGroup is a very impressive woman and has a great business sense, which means shrewd in her case. I hope IGNW gets it back together, because they have coordinated several corp-to-corp contracts for me that I would not have otherwise known about and are mostly great to work with.

Does anyone know of any other recruiters in Portland that are open to finding corp-to-corp opportunities?

Good recruiters absolutely do exist. I've met them at local tech meetups.

BTW, I can even introduce you to some if you'd like. Send me an email at jason@benfranklinlabs.com and I'd be happy to make an intro. (I'm a freelancer too.)

>to fully vet their candidates and only promote them to companies who are a good fit. It seems that finding one of these could be a win-win. Just like on the hiring side, I don't want to waste time dealing with carpet-bombers.

"fit" is in the eyes of beholder. Hiring these days seems to be very capricious in nature, basically a domain of chance like a roulette, and thus it is subject to the same statistical approach of carpet bombing of every possible wall with spaghetti, i.e making the highest number of lowest cost bets.

I don't know if they exist. I sure have not met one yet. However, you have an option that might be worthwhile to you. Good technical content will usually draw programmers. They will sign up to your newsletter if you consistently publish quality content. You don't need to blog every day, but something like once every three weeks works fairly well. People will then come to you because you have proved to them that you know your stuff (hopefully you do). :)

In my experience, recruiters, like salespeople or journalists, develop expertise for a few domains. That is, they're usually not good at recruiting, selling or writing about any old thing. So to really answer your question, people would need to know exactly what you do, which technologies you use, etc. Among firms, I've heard that Riviera Partners is good.

Nope, these recruiters don't exist, or if they do, are exceedingly rare. Time after time after time in dealing with them in the past few years, all I get the sense of is that they're looking for quick returns with little work.

Recruiters, PR Firms, and Event planning companies I've found to be complete waste of time in working with as a startup. Or an event company.

The compensation model also seems unfair. Many tech recruiters get a cut of engineer's hourly wage and even with that high price I found tech recruiting a very random selection process.

Many good managers I know don't believe that they will find stellar candidates via recruiters.

From my experience all recruiters suck. Some more, some less. You are just a commodity for them.

You should focus all your efforts into building up relationships with clients, small consulting companies and other consultants. The money is better and the work is more interesting.

You can tell that they're a terrible recruiter when they try to give you the "Most recruiters do X, but we're different..." speech

Aline Lerner.

That's the only good one I know. Seriously. And I think she's turned that into a different/related business now.

I'm guessing with near certainty that you're talking about contingency recruiters. Contingency recruiters are the type you "pay for performance" -- if you hire someone, they get a fee, typically ~20% of first year's salary. If you don't, they get nothing.

In theory, this business model incentivizes everyone perfectly -- they only get paid if they perform. In practice, it's awful and doesn't work at all.

To understand why, think about it from their perspective as an honest recruiter trying to do a good job. You give them a call, and have all kinds of very specific requirements for the kinds of candidates you are looking for. They need to spend a lot of time upfront working for you, which is an asymmetric commitment, since you aren't paying them anything until they hire someone, which means a few weeks of free work on their end up front in the best case scenario. Just like there are a bunch of flaky recruiters that drive by and waste your time, there are a bunch of flaky companies that do the same to them, except they don't have any upfront commitment.

What this means is that the contingency recruiter model tends towards a resume dump. It's nearly completely worthless -- the only thing you could get out of it is to insist that they just send you a dump of all resumes they have that match your criteria.

The good news is, there are other recruiting models that work much better.

A retained search is usually done for a more senior position, and it works very well. You agree that they have the exclusive on the search, and agree on some large fee you will pay them for finding you a VP of X. You pay half of it up front and you won't get it back if you don't end up hiring someone -- the reason is because they will dive deep into your needs and go out and find candidates specifically for you. They put in a lot of work up front, so you pay some up front, too. They will often have great relationships with the candidate pool you are looking for, and might even place the same person 2 or 3 times throughout their career. Because there more risk up front for you, you will interview their references extensively and rely on their reputation.

The third type of recruiting business model that works really well is a contract recruiter. This is someone who is basically a contractor for you. They may work full time, or maybe 1/2 to 1/3 of their time at several companies, depending on how many positions you are trying to fill. You pay them a flat rate for their time, and will likely set performance expectations (for example, it might be reasonable for one 1/2 time recruiter to hire 1 great engineer per month), but their pay will be fixed and not performance based. This person comes into your office, becomes a part of your team, understands exactly what it is you are looking for, and helps with all of the leg work of recruiting: sourcing, screening, scheduling, extending the offer, and onboarding. You take some risk, because they might not be very good and you might not find that out for a few months, but no more risk than you take with any other regular employee. If they are good, this person will become a very critical part of your team, and will help you build an amazing team!

There are a lot of people that have tried to solve the contract recruiting model, and most have failed. The only people I know doing well are Triplebyte, and I hope they succeed because, as this thread shows, there are a lot of people who would like it to work!

What you probably don't realize yet is that there are two problems here, or in other words, the problem is twice as grave as you might think it is.

Most recruiters and agencies are utterly incompetent. It's the fact that practically everyone involved in IT knows. That's why companies avoid dealing with recruiters in general, being unable to spot the good ones (and I certainly wish to believe they exist). But even if you run into a good professional recruiter, you are still going to be suffering from the second problem.

Which is developing on the other side of the fence. Software engineers too are painfully aware of the recruiter tactics and many good developers have long banned them. Recruiters might try to approach them but people won't even pick up the phone.

That means that even the good recruiters (if you ever find them) will only have a very narrow and scarce pool of good people to offer you. Much narrower than it might have been if things in the hiring industry were different.

What I'm saying is that you should not necessarily look at the recruiters as your salvation. There might be great people near you who effectively avoid the recruiters' radars. You really should look into finding means to discover and contact people directly.

It's not the thing that everyone is happy to admit but the reality is that hiring key people in software industry is manual labor which can't really be outsourced or automated. Recruiters in general are not involved in any of the industry, therefore they have no knowledge of what drives the businesses, what problems they are facing and how skilled individuals fit into the picture. Therefore, their only usefulness is to place the workers of lowest ranks where they don't play an important role. Everyone believes that recruiters are placing top people in top companies and playing an important role in the economy, that's the general story of their place in the universe that they like to spread and maintain, but the reality is that they mostly place low-level grunt workers who have no advanced skills and therefore do not require vetting by a competent specialist.

The only difference might be if a recruiter would be coming from a specific industry having spent there an appreciable number of years and having learned all the ins and outs. Then they would be able to fully understand the client needs and find the right people to satisfy the requirements. But then it would really be just a different form of "specialists hiring specialists", specifically "former specialists hiring specialists".

Your best bet under these circumstances is to dedicate some time to conducting PR activities like talking about your company, hanging out in the places where good developers hang out, unobtrusively advertising yourself to them and directly approaching certain people that you spot who you believe might be persuaded to come on board. Once more, it's long, tedious, manual labor but it's just the way things are.

Having said that, I do recognize the value that recruiters might provide to the industry if they changed their ways. There really is a place for them in the economy and they could in principle significantly ease the lives of both companies and candidates. But for now, they only seem to be making everyone's lives harder.

speaking as a software engineer I'd prefer an agent

Hmm. I'd have to pay, but it might be worth it.

Does anybody do that? Or is this a market opportunity?

This is definitely a thing that exists for top-tier engineering candidates in the financial space, but there are very, very few of them.

I guess this is a good place to put this out: if any good Bay Area recruiters are looking to place someone with ~3 years of Python and Django, my email is in my profile. Or, if anybody has any referrals to good Bay Area recruiters, that would be wonderful as well.