Agent on Demand – Job Offer Negotiation as a Service
10xmanagement.com
10xmanagement.com
Agents are not financially incentivized to get you the best offer. They are financially incentivized for you to accept any offer, period.
The extra commission on negotiating a higher offer does not justify the time and energy. Additionally, it increases the chances that either party will terminate the negotiation outright.
Agents are not working for you, they are working on closing a deal and in fact the agent and the company they're selling you to have the exact same incentives. Get you in as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
Negotiation is more about soft skills, charisma, information obfuscation, and outright lying than it is about fighting to get what you "deserve."
The information asymmetry between the employee and company is huge: they know the market inside out, they negociate compensation packages every day and are strongly motivated to hide how bad they need to fill the particular position and how in-demand are those specific experts. Meanwhile, you only know your own salary and expectations, you are unable to objectively rank yourself and go on bits and scraps of information gathered here and there. This is a situation where you are ripe to be taken advantage of, especially on a booming market.
Where by "taken advantage of" I of course mean "sell your product for less than fair market value".
I think I'd be comfortable paying 1/3 of the boost, for as long as I keep the job (probably with repeat business for the agent, when I change jobs). Maybe with a cap of a few years?
On the other hand, that's probably not a very large slice of total wage, so it's still pretty small compared to the 20% that recruiters apparently get. But maybe agenting is a lot easier than recruitering.
Not that I'm looking for a dev job currently.
There are mitigating factors as it relates to what we are offering and the concerns you raise -- and one misunderstanding.
The misunderstanding first...we are not selling anyone to anything. We have no involvement in finding you the job, we are not recruiters, we are not headhunters. So we have no alignment with anyone other than YOU.
The first mitigating factor is that we offer two different negotiation options. One is us leading the process and speaking directly to your prosepctive employer, the other is us advising you behind the scenes and you talk directly to your prospective employer. In both cases, we are working hand in hand with you so nothing that is being conveyed is something you're not endorsing. Our goal IS to get to a yes, but ONLY a yes that you feel good about. If you don't feel good about it, then the negotiation ends and we move on.
The other thing is that we're offering to provide this service during our beta phase as a pay what you feel it's worth to you. You could choose to pay us nothing...we need to EARN whatever amount you choose to pay us. So we are 100% incentivized to be both ethical and effective during this process. Because if we're not, you're not going to recommend us to others and you're not going to pay us. And honestly, this business will be built and has been built almost exclusively on recommendations and word of mouth so that's a MAJOR incentive to us.
I do agree with you about one thing though, negotiating is NOT about fighting. It's about presenting reasonable and substantiated reasons why certain points should be adjusted. It's about knowing the myriad of areas TO negotiate. It's about understanding the standards and practices across different verticals. And most importantly it's about truly understanding what YOU want out of a deal. Fighting has NO place in this process.
As a concluding comment, agenting is a VERY old profession and widely used in many other verticals. There is a very good reason for this, put simply, most people are not the best at advocating for themselves. But if that doesn't describe you, if you possess all the knowledge required to get you the best deal possible, that's great. No need for our help. Otherwise, let us prove to you why there is a difference. If you don't like it, don't pay us.
A musician or actor is constantly signing new deals and the agent needs (in theory) to balance any immediate incentive to close the deal versus long term income from retaining their best talent.
A salaried job negotiation is more similar to a real estate deal in that it tends represent a very large portion of the client’s financial world and happen much less frequently.
The divergence of incentives becomes harder to manage in that case, because each individual deal ends up being such a smaller part of the agent’s income than the client’s.
That’s a known problematic dynamic across many “verticals” that your answer only partly addresses.
All that said...think of this concept a bit like a public defender. We believe that great talent has a right to great representation. If that's only great representation for one negotiation, that's fine. We still aim to provide great service for that one negotiation.
This is exactly what I want and would pay for. However, I wonder how this works in practice. I work for a fairly well known software company and am involved in the hiring process and I can say with about 90% certainty that negotiations would cease as soon as a candidate presented representation. And my gut is telling me that is the norm in the software industry.
Can you speak to this concern? Have you run in to this or has this come up at all for past clients?
First of all, my experience is many tech people, generally underestimate their ability and earning power - sell themsevles short. Even true rockstars, is very common.
Especially when it comes to salary. People are REALLY uncomfortable asserting themselves for more money. Like, phobia level.
Plus the, you need to talk to my representative. That’s some serious signaling. I’d love to hear about the results they get.
You can also get into this relationship with certain VCs.
I dont know how to find the people to do that - its not in my wheelhouse.
You're not paying enough.
I think 1-5% is fair to find a job for me - 20% seems reasonable to find a person to take a job.
20% and you can shoot as many bullets at the target as you want is a better deal than 1-5% and you can shoot one bullet at a bunch of targets.
I'm also expecting to pay /something/ for the task, even if nothing suitable is found, hence why the expected fee is lower.
As it is, I've yet to find a company that offers this service for any price - yes, there are plenty of headhunting shops that offer the service to employers - but no one offering the opposite - 20-30 years ago, (I'm told by my friends who work in HR) this was indeed a service you could purchase, but no one offers it anymore.
If you think you're right, I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and start this firm. But it'll hurt.
Now it's easy to see why some recruiters sometimes act the way they act. People are unlikely to lie just to earn a small fee, but when the numbers get big, the incentive changes.
The work required by an agent to place a 200K engineer isn't too much different than that of a 50K engineer, other than the 200K engineer likely being more marketable.
And the difference between 1% and 5% is substantial. I don't think I'd offer agent services for 1K, but for 5K I would.
I'm just trying to relo to another market from where I am.
See the moral hazard? How do I know you aren't going to negotiate all the salary surplus into your fee? :-)
Sure, you're in a pay-what-you-want Beta now (fascinating, and wonderful if it turns out to be a profitably pricing structure long term!), but consider posting a pricing model up-front, something like "X% of the negotiated lift in 1st-year pay above your first offer from a company"
How do you get paid? ... and the obvious corollary, why should I trust that our interests are aligned? (either as a candidate or a hiring manager?)
>The other thing is that we're offering to provide this service during our beta phase as a pay what you feel it's worth to you. You could choose to pay us nothing...we need to EARN whatever amount you choose to pay us. So we are 100% incentivized to be both ethical and effective during this process. Because if we're not, you're not going to recommend us to others and you're not going to pay us. And honestly, this business will be built and has been built almost exclusively on recommendations and word of mouth so that's a MAJOR incentive to us.
Not saying the current situation isn't messed up, but there is no reason it couldn't be fixed.
Anyway, look at the numbers here: a good salary negotiation takes maybe 5-20hrs to fight for, I don't know, $10K-$50K/yr gain? And a $5-$50k sign-on bonus? Even targeting an "premium consulting" rate of $500/hour, the agent can make a lot of hay to get their cut, putting in the basic standard amount of work.
But that's a whole paradigm shift in thinking about agency, and they're perfectly happy with how things operate currently. They would have to spend a lot more time actually negotiating.
In the case of real estate, the idea that you absolutely need to work with an agent is so entrenched that it's very difficult to get anyone to consider the alternative outlook.
Real estate agents here do a lot. They decorate your apartment, take professional photos, create marketing campaigns on Facebook and all the big listing sites. You set a date and they handle the showings. After that there's one bidding.
The only way they would be able to sell it before the bidding is if someone makes an offer before the showings.
10x played the roll of an advisor/mentor, guiding me in the negotiation -- on salary, benefits, figuring out what I wanted, etc. They were fantastic in this: instead of feeling like I was in the dark, not knowing what I could ask for, not being sure of my next move, I was coached into asking for the things I wanted (and/or that I didn't think I could get) and ended up very happy with the resulting package (PTO, clear definition of my role, etc.) Having an experienced "wingman" helps, tremendously...!
If you've got a real job offer and want help negotiating it, I would recommend trying them out - and during this expanded beta period, the service is pay what you want, so it's quite reasonable to engage them. Happy to answer questions. Cheers
Generally speaking, it "freaked me out" that this negotiation (happening at the very beginning of employment) would decide so many things going forward. The feeling of "this is my only chance" was weighing down on me.
In using this service:
- 10x both coached and represented me during the negotiations (reducing my stress)
- they (10x) validated that I was getting a good deal in terms of compensation
- it definitely changed the employer's perspective to see that I had an agent working on my behalf (they understood that I was taking this seriously)
- benefits-wise, I received a generous PTO offer and remote work options that suited my travel plans
patio11's classic blog post has put $millions in the pockets of new hires.
I assume you are a contractor, can you tell us a little bit about your background and give us an example of how they helped you find work? Thanks.
I have an engineering background building machine learning/NLP services (think ad servers, chatbots, search engines etc), including at a few startups and on an ads quality team at Google (linkedin.com/in/sbrother). I had taken a few consulting gigs throughout my career, but I finally quit to pursue full time software consulting two years ago. At that point I signed up with 10x management in an effort to bring in leads to supplement those from my own network.
They have a loose network of ~100 similar freelancers, running the whole gamut of software development niches. They do their best to match clients (that's us) with customers, but will send leads out over an email list if not sure. They'll set up the first meeting, and if that goes well they'll help with rate negotiation and later on billing. For all this they take 15% of each invoice. From my perspective it is a fantastic deal -- they helped negotiate my standard rate up by 75% and have brought in some very large contracts for me. Their business has helped me scale mine to the point I've been able to hire an employee and take some time off for "paternity leave" without losing my entire income stream. I highly recommend working with them if their services look useful to you.
I’m a mobile engineer who used to work at Apple/Facebook who’s gone down a similar path and now I work as a consultant/contractor. I think I’ve done a pretty good job sourcing work for myself but I’d love to talk shop with you sometime if you are interested.
Is there a service to help negotiate a better raise? (Of course, working behind the scenes)
I presume this is a struggle for every employee everywhere, every year throughout the career.
I managed to do better a few times by writing a nice email but many a times I just lacked the energy to compose such emails and settled for whatever is offered.
I appreciate the endorsements, but am now curious about the main product: how do I get on the 10xmanagement list of software engineers to be considered for gigs? I don't see a publicly visible way to apply. Is it really via referral only?
If so, where do I go to find a referral? Luck? Research existing "10x developers" and get them to like me?
What are the requirements to becoming a "10xer," aside from the potential for referral?
EDIT: Ah, I did not read the FAQ: https://www.10xmanagement.com/faq/ -- tl;dr as the response below suggests, probably need to contact them. As far as I can tell, they're basically operating as a standalone agency, so it's not much different than applying for a job interview anywhere else.
> I appreciate the endorsements, but am now curious about the main product: how do I get on the 10xmanagement list of software engineers to be considered for gigs?
There's a "Become a 10xer" button on the home page, right at the bottom. It links to this page [2].
Although I do not work for 10x, I am a very happy "client" (I'm a client since they represent me -- it still confuses me after 5 years). Feel free to email me with any questions! gs @ (my hn username).com
Unless it's something trivial like selling a used car or a job you will commit the vast majority of your life to.
That could happen once or twice a year for each user (instead of every 3 years on average), even if they remain at the same job for the same employer.
And even if the negotiation goal is something other than a base salary raise (more vacation time, attending conferences), Pay-what-you-want still works.
if this was launched pre-internet it may have been a successful one.
i would never subscribe to this.
there are similar services which claim to reduce our internet bills but somewhere buried in their terms and conditions will be a line which says ones we register with then they will have the authority and choice to negotiate the duration of contract or other aspects of it and we will only have one more issue to deal with.
this is bad.
did u notice, it is free during the beta stage, that's how they lure u in. if its a authentic and credible service it need not be free when beta. one would be happy to pay for it if it really adds value and doesn't subtract value. but this service may seem like it might add some negligible value in the short term but will end up subtracting value for the larger community in the long run.
i think this is how insurance came into picture and we all know how money sucking it ended up and leading to poor health care and bloated up prices.
i feel like this whole thing is unnecessary. anybody else with me?
the sooner this industry goes out of business its good for everyone, assuming if it exists at all... no body wants one more middle man taking a cut from my paycheck.
the businesses are better paying the good amount to us then have behind the scenes dealings with the negotiator and pay him a fee for the work that the employee is going to do for years.
i am sure a smart person would know how to negotiate their package and some organizations may directly reject to work with any negotiator and will figure out if we are getting inputs from a negotiator behind the scenes.
We will not have the authority or even be aware if such a negotiating organization is working behind our back with other organizations to limit our package.
one organization will massively benefit by teaming up with many other organizations then supporting the individual candidates who wont be powerful enough to sue you in case of any issue in at least most cases.
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Just loaded the form using the direct URL [1] and it worked fine. Try in an incognito window, just to make sure?