Comment by koevet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by koevet | Hacker News Reader

I have been freelancing in Europe for the last 10 years and I have learned to avoid recruiters as much as I can. In the last 4 years I have managed to get contracts through connections and skip middlemen all-together. It takes more time but it's rewarding.

Few rules I use when I deal with recruiters (in Europe):

1) There are really an handful of recruitment companies with a good reputation and history. By default, I distrust a recruiter calling from an unknown agency. There must be thousands of small recruitment agencies in Europe, I get a fairly high amount of emails/calls every week and I mostly ignore them.

2) Be suspicious when a recruiter knocks at your door or publish a job ad with an out-of-market rate. Rates are low these days. They just want to harvest CVs.

3) If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview.

4) Don't waste time talking technical stuff with a recruiter. They don't know shit. In 10+ years I have met maybe 2 recruiters with a real technical/dev background. Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.

5) Most of the time jobs coming from recruiters suck. A company with a decent vision on how to build software will never use zombie recruiters. Maybe they will contact one of the big player or, more likely, they will go on the market themselves. Recruiters jobs are mostly financial/telco crap where Java 1.4 is the standard.

6) Be aggressive when it comes to rates. Recruiters markup is around 20% (again in Europe). It may vary dramatically. So think about it: You are giving 20% of your salary to a guy who phoned you one day, sent you to an interview the next and disappeared. Also, some recruiters (very few) are transparent about the markup. They are normally worth your trust.

7) When you leave a contract, keep good relationship with everyone at every cost. It will pay back.

Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.

Ouch. You cut me deep koevet.

In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here.

Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number).

If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency.

Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens.

TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.

Again, I may sound harsh here, but, given a couple of exceptions, my experiences with recruiters are nothing short that horrendous. That is why now I resort only to personal connections and on networks like Linkedin. I'm also noticing a worrying trend recently:

(caveat: I'm not an native English speaker but I have lived in the UK and I use English as my working language. I can recognize UK accents pretty well).

More often than not, I'm getting phone calls from recruiters with a very strong cockney accent that clearly have no idea of what they are talking about and they sounds like they just landed on that desk without any previous experience in the industry. These are particularly pesky. They go straight to the flag-raising questions and they make you feel like a complete idiot. Honestly, these cowboys are just damaging the image of an already deeply wounded industry. I don't know how your industry deals with dishonest or unprofessional behavior, but if you want to get the trust of people like the one hanging in this community you have to work on some mechanism to keeps the bad apples out of the basket. I can actually smell a business idea here, like a guild of super-hero recruiters, who never let you down and do actually find you your dream job.

That's the same trick as "you're not paying more for using a credit card, the SELLER is paying for it", except of course the seller will have higher prices because of this.

I accidentally upvoted instead of downvoted. It it of course nonsense that you are adding to the salary. If the employer is willing to pay £600, then you are taking X% of £600 and giving the employee (100-X)% of £600. The £500 figure that you are "adding" to is just an imaginary number that has no real significance.

Do recruiters really take as much as 20%? This seems ridiculously high to me. How much of their time are they investing compared to the employee?

An employer is willing to pay an extra 20% to save themselves the time and effort of having to source & interview the hundreds of applications themselves.

As for recruiters taking 20%, that's a comparitively low figure for such a high daily rate. If one of my clients was requesting a £500 a day calibre candidate I wouldn't touch it for anything less than 30% in reality.

We are providing a service, plain and simple. The service fee is calculated in relation to the calibre of candidate as the more senior the candidate, the more difficult they are to find.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 20%. If you get an employee for a year, do you get 20% of the yearly salary? So you have to find 5 people per year to get paid as much as the people you find? (on average)

If so, does that truly not sound ridiculous to you? If all people got employed through recruiters then the recruitment business would make up about one fifth of the total economy!

>An employer is willing to pay an extra 20%...

I'm sorry, but this is an accounting fiction. The cost of an employee to an employer is the total cost; dividing up the total cost and ascribing it to this or that is irrelevant from the perspective of the employer, and disingenuous from the perspective of the employee.

In the US we have social insurance taxes which are sold as having an "employee" portion and an "employer" portion, but this too is just accounting fiction:

    Perceived:
     Gross Salary:      $100,000
     Employee Tax Rate:     7.65%
     Employee Tax Amt:    $7,650
     Net Salary:         $92,350
     Employer Tax Rate:     7.65%
     Employer Tax Amt:    $7,650

    Actual:
     Gross Salary:      $107,650
     Net Salary:         $92,350
     Tax Amount:         $15,300
     Tax Rate:              14.2%

The employee is worth $107,650 to the employer; that part of the money goes to taxes, or to a recruiter, or to a gym membership is wholly irrelevant.

We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.

KoZeN, I also hate sounding harsh because I think I've read comments of yours in other places that sound very clueful -- but this very comment of yours is a perfect example of the rampant, rank slipperiness which seems to exude from every corner of your profession.

The bottom line is that recruiters make the transaction significantly more expensive for both parties -- without adding a heck of a lot value (other than an endless appetite for trolling job boards and screening emails) to either side.

For example, if the client says to you, a recruiter, that they're willing to pay £500, that already means that their real, true, internal budget real budget is £600. As in, they'd be happy to pay that £600 for someone they found for someone they found through their own channels.

Or if you look at it the other way: even I, as a developer, decide that it's fine (if not great) to take £500 per day, I still pay (through the nose) for it, in that I know I'm being billed at a significantly higher rate, and corresponding I have to walk an eggshells in every meeting with management knowing that they're paying through the nose more for each day of my time then they should have to, and with fellow developers also (resentful of the fact that their company is paying significantly more for a unit of my time than for theirs, also). Plus the additional, very substantial risk that I will get laid off sooner than I otherwise might, precisely because of the higher rate (and the fact that they have to walk on eggshells, or otherwise deal indirectly with me because I'm branded as coming from an agency).

All of this, aside from the fact that the 20% overhead you're quoting is a very low outlier, in my experience. In fact, in all cases when I've had direct knowledge of a recruiter's overhead, it's been 30% or higher - with 50% being not uncommon.

I know I'm fudging a bit: recruiters do provide some value (much of it psychological, in that they serve as proxies, or foils more like it, in various parts of the negotiation process); it does take time to sift through those job boards (and many employers just don't know where to post, or how to post effectively); and a very small portion (less than 10%) of recruiters -- it seems you may be one of them -- do seem to have natural talents, and are capable of adding substantial value to the negotiation process (in terms of knowing the market, sizing up candidates, etc).

But the vast majority do not (again, other than serving as a psychological buffer for a highly nerve-wracking process both ways). Many seem to add substantial negatives (either through obfuscations, outright cluelessness, general slipperiness and stuffiness, etc).

And either way, it's simply intellectually dishonest for you to claim that we, as contractors, don't pay for your hefty fees. Of course we do (and so do clients) -- we both pay through the nose. And we just don't seem to get all that much in return.

Complete agree with "If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview."

They're always fishing for people (a major alarm bell should be if they're asking for hiring managers or persons of authority) who they can then spam with offers of services.

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