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Comment by alextingle | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed a disturbing trend for some of the larger recruitment agencies in London to insist on knowing your salary. They've refused to pass on my CV without it. Worse, they claim it's the HR departments who are driving this, but that's plainly false - I've asked several very senior HR people and they've never heard of an HR department requiring current salary details along with CVs.

I suspect that the agencies are aggressively trying to gather valuable salary data, for their own purposes.

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On the flip side I'm hiring in London for Yell and our HR use agencies. I've seen the salary information be used by agencies to pitch someone fractionally above what they're currently on, and lower than we're prepared to pay, just to help ensure they get the placement and kick back. They're more concerned with getting placements at all rather than finding the right person for the job (and making me a happy client) or increasing their revenue per placed candidate.

I dislike this, it's not helping me find the best candidates, and it's not rewarding the best candidates accordingly (I want them to not have money as an issue so that they are not stressed at work about silly things outside of work... so I want to pay them more than they need to a point of comfort). In fact it closes career progression off from the candidate, as progression is usually paired with salary increase to acknowledge the maturity of experience and skills acquired.

As a result of this I flatly refuse to act on salary information and keep it out of the interview. I'm not interested in money and hope that the candidate isn't either... we'll pay well enough for it not to be a worry without paying too much that it is a burden too much for us. The rest of the game, other companies can play that.

I'm possibly naive.

[edit]If you're wondering, whilst I do entertain the process and do act on agency CVs, we've hired way more people directly (us finding them or them finding us) as the quality of the candidate is way higher. CVs are so bad at communicating passion, creative thinking, actual technical skill... even more so once an agency filters them.

I'm currently working as a programmer in London, and I'd love to know how do you go about finding them, and what I could do to be easily found. I realise it's a little off topic but I'd appreciate any response you may have.

There are two approaches I use: 1) You find one of us (we're tweeting, we're on linkedin, we have blogs, we're on hackernews, etc). 2) We find you.

The earlier one depends on who you're aiming at, but go follow the people you want to work with, engage in them and if they ponder ideas try fleshing them out or producing prototypes and blogging about it... it will get their attention.

The latter one is a question of where we're likely to look. My preferred option at the moment is IRC dev channels for the specific skill I'm looking for, or a search of github for projects that are somewhat related and then approaching those people. If you do the github route then make sure there's a way that people can get in touch... leave a readme markdown with email address, and ideally a link to a fuller profile page (just not one that requires a login... don't link to facebook).

Also on the "we'll find you" route would be open source projects related to the area in which you want to work. Go fix bugs, lots of them... get yourself known amongst those teams. Want to work in a devops shop? Then fix Puppet and Cobbler bugs and make well-made Puppet scripts. Want to work in a rails team? Then go find some large open source rails project or rails itself and get known there.

This all falls into networking of course, but this isn't meet for a beer networking, it's doing stuff that we're mutually interested in... constructing the opportunities to cross paths. It works.

Thank you very much for taking the time to write a response, it's very much appreciated. I've recently started playing with node.js and it's capturing my imagination. That coupled with what you've written makes me think it's time for me to find an open source module to help contribute to.

Thanks again.

Alan

In terms of direct company-to-developer advertising, Twitter seems to be very popular these days, and to a lesser extent local programming language groups/mailing-lists.

Recruitment based upon github activity seems to be popular among startups as well.

I'm currently working on a UK based startup that should hopefully make direct company-to-developer hiring easier for both parties (in the US you have StackOverflow's Careers site, but there's nothing really comparable for Europe).

Last time I went for an interview I learned that you should not be honest about your salary ... let me try to explain.

I am at a certain level in a big company with a salary range that is quite large. Many people at my level earn £5000 - £7000 more than me, mainly because they have been around in the company a lot longer.

In my last interview, I was offered a job and the company offered me my current salary + about £5000 (I was honest about what I was earning when they asked). Now, being that many of my collegues were currently earning that for doing the same job as me, I always wondered if they would still have offered me a £5000 bump if I had exaggerated my salary by £5k to start with.

I guess I will never know, and I didn't take that job for other reasons, but the guy really wanted me to work there, and I got the impression that he was trying to tempt me in with an offer that is just big enough compared to my current salary, without really reflecting on my skills and what they were worth.

I decided then that my salary would be exaggerated a little to any agencys or interviewers who ask so I can try and negotiate a better deal, ethical or not.

Lying doesn't seem like the best way to start a new professional relationship. Perhaps you could share your salary expectations instead.

Maybe correct. Ideally I'd like them to make me an offer based on what they think I am worth, considering market rates etc.

However if they insist on me revealing my salary, I am going to assume its so they have try and gauge how much it would take to make me jump to them, which is (in my mind) on the same ethical level as my exaggerating my existing salary to try and negotiate a better deal.

I've been offered jobs contingent on providing proof of disclosed salary (pay stub).

Interesting - I think think that is way out of line, but maybe it adds weight to the argument of point blank refusing to reveal your salary at all. Perhaps I should reconsider my strategy :-/

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