Ask HN: Why are recruiters not interested in contractors? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why are recruiters not interested in contractors?

18 pointsremotecontract18 comments

I have 10 years of development experience and have been doing contracting remotely for like 5 years now. I get most of my work through an agency at a rate of $100 / hour.

Nearly every day some recruiter emails me about a job opportunity. I am not really interested in switching since my arrangement is flexible and comfortable, but just for kicks, I always reply that I am available as a remote contractor at a rate of $130 an hour.

No recruiter has ever wanted to move forward or hear more. Why not? Is it the remote thing, or the contractor thing, the way I am responding, or what?

It seems like a lot of contracting happens in the industry, and overall contracting seems like a great way to bring someone on risk free, before trying to convert them to a full time employee (although I never go for this). What is it about offering back a remote contract that makes the recruiters run for the hills?

I'll give a slightly different perspective. I work with TekSystems a lot. Let's imagine you're a customer and you go into a car dealership. You tell them you want a nice midsized sedan at a certain price level. If the sales person comes back and says "that's cool but I want you to lease this much nicer two door sports car. The horse power is double. And the price is 50% higher." You wouldn't be happy.

The client in this case is the company hiring an employee. They are asking for an FTE. They want to pay a certain salary. You are a consultant. You are asking for a certain hourly/daily/weekly/monthly rate. It's not that they don't like you. They just want something else. It's nothing personal.

Recruiters are hired to do a job which typically means get as ass in a seat. A contractor isn’t that, so they don’t want it.

Recruiting is a very concrete, straightforward task. Anything that doesn’t fit into the mold is simply ignored. It’s not illogical, don’t take it personally. They got horse blinders on and aren’t focusing on anything that isn’t directly tied to their duties.

Also (anecdotally) the kind of recruiters who are going to reach out to you are not the kind of people you want to be working with anyway.

All this being said, I empathize with you. Ultimately there’s a significant chance that you are exactly the type of person that they are ultimately being hired to find... but it’s not the way that business works.

Why are they not the ones you want to work with?

My take: good jobs are not even posted anywhere, they are given to friends and acquaintances. Bad jobs remain open long enough that a recruiter is called.

Because in next few days recruitment will find a very capable developer with 12 Years experience who will do it for 90 because not everything in life is in his control and he wants the gig ASAP.

You are replaceable commodity. Like iron ore etc.

you must be a recruiter for sure

Their pay schedule is dependant on you being hired. Perhaps it's simply too difficult for them to find you clients or they just don't want to try. Either way remember they are middlemen. Maybe find one that specializes in contract recruiting and you'll have better results.

Like swedish_mafia has already stated: If you market yourself in terms of development experience you’re a commodity to these people.

Market yourself in terms of the actual value you provide to customers and simply ignore those recruiters.

In my experience there are two types of "recruiter"

#1 gets a commission for hiring someone for a job as an employee. The employer will pay him a percentage of your yearly salary to the recruiter if you are hired.

#2 is a contract shop recruiter. You are hired by the contract shop and then subcontracted to the employer at an hourly wage which they get an ongoing cut of.

These two types of recruiters are different animals with different skills and motivations.

In my experience, #1 will not do #2 type deals. #2 will sometimes act as #1 doing conversions of temp-to-perm for a lump sum.

There is also a variant of type #1 - a recruiter for a large company that I believe recruits for a salary without commission. This may be to eliminate conflicts of interest in the hiring process (or more properly, favor the employer to be)

all this might have morphed - I haven't interacted with type #2 for many years.

In both of these cases the recruiter has incentives that the recruitee gets a high wage and has insider info from past recruitments. Why don't the recruiters help in salary negotiations?

Most recruiters have no clue what the fuck they’re doing.

That is true. Then you get a recruiter that knows what they are doing only to be met by a company that has no clue what the fuck they're doing. Me and recruiter left confused.

I can't echo this enough! The one time I had an exceedingly positive experience with a recruiter, the role and company involved had been grossly misrepresented and had a very fractured org (which explained the rushed hiring / recruiting bit).

Good recruiters (i.e. retired software devs will likely not have bad intent or be clueless) will usually mean good, but can still screw you. Otherwise, most recruiters are econ majors or business majors who couldn't fill out excel sheets well enough to find a decent job, so they decided to try "recruiting". "in-house" recruiters, seemingly a new SF trend, generally aren't any more qualified (still have basically zero tech background) and seem to just be trying the hardest to "be cool" and set the stage for an over-blown behavioral interview.

This has nothing to do with your skills, and everything to do with the way recruiters are paid.

Recruiters are paid to find employees, and get a percentage of their yearly salary when they make a placement.

In contrast, agencies and contractors are completely different. It’s normally the job of the agency to find clients, they are not found by recruiters. If youre getting paid $100/hr, it’s likely your agency is charging $200/hr. That may seem unfair, but it’s likely they spent a ton of time and energy trying to find a client who values your work. That extra money supports those client development activities.

In many ways contractors/agencies are competing against full time recruiters. I wouldn’t expect them to be your friend.

It's not risk free.

Keeping a secret becomes harder as more people are involved. Employee (or contractor) turnover means more people are involved.

The same goes for the number of work sites, with each remote worker being their own work site. It is reasonable to guess that you don't have 24x7 guards, video recording, and competent on-site IT staff.

Then add in a training investment, the legal implications (tax, insurance, holidays...) if you are in a different jurisdiction, and all the uncertainties that a one-of-a-kind agreement would bring. Not every company is prepared to deal with the situation you would create.

Aside from startups, very minimal amount of companies do recruitment in-house.

Recruitment agencies charge anywhere from 25% to 50% annual wage for a successful hire, at least here in SEA, I'm not sure about the US, but imagine it must be comparable.

How would they charge for bringing in a contractor?

Just apply straight to the companies, recruiters always trying to find whatever benefits them most and it's never in your interest.

your salary requirements are too high

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