1. Is there interest in this? 2. Would this be feasible?
Employers sure as hell wouldn't like it, but I wonder if they'd tolerate it.
It probably wouldn't work in other industries without a huge shift in expectations, but it really does work at thousands of employers.
If you could get a unified group of employees to all sign an agreement to be represented as a group, then you would have collective bargaining power...
If we take the 'order of magnitude of productivity' difference in programmers seriously, it seems that the best programmers would have a serious incentive not to join the union, were they actually able to negotiate proportional to their ability level. (Granted, they don't and it is unlikely you will find an employer willing to pay you 10x as much as one of your coworkers, so maybe it does make sense).
Also, the governor of Wisconsin wouldn't stand for it, and the company would likely fire the lot of you as soon as you decided to unionize.
A far better idea for a service would be for negotiation counseling. This service actually already exists, but is so touchy- feely- that it isn't taken seriously by hard-nosed tech workers, who as a result get rolled by their employers.
To complicate matters, I've worked with many BigCo HR departments, and really doubt that they'd deal with a third party that they didn't have on their approved vendor list. In fact, a third party would probably be a deal breaker.
Rubbish. Why would we compromise our bottom line for the sake of getting a deal done? Sure I could push you in at your absolute minimum salary but if you get a better offer in the mean time then I lose my fee. It's in my best interests to get you as high a salary as I can possibly get you.
That's the basic issue. If you're getting 5%, then by definition you should care 5% as much as the candidate what the final salary ends up being, and thus care much less if it's a little bit lower than it could have been.
Secondly, negotiating an offer is the quickest and easiest part. It hardly consumes any time at all by comparison to the amount of time and effort invested just to get to the point where there is any offer at all.
If I've invested a massive amount of time and effort into getting a candidate through the process to the point where the employer wants to make them an offer, believe me, I am going to fight tooth and nail to squeeze every penny from the employer that I can get.
I'll buy that; the recruiters I've worked with have certainly put in a lot of time getting me to the point of having an offer.
The point of serious mismatch is when you're working with more than one recruiter (at different agencies). Some years back, I was almost at the offer stage from company X through recruiter A; recruiter B pushed me to apply at company Y, too. Problem was, X and Y were founded/funded by the same people, and had an agreement (possibly illegal) not to compete on candidates. B somehow convinced me to go ahead anyway; I talked to Y, and X dropped me.
If I recall correctly, the authors of Freakanomics discovered that when real-estate agents sell their own houses, they sell for a higher price than comparable houses where a non-agent used an agent as a middleman. This confirms the hypothesis that agents are willing to compromise on price to close the deal sooner.
Correction:
This confirms the hypothesis that ESTATE agents are willing to compromise on price to close the deal sooner.In other words, results don't extrapolate to all agents.
For your argument to be true, you'd have to assume that there was something special about the sample population chosen by the authors. That flies against the laws of statistics. Further, there is a clear explanation of the behavior that aligns with the economic incentives of the parties.
In buying and selling homes multiple times, I have always casually mentioned the study to my agents, and they have vehemently denied that it is true. However, in every transaction save one, the agents have eventually acted in ways that would close the deal quickly for a loss to me, yet get them their (slightly reduced) commission sooner.
If the statistical results are sound then we can infer some characteristics about the population. But in this case, the sample came from a population of real estate agents. There is a fixed effect found across the whole sample: they're in the housing business, not the headhunting business. No recruiters in that population, so we can't infer anything about recruiters in general.
Sorry to argue semantics, but this is a basic sampling concept that people forget about.
- Real estate agent negotiates 8 hours for an additional $10,000 on the sales price: 5% commission gets him $500 for an hourly rate of $63.
- Real estate agent negotiates 8 hours for an additional $10,000 on the sales price of his own home: he keeps all $10,000 for an hourly rate of $1250.
- Recruiter negotiates for 8 hours for an additional $5000 salary: he gets a 20% commission for $1000 or $125/hr.
- Job hunter negotiates for 8 hours for an additional $5000 on his own salary: he gets $5000 for $625/hr. plus compounding effects for every future salary negotiation that is based off of his current salary.
After a while negotiating for an extra few thousand gets the recrutor an extra few hundred. If it takes 2 days to get this much more then the recruiter has lost money.
However to the employee, this takes none of his/her time and compounds onto top of each additional raise so it's in their interest to get the most they can no matter how much time, with in reason, it takes the recruiter to get the deal done.
Of course, their incentive is much smaller than mine, since an initial 2K/month salary boost might translate to 50K in extra salary over my tenure with that company and, conceivably, extra hundreds of thousands over my career.
Because they can increase their total commissions by 20% if they increase their number of employees placed by that much.
But really my take on this is different. If it takes an extra 20% of work, then the hiring company is probably not for me. I'd rather work for companies where good compensation is a given, because they tend to do other things better as well.
- Companies that hire through recruiters have deep yearly budgets; companies that hire direct have shallow project budgets. I have never not gotten a higher rate through a recruiter.
- Companies that hire through recruiters pay on time; companies that hire direct pay late and usually after repeated prodding; sometimes they don't pay at all.
- Companies that hire through recruiters pay for hours worked; companies that hire direct fight for upfront concessions and then fight some more when the bill comes.
- Most recruiters make a percentage and not a set fee, although yes, it's usually capped at around $25/hour. However that means that you need to be making upward of $100/hour to hit that cap. Which means that for the majority of people, the recruiter does make more when you make more.
All in all I never understood the customary programmer/recruiter animosity. Making more and never having to deal with collections is awesome. In my book, recruiters' cut is well-deserved.
Whenever I work direct for a company, I always make way more (basically, my cut, and the headhunters cut).
Despite this, companies seem to always work through headhunters...I've never seen any manager ask any developer "do you know any good ____ people that might be available?" It's really bizarre.