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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried talking with a recruiting agency? I notice you've mostly applied at household-name companies, many of which are very competitive. The majority of the tech jobs out there are not at companies you've ever heard of. Recruiters (third-party, not in-house) are motivated to find you something that's a good fit because they get commission (from the company) based on you getting hired. They'll coach you, help you with your resume, draw from a huge pool of companies to find something that's just the right fit. Their job is solving this exact problem.

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This is a great tip. Earlier in my career I was stuck at a mid-point where I didn't have quite enough experience to get hired by a household-name tech company, and working with third-party recruiters made finding a job easy. Knowing what I know now, I never would have even made it past screening at a lot of companies. They will take a cut of your salary, but they'll also work hard to sell you, as that's the only way they get paid. You are to them what a house is to a realtor, and the market is hot right now.

> They will take a cut of your salary

I've never had one that did this (or told me about it, at least). My understanding was that the company is basically paying them to find talent, so you're the product being sold. Sometimes there's even a clause that if you quit too soon they have to give back their commission, which further incentivizes them to make sure you really are a good fit.

If the hiring officer has a budget of 150k for the first year, and the recruiter charges 30k, how much are they going to offer you?

You can still negotiate to what you're worth. If you're no better than the applicants they got without recruiters then good luck, but that's why companies are hiring from recruiters, they can't find the talent on their own.

You likely just didn’t realize it. Usually the head-hunter cut is a % of the new hire’s salary for a length of time and is paid by the hiring company. So you never see it... but if someone gets hired directly then they can usually negotiate a higher salary instead of that money going to the non-existent headhunter. Another way of saying it is that initial offerings through a headhunter are lower since the cost is higher to the company.

This is my experience, either the recruiter will want to pay you directly, thus the company can avoid its own HR red-tape, or their deal with the recruiter is deliberately hidden from you, but you still join FTE. Of course, there's a million different ways to do this, but an organization like Triplebyte is upfront about taking 30% of your salary for two years.

I've hired tons of people, I've never offered someone less because they came in via a recruiter. You typically budget for salary + recruiter fee and if someone is hired organically then that's a bonus.

You don't pay someone less because they came via a recruiter because then they are going to be poached for being underpaid. You also don't pay someone more because they didn't come in via a recruiter otherwise now I have guys working on varying salaries which creates issues if that comes out in a team.

source: prior founder, hiring manager at large companies, etc

This is great advice. I would add: don't wait for them to coach you, tell them what your strengths are and how you've had trouble finding a job at big tech companies. Let them know you're open to smaller and lesser known tech companies and that you want to be coached to help you with the interviews. Because you're striking out at the interview stage and you know you can perform better.

EDIT: based on the first reply I got I want to revise this slightly. Don't go into too much detail about who rejected you or how many times. In fact keep the details short but make it clear you think interviewing is a weakness they should coach you with

Personally I wouldn't volunteer to tell them which or how many big tech companies rejected my resume. I'm afraid that nine times out of ten it would create undue prejudice in the interviewer/recruiter.

Thanks that is actually great advice. I added an addendum suggesting let agencies know he could use interview coaching but avoid details like where he's applied already or to how many companies.

Important to note that interviewer and recruiter are two different parties. The interviewer's job is to be skeptical of you; the recruiter's job is to polish you up and sell you to the interviewer. The recruiter is on your side, so it makes sense to be open with them.

(Note that this only applies to recruiting agencies. A "recruiter" at the company you're interviewing for is the exact opposite story.)

And OP, ask them to help you find long term positions. It sounds like your resume shows a lack of commitment and it'd be good to show you can stick with something for more than a year.

Yeah, a headhunter might be a good idea. I'll check out some which were mentioned here. I heard of triplebyte but have heard they've done some sketchy stuff (spam emails, exposing PI) etc. But it sounds like they do have incentives to champion applicants.

Can you recommend any good third party recruiting agencies for tech?

I'm not sure. Most of the ones I've talked to have contacted me on LinkedIn or by email, and I'm not sure how local they are/aren't to my area.

Now that I think about it I'm not sure how to actually seek one out otherwise... you might attract them by putting buzzwords on your LinkedIn? It probably isn't too hard to Google for them either

Googling just returns the sites that have won the SEO game. While it will return results, it's not anywhere the same as personal recos/warnings from like minded people. At least it might help with picking something from a search result. I might even put more weight into HN recos over something like Amazon reviews, maybe ;-)

Vettery, Jobot, Triplebyte

I have had good experiences with Aerotech. Really nice people who listen to what you want and try to find it for you.

I get contacted by them through linked in. They probably pay to search people with certain resume attributes, and then just spam email them in a numbers game to try to put credible candidates in front of their clients

I got my first bay area job through Triplebyte -- they were pretty perfect for me being able to demonstrate technical ability without a deep resume. Their process has gotten more cookie cutter over the years but the resume-blindness might be an asset in OP's situation. They're also much better positioned to give feedback on why you're struggling in interviews than an HN thread.

I've had pretty good experiences with Hired before. Coming out of a product consulting background, I wasn't sure I was going to have the requisite experience to transition to an in-house role, but they found several leads for me and I ended up landing a gig with a significantly higher starting salary than I expected.

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