"Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.
If they do name a number and you reply it's too low, they again go into a canned response of "we're willing to reach (++x) for the right candidate", which is just as much bullshit as before. You'll complete an interview cycle and get the lowball offer of (original x).
TLDR they'll lie about comp and never completely answer you.
On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's never anonymized and simply pasting it into Google will almost always get you a lead on the hiring company.
Another lead is if they give you the company location. There is only one company on the planet, for example, that has R&D offices in both Mossvile and Aurora, Illinois.
I want them to understand that I need to know up-front if the position is interesting enough to be worth investing my time in at all. I could sacrifice my time and energy to assuage their fears, but every time I've done that in the past ten years there has been zero return on investment.
A reader might, at this point, optimistically point out that the next recruiter could be different. This reader would be correct. That could indeed be the case! Yet every time I wind up deciding to try the optimistic approach I wind up on a phonecall in which I learn that the company isn't someone I want to work for, the JD isn't one I actually want to work on, the comp isn't nearly enough, or some combination thereof. Generally the comp is so far off it has no change to even be negotiated to something I would consider. Often they try to sell me on a 40%-60% pay cut, because a slice of that is worth a lot to them (it's happened twice this month).
At this point I'm quite tired of paying optimism's price to assuage the fears of recruiters. The kindness is not returned. I understand others might choose differently.
This isn't my experience at all, having worked with recruiters both as a hirer and hiree. Recruiters typically are looking to close as many positions as possible, making money on volume. Their incentives are to spend as little time as they can getting candidates just enough so they say yes.
They typically are paid a percentage of a candidates first year salary. At first glance this might seem to mean they're motivated to get you as much as possible. In reality it means that the effort to get an extra $20k, which might make a big difference for the candidate, only results in an extra e.g. $2000 for them. They're not going to spend time on that that could be spent on closing another candidate, and getting another full commission, if they think the candidate will accept either way.
The money a recruiter is paid also often comes from the same budget a potential signing bonus would. The fact that they take 10% of the first year salary makes companies less forthcoming with extra money for the candidate.
Up to a point. They get a fraction of the marginal increase in salary, and they’d much sooner “close the sale” than risking having someone else fill the job to try and get an extra 500$ commission.
It’s the same story with real estate agents: selling your house for an extra 20k might be a lot to you but to the agent it’s an extra 400$ in commission (exact percentage varies). In other words, it’s hardly worth risking the seller losing interest or working an extra 2–3 weeks for so little.
In non rush times though where tables didn’t get filled when people left, it made a lot more sense to play up dessert.
> Real estate agent-owned homes are on the market longer and sell for more (2005)
As someone who has been trying to buy a house on and off for a few years now, thank you for caring about this.
Unlikely. Its way better for the recruiter to focus on the quantity of hires rather than trying to increase the salaries of a smaller number of them. It takes way more work and makes them less money to help increase your salary by 20% than just finding another role and hire.
It's in the recruiters best interest to maximize their throughput in placing candidates, and they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
No, the company would pay you your salary and keep the commission itself, it would not have given you that commission simply because you went directly with them.
https://freakonomics.com/2008/02/real-estate-agents-revisite...
It's in their interest, yes - but it's not worth more than closing a deal quickly.
They generally make more money by seating 3 hires at new companies for 100k than they do seating 1 hire for 300k.
Because of the downside risk of possibly losing a deal, and further - because they're paid over time as an employee remains with a company, it's much more beneficial to place many people quickly than it is to place a few people for more money.
To my eyes, thirty minutes is a pretty expensive way to find out if a position is in line with my comp and the company one I want to work for. It could just as easily be handled in thirty seconds.
Last month I had a quick 20-minute call with a recruiter who couldn't tell me anything about the company or the position that I hadn't found in thirty seconds of searching. This is not an unusual experience, unfortunately. The only explanation for that call I can find is that the recruiter sincerely expected to impress me with a phone sales approach.
Well, that's not a problem - the whole point of this reply template is to filter out the useless cold-calling spam without wasting time in interviews, so that 80-90% of recruiters going silent is exactly what you want. The only reason why you respond at all is to give a chance to the 10-20% of serious offers.
I'm on a subreddit that talks about my profession and basically all interview processes are now broken in my industry. A lot of just nonsense, waste of time stuff. You hire the professional prep companies so you know the right buzzwords to say and how to show you follow the "framework", but almost nothing from the interview actually really determines how well you'll do day to day.
Instead of going to an interview, they should just call my dev team and scrum master and ask how things run with me and use their feedback as the evaluation.
Protip: If you want senior people to respond, you should probably include that information up front.
I've done several interviews at places only to get to the stage we're talking money and suddenly it becomes clear they were expecting to pay about a third to half of what I currently make for someone in a senior position. Each time I think it could genuinely save a lot of time and effort (and thus money) by just being up front about that stuff.
But more practically: if I decline after the first, I don’t get the other 4 emails they have queued up for me
If you have an existing relationship with them, then it could be considered rude, but it would depend on your relationship.
For me: Linkedin inmail->email->cold text within 3 minutes.
When I told the guy that was pretty unprofessional. His response "it's just text mate".
Escalated to jeff at amazon. That got his attention pretty quickly.
I still get recruiters trying to recruit me to amazon.
My LinkedIn profile clearly shows I work at AWS…
"Hi, thanks for the message. I would appreciate as much detail as you can via message. Interested in location, compensation, and what specific problems they need help solving. Thanks!"
I don't take a call unless the work description is specific enough. I don't want to work on your "backend". If asked, I tell them my comp expectation is min +50k over what I currently make. And I sure as hell am not moving to the bay area.
A number of recruiters are also just bad at their job. I worked as a .Net developer 12 years ago, but most recruiters apparently aren’t smart enough to figure out that not only is my knowledge horrible out of date, it might also not interest me anymore.
Works most of the time for me.