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Comment by uuyi | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not sure what the compensation model for recruiters is, but it seems to encourage bringing in as many candidates as possible over treating them with honesty and respect.

From experience dealing with recruiters for the last 25 years they universally lie to both sides to pocket the commission at all costs.

I drove 400 miles once to do an interview for a solution architect position. Got there and the company were recruiting an Oracle DBA. The recruiter had plain up lied because I had some Oracle experience on my CV. They assured me they would ream the recruiter and bought me lunch and gave me an Amazon voucher to cover the fuel and time though which was nice.

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I drove to LA once to do an interview the next day after confirming with the in-house recruiter. When I got there they told me they didn’t think I was actually coming because they had already hired someone. Also they didn’t want to pay expenses despite offering to do so in their letter to me.

So I called up a consultant firm I knew in LA and sez, “hey I’m in town interviewing at X for Y, but I don’t like them and I wonder if you got any Y jobs" and they got me a (consultant) job as the technical lead for the job the X company had placed the other DBA at.

Later I had my attorney send a letter with my documentation to X company and settled up for time, expenses, and atty fees.

This is how you play the game, hats off to you!

did it work ?

> did it work ?

Hah! it was a 3 month DBA contract at an LA legal firm that specialized in converting publicly available data from court cases and data mining the results for various ordinary and/or predatory legal practices...I upgraded the SQL Server databases, fixed the document vector mining, fixed the license compliance issues (this was during the Business Software Alliance predatory compliance era). I didn’t want to continue because I didn’t like the culture, but I did work with the guy I supervised to help him achieve a perm position. I got paid, got my stipend, got my bonus, got my expenses with no delay after my attorney letter. The lying recruiter faded out of sight, I didn’t pay any attention to what happened to her because my pals at the consulting firm put me into a new contract immediately with a higher pay rate.

This is probably more true for headhunters than for in-house recruiters.

FAANG mostly (completely?) use in-house.

with the the roles of recruiters being so metrics driven, most recruiters seem to be optimizing for funnel metrics. FAANG or not. But especially at FAANG where the number of recruiters and candidate pool is large that they prefer metrics.

I’ve had third party recruiters contact me for Amazon roles, although I believe it was mainly sourcing and they passed you off to an internal recruiter if you got past the very basic sourcing screen. Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft were all internal-only in my experience.

The only good experience I have had with a 3rd party recruiter was when they put the name of the company in the email and I contacted that company directly.

It just doesn't work well to have a non technical person be the middle man between two technical people

I once went for an interview, setup by a recruitment agency, in a town nearby. The job looked great, and it was a step up for my career. It was for a mature company that made software for the oil drilling industry amongst other things.

The interview went well, the coding test was good. Finally, I were just chatting with the CEO, and he asked "So you're ok with spending 2 years on site in Kazakhstan?"

Needless to say we both agreed that it was a wasted interview and that the recruitment agency should have mentioned the Kazakstan bit...

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