Ask HN: How can engineers profit from tech recruitment | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can engineers profit from tech recruitment

2 pointsWM6v8 comments

How can an engineer capture some of the value from the tech recruitment market? It seems to me engineers are used as goods that are traded between people who don’t understand tech or the market. It's exploitative and opportunistic — how can a random person just show up in LinkedIn and start trading engineers and extract value from their major life choices?

Engineers understand the technology and market and would have a huge information advantage compared to someone with no experience in the field. Even just consulting on some domain/tech knowledge for recruiters would benefit the recruiters.

How can I, as an engineer, get some of that pie?

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An experienced software developer in the U.S. might make $150k/year and provide $500k/year value or more to their employer. The one-time $25k fee a recruiter made from placing that developer is so minor compared to all that that it's arguably not worth worrying about.

However there are developers who act as their own recruiters. They build big networks, get their name out there at conferences and meetups, and write books or create well-advertised projects. These are the people who talk about how as employees they get so much inbound interest that they haven't had to apply for a job for years, or how as contractors they've increased their rate to eye-wateringly high levels just to keep the amount of work manageable. So there's definitely value in doing that sort of thing, it's just that a lot of tech people aren't good at it, don't want to do it, or don't know how to do it.

You 100% can take some of that pie.

Get involved with recruiting if your company has internal recruiters. Start advertising on your LinkedIn page open roles and offer to refer people from your network for those roles. But here's the kicker -- don't just whore out your referrals -- vet these folks. I setup, much like a recruiter would, a video call with the person if they're not a friend but a connection and we talk. I get to know them. Figure out their desires and what they want out of a role. I try to get a sense as an engineer of what their skills are and coach them in the roles that they'd have the best chance for getting hired for.

Then I reach out to the hiring manager and the recruiter and introduce them. This is after the refer-ee applies to a role and I endorse them internally. And anyways all of this doesn't turn into a referral bonus but when the whole thing works out and they get hired a bonus is paid out and then just rinse and repeat.

> Engineers understand the technology and market

That's where you are wrong. A lot of engineers don't understand the market.

Anyway, I am not sure what you want to achieve. Engineers are not traded, but can make choices on where to work. Nobody forces you to work for company B if you are happy with company A.

I agree, most don't. And I believe even larger part of recruiters don't understand either. You can make a choice but C is extracting a share from the transaction. And if not in your particular case, they are doing so in the large share of recruiting.

The recruiter needs to understand a different market than an engineer.

Recruiters also don't come into play when you can easily fill the position. The harder it becomes the more relevant a good recruiter becomes.

Are there plenty of bad ones? Definitely. But that's true for almost every profession.

This is what I'm getting at: It's an easy market for the domain expert to be great at. How hard can it be? With the added criticism that I see little value in less competent people doing it.

I just don't think deep domain expertise makes you a better recruiter. You need to have deep domain expertise in recruiting with all its facets. Then, you need a working knowledge of the domain you are recruiting for.

Having a little experience coding is definitely a good thing if you are recruting software engineers. However, you don't need to be able to build a distributed system using AWS.

A good recruiter only recruits for a specific horizontal or vertical niche and knows enough about that domain to talk.

One way to extract value from that chain for an engineer would be, to offer tech consulting/teaching to recruiters.

It depends on what you mean by getting some of that pie. Do you want to refer engineers and get a cut of the referral fee or do you want to start a better tech recruitment company?

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