Wasn't part of the job of the technical recruiter supposed to be negotiating the salary? Considering they make a commission off it, I would assume it would be in their best interest.
I'm going to speak for our location (Greenville, SC). The normal direct-hire % is between 18-25%. If you're doing volume with a company you'll probably be 18-20%. If it's a niche skill or new company then 25%. The days of 30% is mostly over unless it's a retained search or some extremely difficult skill.
This recruiter is on par with his advice. For a direct-hire role it is his best interest in getting you the highest salary possible because he will make more money that way. If he's a good recruiter he will do all the negotiation for you and you won't have to worry about it at all. You tell him what you need and he'll work his magic. Trust me, we are very good at getting those target salaries (if not more) for our developers.
If you are going through a good agency and the salary question comes up then you need to defer that to the recruiter and if your recruiter doesn't know what to do then find a different agency. Lots of bad ones out there.
Sometimes though you have to persuade a candidate even if the salary is not what he wants. As an example I placed a Sr. Architect at an awesome gig and the salary was 15K lower than what he was used to making. He was hemming and hawing and I told him up front that he could continue to look for work for his skillset and not find it in this area (he had been out of work for about 6 months at this time) or take the job at the lower salary with the potential to grow. Needless to say he took the job and has since been promoted (which I knew would happen cause of his skills and knowledge).
No on contract-to-hire gigs it's the best interest in the recruiter to get you to take the lowest possible hourly rate and then he will bill the client the highest he could go. Why? Because it's all based on a Net Margin formula and the more NM the recruiter makes the more commission he'll make. Our firm wasn't too aggressive on beating down candidates but companies like TekSystems are notoriously known for low-balling their contractors and high-billing clients.
Hope this helps some. Not all recruiters and agencies are bad but unfortunately many fly-by-night and sorry shops give the good ones a bad name.
I will say this that 90% of the IT jobs out there (at least in our market) are never posted on a job board. They are filled by agencies because they can get it done faster and more efficiently than a job board and an HR person who's clueless on IT skill sets.
~V
ps On a side note we had a joke in that internal recruiters were folks that couldn't hack it working for an agency. It's a different culture and fast-paced and being heavily commission driven tends to drive a good number of folks away. Why I left was that I placed myself back into IT :) And no, I did not get a commission on that (which would have been nice to boot!) :)
I made out well in that I was involved with a small company with lots of experience in the management team and they invested in training and helping me get off the ground. That and the commission motivation was pretty nice too.
Now if I got hired on by someone at Robert Half or TekSystems I doubt I would have made it. They are too corporate and too inflexible needless to say.
Having a tech background did help because I could tell when a candidate was blowing smoke or trying to be more technical then what they really were. Other skills that made me successful was determination to succeed (drive), work ethic, ability to cold call (or at least ignore it), ability to shrug off rejection and keep going, and most of all ability to listen and think critically.
I know a bunch of HN posters stay in start-up land, where things are likely different, but I'm wondering if those who aren't have any other recruiter experience? My wife did have good luck with a recruiter in the law world, though the market there is quite different from the tech market.
My recruiter was helpful and remained at all times respectful of my time and my goals. She never pushed me to interview with companies I wasn't interested with, and she gave me some really valuable advice about how to sell myself as a less experienced and junior programmer. And regarding compensation, she was able to help me negotiate for a lot more than I thought I was going to be able to ask for.
I'm obviously not that experienced, but I think there definitely are some good recruiters out there who can be really helpful in certain situations. In my case the relationship happened to be extremely beneficial, partly because of my inexperience but also because it was just good timing.
Same goes for a real estate agent selling your house, why should they spend a week trying to sell for five or ten thousand more when only get five percent of that?
It's a bit different for internal recruiting, but this fellow seems like a normal external recruiter.
Think about it this way - the recruiter gets paid a percentage of your salary when both sides reach agreement. Let's go with the 6 month figure here. So the company offers 100K and the programmer wants 110K.
The recruiter stands to get 5k more. Sure, that's nice, but not if it means way more work, along with a risk of the deal falling apart! Here's a recruiter's dream placement:
1) recruiter get a resume 2) recruiter does quick hygiene check 3) recruiter forwards contact info to client 4) developer interviews well and accepts offer 5) recruiter collect commission
A recruiter would much rather collect a quick 50K check for very little work than spend a lot of time haggling and potentially watching the whole deal fall apart.
Most brokers are mainly interested in getting both sides to agree to a deal, because then they get paid. This is a very important thing to keep in mind when dealing with brokers!