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Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

The incentive is not to make sure you get the most money. The incentive is to make sure you get placed fast.

While $200K vs $220K means a lot to you over the course of your job, they aren’t going to risk losing a placement arguing for you to get $20K more so their firm can get $44K instead of $40k and the recruiter themselves can get maybe 60% of what the firm gets.

There was a famous similar study published in Freakonomics about real estate agents.

https://freakonomics.com/2008/02/real-estate-agents-revisite...

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I don't argue as mentioned I tell the recruiters I'm making 220k (while really I'm only making $175k for example) already forcing them to either not continue the conversation if they can't match or they can & the conversation continues.

Of course this is done once you have a few years experience and aren't really looking. Though recruiters on LinkedIn & via email reach out and you can casually play the field for fun to potentially giving yourself a huge increase. Job jumping is a good way to really boost your salary.

The thing is, they won’t get the placement if they don’t push to get a $220k offer and the other recruiter does. It’s competitive. It’s a better model than real estate because you aren’t agreed to work with one recruiter.

But only one recruiter is going to be placing you at that job. Two recruiters trying to place you at the same job is radioactive to the company. The company has to decide who gets the referral money. Lawsuits start happening for the one who doesn’t get referral money.

Also most companies who do work with external recruiters only work with one company

True. I was thinking of how you have 2-3 recruiters trying to get you offers at different companies that are mostly equivalent.

Have you seen the market since 2022?

I’ve been in software development since 1996 and looked for a job in 1999, 2001 (took a counteroffer), 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2023 and a month ago. My job in BigTech in 2020 fell in my lap.

I have never seen a job market this bad. Even in 2000, as a regular old Windows developer I could easily find a standard enterprise job.

My only saving grace when I was looking both last month and last September was that I had 3.5 years of working at AWS in the Professional Services department (full time direct hire) and AWS partners love to get people from ProServe because they know we can be trusted to talk to decision makers and fly out to clients and lead and do the work.

But I usually would throw my resume up in the air pre-2020 and have multiple job offers fall in my lap.

Appreciate sharing that experience. I’d wondered about the pros and cons of AWS Professional Services especially; almost went there once…

I have recent experience. It’s definitely slower in the last 2.5 years. I see that as a different issue. If the hiring market is soft, then a recruiter can still be working hard for you if your offers aren’t as good. Some of that sorts out earlier in the process when you pitch yourself to the recruiter to be worth presenting to the employer.

What I personally did in early conversations is express my comfort with a longer search process and focus on the right mutual fit. That let them know that they may be overlapping with other applications, and also that they were competing with my job at the time. I realize I was fortunate to have a job to use as a motivator.

200 vs 220 is likely noise. The recruiter shouldn’t care about tha2, and neither should you.

But £200k vs £400k is real!

That’s the real span for e.g. hedge funds in London. Actually, it was a few years ago. Probably more now!

You shouldn’t care about $20K???

In 10 years invested at $20K a year that’s 370k at 10% returns (about average for the S&P 500).

Thinking like that is how car manufacturers get people to pay for useless add ons.

On top of that, raises are usually a percentage of current base.

Would you tell someone making $20K not to worry about $40K

you've not heard of tax?

It’s called a 401K or HSA…

One is free from federal and state tax up to $23K (well $30.5K for me this year - check my username) and one is free from Federal, State and FICA up to $4250 if you’re single or $8500 if married.

That means I can shelter $39K from taxes.

That $20K is over half the allowable amount.

20k isn’t noise to most people in a 200k salary range.

And with most raises being 3%-4% a year, if you don’t negotiate that in the beginning, it’s going to take 3 years to reach that amount after you start

> The incentive is to make sure you get placed fast.

No. If you place someone and the company has a 3 month probation period. If the person does not last past probation the recruiter does not get paid.

Unless America is different, this is how it works in Europe, Asia, AU/NZ.

The only time this changes is contract work because contract work done via a recruiter is the recruiter might charge you at $150/hr to the company and pay you $100/hr taking $50/hr for himself.

There isn’t an official “probationary period” at most jobs in the US.

But we are referring to cases where a good candidate wants $20k more. The recruiter is more interested in convincing a candidate to take the job than negotiating hard for them to get $220K.

The candidate especially in this market isn’t likely to jump ship in a year over $20K

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