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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

Recruiters and agents have been solving this problem for years. Firms hire a recruiter for jobs that they actively want to fill. Applicants hire a job agent. Those two meet. Very little incentive for spam in this relationship.

The problem, of course, is mismatched incentives for the middlemen versus the clients, particularly at the margins. Similar to real-estate brokers. They may be effective in many ways, but they are looking for pareto-efficiency, where they get you 80% of the match (or 80% of the pay) or whatever for 20% of their effort.

It's hard to imagine any incentive scheme between buyers (hiring managers) and sellers (applicants) that wouldn' be subject to the same market mechanics, even if at lesser scales when done through more automated means.

I don't think crypto really has anything to do this.

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The power dynamics between employee and employer are such that the employer ought to foot the bill for that on their own. Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job.

The employer doesn't need to hire an external recruiter either. They just need an HR team that actually does anything other than protecting against liabilities and aggressively managing labor costs down. Most of HR is a practical joke of questionable taste.

> Candidates really shouldn't have to go to an agent to find a job.

Do you know how much the last candidate got hired for? An agent probably does.

I know how much I'm willing to accept after doing my own diligence, and I'd rather not shell out tens of thousands of dollars to an agent. There are also jurisdictions where the salary must be disclosed. Hiring an agent introduces the principal-agent problem, so they cost more than just their fees.

Yes, you can absolutely add a middle man to sort through the spam for you, and that "solves" the problem in the sense that you are trading money for time. It's no different than paying for a personal assistant to collect your mail for you and pass along the valuable stuff. That said, it's incredibly inefficient and most people, for most interactions, cannot hire a third party to handle those interactions for them.

So no, I don't think adding layers of middle men really solves the problem for most people.

> "solves" ... money for time

The proposal was two middlemen. It's just an inefficient way to, as you (or somebody up the chain) said, charge for attention to reduce spam. Since the middlemen are being paid, most spammers won't hire them.

> incredibly inefficient

In practice, yes. In theory, it could be fantastic. Imagine, as a simple example, you have two early-career backend developers. They could each do the same search, or a middleman could do one search and share the highlights with each developer. The fact that you have overlapping demands and information opens up the potential for the work to be amortized, even if you're not adding any value as a middleman other than trading time for money.

I've heard that one of tricks recruiting agents use is to maximize mismatch without breaking the illusion of a perfect match, so that victim companies has to come back as often as possible, each time rewarding them with commissions. Value alignment is definitely going to be a problem.

I’ve never heard of, or met, a job agent. More info?

You ask someone to land you interviews and, if you get hired, you pay them a fee. Usually some (fat) percentage of your first couple paychecks.

I was asking for specific people.

Unfortunately there are good and bad agents out there, and the bad ones absolutely do have an incentive to spam. I remember one place I worked at maintained a blacklist of bad recruitment firms.

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