Hacker News Reader

Comment by jbooth | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing about recruiters, is going through a recruiter I've generally wound up with higher pay than doing things the other way around. They'll be their typical aggressive recruiter selves, sell me, bid me up and insist that I can't possibly work for less than X without making me seem like the prima donna.. I still get to be the mild mannered guy who's primarily motivated by the quality of work. They've also gotten me into places faster.. last couple of times I was looking for work, the companies with a recruiter had me into final interview stage before other companies (some of whom I was actually interested enough in to seek out and contact) even got back to me from my first "here's my resume" email.

So.. they actually do work. You'd think that if the company wasn't forking over 25% of my salary to a recruiter, they'd be more enthusiastic to speak to me and would be willing to pay me more, but it hasn't worked out that way in practice. YMMV.

View on HN

I agree that recruiters do actually find good placements. Like I said, I don't want to cut recruiting out of the picture, but instead, make it more palatable. I think you are arguing the ends justify the means, and I think that's fine, but I really believe there must be a better way to achieve the same ends with less annoying means.

Definitely. I see your point, and I'm not even arguing so much as marvelling, you'd think saving 25% of my annual salary would be motivation for companies to be a little more flexible in the negotiation.. but no, turns out to be a total wash and having the 'agent' helps me.

That sounds more like having an agent (like pro athletes) then being recruited. That model might work.

Recruiters and agents are very much alike, except there's no exclusivity -- and since employees don't get contracts, their payment schedule is different. (Typically a percentage of the employee's annual salary for FTEs, or X dollars an hour for contract work.)

I disagree. Outside of similar incentive alignments (agents and recruiters get paid more if you get paid more), the two are worlds apart. An agent is often much more than just someone who shops around a resume looking for the best deal. Agents are often responsible for everything from transportation to financial management to legal advice. These are two VERY different jobs imo, especially when considering, as stated above, that recruiters almost never act as your advocate after the initial interview process has begun and may even give misleading information to try to close a deal.

Except most candidates don't have the (perceived) star power they need for this model to work.

E.g., if the Yankees thought all first basemen were pretty much the same, there's no way Scott Boras could have convinced them to spend so much on Mark Teixeira last winter.

No recruiter is going to do the work of an agent (which requires a totally different focus & commitment to the candidate) for Joe Average programmer.

You don't need "star power" to have an agent, just marketable skills. Almost all pro athletes (with a few notable exceptions like Daunte Culpepper) have agents, from Texeira's backup all the way down to the guys in double and single-A. (Okay, not sure about how far down it goes.)

And your point about recruiters not doing the work of agents is correct. Recruiters recruit, ergo they work for the hiring company.

Agents represent the talent. In this case, I'm guessing an agent would pound the pavement looking for programming jobs while the programmer sits at home waiting for a phone call.

At this point of the analogy, it's starting to sound a little ridiculous, but who know.

It wouldn't be ridiculous if the programmer is working full time with constant work coming in while the agent is out pounding the pavement. There's no reason the two tasks of "finding work" and "doing work" need to be done serially.

And what you've just described is what consulting firms do. The sales people are out pounding the pavement hitting up prospective customers to bring in work for the programmers (or whatever positions the sales people have claimed they have bodies for). This obviously isn't an ideal situation, for the customer or the programmer, but it seems to be reasonably successful, at least with large consulting firms. It could work better with a customer centric salesman and a small team of developers -- I'm sure there's small 4 or 5 people firms that work like this, with a "sales agent" in house.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com