[paul7986]

I don’t get the dislike for recruiters?

I use them to boost my salary when asked how much I’m making. I say 1/4 more then reality. From there they boost their offer.

Why not use recruiters to give yourself a big fat raise? They are after all coming after you.

Only downside of recruiters for me has been they are distracting and blow up your ego thinking you can find any job. Yet their offerings are only prospective.

[JoshDoody]

I don't dislike recruiters at all. They're making a living helping place people in jobs - that's a useful thing to do. But it's important to distinguish "placing people in jobs" from "looking at for the best interests of those people by getting them the best compensation package possible".

It's important to take agency of the salary conversation because it can be so valuable for the candidate to handle that and maximize salary. Unfortunately, maximizing salary often conflicts with the recruiters' goal of placing as many people as possible as fast as possible.

Thanks for the question and for giving me a chance to clarify!

[dozzie]

> I don't dislike recruiters at all.

In principle, I agree. Execution is vastly different, though. Recruiters I've met up to now are mostly bunch of people not understanding the thing they recruit for in the slightest, so they just move documents from pile A to pile B, rejecting them at random in the process.

I met a few recruiters that understood the industry they operated on. They just were outliers, not the norm.

> They're making a living helping place people in jobs - that's a useful thing to do.

Wrong. Helping people land in a job is an unimportant side effect. They mainly help companies fill the roles with bodies. It's irrelevant if the candidate likes the role, is a good fit, and would grow professionally. The only part that is important is that the company finds the candidate competent enough, not the other way around.

[scarface74]

Unless you're a special snowflake and you know your market, how much of a salary negotiating is there? I ask for X which I believe is in the middle of the range, I work with 7-8 recruiting companies and they send me jobs offering X. I don't believe I've ever been that much off the mark from my market value.

Especially since I was always looking for a job with the next job in my mind it was always some combination of pay and new skills I could learn.

If my market value got to out of whack with my salary I start interviewing again.

[no_one_ever]

One distasteful interaction I've had with recruiters went as follows: I stated that only a significant (+20%) raise to my salary would incentivize me to leave my current company, and the recruiter said I would never amount to anything in this field if all I cared about was money. I think she was just angry she couldn't get cheap hires for her clients.