[Aloha]

What I'd really love a company to do is offer a service where I can pay them to look for a job for me - I work 50+ hour weeks now, I dont have the time to go job hunting, I'd be nice if I could find a recruitment firm, who would work for me.

[tibbetts]

A good independent recruiter will do this. Many senior engineers I know maintain a relationship with a couple of recruiters who know what kind of startups they like and only bring them compelling offers. The recruiter can expect a multi-decade relationship with the engineer and thus has reasonable incentive to treat them well. They will even sometimes place these engineers commission-free when they know it is the right thing.

You can also get into this relationship with certain VCs.

[fecak]

Former indy recruiter here, and this is good advice. The line between "agent" and "recruiter" is blurry in cases of skilled and highly-ethical recruiters, and I'd toyed with changing my model to an agent approach. The issue is that job seekers don't want to pay someone anywhere near what a hiring company pays as a recruiting fee.

[Aloha]

I would quite happily pay someone 1-5% of the wage of the position, if I could find someone to do the work for me.

I dont know how to find the people to do that - its not in my wheelhouse.

[eropple]

Recruiters, on the other hand, are paid up to 20% or so of the position's salary to get you to take it.

You're not paying enough.

[Aloha]

Searching for the needle is a hell of a lot harder than searching for the haystack.

I think 1-5% is fair to find a job for me - 20% seems reasonable to find a person to take a job.

[eropple]

What you think is fair is not particularly relevant: you're not going to get anybody who's actually good to give you the time of day.

20% and you can shoot as many bullets at the target as you want is a better deal than 1-5% and you can shoot one bullet at a bunch of targets.

[icebraining]

Sorry, when you two are speaking about percentages, is that of the annual salary?

[joncrocks]

That's what I understand. A one-off fee of the percentage of the annual salary.

[fecak]

Not a lot of people do that. As mentioned, it's a service idea I kicked around a bit and wrote an article about that still gets me inquiries years later. 1-5% might make it worthwhile depending on how high ticket an item you are.

The work required by an agent to place a 200K engineer isn't too much different than that of a 50K engineer, other than the 200K engineer likely being more marketable.

And the difference between 1% and 5% is substantial. I don't think I'd offer agent services for 1K, but for 5K I would.

[Aloha]

I'm somewhere between those two extremes in pay - but I'd negotiate something that was fair for everyone.

I'm just trying to relo to another market from where I am.

[Aloha]

Finding one of those is the hard part - I work mostly in Telecom - so I'm not looking at companies for the most part that are VC funded (or even in the valley)

[tibbetts]

Ask current and former coworkers or ask former bosses or former HR what recruiters they like working with.