[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.

[Aloha]

You're ignoring my point that the task of finding someone a job, and finding someone for a job, are fundamentally different tasks.

I'm also expecting to pay /something/ for the task, even if nothing suitable is found, hence why the expected fee is lower.

As it is, I've yet to find a company that offers this service for any price - yes, there are plenty of headhunting shops that offer the service to employers - but no one offering the opposite - 20-30 years ago, (I'm told by my friends who work in HR) this was indeed a service you could purchase, but no one offers it anymore.

[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]

Yes, to confirm a recruiter's fee is typically anywhere from 15-25% of employee's first year annual salary. So that 150K engineer in NYC earns an independent recruiter (working for herself/himself) anywhere from 22-37K.

Now it's easy to see why some recruiters sometimes act the way they act. People are unlikely to lie just to earn a small fee, but when the numbers get big, the incentive changes.

[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.