[dsk139]

I'm a software engineer & a recruiter. I also work on a SaaS software for recruiters. There are a ton of bad recruiters. But a lot of bad acting happens because of 1) incentive misalignment 2) information asymmetry.

Looking at the list of reasons why a recruiter might be "bad" some of the blame is on recruiting company structure, but another major source of blame is on employers.

They sign contracts with recruiting firms, give little to no oversight, and provide a limited set of information about the role/responsibilities/comp/etc. At the same time, a lot of employers are really bad when it comes to retention. This combination leads to recruiters/recruiting companies that get away with bad behavior and still make a lot of money since it's purely a numbers game and they find that subset of engineers willing to tolerate their behavior. And companies pay them large fees for each transaction.

Protip: If you want to get rid of a lot of recruiter contacts, deactivate your LinkedIn. And make sure your public commits on Github don't include your real e-mail.

[chpmrc]

Thank you for the insight. Websites like Glassdoor already do a good job of giving you an overview of potential employers but the same doesn't exist for recruiters.

Normally you might be in contact with 10-20 recruiters for a few months and end up working only for one company for the next few years so the impact recruiters have is a superset of the employer's.

Maybe recruiters could stop selling the company to death and openly admit what is wrong with the current state of things (e.g. poor Joel score). People appreciate honesty and I would definitely work for a company that admits their problems but is willing to fix them.

Also getting rid of recruiters altogether is not a viable option.