[WalterBright]

Yeah, well, any recruiter can spend hours regaling you with tales of inept candidates, too :-)

A recruiter is a lot like a real estate agent. Understanding how their business works and how they operate, leads to a good professional relationship with them that works for both of you.

[JMTQp8lwXL]

I'm not blaming the recruiter. They could say 'the limit is $X' on an intro call. But I tend to take that as an early negotiation tactic. Because if I say X+Y% during the offer-letter phase of the pipeline, and they say yes, the first limit mentioned was a fabrication.

In other words, there is no way to truly know the limit until you've reached the end of the funnel. Maybe the company's struggled with finding a candidate, and now has decided to shell out a premium upon request. You'll never have that context. But true cards will only played at the end, not the beginning, of the conversation.

[WalterBright]

> the first limit mentioned was a fabrication

As the process goes on, the company may decide you offer more value than they originally anticipated, hence are worth a higher limit.