[fecak]

Former recruiter here. You are spot-on about referrals, and having an insider advocating for you or just their willingness to make the recommendation starts things off at a great spot.

Here's where I disagree. You haven't doubled your salary BECAUSE of your policy of not working with recruiters, but rather DESPITE this policy.

Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise, especially at the higher levels. Exec roles are often handled by retained recruiting firms and aren't as well publicized as entry level and junior roles. So just saying "I will never work with a third party recruiter" can certainly be your policy, and you may save yourself a fair amount of time by sticking with it, but that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)

The reasons that there are so many incompetent recruiters are many, but a few are:

- low cost: companies hire entry level recruiters and pay them next to nothing in guaranteed compensation (mostly commission-based). The good ones will make the company a lot of money, and the bad ones can't afford to stay in the industry because they aren't making enough in commission - so they 'go away'.

- low skill: the skills required to be a good recruiter aren't typically taught in school, so they aren't coming out of college with a strong foundation. They need to learn and be successful quickly (because it's commission-based)

[dvtrn]

Deciding to disregard any recruiter opportunity is just shutting out quite a few things that you probably won't hear about otherwise

and

that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)

Are readers supposed to read this as a suggestion that missing out is synonymous with losing out? I kind of take exception to these phrases because it strips a lot of agency out of otherwise exceptional people who are more than capable of navigating their careers to where they want them to be, maybe not necessarily where you as a recruiter think they should be.

Seems to me the market is very strong for employees and those with in demand skills and experience to back them up are probably missing out on job x but probably aren’t losing out by any equal measure-all other considerations being equal. One of the most common refrains I've been hearing right here on HackerNews in response to the 'Great Resignation' isn't that people are leaving the workforce, they're just finally leaving jobs they've been wanting to anyway and taking their labor elsewhere.

So

That said, what does it really matter if someone decides they want more autonomy in who they decide to interview with? Shouldn’t we be encouraging more of this?

Especially given some of the fees that come with hiring through a recruiter?

[fecak]

I don't think missing out and losing out are synonymous. I'm simply stating that if you decide to ignore any subset of potential opportunities solely due to the source, you are limiting your exposure to possibilities.

For example, if you don't have a LinkedIn profile, you will probably get far less incoming inquiries from hiring entities (external/internal recruiters, hiring managers, etc.). That's a decision many people make.

Everyone has autonomy in who they interview with - I'm not sure where that comment is coming from.

This isn't about autonomy or interviews. It's about the ability to say "yes" or "no" to additional information about opportunities. Nothing more.

EDIT: To address the Great Resignation thing, agreed there as well. I'm a resume writer/career advisor now and my business has been brisk. Lots of clients are changing industries to find more impactful work, better working conditions, etc. Obviously if someone IS leaving the workforce they aren't calling me to write their resume, but I'm seeing a lot of activity from people looking to find work they "feel better" about in one way or another.

[vintermann]

As far as I can see, the only thing outsourced recruiters provide is blame-shifting. They're not better at judging candidates. They're not better at finding candidates. They're almost certainly worse at understanding what the company needs than the company, and worse at understanding what the candidate has to offer than the candidate.

But, if the company hires a few people they're unhappy with through a recruiter (which is bound to happen from random chance no matter how they hire), they have someone to blame. They can switch to another recruiter, and assure their further-ups that the problem has been addressed.

There are many corporate roles that are mostly about providing blame-shifting opportunities, but outsourced recruiting is an unusually pure one. Along with "networking"-logrolling, it's one of the things which I really can't stand about working in software development, and on darker days they makes me wonder if I shouldn't go be a hermit in a cabin in the woods or something instead.

[sebzim4500]

Does this blame shifting really happen though? I've never seen recruiters get blamed for a bad hire. I've seen them get blamed for sending people that fail at the first interview though.

[fecak]

A bad hire isn't on a recruiter unless they are basically lying to the employer about the hire's credentials or background, and even then it's the employer's job to vet what is being said.

[weq]

Companies are stupid. Recruiters talk them into bad hires all the time, then there candidate gets a job, experience, and they get to replace them the following year, placing another person with the original company and moving the other candidate to the next.

[wheresmycraisin]

That's assuming the employer has infinite time and resources to interview and vet candidates. They don't, they are overwhelmed, and it's supposedly the recruiters job to make it easier, yet most seem completely clueless and useless.

[fecak]

I said bad "hire", not bad "interview" - this was by design. If a company makes a bad hire, it's not (generally) because the candidate was presented, but rather a flaw in their interview and vetting process. The "how" of the candidate appearing is mostly irrelevant at that point.

[makeitdouble]

I’ve only seen the blame shifting work at another layer: HR dept telling us that they made their best by engaging a recruiting firm, they can do us a favor by finding other recruiters, but it’s not on them if all the candidates we get sent are mismatched.

[CRConrad]

> "networking"-logrolling

What is that?

[NikolaNovak]

I read it as a fairly mathematical statement of fact. There is a tree of opportunities, and one can choose to prune some of them at the root. By definition, any direct/anticipated; and any unanticipated, indirect opportunities; are gone. Which is a 100% valid personal choice, I interpreted the minor quibble being whether this is a net positive creditor to their overall success. On one hand, pruning opportunities is in principle a negative; on the other hand, time saved not dealing with undesired channels is a positive.

[fecak]

The reluctance to work with recruiters is mostly the "time suck" element. If you were to chase every opportunity sent by recruiters you'd waste a ton of time, but you'd also maximize your potential for getting offers that meet your criteria (whatever those criteria are).

It was meant as a statement of fact. To oversimplify, if you limit the information you are willing to receive, you won't have all the information you could have.

My main issue with the original post was that OP was crediting a policy of reduced information with doubling their salary. That just isn't the case.

[res0nat0r]

Sounds like just a general statement of opportunity cost. If you're disregarding all recruiters, and someone comes along with a possible job that fits with a $200k raise that you would normally disregard out of hand, and most of your average raises you find on your own are $50-75k when you switch jobs, spending time talking to the recruiter would likely be worth it.

[moron4hire]

That doesn't sound like a thing that ever happens.

If I took every recruiter call I receive, I'd be spending half my week talking to recruiters. All for a tiny, small, infinitesimal chance that they might find me a job that A) is in a field I want, B) at a company I want, and C) at a decent salary.

I've been unemployed with next to no professional network before. And I took those recruiter calls. And they were a waste of time. I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.

In the end, the only way I've ever gotten good jobs is through the professional network. It was faster to build a professional network from 0 by working on open source projects and going out to meetups than to go through a 3rd party recruiter.

[fendy3002]

> I'd end up in companies doing slimy stuff, I'd get low-balled on salary, I'd get bait-and-switched on my role.

It's somehow correlate, since one of the most potential client for recruiters are companies that hard to find employees. Though there are also companies that lack channel / networks to specific fields, it cannot be dismissed that the previous point still stand.

[ipaddr]

I agree with everything you say until you are out of work. At that point I start taking calls.

[travisjungroth]

Some of the replies to this comment make me crazy (should I disclose here I know this commenter?).

There’s some useful information in there, that the distribution of roles behind recruiters change as the jobs become higher level. I didn’t know that. And he hedged his statements all over. And then people still reply like he’s saying if you don’t pick up a cold FaceTime call from a recruiter while you’re in the middle of coding you’re going straight to hell.

I see this pattern so often. I only hope there’s this silent readership thinking “oh, interesting. Thanks.”

[HeyLaughingBoy]

As logical, meritocratic and evidence-based as they claim to be, software developers get dug in to their emotion-based positions and wear blinders just like everyone else does.

Once someone thinks "I hate recruiters; they are useless" it becomes very difficult to change that mindset.

FWIW, I've been in industry for 30 years and all but my first job out of college came through recruiters. I tell the bad ones to quit bugging me and I work cooperatively with the good ones to find positions that I might actually like.

[teakettle42]

I’ve also been in the industry for 30 years, and not one of my jobs has come via a recruiter.

I have always either had — or gone out of my way to establish — the contacts necessary to line up a job at the next company I wanted to work for.

I hardly need a recruiter to find interesting companies where I can do interesting work, and the kinds of companies I want to work for avoid (or outright prohibit) using external recruiters.

[ibi5]

"but that policy is doing nothing to advance your position (career, earnings, etc.)"

Why does everybody assume that the goal is to advance to an exec role?

I'm sure that you were a competent recruiter, but the reality is that I don't have the time or the energy to waste on you to figure out if you are or not.

[fecak]

The OP mentioned doubling salary multiple times.

I don't assume everyone is looking to advance to an exec role - in my experience, most actually are not looking for that at all. I tend to assume people aren't looking for exec roles.

"Advance your position" could refer to improved work/life balance, more time off, remote, whatever you value. I was referring to overall position (life quality), not on an org chart. I can see how that wasn't made explicitly clear.

[piva00]

What's your suggestion on fostering relationships with recruiters?

I do ignore the vast majority of contacts due to the sheer overload of them, I don't have the energy or time to parse through each message and see if it's worth pursuing the recruiter in the future or not.

My CV is no unicorn, I have a lot of experience in different roles and company sizes but I'm not a deep specialist or a very sought after technologist, just a decent engineer. Even then I get dozens of contacts per month, it's impossible for me to actively engage with that...

If I decided to keep some recruiters in the loop when I look for new jobs, how should I do it? I can't just answer all these contacts and filter out, are there good places to match decent professional recruiters and job-seekers? I'd love to have an ongoing relationship with a good recruiter who could match me to openings offering things like a 4-day work week, etc., but usually I'd have to go searching for these openings and then contacting the recruiters for them, how can I invert this relationship?

I feel like tech recruiting became a new gold rush, noticed it got progressively worse the past 15 years with recruiters just blasting me with spam. The increasingly higher bonuses for hiring attracted a crowd that I'm not very fond of.

[fecak]

The article's methods are actually quite good. You should ignore most of the recruiter contacts - if the recruiter approaches you for a job that is clearly not a fit for your background, I'd dismiss that person as either not respectful of your time or incompetent, and both are good reasons to ignore that person down the road.

If you're getting a fair amount of incoming traffic, you're already optimized for discovery, so that is working. Telling recruiters "I'm only looking for jobs that fit these parameters" and then paying attention to the ones that are respectful of that will work to start a relationship. I had some relationships for the entire 20 years I was in the business, and some of those people I didn't make a dime off for maybe 15 of those years.

[nameisname]

One thing that's contradictory to what you've said that's caused me to ignore recruiters is that they misrepresent the opportunity even when the criteria doesn't match up. I've dealt with a few that I've told "this doesn't fit my criteria" and they're very insistent that the company is looking for people, not skills, and I should interview anyway. Ultimately this is a lie and I'll end up wasting everyone's time. I've done probably 30 interviews via recruiter and never landed a single position. All my positions have been the result of me just applying directly or through referrals.

[fendy3002]

Agree, but recruiters who can actually respect and match you with good criteria are valuable. I don't know why companies isn't do better job marketing / posting / community communication, but there are many jobs that feels like exclusively reserved to recruiters.

[fecak]

I don't think that is contradictory at all to what I wrote. I agree, many recruiters will try to send you out to every client and every job they have just to maximize their chances of a fee. Those recruiters should be avoided.

If you've gone on 30 interviews and never landed one job, that might be something you need to also consider and look inward. Going 0-for-30 is pretty unusual, unless you were accepting interviews for jobs you were clearly unqualified for.

[scarface74]

I stayed at one job too long until 2008. I was looking to restart my career and I spammed every ATS I could find. I didn’t have a network and I had no choice. I found a job that paid around $80K as a mid level .Net dev - still more then I was making. But about $10K below the local market.

Over the next three years, I did build out my network of local external recruiters who had relationships with the hiring managers.

I hopped around between various corp dev job - one generic corp dev CRUD job looks about like any other - by leveraging recruiters. By the beginning of 2020, I was making $150K and hearing opportunities of $165K locally. Then Covid hit and external recruiters had absolutely nothing to offer me paying more than I what I was making.

I hopped on the FAANG bandwagon because of an internal recruiter in mid 2020. Almost two years later, I still haven’t had an external recruiter ping me about anything mildly interesting.

[fecak]

I'd bet your LinkedIn isn't optimized at all for discovery. Populate a skills section with languages and tools you use, and you'll often see an immediate uptick.

[scarface74]

The companies paying in the BigTech compensation range don’t care about what languages or tools you are using.

The same recruiters see I work for BigTech and they are still sending me “exciting opportunities for .Net leads paying up to $150K”.

[fecak]

They may not care about what languages and tools you are using when they hire you, but that's how they find you. They aren't on LinkedIn search for "Software Engineer" in most cases - at least I wasn't.

[scarface74]

You would be surprised at how wide even internal recruiters at BigTech companies throw their net. My very light LinkedIn profile had a bunch of no name companies where I was doing CRUD C# work yet and still I had internal recruiters from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook reach out to me. No I wouldn’t have passed the initial tech screen without practice. That would be obvious to anyone who knew their own interview process.

Since 2020, I’ve been working as a “cloud consultant” at BigTech. That’s all it says on my LinkedIn profile. Yet the recruiters from Facebook and Google are emailing me about senior software engineering and even engineering manager positions. I have never been (nor desire to be) a manager. Even internal recruiters aren’t really that good.

Another anecdote, I’ve had internal recruiters reach out to me at my current company on LinkedIn even though it shows I already work here.

On the other hand, my development background from 2008-2018 is doing C# CRUD “full stack development” the salary ceiling for that isn’t high. No matter what tools I say I’ve used - C#, Node, Python - they aren’t going to say “let’s pay him $200K+ to write a CRUD app!”. My one saving grace that let me overcome that without “grinding leetCode” is that all of the major cloud providers have internal cloud consulting divisions.

[selimthegrim]

Your entry point was sales engineer, was it not?

[scarface74]

Technical consultant in AWS ProServe. I specialize in enterprise app dev/architecture + cloud.

Solution Architects are pre sales.

Consultants are post sale doing billable implementations. There is some overlap though. I do some SA type work and depending on the day of the week, I’m lumped in with the SA organization.

Out of curiosity, why did you (correctly) suspect I didn’t “grind leetCode”?

[selimthegrim]

You have mentioned it in the past here.

[actually_a_dog]

That's actually the problem with third party recruiters: the bad ones so greatly outnumber the good ones that it's extremely hard to filter out the bad from the good. I could easily spend half an afternoon or more every week on random calls with third party recruiters and never get anywhere.

What I've started doing is only dealing with the ones who both show a little evidence of having seen my profile on LinkedIn (since this is generally the ultimate source of these contacts), and mention a specific opportunity (not just "full time Python role with my direct client").

That brings me to the second problem, which is that most of these third party recruiters are working for companies that are still series C and earlier. I've done the startup game twice now, and figured out that working for a company that's going to pay me partially in lottery tickets that won't pay out for 7-10 years isn't that great of an opportunity. There are the odd exceptions out there, but they are few and far between.

[ozim]

I think only true part in that description is "Exec roles are often handled and retained by recruiting firms".

But that is level where normal developers are not finding themselves. I am senior developer but I don't imagine being approached for exec level role.

There are different worlds of recruiting - world where I am is low level spamming that I get every day and most of it is just predation on unhappy people that would be open to switch job.

World where there is super specialized recruiting like exec level or really niche skills might work as described but that is super specialized and most people are nowhere near that world.

[fecak]

All of my recruiting work was retained for the last 5-10 years I was in business, and I wasn't recruiting executives. I'm not saying that is the norm (it definitely isn't), and you are correct that senior developers will not be approached for executive roles.

Higher level candidates will probably attract higher level recruiters, because the amount of time to place someone making $100K is the same amount of time to place someone at $500K, with the only difference being a $25K fee for the first person and a $100K fee for the second.

[teakettle42]

> … and a $100K fee for the second.

Or I can place myself and have room to negotiate an additional $100k in my signing bonus.

I don’t network with recruiters. I network with people in my industry that can directly drive hiring decisions.

[jrochkind1]

> The reasons that there are so many incompetent recruiters are many, but a few are… companies hire entry level recruiters and pay them next to nothing in guaranteed compensation (mostly commission-based). The good ones will make the company a lot of money, and the bad ones can't afford to stay in the industry because they aren't making enough in commission - so they 'go away'

Wouldn't that be an explanation for why there shouldn't be so many incompetent recruiters? Why don't the incompetent ones all "go away"?

[fecak]

Good question. The bad ones don't go away immediately. They go away eventually, and are quickly replaced with another round of new hires. So you have maybe 10% of the industry that stays for the long haul, and 90% is a revolving door of college grads.

There are probably other industries that have similar models where most of the workforce is newbies at all times, but I don't have an example that won't be dissected.

[selfhifive]

That's a great description of software consultancy firms. Most people are fresh college grads who leave after their first contract is up or earlier.

[fecak]

The bigger ones, yes. Not boutique/niche firms, but large ones tend to churn.

[nsv]

Well, retail and food service is a classic example of a high-turnover industry.

[ASinclair]

How am I supposed to get any sense of a recruiter's skill when they reach out? Do I need to be looking at their LinkedIn profiles to see their tenure? I've dealt with maybe one or two competent recruiters out of dozens.

[fecak]

Tenure is a good one, but can be misleading. There are a few ways to make money in recruiting. Being really good at it and ethical is one way, but there are also people who are unethical and it hasn't caught up with them.

I would always suggest looking at their tenure. A new recruiter doesn't have the depth of client relationships to be all that helpful, but most new recruiters are 'sourcers' and not handling the client side (they are responsible for researching and bringing in candidates).

[dimmke]

Most people never get to the point where they're candidates for executive positions.

And software salaries get shared publicly on things like levels.fyi these days, so you need third party recruiters even less.

With that said, I don't have a hard line policy of never responding to them, but I pretty much never get contacted by a third party recruiter with something that looks even remotely good or interesting.

I think if the company is using a third party recruiter, the gig probably isn't very good. Obviously there are exceptions, but no great role is getting sourced through Cyber Coders.