[mhzsh]

Years ago, my previous employer had a few listings on Indeed for software engineers (some were very long-running). A recruiter reached out to us with a candidate they had, who had experience in the areas we were looking for, which was enticing because people like this were not so easy to come by for a small company not based in a major city. By chance, we found out during the interview process with the candidate that the recruiter was playing both parties. This very shady recruiter cloned our job listing (removing the company information) and was able to out-rank us in the search. They presented themselves to the candidate as if they were working for us, and to us they presented themselves as trying to place this candidate, effectively collecting a recruiting fee for hijacking our listing forwarding a resume. They ended up with nothing but a warning from lawyers, but they _almost_ got an easy paycheck out of it.

[a2tech]

I don’t think this is uncommon—in fact I think it’s the way many recruiters work.

[raverbashing]

Hence why most companies don't accept placements by recruiters unless it's the one they specifically hired for the job

[apohn]

Unfortunately recruiters lie about "exclusivity" as well.

About a year ago I was on the job market and multiple recruiters reached out to me with the exact same job listing, just with the company name removed. All of them claimed to have an exclusive relationship with the company and they were working directly with the hiring manager. With 5 minutes of Googling I found the original position and the company that posted it.

Do they get penalized if they present a candidate for the job and the company says "No recruiters" and they remove the candidate from their candidate pool?

[benglish11]

penalized by who? It works enough that tech recruiters and their agencies make a lot of money. If there is no agreement between the company and the recruiter the company is free to contact that applicant themselves. The recruiter will usually hide the contact information of the applicant for this reason.

Enough hiring companies only care about getting a seemingly qualified applicant in for an interview and will ignore what ever shady things recruiters do.

[HWR_14]

He's asking if he, as a candidate, will get blackballed by the company if a recruiter submits his resume. I think you're assuring him he will not.

[gumby]

Nowadays you can often use a search with some text from the ad to figure out who the real company is. Though who would bother?

[gorbachev]

I do that every time a recruiter cold calls me about an opportunity without mentioning the company, if the opportunity sounds interesting.

[albedoa]

> Though who would bother?

It takes like four seconds.

[stevage]

Who would bother to find out who the company they would be working for is? Who wouldn't?

[Kalium]

I do that to find out who the company is. It's usually a better way to find out how much they pay than the recruiter is. Too often recruiters try to avoid telling me either item.

[mcv]

I would love to do business directly with the company, but often they don't reach out to me, while these intermediary recruiters do. I guess the value of recruiters is that they reach out to companies and to developers, and they connect the two.

Recruiters who merely repost the same listing that the company posted without adding any value, deserve to go out of business. Mind you, if every listing contained the hourly rate or pay range, they'd have a much harder time inserting themselves where they don't belong.

[m463]

recruiters have all kinds of shady tactics.

A friend asked me if he could use me as a reference, and I said sure.

A few days later I got a call asking about my friend, and I readily engaged because I took being a reference seriously. As we were winding up, he suddenly asked if I was looking for a position. I then began to realize it was the recruiter - who was recruiting off the reference list of my friend. I was gracious (but pissed off, because I think the whole thing might have not been about my friend but recruiting).

[thih9]

And many real estate agents, and sadly perhaps more occupations.

[gamblor956]

This is simply wrong, and any real estate agent caught doing this would lose their real estate license and might even face criminal charges (depending on jurisdiction).

In a nutshell: a real state agent is an agent, which has a specific legal meaning and legal requirements, and that relationship can't just be hijacked by posting someone else's listing.

[lotsofpulp]

How is that how real estate agents work? The seller signs an agreement outlining compensation with a real estate agent before any work is done.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

Realtors certainly will try to get you to sign an exclusivity contract as early as possible. But if you don’t sign, most will show you homes for free. Agents will talk about it like you don’t have a choice to get you to sign, though. Personally, I’d at least demand that such a contract include a cash rebate for a portion of any fees the realtor earns, and I’d want it to be limited to the transaction on a particular home. I wouldn’t sign anything that prohibits me from working with other agents on other purchases.

[tacon]

Not engaging a buyer's agent via a contract is a mistake, but few people understand that. If you have no buyer's agent contract, then guess who you are dealing with? The seller's agent! Yes, that very friendly person that is driving you around to see homes, who listens to your negotiating strategy, your maximum price, and your other sensitive information, is bound by agency law and their state license board to share every detail with ... the seller and their agents. (Why? Because the seller is paying all the agents.) Oh, but you say, your nice agent would not do that! Well, let's say they don't do that. Then you have what is called "undisclosed dual agency", and that gives the seller and/or you a cause of action in court. All these agency options are explained in detail in that pamphlet they shove at you on first contact, but almost no one reads or understands.

>most will show you homes for free

I'm still looking for that real estate agent that does anything "for free".

[lostcolony]

-Some- realtors will. The best ones won't; they know they're offering you more than Zillow. When I bought, our realtor was constantly hounding the seller's realtor and our own financing company to move the process forward, as well as proactively reaching out to answer our questions and in general help us feel good about the process. She also returned texts and calls promptly, and she had an arrangement with an extremely good independent home inspector, plus pretty much every kind of contractor we could need for improvements; everyone she put us in touch with was amazing. She didn't ask for exclusivity, and she absolutely didn't need it.

Meanwhile in the past when we were looking, a mediocre one tried to get us to sign an exclusivity deal that we'd agree to use him until we chose to cancel (no stipulations there at least, though legally I don't know if he could have, but still, into perpetuity unless we canceled) for -any house in the entire state-.

[pyuser583]

I was told this by a realtor once.

[jjk2178]

A real estate agent might repost an owner's ad for an apartment, and earn a broker's fee from the renter when the apartment is rented

[lotsofpulp]

I have only dealt with agents for apartment rentals in NYC, and there, the landlord hires the agent and agrees to pay them a fee, just like a house seller would agree to.

If neither a renter or the landlord have an agreement to pay an agent, why would the agent be owed any money?

[RHSeeger]

In Mass, it's the renter that pays the fee.

[nradov]

That's not how the multiple listing systems work in the US real estate market.

[ricardobayes]

Color me naive, but why is this a bad thing? If your listing reaches more people, it's ultimately better for you. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

[gnicholas]

It's the fee, which is a percentage of the employee's salary. That's much more than the listing fee on Indeed, likely by orders of magnitude.

There's also the downside that some scummy person is representing themselves as being affiliated with you, when they're not. So if they do scummy things to the candidate (which they likely would, given what they're doing to you), then you are painted in a bad light. Think of situations that HNers complain about here, and then imagine that it's your company being (wrongfully) dragged for having lousy interviewing practices.

[bertil]

The fee is the most common issue cited by employers.

I generally respond (as a candidate) to get a sense of the problem. I can assure you that bad representation is the biggest problem. It’s not uncommon for recruiters to say something really problematic (bluntly racist or sexist) or impose excessive interview steps to filter candidates, without knowledge of the industry. I often know the hiring manager well enough to give feedback and they are generally horrified.

[eek2121]

As if companies don't do that on their own.

I'm actively interviewing for new positions, and the amount of stuff that startups (most out of Silicon Valley) are doing is absolute batshit. From 2-hour tech screens to 19-hour unpaid interviews WORKING ON THEIR OWN CODE BASE, I will not be surprised when the DoL does a crackdown on the interview process. I have been in the software development industry for decades. If you can't tell if a candidate qualifies after 45-90 (tops!) minutes of interviews, you may want to look internally for problems. All they are really doing is rejecting a ton of super smart developers, many who may have disabilities.

Oh, and then there was that one company who told me I had no knowledge of a language and framework I am actively contributing to, and have built robust, scalable enterprise apps out of. "We are looking for experts of <language x> and also <framework y> and <framework z>." That was literally the message they sent me. They did NOT know about my contributions because my dumb ass tries not to show off stuff like that when looking for employment as I want to be weighed on my ability to write awesome code and not weighed on a popularity contest.

[bruce511]

>> my dumb ass tries not to show off stuff like that when looking for employment as I want to be weighed on my ability to write awesome code and not weighed on a popularity contest.

I know you likely learned from this, but it's worth repeating especially for people who don't often go looking for jobs.

Getting hired is a sales process. You are the product. It doesn't really matter what you can do - that's probably not what you are selling to the interviewer.

What you are selling is the fact that _you_ (and you alone) are the best choice for the position. That means a combination of skill set and personality.

So specifically, being "popular", or "known", or "admired" in the tech community is a feature, one which is very valuable to potential employers. Being popular means you're (probably) not a dick, and that's worth knowing.

I say this with respect, but there were likely a bunch of folk they interviewed who can write code just as awesome as yours (at least in their eyes). I don't mean that to demean you, but clearly a) it's impossible to determine code awesomeness in an interview - it takes months for awesome code to even surface - and b) there are a _lot_ of people out there writing awesome code.

In Western culture it is considered polite to be modest, but being modest in an interview, or on a CV is a bug, not a feature. You need to sell, and sell hard, every possible accomplishment - without being a dick.

Writing awesome code is not enough. Fitting in with the team (ie demonstrating social skills), having deep knowledge of some framework (enough to contribute, and have those contributions accepted), publishing or presenting at conferences (ability to communicate and articulate), are all huge box ticks in the recruiting process.

Don't. Be. Shy.

[tshaddox]

I would imagine it's for the same reason that many big musical acts go to lengths to make it difficult for concert tickets to be resold. It's important to them to manage their relationship with their customers, and they simply don't want all or most of their tickets essentially being auctioned off to the highest bidders even if that is technically the most economically efficient allocation according to some extremely short-sighted interpretation of an Econ 101 textbook. Heck, it's the same reason Apple sometimes has long wait times for a new popular iPhone model instead of holding an auction and shipping to the highest bidders first.

[ricardobayes]

I think you're right, it's what separates companies classing the same/similar behavior as unwanted, even illegal (grey market luxury watch dealers) vs encouraged (food delivery). The relationship with the client and it's perceived value. Coming to think about it, probably a Michelin-star high-end restaurant would shoo away a doordash person coming to pick up takeaway.

[JacobThreeThree]

If the recruiter is saying he's been hired by a company to find people for a given job posting, and he hasn't actually been hired by the company, that's fraud.

[kayxspre]

I have a strange case about this. Several years ago I was looking for a job. I found a listing for a position in a company and apply for it, then it went silence for a couple of weeks. I later searched for a posting that seems to be identical to the listing of the company I first applied (though it was presented in recruiter's name and at the time, I was naive enough not to check that it's identical to the previous one. Granted, the company hasn't advertised the position at the time the recruiter did)

It wasn't until the recruiter tell me to proceed with the on-site interview would I learned that in fact, the company the recruiter is seeking candidates for is the same company I applied and failed earlier. This leaves me scratch my head why the company didn't respond to job posting I applied directly, but decided to pick me up when I was referred to by recruiter. They could have turned down recruiter's referral about me and I won't be surprised one bit.

[mcv]

Those recruiters probably badger them much more aggressively than you would ever consider even remotely acceptable, and apparently that works.

[dredmorbius]

Fraud, misrepresentation, front-running, and a potential avenue for further scams (e.g., demanding payment from candidates, collecting personal information). For both candidates and companies, this may mean exclusion from consideration due to misrepresentations or concerns over exclusivity.

See:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/202...

Incidentally, the search for "recruiter (fraud|scam)" turns up a distressingly high number of hits, many from companies targeted:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=recruiter+(fraud%7Cscams)&ia=web

[PragmaticPulp]

Because you don't want an unrelated 3rd party inserting themselves between you and the candidates.

How many good candidates were scared away by the sketchy recruiter? There's no way to know.

[ricardobayes]

How is this different than doordash coming to pick up food from a restaurant and delivering to me? I think it's very similar, they charge an extra fee, restaurants might not sign up for this and it's not the restaurant employees handing me the food.

[mhzsh]

In this case, neither party has really signed-up for it. To the candidate, it might not matter that much if they don't have a negative experience with the recruiter, but to the company whose job listing was straight-up plagiarized and outranked on the same job board (with a big recruiting fee on top), it's very different. With doordash, you at least agree to the fee, right?

[ratww]

Well, for one either you or the restaurant wanted Doordash to do that job, and Doordash isn't misrepresenting themselves as if they were working for the restaurant (without the restaurant's knowledge).

Of course, with that said, there was some service a few years ago (maybe it's Doordash?) that was generating landing pages and buying domains pretending they were the restaurant. But that's also very shady.

[RHSeeger]

> Doordash isn't misrepresenting themselves as if they were working for the restaurant

From what I head, the various delivery services have been setting up websites that pretend to be the actual restaurant's site, but list their own phone number. So they're committing fraud, too.

[ratww]

I don’t underdeveloped why you people are ignoring my second paragraph and repeating what I said. I guess trying to cover all bases in a message doesn’t work anymore, I gotta cover all bases in a single small paragraph, since posting a gotcha takes precedence over reading the whole message.

[opendomain]

Delivery services DO misrepresent restaurants. If you search for a specific restaurant in your area, you will get lots of SEO spam that is not from the actual restaurant.

[ratww]

...and that's precisely what I mentioned in the second paragraph of my message.

[nextstepguy]

I always get contacted by recruiters who rarely work full-time for the company they hire for and hide the company name when they reach out.

[ako]

It is shady, but at the same time it sounds like the recruiter succeeded where your company failed. He was able to find a candidate for your position, where your employer was unable by just posting it to indeed.

He did a better job, and maybe that is worth the additional money? Do you think your employer would have found the same candidate by just relying on the job listing on Indeed?

[theamk]

The recruiter copied listing as-is, with only company name removed. If thir listing wasn't there, candidate would find the company directly.

So they provided no positive value; in fact they provided negative value by adding duplicate listing and making them harder to navigate. I don't thin

[ako]

How do you score higher on indeed with the same text with just a name removed? The original listing would still show up?