| tl;dr: Use smaller agencies or solo recruiters, ignore the big firms. Just another prospective (from a high-end recruiter): You get what you pay for. 10% on a developer making $60-100k means that you need to push a ton of paper to make out a decent living at an agency. Its like the difference between Apartment Brokers vs Real Estate Brokers: The Apartment Brokers are jokers, because they need to deal with 1000's of people to make the 30-40 fees a year that make up a decent living. A Real Estate Broker can do a tenth of the deals and make twice as much. The quality of service is a lot higher. Likewise, in high paying industry with top tier compensation the recruiters are much higher quality. I only need to make 5 placements a year to make six-figures, where as the jokers at Selby Jennings or those other massive paper houses need to make 15-20 placements to even get close to that. I can afford to treat candidates with respect, protect their information, and tailor their search. Most technical recruiters can't. My advice, if you don't make over $100k and want to use a recruiter, go with someone working at a really small firm or by themselves. They take service much more seriously than the well known spam-a-lot agencies. PS: We're hiring, and work in a very cool, niche high tech space. |