| They are sales people. They earn a commission from the hiring company to get you employed. If you are involuntarily unemployed and in desperate need of a job these people feel like angels doing gods work. If you are just trying to angle for a higher salary somewhere else they are a tool working you just as you are a tool working the system. When I was out of work last year I went through a lot of these people because I desperately needed work, but I was also being extremely cautious, and I had to juggle all my needs plus the superfluous demands from my household. Some of these recruiters were amazing and I was the asshole holding things up. Some felt really sleazy and were trying to juice my resume. Now in all fairness hiring last year was, and might still be, weird. Employer online job portals were broken because there too many applicants. Hiring had effectively become professional sprinting in that you had to do stupid things like juicing your resume to survive resume AI filtering so it just became a game and that was even after going through a recruiter who already had access to a hiring manager. This made things challenging equally for both the candidates and the recruiters. My learnings: * The recruiters that had to bend the fewest ethical considerations were employees of the hiring companies. * JavaScript work is for beginners. Every step in the process felt like meat on a slab, an incompetent replaceable commodity that copy/pastes boilerplate for large framework nonsense. You were treated this way because expectations were simultaneously as low as they were frivolous and vain. Many of these jobs were only looking for expert beginners with 8+ years doing this nonsense and never writing an original line of code. It took a lot of matchmaking failure before I realized I don’t need to do that anymore, and maybe suddenly becoming poor wasn’t so bad. |