Tech Recruiters

You don't understand how recruiters work. Imagine a candidate, you. Let's say you want a $100/hr job. Let's say there are no such jobs that recruiter knows of at the moment, and they know (statistically) that such a job shows up once a month, on average. However, they have a bunch of contacts that offer $80/hr jobs. Do you think they will wait for a month looking for your $100/hr requirement? Hell no. They will try to convince you to take a lower paying job, and then switch to the next candidate

The recruiter is still not really working for you, and the incentives are not aligned enough in your favor.What we need is more of an "agent" like actors have: Maybe I don't have a full picture of what a Hollywood agent does, but I imagine they're constantly working in the background, looking for gigs for their busy actor, doing all the toil and paperwork and research on their behalf. Their end product is: "Studio X wants you to work on film A this year, and then Stud

You almost need a recruiter to recruit recruiters...

You're paying for the recruiter's database of programmers. I get calls from recruiters who first contacted me 5 years ago, from time to time. That database is invaluable in most cities, where programmers are more sparse than in the west coast. If you have to rely only on people who are applying or putting their resume on Monster, CareerBuilder, etc. it can take a long time to find someone competent (I've seen it first hand). But recruiters have no problem calling up people they've placed as rec

I think you've just had a bad experience with recruiters. To me that's exactly what they do, helping you find the best position and taking a cut for it

I think it would be interesting / beneficial to have recruiters that work for / get paid by the candidate, much like a real estate buyer's agent.It gets awkward and weird applying for multiple jobs through different recruiters that all work for the employers, and they all want you to be exclusive with them and sell their employers/jobs hard and trash talk any other options you have, and tough keeping track of all the different jobs / applications.It seems like it w

The key with recruiters is to find one that is like you. Read their messages and if they say something that "hits on something" for you, then go with that one. Trust your gut!The benefit of a recruiter is that you won't have to do the whole "meet for coffee" thing, where the company does an initial check to make sure you don't have any crazy red flags. With a recruiter, you "meet for coffee" once, he vets you (or tells you you have a big red flag), and

As I understand it, the problem is this:Joe Random Recruiter can decide one day that he is a recruiter for Google/Twitter/FB/anyone else. He doesn't need or obtain their permission - he just starts firing out emails to everyone he can find on i.e., LinkedIn.The email says something like: "My client, {Google, Facebook, etc}, is looking for someone with {one of your skills}. Are you interested?"If you reply yes, he then sends an email to {Google, Facebook, et

Good recruiters (there are some!) won't do that. And will only get paid when you're hired.

I had expected this to be related to using recruiters to find jobs. I've found that to be primarily a complete waste of time as well, but I suspect the reasons are the same. To most recruiters, it's just a numbers game, as the article points out; they simply "throw engineers at companies in the hopes that one or two will stick and they’ll get their commission". In my experience, it's quite rare to find a recruiter that will spend even a little bit of time actually matching candidates to the posi