Comment by roflc0ptic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roflc0ptic | Hacker News Reader

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I have recently been replying to recruiters because I want information about the market I'm in. Some prescriptive, rather than proscriptive points:

1. respect my time. Three people from TekSystems called me in one day. There was no "Is this a good time to talk? I know I am calling you during business hours and your resume says you're employed", or any explanation about the course of conversation they were trying to have - just a whole lot of questions, which seemed to be scripted. Then one dude told me to go online to take a technical evaluation. "Please do this tonight." How about I have plans tonight, and please fuck off?

2. Respect developers, generally. I have been told repeatedly times "I never would guess you were a technologist" based off of appearance and personal presentation. What exactly do you think of the class of people I belong to? I spent years figuring out how to present as normal, so it's kind of flattering, but not very far down at all I'm a weird dude, and I take the contempt personally.

3. Respect me, personally. The relationship is sour to start with, because I am a resource to be packaged and sold. The trick - and I'm not saying this is easy - is to actually empathize with me.

4. Be concise. This is about respecting my time, but it's also about putting in respectable effort. Tell me in five sentences or less why you think I might want to work at this place. "You're a python developer with experience in GIS. This is a position writing python for GIS systems. It's a quail hunting company and remuneration is in-kind: 6-10 quail per week, depending on experience. Are you looking for work?" If you can't do that, you don't understand what you're trying to sell me, and you are an obstacle to get past rather than a facilitator.

5. Don't try to impress me unless it's with financial remuneration. "We have 20% growth and $50 million in gross income last year!" is worthless to me when asking for $55/hr ends the conversation. I don't care about your income if you're not sharing.

6. If I ask, be up front with me about how much money you stand to make off of me. It's hilarious how uncomfortable recruiters get when I ask what their take is. The only value to hiding it from me is to maintain a power imbalance, and I assume you're negotiating against me rather than for me.

1 - You had me at "TekSystems".

2 - I'm guessing you wouldn't just get that from recruiters though, do you? I'd think recruiters aren't any more apt to say something like that than other technologists. That seems like social skills issues, and I don't think recruiters are generally considered poor in that area.

3 - The relationship is often sour on both sides, to some degree, for a variety of reasons. Recruiters would have to be blind not to see the contempt from many technologists. I think part of this is the knowledge that the candidate holds the final say in a transaction that might net the recruiter tens of thousands of dollars. That gives the technologist a feeling of power - "If I turn down this offer, the recruiter 'loses' 25K". Some recruiters make more money than the technologists they represent, which might also cause some issues.

4 - Agreed. Concise makes sense for both sides of the equation. Time is money for recruiters on commission. And if you are a Py dev that knows GIS, we should talk. (sorry, couldn't help myself)

5 - Again, as I've said to others here, we can't even try to read your minds. One candidate doesn't want to hear about benefits, one doesn't want to hear about the office, and you don't want to hear about company growth or stability. The problem here isn't that they are growing, the problem here is that they aren't paying you what you want. They could say whatever they wanted and you probably wouldn't care if they offered you 100/hr.

6 - This is a genuine problem, and I have no problem sharing that with candidates. I actually make a point of sharing it on most occasions, as I want to make sure candidates weigh my advice based on my incentives. If I stand to make 50K off a transaction, you might think I could be less truthful than if I only stood to make 5K. Incentive to lie decreases as the value of your reputation increases.

You mention hourly rate, so I assume you've done contract work. One interesting aspect of recruiting is that a recruiter increases his/her personal income when negotiating higher salaries for permanent hire candidates (where FEE = $SALARY x $FEEPERCENTAGE, but in contracting the recruiter maximizes income by negotiating hourly rate down (where the recruiter earns $BILLRATE - $PAYRATE).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, interesting perspective.

With regards to your last point, it's true that the recruiter and candidate's objectives are loosely aligned, but it plays out a lot like the relationship between a real estate agent and client in practice, in which the best deals aren't always achieved due to effort overhead. Freakonomics did a pretty interesting piece on it. Youtube summary of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jO_w6f8Ck

The real estate argument is made quite a bit and has some validity, but there are other moving parts. The recruiter is least aligned with the client to some degree, in that the recruiter maximizes their own revenue by increasing the cost to their client (to the benefit of the candidate).

right, that's the aspect they address, it's the same for sellers agents. The issue is that if the agent (recruiter) has the option to increase the salary by say, 2000$, they see a small percentage of that, maybe 100$ worth? If it takes them 4 hours to negotiate that, it's not worth it for them to spend that time for a small gain, so might forego the opportunity. They might focus instead on getting the next placement, effectively increasing the $/hr they earn.

Depends on the recruiter you're talking to, but negotiation in most cases is done to get a 'buy' from the candidate. If I'm going to a client to get more salary, it is usually because the candidate won't accept the current offer (or at least says that).

Sometimes we'll negotiate just because the candidate wants to maximize the offer, but negotiation isn't usually as intricate or time-consuming as it's portrayed.

It does benefit me to close a deal quickly, but the easiest way to close quickly isn't by convincing candidates to take low offers - the best way to make a deal happen quickly is to convince the client to pay my candidate at or above market rate.

If candidate tells me $n gets their acceptance, the easiest way for me to close that deal quickly is to get $n+5 from my client - not to convince candidate to accept $n-5. And $n+5 also nets me more than $n-5.

The risk isn't the time spent in negotiations over a small difference to the recruiter's bottom line - the time is minimal. The risk is losing the deal entirely (and getting $0).

1 - Live and learn, eh?

2 - I think other technologists don't carry the same prejudices against technologists, so they don't accidentally showcase those prejudices. I guess there's a

3 - Spot on.

4 - I think the incentives are against concise initial communication. It's like online dating - from a strictly rational perspective, spamming out a halfway witty message gets better ROI than individual messages. It feels gross, tho. Being reasonably concise would involve some targeting, which would cost timemoney. So you get gross (in both senses) messages. Also, maybe expect an email from me.

5 - That's legit. Maybe my perspective is a little myopic on that point. Oops.

6 - Interesting. My current contract seems to be a fixed percentage, though they won't share the number ("A percentage in the 40s"). I assumed this meant they were lying, but I applied for FTE here and lied about what I make, and HR caught it.

Interesting to hear about it from the other side.

Appreciated your insights as well. Fixed percentage isn't uncommon, which would usually be set by the end client (place you work) to try and keep their contractors from getting gouged - though 40% seems like gouging to me, although I've seen higher.

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