Hacker News Reader

Great response the only thing I’d like to point out is that agenting is the most common and effective when someone needs repeat representation.

A musician or actor is constantly signing new deals and the agent needs (in theory) to balance any immediate incentive to close the deal versus long term income from retaining their best talent.

A salaried job negotiation is more similar to a real estate deal in that it tends represent a very large portion of the client’s financial world and happen much less frequently.

The divergence of incentives becomes harder to manage in that case, because each individual deal ends up being such a smaller part of the agent’s income than the client’s.

That’s a known problematic dynamic across many “verticals” that your answer only partly addresses.

I agree with your point, up to a point...but the hope is that if you use us for this job, you'll use us for the next. Tenure at companies for employees sub 35 is less than 3 years now. And in tech it's even shorter. So we're taking the viewpoint that though the number of deals we may help with per person is lower than it might be in entertainment, it's not limited to just one and done.

All that said...think of this concept a bit like a public defender. We believe that great talent has a right to great representation. If that's only great representation for one negotiation, that's fine. We still aim to provide great service for that one negotiation.

> One is us leading the process and speaking directly to your prosepctive employer,

This is exactly what I want and would pay for. However, I wonder how this works in practice. I work for a fairly well known software company and am involved in the hiring process and I can say with about 90% certainty that negotiations would cease as soon as a candidate presented representation. And my gut is telling me that is the norm in the software industry.

Can you speak to this concern? Have you run in to this or has this come up at all for past clients?

I think this is a very fair point. The way we have dealt with it thus far is to provide guidance behind the scenes if a company doesn't want to speak to us directly. The candidate would stay the face of the process and we would feed them information. That said, when we started 10x, it was unheard of for tech freelancers to have agents. We got some push back. But that changed fairly quickly and we get zero push back now. On the contrary, companies are genuinely happy to have someone like us as an intermediary (on the freelance side). We shall see if the same holds true on the full time side. But good question.

Standard negotiating technique (cars, jobs, etc) is that if you are not the expert, refuse to negotiate live/synchronously. Negotiate over email. When you negotiate over email, your agent can be silently at your side.

I find this facinating and quite exciting.

First of all, my experience is many tech people, generally underestimate their ability and earning power - sell themsevles short. Even true rockstars, is very common.

Especially when it comes to salary. People are REALLY uncomfortable asserting themselves for more money. Like, phobia level.

Plus the, you need to talk to my representative. That’s some serious signaling. I’d love to hear about the results they get.

What I'd really love a company to do is offer a service where I can pay them to look for a job for me - I work 50+ hour weeks now, I dont have the time to go job hunting, I'd be nice if I could find a recruitment firm, who would work for me.

A good independent recruiter will do this. Many senior engineers I know maintain a relationship with a couple of recruiters who know what kind of startups they like and only bring them compelling offers. The recruiter can expect a multi-decade relationship with the engineer and thus has reasonable incentive to treat them well. They will even sometimes place these engineers commission-free when they know it is the right thing.

You can also get into this relationship with certain VCs.

Finding one of those is the hard part - I work mostly in Telecom - so I'm not looking at companies for the most part that are VC funded (or even in the valley)

Ask current and former coworkers or ask former bosses or former HR what recruiters they like working with.

Former indy recruiter here, and this is good advice. The line between "agent" and "recruiter" is blurry in cases of skilled and highly-ethical recruiters, and I'd toyed with changing my model to an agent approach. The issue is that job seekers don't want to pay someone anywhere near what a hiring company pays as a recruiting fee.

I would quite happily pay someone 1-5% of the wage of the position, if I could find someone to do the work for me.

I dont know how to find the people to do that - its not in my wheelhouse.

Recruiters, on the other hand, are paid up to 20% or so of the position's salary to get you to take it.

You're not paying enough.

Sorry, when you two are speaking about percentages, is that of the annual salary?

That's what I understand. A one-off fee of the percentage of the annual salary.

Yes, to confirm a recruiter's fee is typically anywhere from 15-25% of employee's first year annual salary. So that 150K engineer in NYC earns an independent recruiter (working for herself/himself) anywhere from 22-37K.

Now it's easy to see why some recruiters sometimes act the way they act. People are unlikely to lie just to earn a small fee, but when the numbers get big, the incentive changes.

Searching for the needle is a hell of a lot harder than searching for the haystack.

I think 1-5% is fair to find a job for me - 20% seems reasonable to find a person to take a job.

What you think is fair is not particularly relevant: you're not going to get anybody who's actually good to give you the time of day.

20% and you can shoot as many bullets at the target as you want is a better deal than 1-5% and you can shoot one bullet at a bunch of targets.

You're ignoring my point that the task of finding someone a job, and finding someone for a job, are fundamentally different tasks.

I'm also expecting to pay /something/ for the task, even if nothing suitable is found, hence why the expected fee is lower.

As it is, I've yet to find a company that offers this service for any price - yes, there are plenty of headhunting shops that offer the service to employers - but no one offering the opposite - 20-30 years ago, (I'm told by my friends who work in HR) this was indeed a service you could purchase, but no one offers it anymore.

I'm not ignoring your point, I'm discarding it. The skillset involved is so nearly-completely overlapping that nobody who's any good would take your less money for not-less work. You are asking whoever you want to pay to provide an economically inferior service for less money while they are capable of providing an economically better service for more money.

If you think you're right, I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and start this firm. But it'll hurt.

Not a lot of people do that. As mentioned, it's a service idea I kicked around a bit and wrote an article about that still gets me inquiries years later. 1-5% might make it worthwhile depending on how high ticket an item you are.

The work required by an agent to place a 200K engineer isn't too much different than that of a 50K engineer, other than the 200K engineer likely being more marketable.

And the difference between 1% and 5% is substantial. I don't think I'd offer agent services for 1K, but for 5K I would.

I'm somewhere between those two extremes in pay - but I'd negotiate something that was fair for everyone.

I'm just trying to relo to another market from where I am.

You invite people to start an engagement before stating the price. Your profession is negotiating high prices.

See the moral hazard? How do I know you aren't going to negotiate all the salary surplus into your fee? :-)

Sure, you're in a pay-what-you-want Beta now (fascinating, and wonderful if it turns out to be a profitably pricing structure long term!), but consider posting a pricing model up-front, something like "X% of the negotiated lift in 1st-year pay above your first offer from a company"

> The misunderstanding first...we are not selling anyone to anything. We have no involvement in finding you the job, we are not recruiters, we are not headhunters. So we have no alignment with anyone other than YOU.

How do you get paid? ... and the obvious corollary, why should I trust that our interests are aligned? (either as a candidate or a hiring manager?)

I know it was a long comment but you could’ve at least tried reading a few more paragraphs. You would’ve come across this:

>The other thing is that we're offering to provide this service during our beta phase as a pay what you feel it's worth to you. You could choose to pay us nothing...we need to EARN whatever amount you choose to pay us. So we are 100% incentivized to be both ethical and effective during this process. Because if we're not, you're not going to recommend us to others and you're not going to pay us. And honestly, this business will be built and has been built almost exclusively on recommendations and word of mouth so that's a MAJOR incentive to us.