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Comment by BooneJS | Hacker News Reader

If I recall correctly, when an employer signs up with a headhunter service to bring resumes, you're also agreeing to a 1 year term of exclusivity. Often resumes are shared without a name or other basic identifying information until you agree to meet with them. If you end up hiring them anytime from then to 1 year out, you pay the headhunter their fee. Seems fair, only because the headhunter needs to make a buck.

Based on neighborhood traffic on Nextdoor and Facebook, dog walking is still a "hire your neighbor's kid" market, and Wag seems to be trying to elevate it to the gig economy where dogs are walked by those that need to put food on their own table.

Headhunters don't profit forever from every job they connect their clients with, and it seems Wag is trying to get away with changing those rules.

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> Seems fair, only because the headhunter needs to make a buck.

Seems like a relationship built on deep mutual mistrust!

I spoke to a recruiter once who wouldn't tell me the company she was hiring for, presumably to stop me going directly. But it was a ludicrous situation because of course I'm not going to agree to spend my time interviewing with an unknown company!

I'm wondering how that would even work. Do they blindfold you and take you to a mystery location!?

No I presume they tell you after you’ve committed to interviewing. But who would commit to interviewing with someone (a day of your time) that you don't know?

I’m a recruiter. The contract is with the hiring company. Once I’ve submitted your resume to a company, with your permission, the company can’t hire you without paying me. So as long as I have your permission to put you forward for a role, and submit you to the client, you can cut me out of the process as much as you wish ... I’m still getting paid if you take the role.

Why can’t everyone operate with a bit more trust? Am I too hopeful and in reality people would try to screw you over if you were more open?

Yes.

I've found generally I can operate with almost complete trust, but there are always some bad actors AND people fuck up. Of the latter: programmer contacts me about a job I'm advertising. I tell them about the role. They want me to represent them but decide the best course of action is to apply directly to the client on their website (?!). When I find out, I contact the client and try and explain the situation.

First time I've worked with the client, and after some emails, they grudgingly accept that I have the emails to prove the situation, but the candidate fucked it all up ... however, this has engendered enough shitty feeling that they decide they don't want to continue working together.

I don't get paid for most of the candidates I put forward for roles (employers want 4-5 applicants per person they hire, at least), as they don't get the roles, and can't afford to just forgive a $20,000 commission because the candidate managed to gum up the workings.

TBH, the few times Ive worked with a few recruiters, they misrepresented the position they were recruiting for. Now, I'm not sure if it was a recruiter packaging the job to be 'ideal' or if it was HR having absolutely no clue what they were doing.

Never the less, when I walked in and sat down, it was nowhere near what I was expecting and what was conveyed to me.

Of course that's the worst situation. The recruiter doesn't get paid and spent time, the company wasted time, and the potential employee wasted time. But I have no issue in leaving money on the table for you if you do a good job about recruiting. And once you're paid after a year, I'll ask for a raise equal to what you got :) That tells me what they're really willing to pay for me.

There's hundreds of people working in the same space, everyone with a time horizon no farther than the next quarter. Of course they'll rip you off.

>The contract is with the hiring company. Once I’ve submitted your resume to a company, with your permission, the company can’t hire you without paying me. So as long as I have your permission to put you forward for a role, and submit you to the client, you can cut me out of the process as much as you wish ... I’m still getting paid if you take the role.

But isn't it the same for Wag?

The point is that you have two counterparts:

1) the company that could deny having actually employed your candidate but that cannot because there are records about the hiring

2) the candidate that (since he/she has nothing to loose) has no reason to deny being hired

What have Wag to actually prove that someone got again the same dog walker and that they met for the first time through Wag?

My favorite one is just typing the stuff they asked for into google and finding the original job posting and going 'so it's Chewy?'

Ask what industry the client is in. The recruiter will often give you that, which ought to tell you enough to identify them. Or if you sound self-assured and confident, they'll just tell you the name of the client. If you can't even get the industry out of them, pull your resume and terminate your relationship with the recruiter. "Not confident in your firm placing me with a quality firm"

As a contractor, I worked with the same group of recruiters for well over a decade. They were always forthcoming with who and what. I had only one problem in all that time and that was, in effect, my stuff-up. I had my resume in for the same position via my normal process and also via one directly to the company in question. I hadn't taken notice of this and when I found out, I apologised and withdraw my direct application. In that particular case, I didn't get the work. But I attributed that to my failure.

Otherwise, I found that working with the specific recruiting company to be beneficial to myself with them getting their ongoing cut of the business.

I usually am not given the identity of the company from a recruiter, but 95% of the time, I can find who it is with just a minute of searching, based on the language in the job description. It's pointless to take the id off when you don't rewrite the rest - and nobody has time for that.

If you have this rule:

> If you end up hiring them anytime from then to 1 year out, you pay the headhunter their fee.

why do you need to do this:

> Often resumes are shared without a name or other basic identifying information until you agree to meet with them.

Reduces the set of people covered by this to those that the company actually paid attention to through the headhunter, reducing the space for conflict.

Otherwise either the company can reach out directly and claim they didn't rely on the headhunter for that, or alternatively the headhunter has reasons to throw as many resumes as possible at the company just to "claim" more people.

You don’t, the latter is part of candidate marketing where you send resumes to companies to tempt them to sign a contract. Scummy practice imo, as the candidates are rarely told.

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