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Comment by gidorah | Hacker News Reader

I'm a UK accountant, so not IT. But I never apply direct. I always use recruiters. I think the benefits are:

- recruiter usually only sends 2/3 resumes to employer, so better candidate-job match

- recruiter has relationship with the client, so is more trusted - recruitment is a sales job, so they want a better match.

- your first interview is with the recruiter, so less formal. If that goes well, they will make more effort to see your skills and expertise over other candidates.

- better jobs come thru recruiter. These are ones that dont get publically listed

- recruiter will pre-screen roles based on your salary expectations, so you do not apply to roles that have no salary. Saves everyone a lot of time

- you can ask recruiter more about the person the client is looking for, so know how to angle interviews and sole the clients problems

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Every recruiter I have interacted with, in the last decade, has been nasty individuals. Changing my resume without my knowledge, stealing my wages (been fighting two years now, to get it back), paying late consistently (we are talking 4-6 months late, on top of net60) and above all - lying about everything, even silly things that don’t make sense and are easy to verify.

Maybe it is just my dumb luck that I attract shitty recruiters, I dunno. Maybe UK recruiters are better than American recruiters? Whatever is the reason, these days I assume the worst about every recruiter I interact with (I am very trusting of people otherwise), I am still waiting to be proven wrong :(

That sounds like a totally different arrangement. More like how working as temp or contract staff would work in the UK.

For perm staff, recruiters are usually paid a fixed percentage of your annual salary as a one-off fee.

Sounds like UK recruiters work differently to American ones. I don't understand how they would steal your wages. They don't pay you in the UK.

usually you're hired by the headhunting firm for a short period, e.g. 6 months, sometimes more or less. you work for the headhunters, your paycheck and insurance is through them, you just work on site / for the other org.

in 6 months if the other org likes you they can hire you on, or if they don't they can just say "get me a new one", etc. in some cases, like you know its a 2 year project, you just stay on for 2 years.

but that means the headhunters are taking 10-30% of what would otherwise be a full-time salary.

lowers the risk for the other org.

Yeah I also had a good experience with recruiters. I've only got one job through them but it went pretty well. The two best things I found using a recruiter were:

1. They know about all the jobs. Despite searching quite hard I didn't know that some big companies had offices in my city. They are bad at advertising this.

2. They want you to get the job. That's how they get paid. So they are (mostly) on your side and will tell you things like details about what to expect in the interview. Surprisingly useful.

3. They bypass the normal nonsense application process. You just need a CV.

Would use again.

Where do you find a recruiter or identify a good one? Going on Linkedin and just asking random people who say their a "recruiter" sounds like a bad idea, you'll get a lot of duds and not the type of recruiters you're describing.

They constantly spam me on LinkedIn. When I wanted a job I just replied to a few.

The industry I work in (silicon verification) probably helps. It's quite small in the UK and not a target for beginners like web and app development is.

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