Hacker News Reader

Because the job market is completely different in developed countries no offence meant but former warsaw pact countries are in no way the same as the UK/USA

It looks Russian companies do more in house recruiting and employ FTE to do this where as in the developed world this is out sourced to a large extent it doesn't make sense to have full time staff recruiting unless you are the size of Ford or Google

Yes, unfortunately in London either:

1) recruiter effectively steals a percent of your starting salary;

2) company is so cheap they cannot afford a recruiter;

3) big tech companies are paying extremely low in comparison to the primary sector - finance (and the most interesting stuff will still be developed in USA).

re 1 Its illegal for recruiters to charge the employee in the UK

re 3 is mainly related to the poor social standing of STEM employees in the UK

I think by "effectively" he means the company will pay the employee less to compensate for the recruitment fee, not that the employee is directly charged.

Recruiters only make sense in an environment where labor supply is short. Potential employees are not going to accept lower salaries simply because the recruiter's client has a recruitment fee to pay on top of it. So the client ends up paying both.

If you get employed directly you don't get paid any more do you - sounds like the OP is young and doesn't understand how the world works - or more negatively is not suited for a professional role ie what can I scam out of my employer no mater what

    > 1) recruiter effectively steals a percent of your
    > starting salary

This is absolutely true for contractors, and absolutely not true for permanent staff.

I have only lengthy experience to back this up, rather than anything I can link you to, but:

* For a contractor, companies budget a maximum amount to spend per day. How that gets cut between the recruiter and the contractor, they don't care about. If you're going through a recruiter, you could be charging the employing company exactly what they're being charged by the recruiter, and pocketing £70-£120/day difference.

* For permanent staff, it's accounted very differently. Companies large enough to have people employed in an HR capacity will treat recruiter fees and salary very differently. Salaries will normally have an upper-band, the salaries of other employees and future employees will need to be taken in to account, the precedent set will need to be taken in to account, generally payroll and hiring costs are accounted for differently, and so on. A three-person company will see it all as cost, but a larger company will treat the recruiter fee and the salary as completely different. Additionally, it's in the recruiter's interest to get you the best salary they can, as they take a percentage from the employer. They will know the limit the employer will pay, and will try and get you the best salary they think the employer will go for; generally they are far better negotiators than developers!

"better negotiators than developers" - well in my experience they are always trying to "tempt" with a mere £5k boost and never going for the top bracket offered. It is in their interest to play it safe.

In reverse order...

    > please, tell me about the added value recruiters in the UK bring anyone

Sure.

Firstly, the last 5 candidates I've placed were not looking for jobs. Each was in a role where they were slightly unhappy, but inertia was keeping them put. Having chatted to them, I was able to find them roles they enjoyed more, with a significant pay rise. You could see this as introducing liquidity to the market. A job-board would not have found them.

Secondly, of the last job ads I've posted to job-boards, fully 50% of the applicants came from a single non-European company, and the applicants had no right to work in the UK. Of the remaining 50%, almost all were totally unqualified by CV alone. Of the handful who were qualified, a very quick technical chat on the phone weeded out approximately half again. Then the ones whose salary expectations were out of line with the hiring company needed filtering out too. When you're in a position to actually hire people, you'll get a feel for how time-consuming it can be to hire a single role. When you have 5 to fill, it can become a full-time job.

Thirdly, as an immigrant to the UK (welcome!), you'll be well-acquainted with the foibles of the UK immigration system. Candidate A's wife is on a Tier II inter-company transfer visa, and he wants to get a role; does the hiring company need to be on the UK BA list or can you just hire him? What if it's a subsidiary company of a larger company that is on the UK BA list, but it doesn't have its own registration? Is the candidate worth pursuing? What if the candidate applied for ILR four weeks ago? Is it safe to make him a job offer?

Fourthly, as you point out, the UK job-board market is not centralised, and it's not a monopoly. Where should you post a Python job? LinkedIn? Monster? CV Library? Twitter? Reed? Jobsite? Facebook? Jobserve? Any number of the scammy Python-specific job-boards? As a direct employer, your media cost is £200 a pop. Filling out each form take half an hour. Each of these systems has a different way to get the candidates and format them. As a recruiter, however, I'm using a multi-poster, and I'm paying ~£10 for the media cost, and I have the time and motivation to post the job to a wide-range of channels, but I also have a pretty good feel for where my return on investment will be.

Fifthly: What's a reasonable salary for a Ruby developer in London? What if you need them hired in the next four weeks, urgently? What about a contractor? You've probably got a gut feeling, but look, all the job ads show a range, and not an actual salary. How much would you pay for a superstar? How much for a junior? Are you paying more or less than the competition? Two types of people have access to salary data across the industry: HR people, who aren't allowed to share it, and recruiters, who share it as part of their value-add.

There are sixthly, seventhly, eighthly and ninthly here, but who reads long comments anyway?

    > Russian recruitment industry as an example of smoothly-
    > functioning market ... through two of the largest
    > websites

So, to summarize, the Russian way is better because there is a duopoly in the job-board market, rather than meaningful competition. I can't tell if you're making a very clever ironic comment on economic centralization and its effects on the Russian economy, or you're just not thinking through the implications of what you write...

    > that people like you (yes, you) will lose their jobs and 
    > suffer

You should consider re-reading the HN guidelines.

    > who reads long comments anyway?

I do! It's great that someone is able to see through an emotional response and explicitly address most of the points. I'll try doing the same (and also in reverse order).

    > the Russian way is better because there is a duopoly
    > in the job-board market, rather than meaningful competition

The Russian way is better because the marketplace is more efficient for both sides. If I'm a candidate, I have direct access to more real, existing, non-anonymized vacancies. If I'm a hiring company I have the way to target those looking for jobs. You cover the positive results of that with negative wording ("monopoly"), but in reality it's much less one-sided. Would someone willing to purchase some goods prefer to deal on the phone with people with limited inventories or go directly to something like eBay? Is eBay a monopoly in this case? Answer for both: of course not.

    > Fourthly, ... Where should you post a Python job?

You are describing the very root of the problem and make it sound as if it's something to be proud of. As a hiring company, I can also use a multi-poster too. But now think about a candidate. Where would they go to search for a Python job? Aston Carter? Oxygen Recruitment? Any other scammy-looking firm harvesting their CVs?

    > Thirdly, ... Is it safe to make him a job offer?

Sorry, but for this sort of advice, I'll call my lawyer and my lawyer only. We hired a company specializing in legal services for startups the day we raised funding.

    > Secondly, ... you'll get a feel for how time-consuming it can be to hire
    > a single role. When you have 5 to fill, it can become a full-time job.

I did it, so I know. You are right, it's a very time-consuming process. When my company grew to four people, subsequent hires were driven by an in-house hiring consultant (former recruiter now doing consulting) working one day a week.

Would you argue that a person sitting next to you, being able to talk to hiring person (me) in case of any doubt, speaking on behalf of your company (emailing candidates from @company-mail.com, not @recruiter-company-mail.com) and costing fraction of recruiter cost is better than a recruiter from an outside firm?

    > Firstly, ... You could see this as introducing
    > liquidity to the market.

Market liquidity is not a good thing in itself. Its only purpose is to reduce spread between bid and ask prices, but by introducing your fee for a bidder you actually increased the spread. You surely can argue that you did a universal good thing for those applicants but you definitely don't bring more efficiency into the market.

I understand this conversation is a bit meaningless. It's as if someone would talk to me saying that programming profession is outdated and needs to be replaced with something else. I would refuse to believe that, of course.

    > I understand this conversation is a bit meaningless.
    > It's as if someone would talk to me saying that
    > programming profession is outdated and needs to be
    > replaced with something else. I would refuse to believe
    > that, of course.

The conversation is meaningless because you do not - or will not - read.

You are talking to me as if I think the agency model is perfect, where the originating comment specifically stated I thought it needed to be fixed.

You are talking to me as if I am primarily a recruiter, where the originating comment mentions that I am in fact primarily a tech guy. I have been programming commercially for longer than you, and I have been a CTO at a company two orders of magnitude larger than yours, and I have had to fill headcount larger than your entire company - a task that would have been impossible without recruiters.

You are talking to me as if I see the world through an agency recruitment role, where the originating comment mentions that I have a specialisation in recruitment software. As it happens, many of the world's largest companies (and many of its smaller ones) used the software we built at my last role with their in-house recruitment teams - I was responsible for a software system through which 70% of all job-ads posted in the UK passed. My understanding of recruitment comes through working with recruitment teams from 2 person companies to gigantic multinationals, from personal experience as a hiring manager, from countless times as a technical candidate, and - of course - from the time I spend working as an agent.

The values add is you can reduce the size and of your hr team