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Your recruiter is not your friend

fearlesssalarynegotiation.com

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Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#21

Post by DarronWyke »

>salary negotiations

This is an obvious one. I've dealt with a ton of recruiters over the years. If they're not willing to discuss a range upfront with you (amongst other things), they're lying to you. THERE IS NO JOB. They're just building their virtual rolodex for future sales.

If they want to grill you about what you do, who you know, references, etc. before revealing the name and location of the client... THERE IS NO JOB. (Hint for my younger colleagues: never reveal your references until you get an offer. They're just hitting you up for warm bodies that they can then probe.)

Recruiters do this to play some weird game of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I have no idea why. They swing in the extreme direction of sales and remove the technical aspects of it. We're treated like fodder for the job position sacrifice. And worse yet, a lot of them seem to think we're too stupid to know better.

I never expect a recruiter to be technical; they're a form of HR, not engineering. I wouldn't expect one to know how to read a TCP dump, or analyze a Nessus report for false positives. However a base understanding of what you're pushing for is to be expected. I had one recruiter almost shy away from me because he only saw a keyword listed once or twice on my resume...even though it's a core technology used in every single role I've done that's industry-wide.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#22

Post by paulsutter »

personjerry wrote: post #11
paulsutter wrote: post #4

This is a lead gen website / SEO spam, exposed by this gem halfway down the page: “I’m a salary negotiation expert. My goal is to maximize my clients’ salaries with simple, proven salary negotiation tactics.” Which is hilarious really

I think there’s a lot of solid advice in these posts, and they aren’t clickbaiting into buying anything. Check out the article about not disclosing salary, I liked that one a lot. Could you explain why it’s such a problem to disclose what he does?

The problem is that his stories are interlinked repetitive direct marketing spam-copy. He has one or two points (don’t disclose a range, make them do it), and repeats those two points over and over within a phony story about a recruiter.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#23

Post by elechi »

JoshDoody wrote: post #20
elechi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why I ask is because in Washington, D.C, at least in tech, it's almost impossible to get a job in this area without going through a recruiter. So how would you go about dealing with them in an unable to avoid situation?

If you MUST work with a recruiter (staffing firm, for example), I think it's important to be firm that you're excited for good opportunities, but that your salary history and expectations are your private business. I also recommend going around the recruiters whenever possible by using your own network (people who work at the company or in the industry who can make phone calls to put you in touch with the company dir…

I recently interviewed someone for the new company I just started working for. This candidate was recommended by someone already in the company for a position we're trying to fill. The company reached out to their staffing firm, and contacted him through them. So, that's what I mean by D.C. tech companies, they seems to LOVE using recruiters.

Thank you for the article. To actually get to the point, I'm not sure how helpful it is to me. It seems to me like a game: if you're sure you have a strong hand, it makes sense to not disclose your salary. But if you have a weak one, disclosing early/knowing the salary range makes it worthwhile to disclose the range that you're looking for.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#24

Post by dozzie »

JoshDoody wrote: post #17
paul7986 wrote: post #13

I don’t get the dislike for recruiters? I use them to boost my salary when asked how much I’m making. I say 1/4 more then reality. From there they boost their offer. Why not use recruiters to give yourself a big fat raise? They are after all coming after you. Only downside of recruiters for me has been they are distracting and blow up your ego thinking you can find any job. Yet their offerings are only prospective.

I don't dislike recruiters at all. They're making a living helping place people in jobs - that's a useful thing to do. But it's important to distinguish "placing people in jobs" from "looking at for the best interests of those people by getting them the best compensation package possible". It's important to take agency of the salary conversation because it can be so valuable for the candidate to handle that and maxim…

> I don't dislike recruiters at all.

In principle, I agree. Execution is vastly different, though. Recruiters I've met up to now are mostly bunch of people not understanding the thing they recruit for in the slightest, so they just move documents from pile A to pile B, rejecting them at random in the process.

I met a few recruiters that understood the industry they operated on. They just were outliers, not the norm.

> They're making a living helping place people in jobs - that's a useful thing to do.

Wrong. Helping people land in a job is an unimportant side effect. They mainly help companies fill the roles with bodies. It's irrelevant if the candidate likes the role, is a good fit, and would grow professionally. The only part that is important is that the company finds the candidate competent enough, not the other way around.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#25

Post by commandlinefan »

jrs95 wrote: post #3

I actually had a really positive experience with a recruiter. I had a relatively low salary and they negotiated twice what I was making before at my current position. And I don’t even have a degree.

I've honestly only ever had positive interactions with recruiters, and negative experiences finding jobs any other way. I know I'm just a single data point, but I'm a data point that's been programming professionally now for 23 years across 10 different employers. About half of the jobs I've gotten have been through recruiters and the other half through my "personal network" which conventional wisdom suggests is the best way to find a job; yet by far the walking nightmare jobs I've had have all been the personal network type. As best I can tell, there's a reason for that: when somebody who I knew from a past job wants to bring me in as one of his underlings, he has to make a relatively hard sell to management to get me on board, so they (apparently) end up misrepresenting my abilities by a bit. So the first time they expect a miracle, I fail to deliver, and things get... tense. On the other hand, whenever I'm brought in through a recruiter, the expectations on me are mostly in line with what I put on my resume and nobody's personal and professional reputation is on the line if it takes me a few days to get up to speed with the codebase.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#26

Post by scarface74 »

JoshDoody wrote: post #20
elechi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why I ask is because in Washington, D.C, at least in tech, it's almost impossible to get a job in this area without going through a recruiter. So how would you go about dealing with them in an unable to avoid situation?

If you MUST work with a recruiter (staffing firm, for example), I think it's important to be firm that you're excited for good opportunities, but that your salary history and expectations are your private business. I also recommend going around the recruiters whenever possible by using your own network (people who work at the company or in the industry who can make phone calls to put you in touch with the company dir…

Why should salary history be a secret? I know my market value. I make X, I won't consider jobs less than Y. No negotiation necessary. If the company will pay me Y. I accept. I might leave a little money on the table, but not enough to make a difference, when my salary gets too far out of line with the market, I move on.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#27

Post by mindcrime »

paulsutter wrote: post #4

This is a lead gen website / SEO spam, exposed by this gem halfway down the page: “I’m a salary negotiation expert. My goal is to maximize my clients’ salaries with simple, proven salary negotiation tactics.” Which is hilarious really

Links to ArXiv.org papers or the like aside, most links these days are - to some extent - a bit of "content marketing" for something or someone. But some contain more useful information and insights than others. I actually found this piece relatively useful, in that the "realtor metaphor" really gave me a new insight into the mindset of a recruiter.

Honestly, I'd never taken the think to think through the math and realize the extent to which they care about volume more than optimizing any single deal. Thinking about it that way does shed some interesting light on things, IMO.

Anyway, I wouldn't call this post spam. It's not exactly long-form journalism or a "newly discovered work by Thoreau" but it doesn't really claim to be so either.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#28

Post by briffle »

elechi wrote: post #23
JoshDoody wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you MUST work with a recruiter (staffing firm, for example), I think it's important to be firm that you're excited for good opportunities, but that your salary history and expectations are your private business. I also recommend going around the recruiters whenever possible by using your own network (people who work at the company or in the industry who can make phone calls to put you in touch with the company dir…

I recently interviewed someone for the new company I just started working for. This candidate was recommended by someone already in the company for a position we're trying to fill. The company reached out to their staffing firm, and contacted him through them. So, that's what I mean by D.C. tech companies, they seems to LOVE using recruiters. Thank you for the article. To actually get to the point, I'm not sure how h…

I think a big part of the issue is why do you need to tell them your salary? why doesn't the recruiter tell you the expected salary range. The same questions can be answered...

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#29

Post by gumby »

paulsutter wrote: post #4

This is a lead gen website / SEO spam, exposed by this gem halfway down the page: “I’m a salary negotiation expert. My goal is to maximize my clients’ salaries with simple, proven salary negotiation tactics.” Which is hilarious really

I don’t see it as spam. It wasn’t pushed into your mailbox/feed and by saying that you can decide if it adds or detracts from his credibility.

Re: Your recruiter is not your friend

#30

Post by Wildgoose »

MollyR wrote: post #19

I wish this was hammered into all graduating students. I had several recruiters alter my resumes before I went into an interview. It was unbelievable.

I remember in my twenties having a recruiter rewrite my CV, removing relevant experience and claiming experience I didn't have. All without my knowledge. You cam imagine how the resulting interview went....
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