I only ever found one recruitment company that I liked who I felt was consistently top notch when I was freelancing. They didn't ever call me unless I signaled I was looking for work and always negotiated better rates than I felt I was able to when I was first starting out. They were called Recruit Media, but they were later swallowed up by a larger company that I cannot vouch for.
Some former employees set up a new agency that continued in the same vein as Recruit Media - http://www.wearefutureheads.co.uk/. They focus on web and digital content creation specialists. They know what the acronyms mean as well as how to spell them properly. If you're looking for a no-bullshit web/digital recruiter in this in the UK then you could do a lot worse.
Disclaimer: I have never worked as a recruiter and I have no links with Futureheads beyond being placed by some of their staff and also using them to recruit freelancers for projects I have led.
Obviously it goes without saying that you're much better off developing your professional network, negotiating a good rate and going direct if you can.
Just felt compelled to write this to illustrate that not all of them are bad. Sadly I'd estimate that at least 99% of the firms here in the UK are complete time wasters.
(Omission, elision and euphemism is the British way!)
Fortunately I've not had to look for a job since 2003, happy where I am mostly, so my old CV's are probably long gone in disk crashes, failed backups or other purges. I've not been contacted by a recruiter for ~6 years now.
Ahem, speak for yourself. Go check out your local newsagent's daily national press shelves. Pages upon pages of lies and spin.
Hell, the Scottish versions of The Times, Express, Mail and Mirror group papers print contradicting headlines, one version for Scotland and one for England and Wales.
I hate to do the "we're less gullible in Scotland now" thing, but since the referendum we can spot bullshit from a mile off now.
Heh...me too :)
I worked in Germany and in the US. The only time that recruiters got a tad annoying was when I was working in Germany and got 2-3 UK agencies. By far not as bad as the post makes it seem, but some slightly annoying things such as calling me on a Sunday evening, trying to give me prep speeches and overusing my name, script reading, trying to not tell me the client name, mispronouncing the skills they were looking for, ...
In the US, the recruiter eMails are more frequent, but usually pretty civilized. Especially the bigger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google) that have their own in-house recruiters tend to be pleasant to work with.
But I've experienced many of the things this guy is complaining about from 3rd party tech recruiters (I'm in the US), including being lied to (and not coming clean until it came up a few months into the contract), aggressively being contacted, dodging questions about company details, not providing job descriptions, lying about what the company needed so I was unprepared for interviews, not telling me anything about interviews, scheduling an interview for me for THE NEXT DAY at 7 pm that was a 3 hour drive away so I had no choice but to take a sudden personal day to go to the interview (I normally wouldn't do that, but I had two friends working there, and really wanted to check it out), etc.
One agency has been sending me emails and calling me multiple times and LinkedIn connection requests from four people in the company these past couple of weeks. They've attempted to contact me at least 12 times in two weeks, and the most they'll tell me in the messages is "an iOS Developer opportunity". With no information you are not going to make me want to get in touch with you, especially when I'm not looking for a new job.
BUUUUT.... I have had a couple good experiences with external recruiters, in fact my most recent experience was very positive and they negotiated better than I would have for the first salary in my career that I've been satisfied with.
Oh, and of course they would keep bombarding me with Java/XML projects just because my CV (which they doctored and redacted before sending it to the client) mentioned that I had once worked on a Java project (but specialised in something entirely different since).
The one project I actually followed through on turned out to be a total disaster. Other than that, all my work had been directly for clients without a third party -- and that worked out far better.
If you're an inexperienced solo freelancer and want to work for big corporations, sure, recruiters are the way to go. Other than that, IMO you're nearly always better off skipping the middle man and taking the entrepreneurial risk (which is fairly manageable if you don't allow the client to build up several months worth of outstanding payments).
They charged 3 times your rate? I hope that's hyperbole, because that's pretty insane. I get disgusted when a recruiter charges more than 15%. (The best stay below 5% for doing an excellent job, the worst piece of shit I've ever wasted time on turned out to charge over 30% for not doing his job.)
I have had some pretty awful experiences with Dutch recruiters, but also some pretty good ones.
I'm having very mixed feelings about the recruiter that got me my current gig: on the one hand, she was way too pushy and I'm pretty sure she lied to me, and their rate is higher than what the client allows (they're got some cumbersome way to work around that), but on the other hand, what I get is significantly higher than what I got the previous time I worked for the same client (though one of the best and most professional recruiters I've met), so she pushed them even harder than she pushed me, and that's paying off for me too. And it is a really nice gig. The one getting screwed here is not me, and the client is a major bank, so I'm not feeling terribly sorry for them (though I do wonder if I should inform them of the recruiter's overly high rate; is that honest or vindictive?).
Still, it'd be nice if we could do without them. Shouldn't the internet help us cut out all those middlemen?
I'd synched up with a recruiter, they scheduled me for a job interview at a swanky gentlemans club (not a strip bar, literally a club for men), in London. I don my old school uniform, for aged 18 I had not yet bought a suit, and printed some resumes at my Mums office and headed over to St James Place in a cab. I check in for the interview and get led into a room filled with desks, some occupied and others not. I take a seat and wait patiently for whatever comes next... ... ...
... The seats are all pretty much full now, and a man stands at the front of the room and gives a 3 slide presentation along the lines of: we can't tell you who our client is, you'll take a test, the top 10 will be offered a job with the client.
Being 18, I was great at tests! Everyone around me was in their mid 20-30's -- I'd been hacking for 3 years at this point, Linux user for ~18mo - I was ready. The test papers are laid in front of us, the presenter orders us to start, I'm done in the first 18 minutes, and sit patiently for the next 12 when the presenter says: "for those of you who have finished please walk your paper up here, for the rest you've 15 more minutes. Myself and two others rise, take our papers to the front and leave through the door and are directed to a lounge (let me tell you, gentle mans clubs are really fancy -- I don't take the gin and tonic offered to me).
Eventually the room is filled with the other test takers, probably 50 of us in total, and we mill around. I was too insecure to talk to anyone, everyone else was probably a little weirded out by the boy in the school uniform!
Some 20 minutes later the presenter enters the room and announces 11 names to stay behind, I was one of them! (What kind of story would this be were I not;)) it was explained to us that we'd be given a short interview. These were conducted three at a time, the presenter and his two associates would take an interview each.
I was in the second three and I had observed that the first three had short conversations, signed some papers, shook hands with their interviewer and then left the room. My interviewer was the presenter. I can't recall the questions, they were about my test paper, but after a couple of them he laid the paper down and looked at me and asked: "did you cheat?", I answered: "no", and he went on to explain that I got a perfect score, the next highest had received about 80% (if memory serves there were ~50 multiple choice questions and ~5 questions where we had to write out commands: how to compile Linux kernels, etc). He shook my hand and led me out, no papers were signed.
And that was it.
I went back to the legal office my mum worked at, recounted the story, and she became so furious -- she believed I'd been subjected to ageism.
I certainly do not mean to suggest all recruiters are this short sighted, and I'm very proud of where my life has taken me thus far (early yc alum, early leader at twitch, amongst other things), but this experience was so negative that I reasoned to avoid recruiters at all costs. Now, I know the way you find a job is to watch the companies you think are doing a great job, working on tech you care about, and reach out directly to them to find out how you can help.
We can kill the predatory recruiters by starving them!
I would suspect more "we don't want to hire someone who thinks it's appropriate to show up in a literal school uniform to a professional interview" more than ageism, per se.
They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they
leech off our industry.
Imagine this scenario: You get a call from a recruiter. They seem to have an interesting position/client/network so you send over your CV. A couple of months later you are actively looking for a job, so you make a list of cool startups in your area and send your CV and a customized cover letter. They all answer that they got your CV from the recruiter and that they can't afford the recruiter's fee. They can't hire you for 6 months/2 years/indefinitely, depending on the recruiters terms.
Oops.
Maybe I'm exaggerating?
I suppose if they were working with a recruiter, and later ended the relationship, that could cause the problem you describe, but I haven't seen it happen (as a job seeker, a member of many interview panels, and as a hiring manager a couple times).
In theory, the recruiter isn't supposed to send resumes without the job seeker's approval, which means that when they do so, they've probably broken any agreement they have with the hiring company, so the company probably isn't bound by that agreement any longer. Whether you'd be able to convince the hiring company to take the risk of a lawsuit (that they'd presumably win) is another question, of course.
That scenario could easily play out. However, if the employer genuinely has no connection to the candidate (other than having received their CV a couple of times, in different incarnations) then I don't see why they wouldn't pursue the candidate without the recruiter being in the loop.
I've never known recruiter scum to send out a CV without my name, contact details, and references stripped out.
And how can this possibly be enforceable when you haven't given that recruiter any exclusivity?
1. Job advertised doesn't have the name of the company
2. Recruiter is CV harvesting with fake job ads - experienced that
3. Recruiter bait and switches - job is real but is an excuse to get you for something else
4. Recruiter gets wind of big company or gov organisation recruiting via competition, posts the same job spec then uses it to try and undercut while passing themselves off as the "official" recruiter. Had this with a NHS development role where the job I responded to turns out they had no business advertising for.
5. If the company is named then it's usually because said company only wants to use a recruiter. I've had this a couple of times where I've contacted a company directly but been asked to file my application with their official outsourced recruitment service.
6. Recruiter threatens "you'll never work in this town again" if you do somehow get to know who the company is simply because you ask.
Ninety nine percent of all recruiters I have dealt with have been the scum of the earth, even the so called reputable ones.
I truly hope Stackoverflow Careers destroys these businesses.
The noise added to the signal does make it significantly more difficult.
So rather than searching a central repository of job ads for opportunities specifically relevant to you, you have to visit individual company websites, find the "careers" or "jobs" section, and look for leads in a thousand different places.
I consider a no-recruiters policy to be absolutely essential for a job advertisements boards now. Everywhere else, you have to filter out key phrases like "recruiting", "our client", or "resume in Word format" just to find anything useful.
FYI, this will filter out a few companies as well. Qualcomm, for instance, insists on all resumes being Word or RTF for some reason.
Do you know how agencies work? You do understand that employers contact them and ask them to find people, to organise their payroll, do relevant checks e.g. confirm right to work, security, skills etc. And these companies know they will be paying a % to the agency and this is because they dont want to do that work themselves they just want a competent worker in place asap.
Those same employers could spend their time searching job boards for suitable candidates but they don't want to so they outsource.
As for the OP saying they are taking 15% of his money. That's not the case. In most cases the Employer will agree a rate with the agency, so they will be a maximum of e.g £250 a day for the contractor and a 15% fee to the agency. So they are paying out around £290 per day to the agency. If the contractor was located directly do you think they would pay him/her £290 per day? No they would pay £250 as they know that is the going rate. they pay the agency fee so they dont have to go through the recruitment process e.g. post adverts, interview people (phone), interview (in person) skill check, right to work check etc.
Of course many/most recruiters will also bring value, but it's a question of degree. If someone is recruiting for a technical position and they don't have the technical understanding to make any meaningful judgment of the candidate, it's reasonable to ask whether they are worth their fee. Obviously the extent to which that applies depends on the individual, the company, and the local business culture.
Pretty much how the article was written.
To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write.
The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
The recruiters who are working for these companies are, to some extent, as the author describes. The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Never mind that the C-level management at large, established companies is, for the most part, hopelessly disconnected from what it takes to have an effective technology capability at a company. If you don't agree with me on this, then ask yourself why SAP and Oracle continue to make so much money selling huge software implementations that are known to never work and always go over budget.
Absolutely true.
Simplifying a little, there are companies here that everybody wants to leave and companies that everybody wants to join. It's difficult to leave the first category since the employee's skills have atrophied (see https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/).
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr.
So perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people. If the skill-set is worth more than 100/hr, then the company cant recruit the right talent, and complains of "shortages" whereas in reality, the "shortage" is because too many third parties have their hand in the cookie-jar leaving too little to pay the actual market wage.
- £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer
- No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc)
- No free food/snacks/bevare at the company
- No perks (equipment, etc)
When questioned about this, the recruiter said: hey! impossible to get this, this is were I make my money you know!. How is this a "fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions"?
If he didnt attend and interview or discuss these perks prior to signing a contract he fucked up.
If he was genuinely misled then he can actually make a complaint and pursue it but it sounds like he didnt do much checking at all.
It sounds like he read the contract/offer and that it wasn't at all like he had previously discussed with the recruiter.
"£15k less salary than advertised in the offer"
Means the salary was X but he was paid (X - 15k).
I know trainee developers (no education but some skills) who have started off on £21k and that is low for IT in London. I find it hard to believe that any IT role in London was filled for £15k by anyone other than the most junior of people.
If you're only getting $30k (~£20k/year) as a software programmer of any kind, anywhere in the world, you should seriously consider finding a new employer, even if it requires emigrating. And remote jobs still exist.
Canada has the 3rd largest video games industry in the world--after the US and Japan--and its growth has strained the available talent pool. So you might consider Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or Montreal. I have heard that UK-to-Canada emigration is more easily done than UK-to-US, though I had never had any particular motive to investigate the claim.
The "games" jobs earn less on average than the less-specific category of "software" jobs, and "programmer" earns less on average than "developer" and "engineer". So if you don't move, maybe you could pad out your resume to be a "software developer" instead.
I am biased somewhat by working in the US, where software writers are legion, and paid more than elsewhere, but if you have any skill at all, you can probably be paid more for work similar to what you do now.
We don't have an international union, so I don't exactly have any leverage here, but I want you to be paid more. Do you seriously think that you are so far below the median level of skill for a C++ programmer with a degree and two years of experience, that you should be paid so little?
Go. Look for another job, and find out just what they would be willing to pay you. With an offer in hand that you could accept on its own merits, go to your current employer and, without mentioning anything about your other offer, ask that your pay rate be reevaluated, to match your skills in the current market. If you don't get a significant payrise, then at that point, you can decide whether it is worth more to have extra cash in your hand, or to keep a job that you know you like, but pays peanuts--stale peanuts at that. Remember, you don't have to accept any offer you don't like.
For now, you seem to have decided that you like your current job £15-20k/year more than anything else you think you could possibly get.
The most important thing though is that he's learning: that means he will still be able to get better opportunities later. Once the learning stops, it's time to get out.
Further, I seriously question that a different job would be one that they hate.
But you can also pay privately for treatment. I'm not sure why you would chose to do so - you get a private room but not much else. (There's a possibility you get slightly worse outcomes)
Dental isn't free even on the NHS (although many people get exemptions) so paying gets you better dentists, with better wait times, and more cosmetic options.
Did your co-worker actually take this job, without doing the due diligence of reading the contract and the offer letter?
Congrats. That must be how the entire industry works then </sarcasm>
> a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions
Yeah, bull-shit, if you think every engineering job is in a comfy office with great pay and great working conditions, you are seriously delusional. I've worked at places where this wasn't the case.
If everything was all sunshine and rainbows all the time, companies wouldn't have bad reputations, or have a hard time hiring new people. But plenty do have a bad reputation, and plenty do scare off new recruits. That's kind of the entire point of sites like GlassDoor.
> The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
First off, it's his opinion, and his blog, totally his right to have unsupported claims. But considering how many comments actually support his claims, it's my belief you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry.
To end the post with saying "you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry." is just like, jesus man, are you going for some sort of insufferability award? Go outside. Perhaps there is something more rewarding there than grasping at straws to get mad at a stranger on the internet...
It's my experience that the third-party recruiting business is almost as terrible in the US as the author describes in the UK, though sans the oddball Brit dialect. There also doesn't seem to be as much of the third-party contract scam going; if the recruiter is a contracting agency, they'll tell you that up front. But the incoherent and misspelled emails, the rampant spam, the lack of knowledge of the roles they're recruiting for, yes that all rings true in the US too.
Secondly, Google is a world-class, forward-thinking company so they are probably not representative of the rest of the millions of companies out there. That is like saying..."of course 100% of companies provide free lunch, after all hundreds of departments at Google provide free lunch." It is just silly.
Finally, the OP is not upset about ending up with "a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office." How many engineers even have offices these days? Which company do you even work for?
The OP is upset about rent-seeking behavior of outside recruiters. Often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters.
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. OK, perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people.
But I do believe the more likely explanation remains that this guy got angry after getting harassed repeatedly by recruiters and decided to do something about it.
It was at this point that you lost me. You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job.
I'm getting a lot of REALLY bizarre straw men responses to my posts but this one has to take the cake.
You managed to turn me saying that people should stop bitching about IT recruiters calling them for offices jobs that pay well and have great conditions ito a conclusion that I have CLEARLY never had a crappy job? I...what? How? How does a human brain take my input and produce your output? I'm blown away.
I'll give you a hint. No recruiter called me for my crappy jobs. I went and applied for them. Sorry this doesn't fit into your projection that you were clearly qualified to make from that single thing I said.
And since you haven't, you really need to stop telling other people what they can and cannot complain about. Seriously, at what salary level are people not allowed to complain about work conditions any more? What exactly are the conditions that an office has to have before one can no longer complain? Free soda? A snack machine?
Yet this article instead of getting flagged into oblivion got upvoted to #1 as of now. Could that be that HN readers' experience with recruiters mirrors the author's experience?
... and they were right. That is mentioned, if you read right through.
It's not about in-house recruiters like you have at FB/Google, it's about the scumbags that hold potential employees to ransom and act as self appointed gatekeepers to jobs that might or might not exist. As an experiment why not hit up jobserve and try applying for some of these agency advertised jobs (under a fake persona), I don't think you've ever experienced the humiliation and frustration of dealing with these wankers.
It's Friday, go have a beer, relax and rediscover your sense of humour.
Oh good, the "you didn't think this was funny therefore your sense of humor sucks" logic.
I guess its much more "fun and interesting" to work yourself into a rage over things you made up versus just not thinking those things are funny...?
That's taking it quite personally. We can agree that Mocko's sardonic style isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you don't like it, accept that others do and that he's really not going to change it for you. He makes it abundantly clear that he is in a position to ignore (at best) or belittle (at worst) people who disagree with him. So move on.
"Oh good, the "you didn't think this was funny therefore your sense of humor sucks" logic."
"That's taking it quite personally."
What do you even say to someone in this situation...?
But, just as the OP is entitled to an opinion, I'm entitled to say that his opinion is a bunch of horseshit. Sorry that this is so offensive to you?
A lot of the behavior mentioned here is awfully familiar in the US.
There are a lot of people who are not happy with their informatics jobs, especially in the UK, and I think recruiters are a significant part of the reason. As you can probably guess from the slang, the particular situation the author is describing is much worse there.
>> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.
Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think "exploited" I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.
If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.