Point being you are right it is asymmetric information warfare and they will use it against you, even if you offer them a poison pill like I did.

You should be paid what the company believes you are worth, not as little as they can trick you into accepting.

I wrote the article in response to the incentives for recruiters being typically seen as driven by the client (hiring firm). The main issue is that recruiters are paid by hiring firms, and agents would be paid by the employee/new hire.

Job seekers seem less likely to pay for a service like this (negotiation). I've provided coaching to many, which usually includes mostly job search and resume advice, and may end with negotiation advice, but I'm typically not approached just for the sake of negotiation help.

Maybe I should advertise that as a separate service.

In my peer group, there are some developers who treat their employment like a business and negotiate aggressively. They read up on tactics and practice them. I'm not sure agents would actually be that helpful to such people.

Another whole group basically acts like they're paid "enough" and don't negotiate at all. They're unlikely to see the utility in professional negotiators since they're not even willing to read up on tactics themselves.

I tell you what I think I can get out of an employer. If you think you can get more, you take me on as a client and receive x% of the additional amount.

A small percentage tend to have expectations far below market.

There are thousands of engineers getting less than they could be getting if they had better negotiating skills, better marketing skills, and better information.

The number of underpaid engineers doesn't need to be anywhere near a majority for the service to be a good business opportunity, or needed. There are plenty of engineers that could use the help - the question is whether or not they'd seek it out.

Having a trusted third party between myself and the prospective employer would help shift the power dynamic significantly.

Also having a trained negotiator would take a lot of stress off of me.

Any thoughts on a rough price range you would look for to provide this sort of service?

Perhaps a combination of an hourly rate and either (a) % of salary - which would be very small I assume or (b) % of difference between initial offer and final offer - which would be larger than the percentage in a.

I'd have to think about it, but in the short-term I'd charge my standard hourly coach/consult rate to job seekers which is currently $60/hr.

Preventing employers from asking about previous salary does not prevent them from discriminating against women, which is the intention of the MA law. I can definitely see how this law might hasten a transition away from an era where salary was unfairly pegged to gender - but only to the degree that employers aren't still just blatantly discriminating by gender.

Because most other workers aren't, even with an agent, going to get paid enough more to make it worthwhile to pay a competent agent to negotiate on their behalf.

That is why there is negotiation in the first place.

EDIT: I should point out that that's what they do in regards to full-time W2 work, not contract.

There are plenty of awful recruiters who will undervalue you, send you to gigs that don't fit you and such. But it's precisely how bad the field is that makes being a good recruiter such a strategically smart play. Being the rare recruiter that does their job well lands you top talent, that top talent means you can start asking for higher wages for people than the salary bands posted, which leads to more people coming to see you, because you can actually get higher rates than what someone could if they asked up front.

I often ask recruiters what the salary is for the positions they offer. The right recruiter in my town, who I have a work relationship with, will often talk about a 20/hr premium. When compared to the worst (consulting firms that tell you a rate that has nothing to do with what they'll ask the employer, and will hide this) the difference can be huge. I have worked on the same team with another very comparable coworker, and I was getting paid almost triple! and he is an American, not an H1-B.

Recruiters are much more likely to cut bait and leave an extra 5% on the table to:

1. Keep a good relationship with the employer

2. Keep their turnover high, making money on negotiating many "OK" salaries instead of maximizing each individual salary (including yours).

This is because of how their compensation is structured. The contract guy is going to start getting paid immediately. The employer guy is going to get paid when the employee has vested a certain amount of time with the company.

They get paid by the company though. So if I had to pick between the company and the candidate I'd say they're more aligned with the company.

You're definitely right though that they aren't really aligned with the company either.

> fiduciary duty

I think you are misusing that word. A third-party recruiter does not have a fiduciary duty to the company with the role unless they have been empowered to make the hiring decision themselves. I don't know of any agencies with such power.

I'd definitely be willing to pay for something like this. Make it commission based (pay as a percentage of additional salary negotiated) and the incentives between the negotiator and client will be perfectly aligned.

I'm not sure that this is the case when talking about such low amounts.

Taking hints from a similar "agent with percentage", think real estate agents. Unless an agent is working with pretty high level homes, the 3% they are getting is not significantly effected by a something like 20k up or down on a $300k house. It's an extra $600, but often their time is better spent getting the deal closed as quickly as possible for as many people as possible. If that $20k for the client takes an extra few days the haggle, the agent could have been working with another client on another $300k house deal.

In both cases, the thing that throws the agent and client out of alignment is the fact that the deals come through very infrequently, thus from the agent's perspective, they need to keep clients hustled through the door in order to be able to keep their own cash flow going, and working extra hard for a minimal gain isn't going to generally effect future gains. Most engineers would just use the same agent regardless unless the agent was spectacularly bad.

(and there are way more rules for real estate agents than there would be for a hypothetical engineer's agent)

But that would require realtors to give accurate and competitive assessments of property values, distracting from their primary hustle which is getting their client to sign an exclusive contract.

Not sure if that would pan out, or that's a large enough target audience. Just a thought.

So many things wrong with this. Agents typically negotiate fixed-term contracts for athletes and entertainers. Agents take 10% of the entire pot, not "additional salary negotiated" whatever that means. You don't know what you would have been able to negotiate so there is no "additional" amount, only what they got you. Are you willing to give 10% of every paycheck to your agent?

I'm looking to pay someone to negotiate a salary raise on my behalf in exchange for a cut of the additional salary negotiated. It's a one time deal, that should take a couple of emails and a couple of phone calls at most, not a full-time job. It has the potential to pay very well considering the minimum amount of effort required on the part of the "agent" as far as I can see.

Of course, I'm not denying that there could be something I'm missing that could make this arrangement infeasible (in fact, other replies have already mentioned many such factors), but I'm not sure how your post about agents for athletes and entertainers was in any way relevant to the discussion.

Everyone talking about how great an agent would be are forgetting that under the current way every agent works, they'd be writing off 10% of their paychecks in perpetuity to that agent (or at least along a defined timeline).

Largely because the compensation changes are both rare enough and small enough that hiring someone to negotiate on your behalf isn't really worth the money for either side. Paying enough that the negotiator would be able to pocket a decent amount of money would probably not be viable.

Having to? It's not a requirement. I used to get asked this all the time. They want to know how much I made last gig? I tell them the rate I want, not the rate I got.

That's right, if they ask me a question they have no business asking and can never confirm, I reserve the right to tell them what I want them to believe.

I also think it's sexist to frame this as equal pay for women. That implies that women are predisposed to be bad negotiators.

It's a simple matter of supply and demand: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/why-talent-agents-for-engine...

because you haven't built a startup to do it yet, and Gayle McDowell hasn't figured out how do it yet.

Because in your typical job you're trying to negotiate over a few thousand dollars in your annual salary. If you actually paid an agent enough for it to be worth it to them, you may as well have not negotiated at all because the money they won for you is just going in their pocket.

Athletes and actors are haggling over several millions of dollars. They've got plenty of fuck you money in there to pay an agent.

Then again, in a different form, those compensation agents were simply known as unions.