>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.

I'm 3 years into my career with a M.S in CS and I don't know how to read a TCP dump or Nessus report :( Guess I should be a recruiter. Oh wait, I used to be!

Good for you, you're an exception far removed from the rule.

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 maximize salary. Unfortunately, maximizing salary often conflicts with the recruiters' goal of placing as many people as possible as fast as possible.

Thanks for the question and for giving me a chance to clarify!

> 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.

Unless you're a special snowflake and you know your market, how much of a salary negotiating is there? I ask for X which I believe is in the middle of the range, I work with 7-8 recruiting companies and they send me jobs offering X. I don't believe I've ever been that much off the mark from my market value.

Especially since I was always looking for a job with the next job in my mind it was always some combination of pay and new skills I could learn.

If my market value got to out of whack with my salary I start interviewing again.

One distasteful interaction I've had with recruiters went as follows: I stated that only a significant (+20%) raise to my salary would incentivize me to leave my current company, and the recruiter said I would never amount to anything in this field if all I cared about was money. I think she was just angry she couldn't get cheap hires for her clients.

[mention of typo removed]

Incredibly good advice as usual. I used your information when negotiating for my current position (internal HR), and earn ~20% more than my colleagues because of said advice (our team shares our compensation info amongst ourselves).

EDIT: Also, fantastic use of the analogy to real estate agents. Highlights what happens when incentives aren't aligned.

Ah, thank you! Fixing that now. (And thanks for the kind words!) UPDATE: Fixed the typo. Thanks again for pointing that out.

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....

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.

This is great to hear! I wish your story were more common - I think everyone would be better off if it were.

The article doesnt describe "your recruiter". It describes some random person calling you asking you about switching jobs.

MY recruiter is often somebody i have a working relationship with, i trust to some extent, and I've vetted. The author seems to not understand this dynamic.

I love my recruiters i work with. I make sure they understand and specialize in my industry, have a good reputation, have good connections, i can't talk honestly too, and other intangibles.

Of course a recruiter isn't trying to get you the very best offer in purely numeric terms, and neither should you. But both of you have the same problem and your incentives are aligned: you shouldn't take two more months to secure and extra $5000 since you are giving up way more in foregone salary.

There are a lot of bad recruiters out there, but you need to make am effort to deal with good ones. Don't treat your resume like buckshot and spray it everywhere. Work with good recruiters and you'll be fine.

And stop the recruiter hate. If you treat your recruiters as enemies, instead of valuable business relationships, I expect you'll probably have problems.

Most of my experience with recruiters has matched this article. Recruiting, on a small scale, is the "volume game" described in this article.

That said, the best recruiters I've known don't look at the game like that. Imagine how the real estate business would change if homeowners were selling a house every couple of years. Realtors would want to attract and nurture relationships with homeowners selling the most expensive houses in order to secure many recurring high-value payoffs. They'd also know that "high-value" homeowners are likely to be friends with other high-value homeowners. If they do their best for one homeowner, that one will likely lead them to other homeowners and high-value payoffs.

Of course, there are precious few recruiters who truly take that approach (even though they all claim otherwise.) Recruiters aren't a free lunch. It takes time and effort to find the rare recruiters who truly want you to maximize your career potential. If/when you find one who truly gets it, however, you should try to nurture that relationship. (You both stand to make a lot of money off of each other over the course of your careers.)

My last job hunt ended in an offer through a recruiter. The offer was a 40% raise from the job I was working at the time. The recruiter was initially skeptical about my desired salary range (which was actually lower than I ended up getting offered), but she listened when I said that I'd be able to get that number.

I wouldn't have been able to get that much money without this recruiter's help. I had another offer at that time where the company asked me what I thought was reasonable and just gave me that. The number was ~15% lower than the offer through the recruiter. She had all the data on what other engineers with comparable skills/experience were making, so she was able to help me realize that I was undercutting myself.

To be clear, this recruiter is an exception to the rule. She's certainly not the only recruiter I've worked with, but she's the first and only recruiter I'll reach out to when I'm looking for new opportunities. She's been a tremendous help in my career, and I try to help her whenever I can by introducing her to great engineers that fit roles she's looking for. Pretty much every other recruiter I've worked with has fit the description laid out in this article.

(full disclosure: I consider this recruiter to be one of my closest friends, so my views are surely biased.)

Wouldn’t this apply to investment bankers who provide M&A advisory services for companies/startups looking to sell? It’s essentially the same business model as real estate.

The salary question is illegal now in California.

It’s true that the CURRENT salary question is illegal in a few states, but salary EXPECTATIONS are still fair game. So there’s still a lot of room to make a misstep, unfortunately.

Asking OP, what market do you work in? Government? Finance? Tech? Health? And in what city?

I'm currently a salary negotiation coach, and most of my clients are in tech (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, some smaller tech companies). In my previous life, I was a project manager and consultant in the HR Software industry. I live in Florida, but have worked for companies based in Florida, California, Indiana.

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 directly).

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.

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...

In D.C., the place where I've spent most of my adult career, that is the case. If your recruiter doesn't tell you the salary range, it's because they (75%) honestly don't know themselves. Either because it may be based on experience of the candidate, or because there are multiple roles which you as a candidate could fill and the company doesn't want to throw out numbers to confuse/hide things.

In fact, it's usually the opposite situation here. It's weird to NOT know the salary range, and how much wiggle room there is. (It honestly helps that salary range is usually defined in the proposal for contract companies to the government, and they've already built in profit before they even begin to hire employees.)

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.

Whenever I read an article with the phrase "stay with me" I go on click-bait alert.

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

Is it hilarious? This kind of negotiation doesn't come easy to most of us, and it's taken me ages to learn by myself. I've probably lost out to a lot of salary just because I didn't know how to negotiate. If someone could have taught me that, I would have paid for it.

Also, the article is good by itself, no?

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.

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.

I agree, especially given the length. Something about the tone seemed off as well -- here's the summary:

Recruiters typically receive a percentage of your salary as commission, but they also optimizing for "time it takes to make a placement".

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.