A good independent recruiter will do this. Many senior engineers I know maintain a relationship with a couple of recruiters who know what kind of startups they like and only bring them compelling offers. The recruiter can expect a multi-decade relationship with the engineer and thus has reasonable incentive to treat them well. They will even sometimes place these engineers commission-free when they know it is the right thing.

You can also get into this relationship with certain VCs.

Former indy recruiter here, and this is good advice. The line between "agent" and "recruiter" is blurry in cases of skilled and highly-ethical recruiters, and I'd toyed with changing my model to an agent approach. The issue is that job seekers don't want to pay someone anywhere near what a hiring company pays as a recruiting fee.

I would quite happily pay someone 1-5% of the wage of the position, if I could find someone to do the work for me.

I dont know how to find the people to do that - its not in my wheelhouse.

Recruiters, on the other hand, are paid up to 20% or so of the position's salary to get you to take it.

You're not paying enough.

Searching for the needle is a hell of a lot harder than searching for the haystack.

I think 1-5% is fair to find a job for me - 20% seems reasonable to find a person to take a job.

What you think is fair is not particularly relevant: you're not going to get anybody who's actually good to give you the time of day.

20% and you can shoot as many bullets at the target as you want is a better deal than 1-5% and you can shoot one bullet at a bunch of targets.

You're ignoring my point that the task of finding someone a job, and finding someone for a job, are fundamentally different tasks.

I'm also expecting to pay /something/ for the task, even if nothing suitable is found, hence why the expected fee is lower.

As it is, I've yet to find a company that offers this service for any price - yes, there are plenty of headhunting shops that offer the service to employers - but no one offering the opposite - 20-30 years ago, (I'm told by my friends who work in HR) this was indeed a service you could purchase, but no one offers it anymore.

I'm not ignoring your point, I'm discarding it. The skillset involved is so nearly-completely overlapping that nobody who's any good would take your less money for not-less work. You are asking whoever you want to pay to provide an economically inferior service for less money while they are capable of providing an economically better service for more money.

If you think you're right, I encourage you to put your money where your mouth is and start this firm. But it'll hurt.

Sorry, when you two are speaking about percentages, is that of the annual salary?

That's what I understand. A one-off fee of the percentage of the annual salary.

Yes, to confirm a recruiter's fee is typically anywhere from 15-25% of employee's first year annual salary. So that 150K engineer in NYC earns an independent recruiter (working for herself/himself) anywhere from 22-37K.

Now it's easy to see why some recruiters sometimes act the way they act. People are unlikely to lie just to earn a small fee, but when the numbers get big, the incentive changes.

Not a lot of people do that. As mentioned, it's a service idea I kicked around a bit and wrote an article about that still gets me inquiries years later. 1-5% might make it worthwhile depending on how high ticket an item you are.

The work required by an agent to place a 200K engineer isn't too much different than that of a 50K engineer, other than the 200K engineer likely being more marketable.

And the difference between 1% and 5% is substantial. I don't think I'd offer agent services for 1K, but for 5K I would.

I'm somewhere between those two extremes in pay - but I'd negotiate something that was fair for everyone.

I'm just trying to relo to another market from where I am.

Finding one of those is the hard part - I work mostly in Telecom - so I'm not looking at companies for the most part that are VC funded (or even in the valley)

Ask current and former coworkers or ask former bosses or former HR what recruiters they like working with.