I’m a software engineer that started a recruiting company. The current state of the industry is pretty bad. We are trying a different approach- we are transparent. We share all the details about the company right out of the gate. Including salary info. We refuse to work with companies that won’t let us publish salary ranges. I’d love feedback (https://app.facet.net/jobs/search)

Indeed I think many recruiters have it backwards. I've had good and bad experiences. There are recruiters who understand the long term game as a salesman, who build win-win relations and check in on you every few years. Those are the people that will absolutely sell your CV to your future boss and those are the people I have no problem in acting on my behalf as an intermediary.

Edit: I see now that it is filtering on salary (which is visible if you look at the listing details), but the summary is showing total comp.

So much this. I've had many conversations with interesting companies that have good pay and cool products, but recruiters/hr keep coming up with bullshit policies and processes that are just obnoxious and only serve to sort out the compliant from the competent.

I love this distinction. So concise and clear. Thanks.

It seems like it would usually be in the best interest of the potential candidate to work through the recruiter. By having been sought out, you have an advantage. You can actually talk to a recruiter and check status of your progress, where as a web application is a black box of which you may never hear another word. At some point the recruiter is going to feel invested in you.

Why would I skip the recruiter and apply directly unless the recruiter is a non-helpful middleman? I’d love to have a direct contact to negotiate the whole process.

I've toyed with the idea of finding a for-fee recruiter on my own to spam these companies and their listings and pre-negotiate out something really interesting for myself. But that's more like a sports agent. Anyone know a tech sports agency to Jerry Maguire myself with? :D

(I know, first world diva problems, sigh... it's still grating though)

Sure, he's getting like $30k from my employer in a month, but whatever. That $30k has almost no impact on my compensation.

He mainly does Dallas, but my position is fully remote.

Email is my username with one less 0, at gmail

The fact that there seem to be more recruiters than competent developers sometimes tells me a diva status is deserved.

The thing is, a recruiter's pay can easily be 10K per placed candidate. Looking at my current pay, that means they only need to place a handful of people a year to earn as much as I do.

tldr - they do exist, but in very short supply (like many skilled/talented people in most industries)

Not exactly an agent, but you can hire a negotiation consultant at levels.fyi. When you get to the nosebleed levels of comp, it makes sense to have a specialist in your corner.

I've heard this a few times as well over my career, I wonder what-beyond missing out on that sweet contingency fee-recruiters have to lose by, as the article suggest: just being freaking transparent with candidates

Asking for a friend. Does anybody know what this commission is?

Think of all the engineers that hate recruiters. A recruiter has to talk to those folks every day.

Like, I just don't understand the audacity of most of them. Especially when almost invariably their competitive pay is 30% of what even base level fangs would offer. Its a complete waste of everyone's time.

One of the most accurate descriptions I’ve ever read about it is “Don’t feed the beast - the great tech recruiter infestation” [1 - though an archive since the original has been taken down].

[1]: https://gist.github.com/CumpsD/696599d1bd4cd472a056586967293...

They tend to stick around the industry for a while, not treat you like a mushroom (keep you in the dark, bury you in bullshit), and respond humanly to human requests.

You can safely block the one you're describing here, and we'll all be better if that's the standard response.

I'm astounded at how awful recruiters have gotten. What's insane to me is how no one in the industry seems to question the spray and pray approach to recruiting.

There are a few "whoa that's neat!" things on my resume such that if a recruiter or hiring manager looked at it they would certainly notice. This works as a great test for if a recruiter is really looking at me or just spamming a keyword on my linkedin. This filters out essentially all recruiter spam.

What's funny though is how much energy companies spend to pretend like they've read your resume and want the actual you as a candidate in any way. Facebook recently tried a tactic of sending email from the hiring manager. "I really want you on my team, let's find a time to chat!" But clearly it was just an automated email since the message didn't mention any of my resume that might make me a particularly interesting candidate for the team. Another company clearly automatically scraped my resume to make it sound like the read it, but picked the most bizarre, nonsensical things to pull from it.

The funny thing is, even though I love my current job, if you came to me as said "it_does_follow, I've noticed that you worked on XXX and YYY projects, we really need someone who could do that type of work for our team, we're working on exactly these type of problems" and they touched on the actual work I've done that I'm proud of, I would jump on a call in a heart beat.

Every engineer really would prefer to work on problems in their particular domain that interest them, for a team that values them as an individual. I am certain that if recruiters spent their time targeting a much smaller pool of good candidates that really are a match for the role, they would have much higher success rates.

In all seriousness, my experience with third party recruiters overall has been quite good. One sought me out and continued to follow up until it sounded like a good deal, and in the end I won a sign-on bonus, decent salary, and felt like I started a good working relationship with the recruiter themselves, too.

Now, this guy hits me up for when he has potential matches for my team. It's been really good. I'm sure like most things, there are good recruiters and bad ones, regardless of first or third party.

Might be worth a try if you like having a clean inbox.

Oh well! Guess it will be remote work at a normal company for me then.

Instead I get wordy yet vague e-mails or dodgy calls where they don't dare drop the actual name of the companies until you've agreed to go on an interview. And of course, being recruiters instead of actual engineers, they don't actually know what they're talking about.

I just don't get it. I've only been approached by a 'first party' recruiter once, for Google Docs in Germany. I didn't want to relocate or work on Docs though so that was a pass for me, and that was after the 'shine' of Google had passed as well.

One recruiter just couldn't understand that the commute for me was major. I had just left a job which had a 1-1.5hr commute each way for me, and I was looking exclusively for something with no more than a 30 minute commute. They kept trying to toss my resume at jobs that had equivalent or longer commutes because "the perks are really nice" or the "pay was really good". Which I took to mean their commission would be really good.

The only roles I've ever accepted were roles that involved a hiring manager reaching out directly to me. There's a reason for this, namely that the only recruiters worth a damn seem to be working in boutique firms and want to take a significant bite out of my future pay.

Really, just avoid them if possible.

- the transactional part of setting up interview loops, coordinating schedules, etc is extremely tedious for a field of 3-5 serious candidates for a given role. Internal recruiter takes all of this away from a hiring manager who has other duties.

- an internal recruiter can plow through LinkedIn to find solid candidates, identifying ones for the hiring manager to review and, if qualified, reach out to. Again, tedious work for a hiring manager with other responsibilities.

Your job should also include lots of time on LinkedIn searching, as many HMs do today. Letting a recruiter do this for you will give you many more bad interviews (expensive) than you'd get otherwise.

But apparently "tedious work" is above a HM. Have fun being on conference calls all day, pretending that you and not the engineers are the ones who do the work. Worker self management needs to become more of a thing in this field in general if we can't trust HMs to take an active role in candidate selection. Companies that disvow managers and empower their employees produce far more excellent work (e.g. valve) even if they don't always do it on the schedule that execs want - so this would be a net positive for the industry.

In most cases that I've seen the internal recruiters have strong relationships with the hiring managers and are incentivized to make sure the hires actually succeed.