I did this early in my career and ended up underpaid in an unfulfilling job. As a candidate (especially one without sufficient experience in the industry), it's difficult to tell if a recruiter is good or if they're just looking to place people as quickly as possible, fit be damned.

If you don't know what to look out for, bad recruiters can frequently come off as better from a candidate's perspective. They get you more interviews, and they won't tell you to pass on an offer because the compensation is too low. You generally don't find out that the job would be a poor fit until you interview, and you won't find out that you're being underpaid until you've already started (if ever).

It's important to understand the incentives of the recruiter in order to have a successful relationship with them, and to keep your expectations realistic.

(No, a government employee doesn't particularly care about someone they just met, either. They have their own incentives, too.)

I've done this for my current job and the job I'm about to move to. It works pretty well - my recruiter sources gigs for me, starts with a decent idea of what the TC will be from the outset, gets feedback from the companies and pokes them to keep the process moving at a decent clip. I'm looking at a 20ish% raise on this next job hop, and the process has been easy. We just email/text/call, I haven't actually "applied" anywhere, didn't do any Leetcode/Hackerrank BS, just did a few interviews. I've got four offers right now. It's not FAANG, but I have no interest in working at FAANG. The process side of things was a big sell for me - I gave him some guidelines about industries I wanted to avoid (payday loan type companies, adtech, the defense industry), he brings me potential places, I pick the ones that sound interesting, and we start running down the track. Low effort, high yield.

I've known a couple of pretty good recruiters (and a lot of lousy ones) over the years. The biggest thing not usually discussed is that the recruiting industry resembles industries like real estate agents and sales. It's an extremely high-churn, revolving door, of mostly young people with no prior experience, themselves being recruited by agencies to do recruiting. And what happens is, generally, over time the good ones will stick around and will do actual recruiting for maybe 2-5 years or so and after that, generally, will lead (and/or manage) a team of recruiters of a book of business (aka a basket of clients or a region or an industry) and will stop doing individual recruiting pure-play by themselves. Some will also leave an agency and then go to do internal recruiting/HR for a specific company, too.

This isn't true, of course, for ALL recruiters, but definitely most. So as you can see, the only downside of finding a really good recruiter is that because they are good, they won't necessarily stay an individual recruiter forever. And the bad ones? Well, they churn and burn out relatively quickly.

A good recruiter can easily be discovered: how long have they been with their current agency? The longer, the more likely they're good. Bad recruiters job hop. A year here. A year there. LinkedIn gives it all away. At 3+ years at one agency, they're performing at or above expectations. Most agencies are honest, push honesty, and rid themselves of recruiters that lie or underperform. Good recruiters build momentum through referrals and repeat business. So that's how you tell. Not foolproof, but a solid tactic.

What agencies are reputable? Most recruited I encounter work at some Tech-<buzzword> Inc. variation. For instance if you're interested in the FAANG/Unicorn space what agencies even work with them and how would you find that out in the first place?

> partner with a recruiter they like

Years ago, recruiters seems to have a line on positions I had never heard of. Nowadays when recruiters contact me, they are already about positions I know of on Linkedin etc. Maybe with more people working from home (including me) this might change.

One thing recruiters can still good for is post-interview feedback. Some companies feel more comfortable giving it to recruiters than directly to you.

> One thing recruiters can still good for is post-interview feedback. Some companies feel more comfortable giving it to recruiters than directly to you.

Echoing this. In fact, it holds true even for in-house company recruiters, as long as they feel you are a reasonable person and are comfortable disclosing it to you (without fearing that you will start causing problems due to finding out this info). Yes, even FAANG-level recruiters can be ok with that, but that's on a case by case basis.

I personally noticed that over the years (as I got better at interviewing and at communication in general), recruiters themselves would start going "technically I shouldn't be telling you this, but..." more and more frequently. And no, I never asked for "more detailed feedback", they just decided to volunteer it themselves. I can imagine that asking it directly would have been fairly awkward, ("but can you give me the real feedback instead of what you just gave me?")

And the wild thing is that they weren't bsing or just giving me generic "sorry it didn't work out, practice your algos and systems design more". They would give a pretty detailed feedback, half of which would match the stuff I already knew about my performance on those interviews (e.g., "I felt I did poorly on interview #3 due to me not being able to efficiently optimize this one approach and then maybe being a bit too vague during systems design round in the beginning"), which acted as my personal litmus test on the legitimacy of the feedback. And with the other half being brand new information that actually opened my eyes to some blindspots I've been totally missing.

It's to the point where you can usually copy paste a few lines of job description from the recruiter's email with the "brand new opening at a confidential client" into Google and find the original posting from the company.

I'm a recruiter that does precisely this. I don't collect resumes. I view myself as a talent agent for people in tech. A majority of the candidates I work with come from friends/colleagues whom I've worked with in the past. It's a win-win-win. Everyone involved in the process avoids wasting time.

I was a tech recruiter before moving into eng work. I always preferred if someone I'd placed in the past or gotten a number of good interviews for reached out to me if they were looking but I never really expected it.

Even if they did it often depended on what I was working on at that moment. The might be the best backend rails engineer I've ever worked with but if I'm only working on front end react roles I'm not going to have anything for them.

Because I had relationships I could call past clients who I know needed good rails folks and pitch this persons background but they would open up a role maybe 25% of the time?

It's just difficult because third party recruiters don't really control the roles they work on.

I've always been selective with agents and jobs to apply for then stay for a while, I think its a good approach, however my friends who apply to every single thing seem to do better, maybe they get more interview practice.

I would, but the previous recruiters I've worked with, that are good and that got me hired, often become in-house recruiters for specific companies. This makes sense because those jobs are typically better-paid and less stressful, so of course the best recruiters will gravitate to them with time.

So now I focus on filtering the 5-10 new recruiters that contact me through linkedin in or my email every day down to the positions I'm actually interested in.

Recruiters are severely limited in the number of roles they can offer you are severely limiting yourself if you do this.

How does one find a recruiter like this?

Ime they are somewhere in the neighborhood of Car Salesman, trying to get their commission at all costs and bringing jobs that are only tangentially related to my experience to the table.

From my experience the better paying companies have their own internal recruiters. So unless they bounce around FANG~ish companies, your likely to leave money on the table doing this.

I've definitely passed more technical/cultural interviews on my own than I have found recruiters like that. I think you got pretty lucky in that regard.

This might be a solid business idea. Anyone built a model like this before?