How badly are you paid?
Don't really get it myself, I think typically such people are drastically undervaluing their time.
Me: I'm not doing DIY, I'd rather pay someone competent than waste my time and energy.
Also Me: I'm getting 100% of the value from this perk goddammit it's free stuff who turns down free stuff.
Your opinion is wide spread, but it erks me. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is an adage millennia old, and true.
The rule is, nothing is free. Nothing. There are exceptions the rule, but that is exceedingly rare, and if you think you're onto one, it's probably a scam.
"strings attached" is another adage, and often you get "free", by having the strings attached to you.
E.g. I was at an 'all-inclusive' resort for work and some of my colleages seemed to think it was their duty to get as much value out of the meals as possible, even trying to calculate the actual cost of different dishes.
Of course it isn't "free" in the sense it is a result of work, but it is free in the sense it has no additional cost.
Source: finally realized that half the reason I went to technical talks that bored me was for free pizza and beer that were bad for me anyway
The brief stint I was at the company, the recruiter gave me tickets to the local professional baseball team that included access to premium suites and tickets to the local professional football team.
But yeah I get it, having a free meal wouldn’t mean much to me.
We weren’t going to hire contractors outside of that agency.
Heck, my manager asked me did I know someone with the same skillset I had, I had a friend who was looking for work and asked for a rate of $80/hour. They wouldn’t hire them directly. I had to negotiate with the recruiter and my manager until we also settled on paying the agency $120/hour to hire my friend so he could get $80.
No my manager also wasn’t responsible for choosing the agency. That was chosen on higher levels.
Maybe 99%. This doesn't work on me. Any swag I am sent from a recruiter gets handed to someone else. I turn down dinner and drinks because I feel like I'm being manupulated. The harder a vendor or recruiter pushes here, the more uneasy I feel about using them. I don't want to hang out with people who only want to be around me so I can give them something.
Edit: Sadly, I think this doesn't help me from the perspective of being recruited, but I can't help not being comfortable playing this game.
My last job tried to address this by having a small technical test of skill that could be thrown at anyone as a first pass before getting any technical people involved. We got virtually no senior role "spam", so we didn't have to worry about making a challenging technical test, we just needed to weed out junior applicants who basically didn't know how to do anything other than apply for the job.
It worked pretty well for us but we were a relatively small company. I don't remember the exact stats, but I'm pretty sure we hired less than 50 people a year (across a couple offices in the US) for the technical roles we used that test for.
1. We are only allowed to hire through either an approved recruiter or the company job portal. The company job portal gets so many applications for each job it's absurd, and we have to sift these ourselves to some degree (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots) so rather than sifting the portal applications we mostly use 2-5 known recruiters who only give us candidates who can do the job. They do the first screenings, if they give us shit candidates we never use them again, so we rarely get a bad candidate through them.
2. Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).