You'd expect that they would be incentivised to place you somewhere bad so that you're a repeat customer, but there's something that seems to make this not true, perhaps reputation?

In terms of money it’s usually a percentage of the salary. So if the recruiter works on 10% then they have incentive to get you as much money as possible.

While $200K vs $220K means a lot to you over the course of your job, they aren’t going to risk losing a placement arguing for you to get $20K more so their firm can get $44K instead of $40k and the recruiter themselves can get maybe 60% of what the firm gets.

There was a famous similar study published in Freakonomics about real estate agents.

https://freakonomics.com/2008/02/real-estate-agents-revisite...

Of course this is done once you have a few years experience and aren't really looking. Though recruiters on LinkedIn & via email reach out and you can casually play the field for fun to potentially giving yourself a huge increase. Job jumping is a good way to really boost your salary.

But £200k vs £400k is real!

That’s the real span for e.g. hedge funds in London. Actually, it was a few years ago. Probably more now!

In 10 years invested at $20K a year that’s 370k at 10% returns (about average for the S&P 500).

Thinking like that is how car manufacturers get people to pay for useless add ons.

On top of that, raises are usually a percentage of current base.

Would you tell someone making $20K not to worry about $40K

One is free from federal and state tax up to $23K (well $30.5K for me this year - check my username) and one is free from Federal, State and FICA up to $4250 if you’re single or $8500 if married.

That means I can shelter $39K from taxes.

That $20K is over half the allowable amount.

No. If you place someone and the company has a 3 month probation period. If the person does not last past probation the recruiter does not get paid.

Unless America is different, this is how it works in Europe, Asia, AU/NZ.

The only time this changes is contract work because contract work done via a recruiter is the recruiter might charge you at $150/hr to the company and pay you $100/hr taking $50/hr for himself.

But we are referring to cases where a good candidate wants $20k more. The recruiter is more interested in convincing a candidate to take the job than negotiating hard for them to get $220K.

The candidate especially in this market isn’t likely to jump ship in a year over $20K

Also most companies who do work with external recruiters only work with one company

I’ve been in software development since 1996 and looked for a job in 1999, 2001 (took a counteroffer), 2008, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2023 and a month ago. My job in BigTech in 2020 fell in my lap.

I have never seen a job market this bad. Even in 2000, as a regular old Windows developer I could easily find a standard enterprise job.

My only saving grace when I was looking both last month and last September was that I had 3.5 years of working at AWS in the Professional Services department (full time direct hire) and AWS partners love to get people from ProServe because they know we can be trusted to talk to decision makers and fly out to clients and lead and do the work.

But I usually would throw my resume up in the air pre-2020 and have multiple job offers fall in my lap.

I have recent experience. It’s definitely slower in the last 2.5 years. I see that as a different issue. If the hiring market is soft, then a recruiter can still be working hard for you if your offers aren’t as good. Some of that sorts out earlier in the process when you pitch yourself to the recruiter to be worth presenting to the employer.

What I personally did in early conversations is express my comfort with a longer search process and focus on the right mutual fit. That let them know that they may be overlapping with other applications, and also that they were competing with my job at the time. I realize I was fortunate to have a job to use as a motivator.

They are motivated to place you in a job, since that's how they get paid, but they want you to be happy with it.

You answered your own question: "they're super expensive for the company who you hire through"

The person that pays the recruiter money is their customer. The item their customers pay for is the recruiter's product, which is you.

So the recruiter's reputation does matters to acquire additional inventory, but it matters more for their actual customers. Selling bad fits to their actual customer, the hiring companies, would be business-ending.

It is so important to understand when you are the product and when you are the customer.