The main difference we've seen is between retained vs. contingency recruiters. Contingency recruiters don't get paid unless they find you a hire, which sounds great in theory but turns it into a lottery for them: spam as many developers and companies as you can, hoping for a big jackpot. It also leads to some of the scummier practices of hiding names and contact information (wouldn't want to lose that commission!), and paying for referrals (after all, if I'm getting $20k for a hire, I can afford to pay out $2k to the person who did the work). They don't really care if you fire the person after 6 months because they'll be on to the next thing (or, even better, they can make another commission off of you!).

Retained recruiters, whether they're contract or full-time, are ones you pay to represent your company. They work off a salary or an hourly rate, like normal employees. They expect to be there in a year or two, so if the hire doesn't work out they'll hear about it. They represent you as a company and don't have any incentive to hide who they're working for or who they're talking to. You can still get clueless recruiters here, but at least the relationship is much better.

I have almost no problem with internal recruiters, it's the external/contingency recruiters that I hate with a fiery passion. They call during work hours, email constantly, and provide VERY little value in my experience.

As others have mentioned, due to the high payouts to these recruiters they are willing to lie their pants off to get you to accept the job. The last recruiter I worked with tried to hide the name of the company which really irked me. I am not some piece of cattle to be herded between companies and I am perfectly capable of looking up information on a company to determine if I want to work there or not.

I don't need a recruiter throwing buzzwords at me that he/she thinks will convince me to take the job. Every call with the recruiter was more painful than the last and then at one point the recruiters supervisor contacted me and used even more BS/flowery language to try and convince me to apply for the job.

A few months after I got a new job (without a recruiter) I was contacted by another recruiter but noticed before I trashed the email that this wasn't from a company of recruiters. Instead it was a recruiter hired by the company looking for programmers. We talked back and forth on email a little and she was very nice and I felt like there was much less over-hyping (still a little but that's to be expected in that position). Within a few days and about 2-3 emails I had a phone call with the co-founder. I ended up not taking the job due to lack of experience in what they were really looking for but it was a very pleasant experience. Contrast that with 5+ calls (3 during work before I told him not to call 9-5) with the external recruiter, a meeting in person, him harassing my reference, and never once being able to talk to anyone at the company they were trying to hire me for.

You know, I was just called by a recruiter from a great company about a great job. I talked to him for a bit, the job sounded great, the commute sounded great, etc. I asked him if I needed to do anything and he said "no, I'll put you against the job req internally, you don't even have to go on-line".

"When should I hear anything?"

"I have a meeting with the hiring manager in 2 days, I'll call you back right after."

A week passes. I call him back, it's 2pm on Tuesday.

<clearly waking up> "oh yes. Well this job is about..." <repeats the original pitch>

"okay, so I know this, and last time we talked you said you had a meeting with the hiring manager and would get back to me, a week ago."

"so...I'm not at my computer, but I have some feedback on my computer, I'll call you back this afternoon?"

"Well was it good or bad feedback?"

"I...I...have it on my computer. Can I call you back this afternoon?"

"Sure"

No call, nothing. It's 3 days later now. At this point I've hit so many red flags I'm not even interested in checking them out anymore. But it is a great company. One of those Top-20 best places to work kind of places. I called a friend of mine who works there and they checked with the hiring manager, but got a non-reply. I'm apparently being put against the position, so that much is true.

It's not the first time I've dealt with this kind of shenanigans. My favorite is the "why do you want to work here?" question which pops up somewhere in the process. And I respond with "I don't you asked me to come, why do you want me to work here?"

Recruiters really are a waste of time and if I had spent more than 20 minutes on the phone with this guy I would feel kind of burned right now. But instead I've just added it to the pile of bizarre recruiter interactions I've had over the years.

On the flip-side, a company my wife used to work for had great success with a professional retained recruiting agency. It took a few months to finally nail down what they were looking for in a candidate, but before long they had a steady stream of qualified resumes coming in. So there's that.

A lot of the comments here are from the employee "I hate being bothered by recruiters" side, which I totally get. But as a (newly promoted) Director of Engineering in SF I'm struggling to make any headway building my team without using contingency recruiters. I'm new to being on the hiring side and my manager is frustrated that my only resource for candidates is to use recruiters (primarily because of the cost). What other things can / should I be doing?

Here are some things I've considered:

- Meetups: Hosting usually gives you a quick pitch to the audience, but there is a real time investment to make a successful meetup that leaves a good impression. I could attend other meetups and try to recruit but I don't want to be "that guy" when everyone else is there to learn

- Craigslist, StackOverflow, LinkedIn, etc... These are all things our recruiters should be covering, but I thought I might get some traction as an engineer trying to hire people. Not much luck so far

- Hiring remotely. This is a little scary but I think that there's a big talent pool outside of the Bay Area that we're not seeing because they don't want to live here. I've read a lot about how to create successful remote teams but I'm wary of building a team that's 95% in-office with one guy in Alabama who's out of the loop.

I'd really love your thoughts or advice on this.

EDIT: Formatting

If you care about maximizing your take home pay, you will not use a recruiter.

Regardless of what they tell you, their fee will factor into your salary negotiations and give you less leverage to the upside.

While the potential employer won't tell you the recruiters fee, behind closed doors the conversation goes "Well, he wants 125K and the recruiter has a 10% fee on top of that, so..."

You're automatically a more expensive employee if you go through a recruiter and that's a bad thing. If you're half-way good at what you do, reach out to the company you like directly.

Nothing wrong with recruiters, but never make the mistake of thinking they are your friend no matter how 'nice' they appear. They follow the money. It's their job to do that.

I can remember being on contract and wrangling a bottle of Whiskey out of the agent. I had to go into the car park and collect it quietly there as he didn't want the other people he was managing on site to get wind he'd given me it. Funny in an odd way.

Remember that an agent is just following the money. A lot are on basic + bonuses. One reason I used to keep the company and address of my current role off my CV is that their focus is so much on locating new roles.

Of note if you hate an ex-boss, just casually mention that you worked for X :D

I don't get all the recruiter hate. You're the pretty girl/handsome guy at the dance, for now. The unsolicited attention will fade with age. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Recruiters who suck mostly suck because that's what their customers want.

When you get a call from some shady recruiter asking you about a 6 month contract in Omaha, you're getting that call because a company or government agency decided to start doing strategic sourcing and procure people the same way they buy any other commodity.

So two things explain the poor quality -- they are literally squeezing every penny out of the process and are hiring idiots

The other thing is that they don't want to find candidates. They want to have low rates of success -- they're just engaging in a recruitment process to justify hiring workers on guest visas who can be more effectively exploited. If you look in an industry "trade rag", you'll usually find a page with some hard to read, small print job postings -- those are "compliance" advertisements purchased for the same purpose.

The reason full-time internal recruiters tend to operate very differently to external recruiters is primarily because the incentive is entirely different.

Full-time internal recruiters are rarely financially incentivised per hire or to hit targets. If they are, I'd strongly argue that the company employing them is utilising the recruiter incorrectly.

External recruiters live and die by their targets and their commission. Money is a terrible incentive (possibly the worst) for encouraging recruiters to actually help their candidates or clients.

Just like the best engineers/designers/etc, the best recruiters are those that go above and beyond simply to help their company succeed. When you use an external recruiter, that company is an agency.

A recruiter setup an interview for me about an hour or so south of where I live. He talked up how great of a person the C is. I show up early and wait for the recruiter. He showed 10 minutes AFTER the interview was suppose to start and only then actually met the C person.

I started talking to the interviewer and found out that one of the main things on his list for a candidate was to be local. Within 5 minutes we both knew this wasn't going anywhere and wrapped it up.

If you haven't read Elaine Wherry's post "The Recruiter Honeypot," you haven't read the best one about recruiters. Check it out here: http://www.ewherry.com/2012/06/the-recruiter-honeypot/

A lot has been written about recruiter incentives in these comments, but the market is still clearing even with extremely high fees. The reason bad recruiters can still get paid really well is because there's zero transparency and therefore almost no accountability. I think most of the problems with recruiters could be solved just by addressing this issue.

When you're looking for a good restaurant you can go on Yelp to find one, and you can tell from the reviews what to expect. The same goes if you have a bad restaurant experience -- you can write a review on Yelp and warn others about the crappy food / service / etc. Nothing really exists like this in the recruiting space, despite people really loving to write about how much recruiters suck. And a lot of them do, but what real accountability is there? If a recruiter gets in touch about a job, how do I know he's not super shady? If I'm an employer and need to hire rapidly, how can I find good recruiters other than word of mouth? There should be a Yelp for recruiters. If you're slimy, the world should know about it, and you should have a hard time finding new business and new candidates. If you're a great recruiter who's adding real value, that should be obvious, too, so that others will want to work with you.

Some friends and I have been working on making this a reality. Check it out. Leave a review of your worst recruiting experience (worst one we'll feature on the main page). Or your best one. Or both. And if you're interested in helping us with this project, get in touch. www.hiredex.com

Is it not possible to do some sort of "phased" payment to recruiters? So instead of giving 10% of the employees salary if actually employed (or employed for at least 3 months or other variations), how about giving increased percentages depending on actual time employed. So maybe 1% of salary if employed, then 5% is the employee stays for more than 3 months, then 1% every 3 months thereafter until it reaches 10-15% or some other amount.

I would imagine that this would encourage recruiters to not do a shotgun approach (i.e. do any employee you can) as only the actually good employees will be profitable, and the others will probably end up costing the recruiter more than the first 5% he could get.

Of course I have no experience doing this and all figures are made up, but are there any obvious reasons of why this would not work? Maybe in the end the final percentage is higher than the typical market rate for recruiters (i.e. >10% maybe) but extended over a longer period so the recruiter would have to actually cherry-pick the candidates.

Hired is basically a team of recruiters (well, at least there are a good 10 of us coming from various flavors of recruiting) and even we have a need for external recruiters and internal interview coordinator.

The external recruiters we use are in markets we don't know a lot about (like Marketing - which we are hiring for big time right now). The internal coordinator helps keep onsites organized and managing the huge amount of interview flow through the organization so that key stakeholders still have some time to do their jobs.

The low-end contingency recruiting agencies have given the whole profession in San Francisco a bad name, when in reality there are great people (like Oliver, from the post) who do great work and are incredibly valuable to a fast growing organization.

So how does someone who is a recruitee get connected with a DECENT recruiter?

All I seem to get are the body shop type places contacting me (aka Robert Half, TEKSystems). I've told them that I would be interested if and only if it would mean a step up, go on to explain my current levels of pay,vacation, sick, bonus, etc, and say if the opportunity isn't better than that, then we have nothing to talk about.

Of course they start trying to hard sell me, and it turns out these places have zero benefits.

I'd entertain discussion with someone looking for my skills that would be willing to pay for them.

My experience of recruiters is mostly good. I spend almost no time saying no to offers that I don't like. For offers that might be good, I have a better negotiating position than if I applied for the job - I still have my current job, so they have to make a really good offer, otherwise I won't switch.

I am mostly contacted on LinkedIn, and I think, on balance, that it works well there. I've written about it here: http://henrikwarne.com/2013/08/21/linkedin-good-or-bad/

I hate the ones that require you to give an in person interview with them before they'll suggest you for an in person interview with a company. Can someone explain the reason they do this?

My big problem with IT recruiters at the moments is the constant calls. Come on guys, send me a damn email. I am at a work, not I don't have time to talk to you now. Put your stupid questions, which are the same questions every time, in an email, and I will copy and paste from the last time someone did it.

What would be great is finding out how much exactly recruiters and referral services charge. For instance, how much can Hired.com charge per referral to afford to give several thousand back to the employee.

Like the talent you're trying to hire, recruiters span the spectrum from horrible to not-so-horrible... with the occasional gem. Now if only there were recruiters to help find good recruiters.

No

You need to start considering your company's reputation as an employer of technologists. If there is no reputation, you need to start building it. Perhaps sponsoring a meetup for a few hundred dollars is a good investment, as it shows your company supports the community. Perhaps one of your engineers could speak at a meetup, to show off some of your talent or give a sniff of your interesting products and projects.

Once you've built a bit of a hiring brand, you'll start to see incoming traffic coming in organically instead of having to go and do outreach all the time.

I've not been to tons of meetups, but. Ime, half-way through there's five or so minutes for a few people to pitch their company. They keep it short, and stick around after to talk to anyone who is actually interested. To me, it feels more like supporting programmers rather than hunting them. I may be naive ;). But especially for me as a relatively new programmer, without a huge professional network, I appreciate it.

The number one source of candidates should be your own social network, and the number two source is the social network of other engineers at your company. Having an employee referral program is nice, but nothing beats just asking your best engineers directly who they've worked with that you should be working together on recruiting.

I've built iOS and android dev teams at way below market costs by doing one thing. Going to meetups and community events, showing intense passion for building great products and being a strong pitchman for working on my team.

Most people want to work on exciting projects with energetic and curious people. It's infectious.

I can't imagine anyone not liking your short pitch at a relevant meetup. The ability to chat with you afterwards, on a level playing field is a huge boon to making a good connection. It does take time though.

I'm a recruiter, and I often see the opposite effect. There are quite a few candidates that are underpaid and don't realize it until they start talking to a recruiter. If they'd gone directly to the company they may have received that 30% bump to bring them to market rate, but perhaps not. One benefit a recruiter provides to job seekers is the info on the market - of course this only applies to recruiters that know the market.

I'd think fee only figures into the salary conversation when fees are exorbitant (which they can be), otherwise it's a cost of doing business for some companies. Once a startup taps out their friends and family plan, they often reach out to me for some hires, and those usually lead to some referrals from those new hires and the company can subsist off friends/family of the new hires for a little longer.

This is part of the reason I charge lower and fixed (fees paid in advance, well below market rate, and fixed meaning not tied to salary) fees than my competitors, as it takes this argument off the table from both sides. It doesn't prohibit a company from making a hire because the 'tax' on the hire isn't high enough to be prohibitive, and candidates know that the 'tax' on their hire is also relatively low and prepaid. Under this model, any hire is judged based on compensation to value, and not based on a high 'tax'/fee.

On the flip side, what if you're terrible at negotiating? For those people, even s theoretically reduced salary may be higher than what they'd get for themselves.

Agreed, most people follow the money. To me it's just a matter of understanding that their interests are not necessarily aligned with yours. Recruiters want to fill the position quickly. Those smart enough to want your repeat business will want to make sure you're happy with the hire, but their interest isn't an ideal candidate who excels in the job. That's not their concern, and I don't blame them. We just have to set ground rules.

For an employer, that means making sure they're not coaching candidates too much. I once learned a recruiter had coached a candidate so much that their resume was highlighting skills that were actually very weak. They even noted words we'd used a lot in explaining the position, and coached the candidate to use these words in stories. No one outright lied, as far as I could tell, but the recruiter was going a little too far in forcing the fit.

Potential employees need to watch out, too, because the recruiter doesn't really care if you're going to be happy or fulfilled in the position. I've also used recruiters to find jobs, and they helped me find a really great position once early in my career. The recruiter kept trying to get me in to interview for positions I didn't want. He'd say, "just check it out and see." Sorry, no. Make it clear you're not going to waste your time if it doesn't move you in the direction you want or offer the pay you demand.

Recruiters are often maligned on HN because of Linkedin spammers, but I think that's a minority of bad recruiters making more noise than everyone else. My view is that they can be a useful channel as long as you do your homework and know what the recruiter is doing.

Usually the 20K payout is staged and contingent on the employee working through a target date, say 1 year.

This has made me want to call them up at 50 weeks and ask for that bottle of whiskey or brown paper bag of cash, otherwise I walk. Oddly enough, I've had plenty of recruiters that placed me call me up on that 53rd week and try to place me somewhere else.

Too bad the employees are not getting in on this racket?

I'm sure this isn't universal (though I don't think I'm the only one), but my experience with recruiters has been a series of cold emails for jobs that aren't even close to my areas of expertise in areas nowhere near where I'm located. They usually incorporate some form of "if this isn't a good opportunity for you, can you please forward it to someone else" with no attempt to actually get to know me or what I'm looking for. That type of stuff is borderline spam, regardless of market demand.

Well it's "attention" I guess, but is it the right kind?

A better analogy might the pretty girl walking home from high school, of the rather hick-ish / paleosuburban sort -- when the older dropout pulls up in his muscle car and asks "Hey babe, wanna party?"

I get about the same feeling when talking to recruiters, most of the time.

The problem is when the unsolicited attention becomes a distraction. When you have engineers that can have their work process interrupted by something as trivial as workplace banter, an overzealous recruiter that calls incessantly, spams your email with job listings (for "anyone you might know looking for a new opportunity"), and in general doesn't know when to stop is something most developers would rather do without.

I've worked with a few good recruiters, but even over a 5-month job search and talking to every major recruiting firm in town, I got zero actual job offers (and only one real promising lead that fizzled out on the company's side). There's a LOT of inefficiency in the system.

There's a world of difference between being approached by recruiters who have been retained to find talented people, and being hounded by recruiters who are trying to place their allotted candidates where ever they can.

This sounds a bit like contract to hire, but it's an interesting idea. It's the counterpoint to how recruiters debate the issue of guarantees.

Companies want long guarantee periods, meaning if they use a recruiter and pay 25% of salary, they want a refund if the candidate leaves quickly. Most guarantees I see are 90 days.

When a company wants asks for a six month or one year guarantee, recruiters may use the rebuttal "Well if my candidate stays for 20 years, are you going to pay me a 50% fee instead of 25%?"

It's an interesting concept to reward recruiters who provide candidates that stay for a long time. I've never seen any data to suggest that new hires that come from agencies have any longer or shorter tenures than those found through other means, so I'm not sure how a phased payment system would really help change much (other than recruiters having a vested interest in their hires staying at a job for as long as possible, which is the object of contract recruiting).

In Australia, it is not uncommon that the employee has to stay with the company for 3 months, for a reward to be given to the recruiter.