Flash Harry was played by the recently deceased George Cole, gawd bless 'im. I've had first hand experience of the London recruitment scene, as permie and contractor, for many years now, and much of it is just as described in this funny & truthful article. However, one malpractice the author misses is Shitheads bunging brown envelopes to HR staff at large corps to manipulate the PSL. Also, there are some good recruiters out there who know and understand the skill sets they trade in. I've been lucky enough to use a couple of them as a hiring manager when I was permie at a bank. But they are very much in a minority...
I'm looking for work right now (need an embedded engineer in the UK?) and some job boards have a tickbox "[]agency" or "[]direct employer" and most of the direct employer ones are also recruiters. That is a small thing but it's pure evil. And the sad thing is I'm sure that if I asked a recruiter "how can you sleep at night doing this" he'd just shrug and laugh because to him it's normal.
Sorry, that comma changed the meaning of the sentence from "A or B" to "A? B?". You don't put a comma before "or". The answer to that question would be neither. It's just normal recruiter ads that tick the box direct employer despite not being such to get through the filter.
If a company is using an external recruiter the recruiter will list the company name. I only ever saw this once in my life when a company used a recruiter exclusively.
And yet they are our only weapon against business owners who are just as clueless but lack the incentive to pay a competitive wage. When it comes to salary negotiation, it's nice to have Shithead in your corner.
If you have a good recruiter (the last one I worked with was such) they'll negotiate for you. This one asked me what I was looking for, said I could get more than that, and then got even more than that for me. Just because they have industry data and like jobs to back up the negotiation.
I've had bad ones of course, I think everyone has. But the good ones can do a lot more leg work than you have time for and find you a much better situation than you could find on your own, plus play both sides to make their comission as big as possible which benefits you.
more if you as an individual are not good as negotiating (and in IT there can be a higher % of people with less than stellar social skills) then these people will negotiate on your behalf. Its their job to negotiate so if they want to place you you tell them you want $x per day and if they dont get it for you you don't do the job.
They are more likely to negotiate against you than for you. They will tell you the company is offering less than what they actually are, and they will tell the company that you are asking for more than you actually are. Then, if it's at all close, they don't have to actually negotiate, they can find the middle on their own and both of you are happy with the outcome because you didn't know the original set-point.
Yes - you might assume 'well, they get a percentage of what I get so our interests are aligned'. Sure, they do, but their downside if they don't place you is that they get a percentage of nothing, whereas their downside if they place you for less than your value is they get a percentage of a lot of money instead of a percentage of a load of money. Also, they are hoping to work with the hiring company again, whereas they will likely never have to speak to you after you're hired, so who are they going to do a favor for?
So no, your interests really aren't aligned, and they will screw candidates on salary negotiation, take the slight hit on commission, and then make it up in volume.
Many companies are now sharing some of the recruiter costs with the employee if they go direct. In London [currently] it is an employee market, so this is a simple and effective incentive.
The workers are poorly pad because they accept the offers. The recruiters are there because companies like them, I don't know exactly why? Maybe the whole procedure results in lower salaries?
Why not have a lawyer help negotiate on your behalf instead? Employment contracts can get complicated enough that you might want to consult with one regardless.
Eh. If you can't negotiate yourself then you're still going to end up in trouble down the road when Shithead isn't there to negotiate for you in your job.
The recruiter's percentage of what you get is small enough that an extra couple thousand or whatever is much smaller to him than to you and, anyway, closing three deals a little lower than he'd like is better than closing one on the high end.
Have you ever met a recruiter who actually does this? In my experience, recruiters are about matching companies and people for interviews, and the handoff occurs there. I've never heard of someone having the recruiter negotiate on their behalf.
This argument doesn't scan at all. Employer's compensation maximum being equal, you'd be able to negotiate a 25-30% higher salary without the recruiter's cut being a part of total compensation.
At least in the US, the whole recruiting industry hit its nadir during the dot-com bubble of 2000. I remember getting a cold-call from a recruiter, "Hey, got a great gig at a soon-to-IPO startup for a Solaris and Linux guru", "No thanks", hang up, the phone next to me rings, same dude, literally just dialing up the extension tree.
My boss at the time had a strategy where whenever a recruiter called offering "top notch" development talent, he would demand that he only wanted people with >15 years of java experience (remember, this was in 2000, and we also weren't a java shop). If they said, "Absolutely, no problem", they went on the banned list. Most recruiters failed this test.
The whole market was so frothy, I remember people who went from being bartenders to high-end tech recruiters making crazy money and doing coke with their clients in the bars they used to work at...and then back to bartending when the bubble burst.
Today, I feel like it's settled into an annoying-but-manageable background noise. I still get random recruiter reachouts, "Hey, I have an immediate opportunity for a contract Oracle DBA in illinois at $20/hour, interested?" (no, of course), but at least it's easy enough to hang up on them.
Hah. We had something similar one day on a team I used to work with in London. The agent had obviously been given the task of poaching a developer from our team but was utterly failing at it.
One by one, all 16 of us got a phone call at our desks, with no more than a few seconds between each call. By the third call we all knew what was going on so we all just laughed and told the guy to sod off.
Such a bungled effort - even if someone had wanted to take up the offer it would have been impossible at that point to say anything other than "LOL, no thanks buddy"
In NY during that time period one company got a cold call from a head hunter asking to speak to "Mitch" or some name like that. That was the dog's name. They had gotten some list of names and it included the office dog.
In the fall of 2002 (after the dot-com bubble burst) I was laid off and looking for a job. One of the more memorable job postings had a requirement of 5 years .Net experience.
I'm way younger but this sounds about right. Every once in awhile I get a recruiter trying to add me on LinkedIn but nothing like the harassment and weirdness described in the article.
Then again I'm also in the US. Sounds like the UK could really use some help with these guys, assuming the source is good.
To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than Shithead would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be.
There are limits to this, and having someone from your team refer someone they know does not guarantee they will be an excellent worker, but I would tend to agreed that the overall quality of your team will be much higher this way.
Agreed. You need to be careful with exactly how much the bounty is. Too low and people won't bother. Too high and people will recommend anyone they know.
I find recommendations for peers are almost always high quality simply because people want to work with good people.
Bounty payout can also be phased. My current employer does half upfront and half once the hire has been with us for 6 months (i.e.: trial period). The bonus are small but not inconsequential (think a nice vacation or down payment on a Camry...) This has been pretty successful.
On top of this, make the work environment nice enough that your staff will recommend you.
My current job was very strongly recommended to me by a friend and former colleague (who also got a small referral bonus when I was hired), and I'm pleased to say he was not exaggerating.
I've been honest with friends about about the pros and cons of my workplaces. The cons have normally seemed quite easy to fix, but nobody responsible cared to fix it (unfortunately, this part is not easy to fix).
That's still not good enough. I've had recruiters look at who my current employer is then call the public phone number of the company (the reception) and ask for my name. I'm not joking. Happened more than once.
Recruiters would call the office switchboard and ask to be transferred to my extension while I sat on a trading desk next to a managing director (read: dude who brings in major $$$ for the firm).
I have UK recruiters calling the number listed on our website and try to get patched through to my employees. And when I tell them that they just called the boss, they're not even embarrassed and just try again the next day. Only stopped when I called their boss.
I don't usually object to recruiters and haven't had any major issues with them (one saying "I notice you have Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP experience... what about LAMP, do you have any experience with that?" did make me laugh though!) but one did go too far and when they couldn't get hold of me, Googled my name, found my name on an info page for a club night I DJed at, called the promoter's number (who was a friend of mine) and told him he urgently needed to get hold of me regarding work. Needless to say both I and my friend were pretty p*ed off (he used the line "come on, I know the best people are hard to track down" as if that made it okay) and he didn't get the time of day from me!
This is common practice in London. I stopped answering calls with the reception ID as they are normally just recruiters doing what you mention.
The problem is that somehow they get my mobile number and stealing contacts as they themselves move between recruitment agencies is also common practice.
My voicemail recording is just several minutes of classical music with the occasional "All of our representatives are currently busy at this time. Please stay on the line and we'll be with you shortly." at regular intervals.
That's a nice idea too, but in reality it creates trouble (I tried it once). For example, my bank's fraud department often likes calling me several times a day asking me to "verify" transactions. I told them several times to NEVER call me, and that I will monitor my transactions via the online interface and call in the event of suspected fraud. However, they continued calling me, often at the most inconvenient times. Like when I have a bag slung across my shoulder, a grocery bag in one hand, a hot drink in the other, and standing on crowded public transit, they expect me to answer my phone, spill my drink, fall over on a moving train, and yell my social security number in front of everyone on the train? To top that, don't they realize that I need to login to my AWS account and check my instance usage before I can "verify" any transactions? Sorry bank, just DO NOT CALL. Ever. Period. E-mail me. This is the 21st century.
So back when I had one of those error message tones, they once decided that my contact information was "out of date" and just disabled my credit card while I was eating lunch, leaving me stranded at a restaurant like a fool, ATM and credit cards all disabled, without any way to pay. (Like seriously, are you trying to stop fraud, or stop your own customers?)
This is an angry angry rant... and I'm not sure I agree. Some recruiters are pretty good. I was placed by one and I consider another an excellent giver of advice; he actually advised me to take a competing offer from another recruiter (of which I did not mention the name or deal, just the parameters). Generally my experience has been positive.
You know, I like how there is this view out there that anyone who's doing classically "business" or "sales" work is not actually working that hard. I know some recruiters. They aren't the world's smartest people, but the successful ones work really damn hard. They don't make more than minimum wage unless they place people.
These guys are cold calling, searching LinkedIn, crawling phone trees, and sending requests all day. When they can they're touching up resumes and doing screening/placement interviews.
Moreover, their technical is different than your technical. It's social hacking and networking. It's learning how to find better opportunities and better people faster.
You might not like that they're Ronin, and work socially. However, they're pulling 12-15 hour days to make their sale.
As I don't subscribe to the labor theory of value, I don't care how much effort they put in. I care about the value of the results they produce.
To a lesser extent, I also care if any of the manure that they shovel will stick to my heel.
In theory, you should be able to come out ahead by delegating job search to someone who is better at recruiting than anything else, when you are better at software than job-searching, even if you are still better in absolute terms at recruiting than the recruiter. In practice... well, let's just say that specialization only works if the single best thing you can do offers positive value to the market. If your top skill is wasting other people's time, no one is going to hire you for that.
I would have to add to what you've said, that turnover in recruiting agencies seems to be huge, if my LinkedIn feed is any indicator. They seem to move between jobs as much as many contract developers. And of course, some still will exit the business entirely.
Had really bad experience with recruiters in London
- Lies. From "They have a free gym pass" to complete bs like salary and position.
- Screwed up formatting of CV that I've sent (they wanted .doc) I've written that I have basic perl skills, recruiter changed it to good and destroyed the layout of CV making it unreadable. Good luck with perl question during the interview.
Haha! Nice! A bit like if you have an infinite number of chimps on an infinite number of typewriters you'll eventualy get the works of Shakespeare - the rest is Perl.
I once (early 2000s) discovered during the interview the recruiter had edited the CV I sent. I showed my own copy and the interviewer and I ended up putting them next to each other and identifying the differences.
I had a recruiter here in Toronto create a CV for me despite the fact that I no longer keep one (I keep my LinkedIn profile up to date and can replicate a CV if I want to, but I don’t want to). I fired him the next day, saying he was not going to represent me because he didn’t listen to me.
One fairly recently cold emailed me 4 times in one day, the last email quite put out and angry that I hadn't responded yet; this was followed by numerous cajoling to censorious emails in the following days, and then a letter mailed to my home castigating me for not responding. And then more emails. He finally went away.
Then there is the current one - scheduling an interview without my say so, I demanded she cancel it immediately, yet I subsequently get a call from the company "Roger, where are you". She didn't cancel it. I told her to she was not to represent me in any way, to not contact me again. Yesterday, what shows up in my inbox? Demands to respond to her email with regards to a client with clear evidence that she is still shopping/talking about me. All this against a backdrop of me telling them my dog is diagnosed with a brain tumor, my life is occupied with dealing with it, and just leave me alone (true story, not made up to make them go away). Holy fuck.
I had an absolutely great recruiter once, he spent hours talking to me, working to find a good fit (something I found myself ended up working), but don't ask me how to find someone like that. Unfortunately his specialty is in an area (HFT) that I decided that I don't want to participate in.
I've had a few exciting ones happen to me as well... including offers to interview for the COMPANY I AM ALREADY WORKING AT. That was a fun one. My boss was pissed.
Lately, I've been replying to recruiter emails with a short and sweet "$%INSANEAMOUNT% plus or I'm not interested". Haven't heard back yet.
Been doing the same. "Sure, ask them if they'll be able to give [1.8x-2.3x my current salary] and relocation." I haven't gotten any replies yet either.
I had once a recruiter calling me on my workplace's number. He had sent me an email couple of hours before, that I hadn't noticed (it was during work hour), and for some reason he got super carried away about some opportunity and wanted to make sure I would apply through him or something.
About 10 weeks ago, I got an email from such a company, the payload being
"Our database consists of over 2 million resumes of qualified consultants that we rigorously screen and are ready to be deployed. Our footprint is Nationwide.
* is a company that specializes in providing Project/Program Manager, Architect, QA/Code Testing, Business Analyst, DBA, ETL, Virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Storage/Backup, Cyber Security, Analytics, Cloud, Financials, HRMS, ERP/MRP, Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Data Warehousing, Front end/Web/Mobile Development/Design, Middleware, Supply Chain, Logistics, Warehouse Management, Inventory Management, E-Commerce, SDLC, Networking, etc. specified contractors/consultants for contract/contract to hire projects."
This is mostly an angry rant, pretty amusing to me how upset the author actually becomes at times, I think its quite harsh.
I did like this idea towards the end of it:
"To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than [a recruiter] would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be."
I took a job abroad after coming from the U.S., and updated my LinkedIn accordingly. Soon after, the spam shot up through the roof. All of the same, non-descript, no-details contacts the author describes. It's been striking.
I torched my linkedin account a while back after recruiters wouldn't stop hounding me. I also despise social networks of all sorts so that contributed to my decision.
Before I torched it though I tried a little experiment. I left my tech skills in place, but also added things like "Blacksmithing" and "Former POTUS" as my skill set. I also said "Do not contact me" and "I hate recruiters" and something along the lines of "if you contact me, you clearly didn't read my profile" - the spam seemed to increase for a while before I finally deleted the profile completely.
I never made a dime or had any positive experience with Linkedin. Just recruiter spam and "friends" begging for endorsements... so I don't think you're missing out on anything.
It's common in the US, sure, but it rarely works. It's not that we don't all know a few people we'd be glad to work with again, it's that they're mostly happy and well-compensated where they are. Offering me an extra few grand isn't going to change that, and it isn't nearly enough to make splitting it with the candidate a game-changer either. Occasionally someone you want will be available during a bust (which often means during a hiring freeze, too) or under some unusual personal circumstances, but it doesn't happen often enough to make up for attrition much less grow a team.
We ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers last week at the office. Wolfram provided us with a ballpark figure that there are about 70k "IT industry professionals" in London region. Of this, 10-15% (so maybe 12k) are the good ones, and absolutely everybody is fighting for them.
There are more than 10k tech industry companies in London alone. [0]
Competition for talent is fierce, to say the least - and every single startup I know of is hiring. Us included.
Actually the solution he suggested might not be helpful at all as this recruitment methodology may lead gradually over time to favoritism, cliquism, cronyism, tribalism you name it in the workplace as everyone is vouching their friends and acquaintances to key and select positions inside the organization to help them cement and consolidate their power and hinders the progress of the organization as a whole in the process.
Ha ha - that was a funny read. You've got a talent for words, forget this new fangled DeVelOps thing you've been doing for 15 years and get into comedy writing.
I've started using more of Gmail's features to help control this.
First, there is the actual email address itself: Gmail ignores periods and anything after a + (plus sign). So every new site I sign up for gets a different email address, usually my normal email plus a postfix named after that particular site. This way, when I get emails from recruiters saying they found me through LinkedIn, but are actually using a form of my email address I've only used on Github, I know immediately what is going on.
And second, I just mark them as spam. Because they are.
Graduated in 1993, started contracting in 1995, and pretty much been at it ever since then. I have no issue with agents. They make my life easier.
The only and ONLY rule I have is that the employer knows exactly the rate I am getting and is happy with the rate they are paying the agent. I've seen contractors walk out on jobs once they find out the margin the agent is getting. An honest relationship is key.
US recruitment (at least around tech hubs) does seem a lot more civilized than the UK situation - most opportunities I see are directly advertised. I left the UK five years ago, and I still get most of my recruitment spam from UK agents. Someone clearly needs to educate those guys about aging their databases - someone who was in the market for opening level PHP gigs in 2001 is probably not still looking for opening level PHP gigs in 2015.
In the US I've been approached by a lot of headhunters/recruiters from the finance industry, usually throwing salary numbers at me before even saying what it is I would be doing for the world. I agree that the tech industry is mostly directly advertised, as it should be.
I recall one phone call where the guy said "how much do you know about Ajax?" (pronounced like the Dutch football team). There was no reason for the guy to know any different, but it amused me at the time....
I live in Uruguay (South America), many developers don't speak English, and most that do don't speak it well (they usually do read and write decently).
You'd probably be hard pressed to understand what they're talking about :) - for example JSON is definitely JASON, and you'll be looked at funny if you don't pronounce it that way :) , and Ajax is pronounced like the Dutch football team.
If I don't hear it on a video or a talk, I'm probably pronouncing it wrong (and not knowing I am). I hope to get corrected if I do.
I guess its important to make allowances - especially for non-native English speakers.
I worked on a portlet system a few years back (oh the horror!) with a Chinese dude. Super developer. It wasn't until the last day that I figured out what he meant when he said 'poorer led'. Should have figured it out sooner looking back :D
There have been times in my career when good recruiter was my best friend in the world... at least for a couple of weeks. These days I get spammed or called by five or six of them a day, most of whom haven't even read my resume, and have no idea whether I am a fit for the latest position they are trying desperately to fill. It resembles a boiler-room stock pumping operation.
I will admit I did not make it through this entire article, but it really did not ring true to me at all--just sounded like an unsupported, hostile, angry rant.
>> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”.
...
>> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.
Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think "exploited" I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.
If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.
Are you in the UK? If so, I'm seriously surprised this doesn't ring true. To me it exactly matches my experience both as a contractor and as an employer.
As to who is being exploited here, it's the whole IT industry. They are rent-seekers, pure and simple, and they leech off our industry. They may not be sending children down mines, but that doesn't diminish the fact they are terrible companies and terrible people.
Do you know how agencies work? You do understand that employers contact them and ask them to find people, to organise their payroll, do relevant checks e.g. confirm right to work, security, skills etc. And these companies know they will be paying a % to the agency and this is because they dont want to do that work themselves they just want a competent worker in place asap.
Those same employers could spend their time searching job boards for suitable candidates but they don't want to so they outsource.
As for the OP saying they are taking 15% of his money. That's not the case. In most cases the Employer will agree a rate with the agency, so they will be a maximum of e.g £250 a day for the contractor and a 15% fee to the agency. So they are paying out around £290 per day to the agency. If the contractor was located directly do you think they would pay him/her £290 per day? No they would pay £250 as they know that is the going rate. they pay the agency fee so they dont have to go through the recruitment process e.g. post adverts, interview people (phone), interview (in person) skill check, right to work check etc.
It's funny to read complaints about rent-seeking and someone taking a percentage off the top on a tech forum, where that is the business model of a large portion of tech companies themselves. When authors complain about Amazon being rent-seekers "stealing" a percentage of authors' income, they don't tend to get a lot of sympathy here.
Rent seeking means taking a percentage without bringing any value. I'm on board with many of the complaints about Amazon, but it's clearly not the case to say they don't add value.
Of course many/most recruiters will also bring value, but it's a question of degree. If someone is recruiting for a technical position and they don't have the technical understanding to make any meaningful judgment of the candidate, it's reasonable to ask whether they are worth their fee. Obviously the extent to which that applies depends on the individual, the company, and the local business culture.
Actually your CV can be hijacked by a recruiter, effectively keeping you out of a job.
Imagine this scenario: You get a call from a recruiter. They seem to have an interesting position/client/network so you send over your CV. A couple of months later you are actively looking for a job, so you make a list of cool startups in your area and send your CV and a customized cover letter. They all answer that they got your CV from the recruiter and that they can't afford the recruiter's fee. They can't hire you for 6 months/2 years/indefinitely, depending on the recruiters terms.
The firm that said they had already received the CV and couldn't contract has all the evidence that is needed. Surely a firm would unite with a potential candidate to bring down scum recruiters?
That scenario could easily play out. However, if the employer genuinely has no connection to the candidate (other than having received their CV a couple of times, in different incarnations) then I don't see why they wouldn't pursue the candidate without the recruiter being in the loop.
I can tell you why...at my
Last firm, the "first submitting agency" was tied to your name on FieldGlass. You could not get around it. It was the only system you could hire thru firmwide.
Every place I've ever worked where I had any visibility into hiring, at the start of the search the company makes a decision as to who they want to deal with: hire an inside recruiter, retain a single outside recruiter (or several), or accept referrals from all outside recruiters. Once they've made that decision, when a recruiter sends them a resume, either the recruiter they're willing to work with and whose fee they've already decided they're willing to pay, or it isn't. In the latter case, they respond saying "we've got our own recruiting arrangements, thanks" and toss the resume. In that case, if the same resume comes in through a different channel later, they're under no obligation to the recruiter, and they'd be perfectly happy to hire you.
I suppose if they were working with a recruiter, and later ended the relationship, that could cause the problem you describe, but I haven't seen it happen (as a job seeker, a member of many interview panels, and as a hiring manager a couple times).
In theory, the recruiter isn't supposed to send resumes without the job seeker's approval, which means that when they do so, they've probably broken any agreement they have with the hiring company, so the company probably isn't bound by that agreement any longer. Whether you'd be able to convince the hiring company to take the risk of a lawsuit (that they'd presumably win) is another question, of course.
The same nothing that does not stop the companies actually seeking their own employees also does not stop 300 recruiters from copying their posted text, stripping out the original company-identifying information, and re-posting.
The noise added to the signal does make it significantly more difficult.
So rather than searching a central repository of job ads for opportunities specifically relevant to you, you have to visit individual company websites, find the "careers" or "jobs" section, and look for leads in a thousand different places.
I consider a no-recruiters policy to be absolutely essential for a job advertisements boards now. Everywhere else, you have to filter out key phrases like "recruiting", "our client", or "resume in Word format" just to find anything useful.
Actually if the company hired a recruiter there may indeed be reasons you can't apply directly and they can't post job ads themselves. I've seen companies make the mistake of accepting absurd NCAs giving recruiting agencies a quasi-exclusive right to applicants. It's not universally common but depending on the kind of contract you enter (and for some of them it's possible to do so informally just by giving them the go-ahead via e-mail) you can tie your hands.
1. Job advertised doesn't have the name of the company
2. Recruiter is CV harvesting with fake job ads - experienced that
3. Recruiter bait and switches - job is real but is an excuse to get you for something else
4. Recruiter gets wind of big company or gov organisation recruiting via competition, posts the same job spec then uses it to try and undercut while passing themselves off as the "official" recruiter. Had this with a NHS development role where the job I responded to turns out they had no business advertising for.
5. If the company is named then it's usually because said company only wants to use a recruiter. I've had this a couple of times where I've contacted a company directly but been asked to file my application with their official outsourced recruitment service.
6. Recruiter threatens "you'll never work in this town again" if you do somehow get to know who the company is simply because you ask.
Ninety nine percent of all recruiters I have dealt with have been the scum of the earth, even the so called reputable ones.
I truly hope Stackoverflow Careers destroys these businesses.
As a London based developer (VR these days), I have to say that I immediately recognise the hammed up picture this guy paints of IT recruiters in the UK.
I only ever found one recruitment company that I liked who I felt was consistently top notch when I was freelancing. They didn't ever call me unless I signaled I was looking for work and always negotiated better rates than I felt I was able to when I was first starting out. They were called Recruit Media, but they were later swallowed up by a larger company that I cannot vouch for.
Some former employees set up a new agency that continued in the same vein as Recruit Media - http://www.wearefutureheads.co.uk/. They focus on web and digital content creation specialists. They know what the acronyms mean as well as how to spell them properly. If you're looking for a no-bullshit web/digital recruiter in this in the UK then you could do a lot worse.
Disclaimer: I have never worked as a recruiter and I have no links with Futureheads beyond being placed by some of their staff and also using them to recruit freelancers for projects I have led.
Obviously it goes without saying that you're much better off developing your professional network, negotiating a good rate and going direct if you can.
Just felt compelled to write this to illustrate that not all of them are bad. Sadly I'd estimate that at least 99% of the firms here in the UK are complete time wasters.
I worked in Germany and in the US.
The only time that recruiters got a tad annoying was when I was working in Germany and got 2-3 UK agencies.
By far not as bad as the post makes it seem, but some slightly annoying things such as calling me on a Sunday evening, trying to give me prep speeches and overusing my name, script reading, trying to not tell me the client name, mispronouncing the skills they were looking for, ...
In the US, the recruiter eMails are more frequent, but usually pretty civilized.
Especially the bigger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google) that have their own in-house recruiters tend to be pleasant to work with.
When I was a freelancer in Germany (i.e. up to last year) most "recruiters" were scum. I can't speak about the ones that focus on permanent positions but nearly all of the "Projektvermittler" (i.e. glorified temp agencies) were trying to guilt me into lowering my rates for them (because they'd charge the client 2-3x on top of that), tried to get me to sign NCAs far beyond the scope of the project (which is legally unenforceable but backed up with serious threats that would make anyone think twice) and were about as dishonest and intransparent about the entire process as humanly possible.
Oh, and of course they would keep bombarding me with Java/XML projects just because my CV (which they doctored and redacted before sending it to the client) mentioned that I had once worked on a Java project (but specialised in something entirely different since).
The one project I actually followed through on turned out to be a total disaster. Other than that, all my work had been directly for clients without a third party -- and that worked out far better.
If you're an inexperienced solo freelancer and want to work for big corporations, sure, recruiters are the way to go. Other than that, IMO you're nearly always better off skipping the middle man and taking the entrepreneurial risk (which is fairly manageable if you don't allow the client to build up several months worth of outstanding payments).
They charged 3 times your rate? I hope that's hyperbole, because that's pretty insane. I get disgusted when a recruiter charges more than 15%. (The best stay below 5% for doing an excellent job, the worst piece of shit I've ever wasted time on turned out to charge over 30% for not doing his job.)
Generally speaking, I've never had an issue with in-house recruiters.
But I've experienced many of the things this guy is complaining about from 3rd party tech recruiters (I'm in the US), including being lied to (and not coming clean until it came up a few months into the contract), aggressively being contacted, dodging questions about company details, not providing job descriptions, lying about what the company needed so I was unprepared for interviews, not telling me anything about interviews, scheduling an interview for me for THE NEXT DAY at 7 pm that was a 3 hour drive away so I had no choice but to take a sudden personal day to go to the interview (I normally wouldn't do that, but I had two friends working there, and really wanted to check it out), etc.
One agency has been sending me emails and calling me multiple times and LinkedIn connection requests from four people in the company these past couple of weeks. They've attempted to contact me at least 12 times in two weeks, and the most they'll tell me in the messages is "an iOS Developer opportunity". With no information you are not going to make me want to get in touch with you, especially when I'm not looking for a new job.
BUUUUT.... I have had a couple good experiences with external recruiters, in fact my most recent experience was very positive and they negotiated better than I would have for the first salary in my career that I've been satisfied with.
I think it sticks out because, in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces. And in the recruitment business it seems to happen a lot.
(Omission, elision and euphemism is the British way!)
As an aside, is it not fraudulent to lie in this way? For instance, altering resumes without permission, or promising a perk and a salary which the recruiter does not know exist or apply.
It probably is and there's all sorts of Data Protection rules being broken (that's even if they've registered with the Data Protection Registrar). But it's a mammoth and futile task to report possible violations and by the time it's looked into said recruiter has folded and started some other scam. I've tried this and failed miserably.
Fortunately I've not had to look for a job since 2003, happy where I am mostly, so my old CV's are probably long gone in disk crashes, failed backups or other purges. I've not been contacted by a recruiter for ~6 years now.
> in the UK, we're not used to people just lying directly to our faces
Ahem, speak for yourself. Go check out your local newsagent's daily national press shelves. Pages upon pages of lies and spin.
Hell, the Scottish versions of The Times, Express, Mail and Mirror group papers print contradicting headlines, one version for Scotland and one for England and Wales.
I hate to do the "we're less gullible in Scotland now" thing, but since the referendum we can spot bullshit from a mile off now.
As a ""cybernat"" and Wings reader, I very much agree - but that's more a sort of impersonal bulk lying, not someone calling you up personally by name and lying about job opportunities or the qualifications of candidates.
In the UK in ~2000, the last time I was looking for a job without a reliable network, I had an awful experience due to recruiters.
I'd synched up with a recruiter, they scheduled me for a job interview at a swanky gentlemans club (not a strip bar, literally a club for men), in London. I don my old school uniform, for aged 18 I had not yet bought a suit, and printed some resumes at my Mums office and headed over to St James Place in a cab. I check in for the interview and get led into a room filled with desks, some occupied and others not. I take a seat and wait patiently for whatever comes next... ... ...
... The seats are all pretty much full now, and a man stands at the front of the room and gives a 3 slide presentation along the lines of: we can't tell you who our client is, you'll take a test, the top 10 will be offered a job with the client.
Being 18, I was great at tests! Everyone around me was in their mid 20-30's -- I'd been hacking for 3 years at this point, Linux user for ~18mo - I was ready. The test papers are laid in front of us, the presenter orders us to start, I'm done in the first 18 minutes, and sit patiently for the next 12 when the presenter says: "for those of you who have finished please walk your paper up here, for the rest you've 15 more minutes. Myself and two others rise, take our papers to the front and leave through the door and are directed to a lounge (let me tell you, gentle mans clubs are really fancy -- I don't take the gin and tonic offered to me).
Eventually the room is filled with the other test takers, probably 50 of us in total, and we mill around. I was too insecure to talk to anyone, everyone else was probably a little weirded out by the boy in the school uniform!
Some 20 minutes later the presenter enters the room and announces 11 names to stay behind, I was one of them! (What kind of story would this be were I not;)) it was explained to us that we'd be given a short interview. These were conducted three at a time, the presenter and his two associates would take an interview each.
I was in the second three and I had observed that the first three had short conversations, signed some papers, shook hands with their interviewer and then left the room. My interviewer was the presenter. I can't recall the questions, they were about my test paper, but after a couple of them he laid the paper down and looked at me and asked: "did you cheat?", I answered: "no", and he went on to explain that I got a perfect score, the next highest had received about 80% (if memory serves there were ~50 multiple choice questions and ~5 questions where we had to write out commands: how to compile Linux kernels, etc). He shook my hand and led me out, no papers were signed.
And that was it.
I went back to the legal office my mum worked at, recounted the story, and she became so furious -- she believed I'd been subjected to ageism.
I certainly do not mean to suggest all recruiters are this short sighted, and I'm
very proud of where my life has taken me thus far (early yc alum, early leader at twitch, amongst other things), but this experience was so negative that I reasoned to avoid recruiters at all costs. Now, I know the way you find a job is to watch the companies you think are doing a great job, working on tech you care about, and reach out directly to them to find out how you can help.
We can kill the predatory recruiters by starving them!
I would suspect more "we don't want to hire someone who thinks it's appropriate to show up in a literal school uniform to a professional interview" more than ageism, per se.
It's easier to train a professional and prepared candidate in some fraction of job skills than is it to train a very skilled candidate in business proprieties, especially for an interview that starts with a multiple-choice test.
I live in Netherland, but I'm surprised how often I'm contacted by UK recruiters for Dutch jobs. Apparently they've been expanding their market. I don't have any terrible experiences with them as far as I recall, but I never remember their names and haven't gotten any jobs through them.
I have had some pretty awful experiences with Dutch recruiters, but also some pretty good ones.
I'm having very mixed feelings about the recruiter that got me my current gig: on the one hand, she was way too pushy and I'm pretty sure she lied to me, and their rate is higher than what the client allows (they're got some cumbersome way to work around that), but on the other hand, what I get is significantly higher than what I got the previous time I worked for the same client (though one of the best and most professional recruiters I've met), so she pushed them even harder than she pushed me, and that's paying off for me too. And it is a really nice gig. The one getting screwed here is not me, and the client is a major bank, so I'm not feeling terribly sorry for them (though I do wonder if I should inform them of the recruiter's overly high rate; is that honest or vindictive?).
Still, it'd be nice if we could do without them. Shouldn't the internet help us cut out all those middlemen?
Maybe things are different in the UK, but in Canada I've never had to rely on a recruiter to find good work. I've interacted with them a few times and yes, it wasn't pleasant, but they hardly had the market cornered. My impression has been that those who rely on recruiters are unable to navigate the job market well themselves. It's not a forced reliance.
In London these days you don't have to depend on third-party recruiters, but they will contact you anyway. Wayyyyy more than I saw in either Toronto or Vancouver.
> If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.
Yet this article instead of getting flagged into oblivion got upvoted to #1 as of now. Could that be that HN readers' experience with recruiters mirrors the author's experience?
I think the complaint is that the author could have instead made this argument in a rational, not irate, not mean spirited and substantiated way. What would have been so bad about that?
I think you've completely missed the humour in this post. It describes in a funny, sarcastic and sardonic article just about every experience I and my dev/IT pals have had with IT recruitment agencies.
It's not about in-house recruiters like you have at FB/Google, it's about the scumbags that hold potential employees to ransom and act as self appointed gatekeepers to jobs that might or might not exist. As an experiment why not hit up jobserve and try applying for some of these agency advertised jobs (under a fake persona), I don't think you've ever experienced the humiliation and frustration of dealing with these wankers.
It's Friday, go have a beer, relax and rediscover your sense of humour.
> Oh good, the "you didn't think this was funny therefore your sense of humor sucks" logic.
That's taking it quite personally. We can agree that Mocko's sardonic style isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you don't like it, accept that others do and that he's really not going to change it for you. He makes it abundantly clear that he is in a position to ignore (at best) or belittle (at worst) people who disagree with him. So move on.
Are you in the UK and have you dealt with a large number of recruiters? I would be super surprised to meet someone who has a good sample size of working with UK recruiters who doesn't have similar thoughts on the subject.
Honestly it seems like the author has some serious problems. I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all.
To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write.
The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
I think the author being deliberately hyperbolic for humour's sake, playing up lots of British stereotypes etc for laughs or a bit of catharsis. It's a Friday afternoon "I've had a shit week" blog post and it wasn't to my tastes, but I wouldn't necessarily assume the author has some problems.
Exactly. His post is rather long to be only an outburst of angriness. I think he is pretty pissed off by the recruitement process and decided to take it up a notch in order to make it grotesque.
You clearly don't have a clue about how things are here in the EU. Few weeks ago one of these charitable souls deceived a co-worker offering him an incredible opportunity to move to London and the result was:
- £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer
- No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc)
- No free food/snacks/bevare at the company
- No perks (equipment, etc)
When questioned about this, the recruiter said: hey! impossible to get this, this is were I make my money you know!.
How is this a "fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions"?
This is why I dislike them - I get sent jobs from recruiters and it irks me to not know the cut they are taking (and I can only guess it is above their actual value). If they were completely open about it, maybe it would improve the state of the industry?
Recruiters sometimes lie or exaggerate. That's nothing new. Actually, they have to do it, to show their bosses that they're getting warm bodies into interviews.
Did your co-worker actually take this job, without doing the due diligence of reading the contract and the offer letter?
Holy god, that's a job in technology? Sounds like your typical retail wage slave situation here in the US. Even entry level tech jobs are in the $40-$50k range generally.
I certainly hope you meant to type £30k/year (~$45k/year).
If you're only getting $30k (~£20k/year) as a software programmer of any kind, anywhere in the world, you should seriously consider finding a new employer, even if it requires emigrating. And remote jobs still exist.
Canada has the 3rd largest video games industry in the world--after the US and Japan--and its growth has strained the available talent pool. So you might consider Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or Montreal. I have heard that UK-to-Canada emigration is more easily done than UK-to-US, though I had never had any particular motive to investigate the claim.
The "games" jobs earn less on average than the less-specific category of "software" jobs, and "programmer" earns less on average than "developer" and "engineer". So if you don't move, maybe you could pad out your resume to be a "software developer" instead.
I am biased somewhat by working in the US, where software writers are legion, and paid more than elsewhere, but if you have any skill at all, you can probably be paid more for work similar to what you do now.
£20k/year is exactly what I'm on. My problem at the moment is that I've been working just a bit more than 2 years now, and I absolutely love what I'm doing. I'm part of the engine team on a game that will be one of the biggest releases of 2016, and learning a tonne every day. I got very flexible hours, private health insurance and 30 days of paid vacation days a year. It's just the pay that's abysmal. I've got two computer science degrees and everyone I know in IT makes almost twice as much as I do. But at the same time, everyone I know works for a bank or a financial institution of some kind and they hate their jobs, their bosses, and everything that I on the other hand really like. So yeah, I could quit tomorrow and probably make 2x as much straight away. Do I want to? I'm not sure, and that's my problem at the moment.
Absolutely none of that makes up for the abysmal pay, though. You can easily get a software development job making much, much more than that, with most, if not all of the same benefits.
I disagree. A job you love is a lot better than a job you hate. I agree $30k is ridiculously low, but if it pays enough to live the life you want, why should you get more if that would make you hate your life? There's no bigger blessing in life than to get paid for doing something you love.
The most important thing though is that he's learning: that means he will still be able to get better opportunities later. Once the learning stops, it's time to get out.
Will you at least get a portion of the sales on the game? If the game really will be one of the biggest releases next year, a 20k salary is likely nothing compared to residuals/bonuses that might accrue to you.
There's very likely going to be a profitability bonus, but at the most it's going to be half of my salary. Pretty good for a bonus,but it's not making up for the low salary over all.
If you have 2 years experience in programming, you should be looking elsewhere in the game industry. The first couple of years are rough, but after "paying your dues" for a couple years, you'll find you can jump into another game dev job without much difficulty. This is a bit more problematic if you're not willing to relocate, since UK is one of the lower-paying game dev markets. However 30k usd is far too low even for the UK for a fresh-out-of-college junior programmer.
So... Pitbull Studio (Epic UK) for something using Unreal Engine 4?
We don't have an international union, so I don't exactly have any leverage here, but I want you to be paid more. Do you seriously think that you are so far below the median level of skill for a C++ programmer with a degree and two years of experience, that you should be paid so little?
Go. Look for another job, and find out just what they would be willing to pay you. With an offer in hand that you could accept on its own merits, go to your current employer and, without mentioning anything about your other offer, ask that your pay rate be reevaluated, to match your skills in the current market. If you don't get a significant payrise, then at that point, you can decide whether it is worth more to have extra cash in your hand, or to keep a job that you know you like, but pays peanuts--stale peanuts at that. Remember, you don't have to accept any offer you don't like.
For now, you seem to have decided that you like your current job £15-20k/year more than anything else you think you could possibly get.
You're getting fucked. Hard. But that's what the games industry is all about. Fucking developers over, and then replacing them with fresh faced new grads who think it'd be just spiffy to work in games.
Not in London it isnt. £15k is below average wage, way below for London. Unless this IT job was excel monkey or perhaps keyboard cleaner original commenter is full of shit.
I know trainee developers (no education but some skills) who have started off on £21k and that is low for IT in London. I find it hard to believe that any IT role in London was filled for £15k by anyone other than the most junior of people.
That low, in London?! I was under the impression that London was a very expensive city, and I'd expect salaries to reflect that. £21k in a city like that sounds bizarre. Or is it after taxes, including tons of secondary benefits?
To be fair your friend got fucked over but predominantly because he didn't read the contract. If he was offered £40k and then a contract came and he signed it without checking, his fuck up. If he didnt sign a contract and moved cities on the word of an individual he fucked up.
If he didnt attend and interview or discuss these perks prior to signing a contract he fucked up.
If he was genuinely misled then he can actually make a complaint and pursue it but it sounds like he didnt do much checking at all.
The NHS provides mostly excellent free health care. (Some non-urgent but unplanned stuff can be frustrating).
But you can also pay privately for treatment. I'm not sure why you would chose to do so - you get a private room but not much else. (There's a possibility you get slightly worse outcomes)
Dental isn't free even on the NHS (although many people get exemptions) so paying gets you better dentists, with better wait times, and more cosmetic options.
He's obviously very hyperbolic, but when you leave the sphere of elite IT (Google/Facebook) and head into the folks who are in other geographic locations (and not willing to move to tech hotspots) suddenly the skills in demand and the positions available become overwhelmingly large enterprise type IT jobs.
The recruiters who are working for these companies are, to some extent, as the author describes. The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Never mind that the C-level management at large, established companies is, for the most part, hopelessly disconnected from what it takes to have an effective technology capability at a company. If you don't agree with me on this, then ask yourself why SAP and Oracle continue to make so much money selling huge software implementations that are known to never work and always go over budget.
> The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay.
Absolutely true.
Simplifying a little, there are companies here that everybody wants to leave and companies that everybody wants to join. It's difficult to leave the first category since the employee's skills have atrophied (see https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/).
This is absolutely on point. As I said in another comment, often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters.
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr.
So perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people. If the skill-set is worth more than 100/hr, then the company cant recruit the right talent, and complains of "shortages" whereas in reality, the "shortage" is because too many third parties have their hand in the cookie-jar leaving too little to pay the actual market wage.
Since it wasn't stressed yet to you: The article talks about recruiters from outside of tech companies, not recruiters at FB or Google. I have to say I'm doubtful you "know" hundreds of recruiters (inside or outside the companies), unless you mean you got an email from hundreds of recruiters. If you just reject the emails, you probably won't get the experience described in the article.
I've been fine with recruiters until i came to berlin and somehow let my phone number slip to the uk recruiters. Now, I'm trying to figure out how to block all uk numbers, nothing I can say will make them stop cold calling me, and they're so aggressive it's hard to escape a call without being rude. I really don't get why uk recruiters in particular are so awful, the German ones are fine.
My theory is probably wrong, but it is possible that this article is a way for the author to signal his skills/worth/value. Someone with low skills and who's desperate to find a job is highly unlikely to publicly complain about the amount of attention he gets from recruiters, so by actually doing it, he signals that he has high value.
But I do believe the more likely explanation remains that this guy got angry after getting harassed repeatedly by recruiters and decided to do something about it.
He's not commenting on the in-house recruiting staffs at the major corporations, he's commenting on the third-party (usually contract) recruitment industry. They're not the same; the lack of knowledge and perverse incentives are much less an issue with direct recruitment.
It's my experience that the third-party recruiting business is almost as terrible in the US as the author describes in the UK, though sans the oddball Brit dialect. There also doesn't seem to be as much of the third-party contract scam going; if the recruiter is a contracting agency, they'll tell you that up front. But the incoherent and misspelled emails, the rampant spam, the lack of knowledge of the roles they're recruiting for, yes that all rings true in the US too.
> I know hundreds of recruiters having been at Google and Facebook and not a single one of them thinks like this at all.
Congrats. That must be how the entire industry works then </sarcasm>
> a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions
Yeah, bull-shit, if you think every engineering job is in a comfy office with great pay and great working conditions, you are seriously delusional. I've worked at places where this wasn't the case.
If everything was all sunshine and rainbows all the time, companies wouldn't have bad reputations, or have a hard time hiring new people. But plenty do have a bad reputation, and plenty do scare off new recruits. That's kind of the entire point of sites like GlassDoor.
> The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
First off, it's his opinion, and his blog, totally his right to have unsupported claims. But considering how many comments actually support his claims, it's my belief you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry.
I'm impressed at your infinite snark and sarcasm to actual arguments ratio. When you START your post with a combination of intentionally misunderstanding my point with the sarcasm tag than it is literally impossible to take you seriously.
To end the post with saying "you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry." is just like, jesus man, are you going for some sort of insufferability award? Go outside. Perhaps there is something more rewarding there than grasping at straws to get mad at a stranger on the internet...
"To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write."
It was at this point that you lost me. You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job.
"You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job."
I'm getting a lot of REALLY bizarre straw men responses to my posts but this one has to take the cake.
You managed to turn me saying that people should stop bitching about IT recruiters calling them for offices jobs that pay well and have great conditions ito a conclusion that I have CLEARLY never had a crappy job? I...what? How? How does a human brain take my input and produce your output? I'm blown away.
I'll give you a hint. No recruiter called me for my crappy jobs. I went and applied for them. Sorry this doesn't fit into your projection that you were clearly qualified to make from that single thing I said.
Once again, you've clearly never experienced a recruiter trying to get you for a crappy job. Consider yourself lucky.
And since you haven't, you really need to stop telling other people what they can and cannot complain about. Seriously, at what salary level are people not allowed to complain about work conditions any more? What exactly are the conditions that an office has to have before one can no longer complain? Free soda? A snack machine?
Firstly, Google tells me outright they do not source from outside recruiters, which the OP is speaking about. Perhaps it is different at executive levels or outside the US.
Secondly, Google is a world-class, forward-thinking company so they are probably not representative of the rest of the millions of companies out there. That is like saying..."of course 100% of companies provide free lunch, after all hundreds of departments at Google provide free lunch." It is just silly.
Finally, the OP is not upset about ending up with "a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office." How many engineers even have offices these days? Which company do you even work for?
The OP is upset about rent-seeking behavior of outside recruiters. Often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters.
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. OK, perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people.
Its an over-the-top, funny rant in prototypical UK style on the state of outsourced recruiting - not in house recruiting (which has its own, different issues).
A lot of the behavior mentioned here is awfully familiar in the US.
I'm in the US, actively looking for work, and this rang VERY true. These guys can be relentless, with ethics and tactics a professional spammer would admire.
Agreed, at first I thought they were trying to make a point, then it seems to lapse into some sort of cartoonish straw man just-for-entertainment depiction, but then it veers back to a serious conclusion along the lines "and this is why these companies shouldn't exist. The End". It's a bit confusing.
I don't think you should comment on articles you haven't read. Also, I suspect your knowledge of sex workers in Southeast Asia is entirely theoretical or, at best, as a client.
There are a lot of people who are not happy with their informatics jobs, especially in the UK, and I think recruiters are a significant part of the reason. As you can probably guess from the slang, the particular situation the author is describing is much worse there.
> Once I talked a client into advertising a position themselves. The signal-to-noise ratio was appalling and sorting through the flood of applicants took days. Some cover letters were tragic, begging in broken English “I fast learner, my family starving, England less shooty, pliz you help us move?”.
Bah, you can rant without resorting to racist aping of ESOL speakers. Especially when the odds are good that the author only speaks one language.
I recently moved jobs. Since I work in a fairly niche field, made plenty of good
friends at my old workplace, and the company was looking to add to my old team
while I was still there, I've had the pleasure of seeing several sides of a
hugely inefficient job search.
First, there is the Chinese whispers from within the company. They don't seem
keen on finding candidates directly, which in this field is as easy as it gets,
so off they go to the recruitment agency.
My (now former) boss
writes a job spec, this goes to HR (who aren't familiar with any of the technical details) and
HR add some company blurb and send it on to a recruiter, but not before crippling the job spec
by slapping on a below-market salary that nobody competent will accept to try and save some cash.
The recruiters think they have plenty of candidates who will take the salary, but
the candidates simply aren't good enough or don't have the right experience. The recruiters have no way of telling this, so they keep telling
the company that there are plenty of great candidates and to keep
interviewing.
From the applicant side, several friends of mine who are generally looking to move
to a new job had this role aggressively pitched to them by a recruiter.
Most of them would be brilliant for this job.
What my friends really need is a ten minute phone call with my old boss to see if
it's a potential fit before starting any formal interview process.
I'd have been happy to put them in touch
directly at an earlier stage, but there has now been contact through a recruiter
and I don't want to meddle behind the scenes.
None of my friends ended up going for the job since the recruiters were telling
them confusing things, and all got better offers than the
advertised range elsewhere. The company have unsuccessfully interviewed a few
candidates that the recruiters have pushed on them, the team has been desperate
for someone new for months (and they're crucial to the company's success)
and people like my old boss have no idea and little way of knowing how close
they are to finding the right people.
And yes, the stereotype of the shiny-suited young "failed salesman" recruiter is unfortunately true in my experience.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 235 ms ] threadI've had bad ones of course, I think everyone has. But the good ones can do a lot more leg work than you have time for and find you a much better situation than you could find on your own, plus play both sides to make their comission as big as possible which benefits you.
The best are agents, the worst are pimps.
So no, your interests really aren't aligned, and they will screw candidates on salary negotiation, take the slight hit on commission, and then make it up in volume.
Many companies are now sharing some of the recruiter costs with the employee if they go direct. In London [currently] it is an employee market, so this is a simple and effective incentive.
My boss at the time had a strategy where whenever a recruiter called offering "top notch" development talent, he would demand that he only wanted people with >15 years of java experience (remember, this was in 2000, and we also weren't a java shop). If they said, "Absolutely, no problem", they went on the banned list. Most recruiters failed this test.
The whole market was so frothy, I remember people who went from being bartenders to high-end tech recruiters making crazy money and doing coke with their clients in the bars they used to work at...and then back to bartending when the bubble burst.
Today, I feel like it's settled into an annoying-but-manageable background noise. I still get random recruiter reachouts, "Hey, I have an immediate opportunity for a contract Oracle DBA in illinois at $20/hour, interested?" (no, of course), but at least it's easy enough to hang up on them.
His first questions was: "What's your company's name again?"
clickety-click!
"Then, would you mind explaining why your company is not right on the top of a Google search?"
It was a mighty short visit.
One by one, all 16 of us got a phone call at our desks, with no more than a few seconds between each call. By the third call we all knew what was going on so we all just laughed and told the guy to sod off.
Such a bungled effort - even if someone had wanted to take up the offer it would have been impossible at that point to say anything other than "LOL, no thanks buddy"
Major duties: Licking the spot where my balls use to be.
Then again I'm also in the US. Sounds like the UK could really use some help with these guys, assuming the source is good.
I find recommendations for peers are almost always high quality simply because people want to work with good people.
My current job was very strongly recommended to me by a friend and former colleague (who also got a small referral bonus when I was hired), and I'm pleased to say he was not exaggerating.
I've been honest with friends about about the pros and cons of my workplaces. The cons have normally seemed quite easy to fix, but nobody responsible cared to fix it (unfortunately, this part is not easy to fix).
Seriously awkward conversations afterwards.
So back when I had one of those error message tones, they once decided that my contact information was "out of date" and just disabled my credit card while I was eating lunch, leaving me stranded at a restaurant like a fool, ATM and credit cards all disabled, without any way to pay. (Like seriously, are you trying to stop fraud, or stop your own customers?)
With the hold message this doesn't happen. :)
95% of the author's [limited sample] where recruiters earning a large amount of money for doing very little technically.
These guys are cold calling, searching LinkedIn, crawling phone trees, and sending requests all day. When they can they're touching up resumes and doing screening/placement interviews.
Moreover, their technical is different than your technical. It's social hacking and networking. It's learning how to find better opportunities and better people faster.
You might not like that they're Ronin, and work socially. However, they're pulling 12-15 hour days to make their sale.
To a lesser extent, I also care if any of the manure that they shovel will stick to my heel.
In theory, you should be able to come out ahead by delegating job search to someone who is better at recruiting than anything else, when you are better at software than job-searching, even if you are still better in absolute terms at recruiting than the recruiter. In practice... well, let's just say that specialization only works if the single best thing you can do offers positive value to the market. If your top skill is wasting other people's time, no one is going to hire you for that.
- Lies. From "They have a free gym pass" to complete bs like salary and position.
- Screwed up formatting of CV that I've sent (they wanted .doc) I've written that I have basic perl skills, recruiter changed it to good and destroyed the layout of CV making it unreadable. Good luck with perl question during the interview.
- Constant phone calls with no new information.
Isn't unreadable a plus in Perl? :-p
It's better if you only hand out a pdf version.
There was a time when I obeyed requests for a Word version of my CV, but that time is now gone.
I've been in the Dublin market for a couple years and the amount of bait and switch they do it's unbelievable.
Then there is the current one - scheduling an interview without my say so, I demanded she cancel it immediately, yet I subsequently get a call from the company "Roger, where are you". She didn't cancel it. I told her to she was not to represent me in any way, to not contact me again. Yesterday, what shows up in my inbox? Demands to respond to her email with regards to a client with clear evidence that she is still shopping/talking about me. All this against a backdrop of me telling them my dog is diagnosed with a brain tumor, my life is occupied with dealing with it, and just leave me alone (true story, not made up to make them go away). Holy fuck.
I had an absolutely great recruiter once, he spent hours talking to me, working to find a good fit (something I found myself ended up working), but don't ask me how to find someone like that. Unfortunately his specialty is in an area (HFT) that I decided that I don't want to participate in.
I've had a few exciting ones happen to me as well... including offers to interview for the COMPANY I AM ALREADY WORKING AT. That was a fun one. My boss was pissed.
Lately, I've been replying to recruiter emails with a short and sweet "$%INSANEAMOUNT% plus or I'm not interested". Haven't heard back yet.
"Our database consists of over 2 million resumes of qualified consultants that we rigorously screen and are ready to be deployed. Our footprint is Nationwide.
* is a company that specializes in providing Project/Program Manager, Architect, QA/Code Testing, Business Analyst, DBA, ETL, Virtualization, Disaster Recovery, Storage/Backup, Cyber Security, Analytics, Cloud, Financials, HRMS, ERP/MRP, Business Intelligence, Business Objects, Data Warehousing, Front end/Web/Mobile Development/Design, Middleware, Supply Chain, Logistics, Warehouse Management, Inventory Management, E-Commerce, SDLC, Networking, etc. specified contractors/consultants for contract/contract to hire projects."
I had to like the use of "specialize".
I did like this idea towards the end of it: "To employers – ask your staff to help find new hires. Offer a bounty – enough to get their attention, say a fortnight’s salary. It’s a lot less than [a recruiter] would cost. And their incentives are all positive: no-one will hire an idiot if they have to work alongside them and new staff with social ties to your team are far more likely to stay. You’ll be amazed how effective this can be."
Except for the use of the term "fortnight". :)
Before I torched it though I tried a little experiment. I left my tech skills in place, but also added things like "Blacksmithing" and "Former POTUS" as my skill set. I also said "Do not contact me" and "I hate recruiters" and something along the lines of "if you contact me, you clearly didn't read my profile" - the spam seemed to increase for a while before I finally deleted the profile completely.
We ran some back-of-the-envelope numbers last week at the office. Wolfram provided us with a ballpark figure that there are about 70k "IT industry professionals" in London region. Of this, 10-15% (so maybe 12k) are the good ones, and absolutely everybody is fighting for them.
There are more than 10k tech industry companies in London alone. [0]
Competition for talent is fierce, to say the least - and every single startup I know of is hiring. Us included.
0: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-06/10/tech-city-uk-... (24% of 47k)
First, there is the actual email address itself: Gmail ignores periods and anything after a + (plus sign). So every new site I sign up for gets a different email address, usually my normal email plus a postfix named after that particular site. This way, when I get emails from recruiters saying they found me through LinkedIn, but are actually using a form of my email address I've only used on Github, I know immediately what is going on.
And second, I just mark them as spam. Because they are.
The only and ONLY rule I have is that the employer knows exactly the rate I am getting and is happy with the rate they are paying the agent. I've seen contractors walk out on jobs once they find out the margin the agent is getting. An honest relationship is key.
I wonder if a similar service would gain traction again. Because all of the job boards for UK have 90% recruiter spam really.
"JASON knowledge is an advantage..."
Yep. I still don't know jason
Someone like me probably set them down the wrong path!
You'd probably be hard pressed to understand what they're talking about :) - for example JSON is definitely JASON, and you'll be looked at funny if you don't pronounce it that way :) , and Ajax is pronounced like the Dutch football team.
If I don't hear it on a video or a talk, I'm probably pronouncing it wrong (and not knowing I am). I hope to get corrected if I do.
I worked on a portlet system a few years back (oh the horror!) with a Chinese dude. Super developer. It wasn't until the last day that I figured out what he meant when he said 'poorer led'. Should have figured it out sooner looking back :D
>> “Fucked if we care” think the recruiters, “now grovel and be exploited”. ... >> You’re meat to them, a resource to be packaged and sold and exploited.
Who's being exploited here? I think he's implying the programmers, but as someone who left academia for industry, I do not at all share that sentiment. When I think "exploited" I think of diamond miners in Africa or sex workers in Southeast Asia. I got my first job at a start-up through a recruiter, gained a ton of skills, later left, and now I have a very well-paying job at a place I love. People with technical skills are highly sought-after, and do quite well in my experience, whether or not they go through recruiters.
If a comment as irate, mean-spirited, and unsubstantiated as this blog post appeared in HN, it would get down-voted into oblivion.
Do you know how agencies work? You do understand that employers contact them and ask them to find people, to organise their payroll, do relevant checks e.g. confirm right to work, security, skills etc. And these companies know they will be paying a % to the agency and this is because they dont want to do that work themselves they just want a competent worker in place asap.
Those same employers could spend their time searching job boards for suitable candidates but they don't want to so they outsource.
As for the OP saying they are taking 15% of his money. That's not the case. In most cases the Employer will agree a rate with the agency, so they will be a maximum of e.g £250 a day for the contractor and a 15% fee to the agency. So they are paying out around £290 per day to the agency. If the contractor was located directly do you think they would pay him/her £290 per day? No they would pay £250 as they know that is the going rate. they pay the agency fee so they dont have to go through the recruitment process e.g. post adverts, interview people (phone), interview (in person) skill check, right to work check etc.
Of course many/most recruiters will also bring value, but it's a question of degree. If someone is recruiting for a technical position and they don't have the technical understanding to make any meaningful judgment of the candidate, it's reasonable to ask whether they are worth their fee. Obviously the extent to which that applies depends on the individual, the company, and the local business culture.
Pretty much how the article was written.
Imagine this scenario: You get a call from a recruiter. They seem to have an interesting position/client/network so you send over your CV. A couple of months later you are actively looking for a job, so you make a list of cool startups in your area and send your CV and a customized cover letter. They all answer that they got your CV from the recruiter and that they can't afford the recruiter's fee. They can't hire you for 6 months/2 years/indefinitely, depending on the recruiters terms.
Oops.
Maybe I'm exaggerating?
That scenario could easily play out. However, if the employer genuinely has no connection to the candidate (other than having received their CV a couple of times, in different incarnations) then I don't see why they wouldn't pursue the candidate without the recruiter being in the loop.
I suppose if they were working with a recruiter, and later ended the relationship, that could cause the problem you describe, but I haven't seen it happen (as a job seeker, a member of many interview panels, and as a hiring manager a couple times).
In theory, the recruiter isn't supposed to send resumes without the job seeker's approval, which means that when they do so, they've probably broken any agreement they have with the hiring company, so the company probably isn't bound by that agreement any longer. Whether you'd be able to convince the hiring company to take the risk of a lawsuit (that they'd presumably win) is another question, of course.
I've never known recruiter scum to send out a CV without my name, contact details, and references stripped out.
And how can this possibly be enforceable when you haven't given that recruiter any exclusivity?
The noise added to the signal does make it significantly more difficult.
So rather than searching a central repository of job ads for opportunities specifically relevant to you, you have to visit individual company websites, find the "careers" or "jobs" section, and look for leads in a thousand different places.
I consider a no-recruiters policy to be absolutely essential for a job advertisements boards now. Everywhere else, you have to filter out key phrases like "recruiting", "our client", or "resume in Word format" just to find anything useful.
FYI, this will filter out a few companies as well. Qualcomm, for instance, insists on all resumes being Word or RTF for some reason.
1. Job advertised doesn't have the name of the company
2. Recruiter is CV harvesting with fake job ads - experienced that
3. Recruiter bait and switches - job is real but is an excuse to get you for something else
4. Recruiter gets wind of big company or gov organisation recruiting via competition, posts the same job spec then uses it to try and undercut while passing themselves off as the "official" recruiter. Had this with a NHS development role where the job I responded to turns out they had no business advertising for.
5. If the company is named then it's usually because said company only wants to use a recruiter. I've had this a couple of times where I've contacted a company directly but been asked to file my application with their official outsourced recruitment service.
6. Recruiter threatens "you'll never work in this town again" if you do somehow get to know who the company is simply because you ask.
Ninety nine percent of all recruiters I have dealt with have been the scum of the earth, even the so called reputable ones.
I truly hope Stackoverflow Careers destroys these businesses.
I only ever found one recruitment company that I liked who I felt was consistently top notch when I was freelancing. They didn't ever call me unless I signaled I was looking for work and always negotiated better rates than I felt I was able to when I was first starting out. They were called Recruit Media, but they were later swallowed up by a larger company that I cannot vouch for.
Some former employees set up a new agency that continued in the same vein as Recruit Media - http://www.wearefutureheads.co.uk/. They focus on web and digital content creation specialists. They know what the acronyms mean as well as how to spell them properly. If you're looking for a no-bullshit web/digital recruiter in this in the UK then you could do a lot worse.
Disclaimer: I have never worked as a recruiter and I have no links with Futureheads beyond being placed by some of their staff and also using them to recruit freelancers for projects I have led.
Obviously it goes without saying that you're much better off developing your professional network, negotiating a good rate and going direct if you can.
Just felt compelled to write this to illustrate that not all of them are bad. Sadly I'd estimate that at least 99% of the firms here in the UK are complete time wasters.
I worked in Germany and in the US. The only time that recruiters got a tad annoying was when I was working in Germany and got 2-3 UK agencies. By far not as bad as the post makes it seem, but some slightly annoying things such as calling me on a Sunday evening, trying to give me prep speeches and overusing my name, script reading, trying to not tell me the client name, mispronouncing the skills they were looking for, ...
In the US, the recruiter eMails are more frequent, but usually pretty civilized. Especially the bigger companies (Facebook, LinkedIn, Google) that have their own in-house recruiters tend to be pleasant to work with.
Oh, and of course they would keep bombarding me with Java/XML projects just because my CV (which they doctored and redacted before sending it to the client) mentioned that I had once worked on a Java project (but specialised in something entirely different since).
The one project I actually followed through on turned out to be a total disaster. Other than that, all my work had been directly for clients without a third party -- and that worked out far better.
If you're an inexperienced solo freelancer and want to work for big corporations, sure, recruiters are the way to go. Other than that, IMO you're nearly always better off skipping the middle man and taking the entrepreneurial risk (which is fairly manageable if you don't allow the client to build up several months worth of outstanding payments).
They charged 3 times your rate? I hope that's hyperbole, because that's pretty insane. I get disgusted when a recruiter charges more than 15%. (The best stay below 5% for doing an excellent job, the worst piece of shit I've ever wasted time on turned out to charge over 30% for not doing his job.)
But I've experienced many of the things this guy is complaining about from 3rd party tech recruiters (I'm in the US), including being lied to (and not coming clean until it came up a few months into the contract), aggressively being contacted, dodging questions about company details, not providing job descriptions, lying about what the company needed so I was unprepared for interviews, not telling me anything about interviews, scheduling an interview for me for THE NEXT DAY at 7 pm that was a 3 hour drive away so I had no choice but to take a sudden personal day to go to the interview (I normally wouldn't do that, but I had two friends working there, and really wanted to check it out), etc.
One agency has been sending me emails and calling me multiple times and LinkedIn connection requests from four people in the company these past couple of weeks. They've attempted to contact me at least 12 times in two weeks, and the most they'll tell me in the messages is "an iOS Developer opportunity". With no information you are not going to make me want to get in touch with you, especially when I'm not looking for a new job.
BUUUUT.... I have had a couple good experiences with external recruiters, in fact my most recent experience was very positive and they negotiated better than I would have for the first salary in my career that I've been satisfied with.
(Omission, elision and euphemism is the British way!)
Fortunately I've not had to look for a job since 2003, happy where I am mostly, so my old CV's are probably long gone in disk crashes, failed backups or other purges. I've not been contacted by a recruiter for ~6 years now.
Ahem, speak for yourself. Go check out your local newsagent's daily national press shelves. Pages upon pages of lies and spin.
Hell, the Scottish versions of The Times, Express, Mail and Mirror group papers print contradicting headlines, one version for Scotland and one for England and Wales.
I hate to do the "we're less gullible in Scotland now" thing, but since the referendum we can spot bullshit from a mile off now.
Heh...me too :)
I'd synched up with a recruiter, they scheduled me for a job interview at a swanky gentlemans club (not a strip bar, literally a club for men), in London. I don my old school uniform, for aged 18 I had not yet bought a suit, and printed some resumes at my Mums office and headed over to St James Place in a cab. I check in for the interview and get led into a room filled with desks, some occupied and others not. I take a seat and wait patiently for whatever comes next... ... ...
... The seats are all pretty much full now, and a man stands at the front of the room and gives a 3 slide presentation along the lines of: we can't tell you who our client is, you'll take a test, the top 10 will be offered a job with the client.
Being 18, I was great at tests! Everyone around me was in their mid 20-30's -- I'd been hacking for 3 years at this point, Linux user for ~18mo - I was ready. The test papers are laid in front of us, the presenter orders us to start, I'm done in the first 18 minutes, and sit patiently for the next 12 when the presenter says: "for those of you who have finished please walk your paper up here, for the rest you've 15 more minutes. Myself and two others rise, take our papers to the front and leave through the door and are directed to a lounge (let me tell you, gentle mans clubs are really fancy -- I don't take the gin and tonic offered to me).
Eventually the room is filled with the other test takers, probably 50 of us in total, and we mill around. I was too insecure to talk to anyone, everyone else was probably a little weirded out by the boy in the school uniform!
Some 20 minutes later the presenter enters the room and announces 11 names to stay behind, I was one of them! (What kind of story would this be were I not;)) it was explained to us that we'd be given a short interview. These were conducted three at a time, the presenter and his two associates would take an interview each.
I was in the second three and I had observed that the first three had short conversations, signed some papers, shook hands with their interviewer and then left the room. My interviewer was the presenter. I can't recall the questions, they were about my test paper, but after a couple of them he laid the paper down and looked at me and asked: "did you cheat?", I answered: "no", and he went on to explain that I got a perfect score, the next highest had received about 80% (if memory serves there were ~50 multiple choice questions and ~5 questions where we had to write out commands: how to compile Linux kernels, etc). He shook my hand and led me out, no papers were signed.
And that was it.
I went back to the legal office my mum worked at, recounted the story, and she became so furious -- she believed I'd been subjected to ageism.
I certainly do not mean to suggest all recruiters are this short sighted, and I'm very proud of where my life has taken me thus far (early yc alum, early leader at twitch, amongst other things), but this experience was so negative that I reasoned to avoid recruiters at all costs. Now, I know the way you find a job is to watch the companies you think are doing a great job, working on tech you care about, and reach out directly to them to find out how you can help.
We can kill the predatory recruiters by starving them!
I would suspect more "we don't want to hire someone who thinks it's appropriate to show up in a literal school uniform to a professional interview" more than ageism, per se.
I have had some pretty awful experiences with Dutch recruiters, but also some pretty good ones.
I'm having very mixed feelings about the recruiter that got me my current gig: on the one hand, she was way too pushy and I'm pretty sure she lied to me, and their rate is higher than what the client allows (they're got some cumbersome way to work around that), but on the other hand, what I get is significantly higher than what I got the previous time I worked for the same client (though one of the best and most professional recruiters I've met), so she pushed them even harder than she pushed me, and that's paying off for me too. And it is a really nice gig. The one getting screwed here is not me, and the client is a major bank, so I'm not feeling terribly sorry for them (though I do wonder if I should inform them of the recruiter's overly high rate; is that honest or vindictive?).
Still, it'd be nice if we could do without them. Shouldn't the internet help us cut out all those middlemen?
Yet this article instead of getting flagged into oblivion got upvoted to #1 as of now. Could that be that HN readers' experience with recruiters mirrors the author's experience?
... and they were right. That is mentioned, if you read right through.
It's not about in-house recruiters like you have at FB/Google, it's about the scumbags that hold potential employees to ransom and act as self appointed gatekeepers to jobs that might or might not exist. As an experiment why not hit up jobserve and try applying for some of these agency advertised jobs (under a fake persona), I don't think you've ever experienced the humiliation and frustration of dealing with these wankers.
It's Friday, go have a beer, relax and rediscover your sense of humour.
Oh good, the "you didn't think this was funny therefore your sense of humor sucks" logic.
I guess its much more "fun and interesting" to work yourself into a rage over things you made up versus just not thinking those things are funny...?
That's taking it quite personally. We can agree that Mocko's sardonic style isn't everyone's cup of tea. If you don't like it, accept that others do and that he's really not going to change it for you. He makes it abundantly clear that he is in a position to ignore (at best) or belittle (at worst) people who disagree with him. So move on.
"Oh good, the "you didn't think this was funny therefore your sense of humor sucks" logic."
"That's taking it quite personally."
What do you even say to someone in this situation...?
But, just as the OP is entitled to an opinion, I'm entitled to say that his opinion is a bunch of horseshit. Sorry that this is so offensive to you?
To say "now grovel and be exploited" about a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions may actually be the least self aware thing I've ever seen a human being write.
The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
- £15k ($23k) less salary than advertised in the offer
- No benefits (healthcare, dental, etc)
- No free food/snacks/bevare at the company
- No perks (equipment, etc)
When questioned about this, the recruiter said: hey! impossible to get this, this is were I make my money you know!. How is this a "fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions"?
Did your co-worker actually take this job, without doing the due diligence of reading the contract and the offer letter?
If you're only getting $30k (~£20k/year) as a software programmer of any kind, anywhere in the world, you should seriously consider finding a new employer, even if it requires emigrating. And remote jobs still exist.
Canada has the 3rd largest video games industry in the world--after the US and Japan--and its growth has strained the available talent pool. So you might consider Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, or Montreal. I have heard that UK-to-Canada emigration is more easily done than UK-to-US, though I had never had any particular motive to investigate the claim.
The "games" jobs earn less on average than the less-specific category of "software" jobs, and "programmer" earns less on average than "developer" and "engineer". So if you don't move, maybe you could pad out your resume to be a "software developer" instead.
I am biased somewhat by working in the US, where software writers are legion, and paid more than elsewhere, but if you have any skill at all, you can probably be paid more for work similar to what you do now.
The most important thing though is that he's learning: that means he will still be able to get better opportunities later. Once the learning stops, it's time to get out.
Further, I seriously question that a different job would be one that they hate.
We don't have an international union, so I don't exactly have any leverage here, but I want you to be paid more. Do you seriously think that you are so far below the median level of skill for a C++ programmer with a degree and two years of experience, that you should be paid so little?
Go. Look for another job, and find out just what they would be willing to pay you. With an offer in hand that you could accept on its own merits, go to your current employer and, without mentioning anything about your other offer, ask that your pay rate be reevaluated, to match your skills in the current market. If you don't get a significant payrise, then at that point, you can decide whether it is worth more to have extra cash in your hand, or to keep a job that you know you like, but pays peanuts--stale peanuts at that. Remember, you don't have to accept any offer you don't like.
For now, you seem to have decided that you like your current job £15-20k/year more than anything else you think you could possibly get.
I know trainee developers (no education but some skills) who have started off on £21k and that is low for IT in London. I find it hard to believe that any IT role in London was filled for £15k by anyone other than the most junior of people.
"£15k less salary than advertised in the offer"
Means the salary was X but he was paid (X - 15k).
If he didnt attend and interview or discuss these perks prior to signing a contract he fucked up.
If he was genuinely misled then he can actually make a complaint and pursue it but it sounds like he didnt do much checking at all.
It sounds like he read the contract/offer and that it wasn't at all like he had previously discussed with the recruiter.
But you can also pay privately for treatment. I'm not sure why you would chose to do so - you get a private room but not much else. (There's a possibility you get slightly worse outcomes)
Dental isn't free even on the NHS (although many people get exemptions) so paying gets you better dentists, with better wait times, and more cosmetic options.
The recruiters who are working for these companies are, to some extent, as the author describes. The real reason the industry is so slimy on that end is because enterprise companies are too old fashioned to view technology workers as people who deserve to be paid salaries on par or exceeding middle managers. Therefore, the salaries simply aren't high enough to attract talent beyond H1B indentures and fakers who are horribly unproductive. This creates an IT department that isn't very good or effective, and thus isn't thought of as deserving high pay. Never mind that the C-level management at large, established companies is, for the most part, hopelessly disconnected from what it takes to have an effective technology capability at a company. If you don't agree with me on this, then ask yourself why SAP and Oracle continue to make so much money selling huge software implementations that are known to never work and always go over budget.
Absolutely true.
Simplifying a little, there are companies here that everybody wants to leave and companies that everybody wants to join. It's difficult to leave the first category since the employee's skills have atrophied (see https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2015/09/how-to-be-awesome/).
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr.
So perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people. If the skill-set is worth more than 100/hr, then the company cant recruit the right talent, and complains of "shortages" whereas in reality, the "shortage" is because too many third parties have their hand in the cookie-jar leaving too little to pay the actual market wage.
But I do believe the more likely explanation remains that this guy got angry after getting harassed repeatedly by recruiters and decided to do something about it.
It's my experience that the third-party recruiting business is almost as terrible in the US as the author describes in the UK, though sans the oddball Brit dialect. There also doesn't seem to be as much of the third-party contract scam going; if the recruiter is a contracting agency, they'll tell you that up front. But the incoherent and misspelled emails, the rampant spam, the lack of knowledge of the roles they're recruiting for, yes that all rings true in the US too.
Congrats. That must be how the entire industry works then </sarcasm>
> a process where the person will almost certainly end up with a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office with great pay and great working conditions
Yeah, bull-shit, if you think every engineering job is in a comfy office with great pay and great working conditions, you are seriously delusional. I've worked at places where this wasn't the case.
If everything was all sunshine and rainbows all the time, companies wouldn't have bad reputations, or have a hard time hiring new people. But plenty do have a bad reputation, and plenty do scare off new recruits. That's kind of the entire point of sites like GlassDoor.
> The author is a bad writer, is unable to support their points and shows the self awareness of a 5 year old. Why did this post get a single upvote? Is the whole "lets work ourselves in a furor over things we made up about strangers" not getting old to you people...?
First off, it's his opinion, and his blog, totally his right to have unsupported claims. But considering how many comments actually support his claims, it's my belief you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry.
To end the post with saying "you are severely disillusioned as to the true state of your industry." is just like, jesus man, are you going for some sort of insufferability award? Go outside. Perhaps there is something more rewarding there than grasping at straws to get mad at a stranger on the internet...
It was at this point that you lost me. You've clearly been lucky enough to never had a crappy job.
I'm getting a lot of REALLY bizarre straw men responses to my posts but this one has to take the cake.
You managed to turn me saying that people should stop bitching about IT recruiters calling them for offices jobs that pay well and have great conditions ito a conclusion that I have CLEARLY never had a crappy job? I...what? How? How does a human brain take my input and produce your output? I'm blown away.
I'll give you a hint. No recruiter called me for my crappy jobs. I went and applied for them. Sorry this doesn't fit into your projection that you were clearly qualified to make from that single thing I said.
And since you haven't, you really need to stop telling other people what they can and cannot complain about. Seriously, at what salary level are people not allowed to complain about work conditions any more? What exactly are the conditions that an office has to have before one can no longer complain? Free soda? A snack machine?
Secondly, Google is a world-class, forward-thinking company so they are probably not representative of the rest of the millions of companies out there. That is like saying..."of course 100% of companies provide free lunch, after all hundreds of departments at Google provide free lunch." It is just silly.
Finally, the OP is not upset about ending up with "a fantastic offer for an engineering job in a comfortable office." How many engineers even have offices these days? Which company do you even work for?
The OP is upset about rent-seeking behavior of outside recruiters. Often, HR departments outsource the entire search to recruiters. Here in the US, the typical cut is 20 to 75%. For those recruiters who have negotiated higher cuts like 75%, it is usually due to an executive-level relationship...but they don't keep the full 75%, they then sub-source the talent from secondary or even tertiary recruiters.
Lets take an example -- the worker makes 100/hr, the tertiary (recruiter who actually found the talent) gets 25/hr, the secondary (who vetted from multiple tertiaries) gets 25/hr, the primary (who plays golf with the CIO) gets 25/hr. OK, perhaps the worker is well off at 100/hr, but this is a huge loss to the company -- three extra parties have taken a cut just because the HR manager didnt want to vet their own people.
A lot of the behavior mentioned here is awfully familiar in the US.
OT, but you don't have exploited sex workers where you live?
There are a lot of people who are not happy with their informatics jobs, especially in the UK, and I think recruiters are a significant part of the reason. As you can probably guess from the slang, the particular situation the author is describing is much worse there.
Bah, you can rant without resorting to racist aping of ESOL speakers. Especially when the odds are good that the author only speaks one language.
First, there is the Chinese whispers from within the company. They don't seem keen on finding candidates directly, which in this field is as easy as it gets, so off they go to the recruitment agency. My (now former) boss writes a job spec, this goes to HR (who aren't familiar with any of the technical details) and HR add some company blurb and send it on to a recruiter, but not before crippling the job spec by slapping on a below-market salary that nobody competent will accept to try and save some cash.
The recruiters think they have plenty of candidates who will take the salary, but the candidates simply aren't good enough or don't have the right experience. The recruiters have no way of telling this, so they keep telling the company that there are plenty of great candidates and to keep interviewing.
From the applicant side, several friends of mine who are generally looking to move to a new job had this role aggressively pitched to them by a recruiter. Most of them would be brilliant for this job. What my friends really need is a ten minute phone call with my old boss to see if it's a potential fit before starting any formal interview process. I'd have been happy to put them in touch directly at an earlier stage, but there has now been contact through a recruiter and I don't want to meddle behind the scenes.
None of my friends ended up going for the job since the recruiters were telling them confusing things, and all got better offers than the advertised range elsewhere. The company have unsuccessfully interviewed a few candidates that the recruiters have pushed on them, the team has been desperate for someone new for months (and they're crucial to the company's success) and people like my old boss have no idea and little way of knowing how close they are to finding the right people.
And yes, the stereotype of the shiny-suited young "failed salesman" recruiter is unfortunately true in my experience.