I also recommend a response to every recruiter, but you don't need to explain your privilege, you don't need to suck up to them, and you don't need to justify your actions.
"Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
> "Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"
I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
I'm genuinely unsure what I - or they - get out of dragging this out into a screenful of blah blah blah.
One of the most common reasons is simply that they don't want you to go direct to the company in question and bypass their commission. If they give you too much, it is very easy to do and many companies will recruit directly and the recruiter would have no legal basis to do anything about that.
On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
> it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them
Up to a point. They get a fraction of the marginal increase in salary, and they’d much sooner “close the sale” than risking having someone else fill the job to try and get an extra 500$ commission.
It’s the same story with real estate agents: selling your house for an extra 20k might be a lot to you but to the agent it’s an extra 400$ in commission (exact percentage varies). In other words, it’s hardly worth risking the seller losing interest or working an extra 2–3 weeks for so little.
My point exactly. The seller’s (or job seeker’s) upside is much higher than the agent’s, and so the agent won’t try and get you a higher price/salary if it means delaying the sale.
This works if you have an open house/2-5 days dedicated to showings and a set time where offers are allowed (which is at the end of that showing period). However, even now, houses need to be appraised by the bank for the buyer to get the loan for the house, and many people aren’t ready to get in a bidding war only to then need to come out-of-pocket an extra $10k because they bid too much and the bank appraised it that much below the offer amount.
Exactly. When I sold my house a few months ago I found a good agent that helped me price correctly and we sold the same weekend. Made sure it went to someone that actually needed a house and not some investor looking to flip. Still came in over asking.
Assuming it is an active real estate with lots of transactions, yes, the agent is absolutely more motivated to close the deal and move on to another deal than to get the highest commission possible on a particular deal. The situation is similar with recruiters. It is important to understand these motivations to correctly interpret what you are hearing from the agents/realtors.
I used to work as a waiter when I was in my first summer out of high school. The calculus was similar there. When it was busy the tables turned as soon as the person got up, so I would often not emphasize dessert. The added $15 on the check from dessert increased my tip a couple dollars, but regular desserts could cause me to lose 1-2 full turns of my section over the course of the evening, so with a four table section of everyone for dessert, I might lose 8 tables total, and if the average tip was $20, I’d lose $160 minus the extra $16 in tip gained from everyone having dessert. Point is, I much preferred quick turns over small per capita increases in per table tips.
In non rush times though where tables didn’t get filled when people left, it made a lot more sense to play up dessert.
I’ve never encountered a recruiter who would even entertain that idea. They loved “cookie cutter” deals and hated this kind of unusual arrangements for the same reason that they can’t understand anything else than keywords.
> On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
This isn't my experience at all, having worked with recruiters both as a hirer and hiree. Recruiters typically are looking to close as many positions as possible, making money on volume. Their incentives are to spend as little time as they can getting candidates just enough so they say yes.
They typically are paid a percentage of a candidates first year salary. At first glance this might seem to mean they're motivated to get you as much as possible. In reality it means that the effort to get an extra $20k, which might make a big difference for the candidate, only results in an extra e.g. $2000 for them. They're not going to spend time on that that could be spent on closing another candidate, and getting another full commission, if they think the candidate will accept either way.
The money a recruiter is paid also often comes from the same budget a potential signing bonus would. The fact that they take 10% of the first year salary makes companies less forthcoming with extra money for the candidate.
A lot of the recruiters have different businesses. Some may be recruiting for direct hire but alot of them retain them as employees as they contract for six months or however long...sometimes years..for an hourly rate. They pocket the difference over what is paid to the engineer.
I want them to understand that I need to know up-front if the position is interesting enough to be worth investing my time in at all. I could sacrifice my time and energy to assuage their fears, but every time I've done that in the past ten years there has been zero return on investment.
A reader might, at this point, optimistically point out that the next recruiter could be different. This reader would be correct. That could indeed be the case! Yet every time I wind up deciding to try the optimistic approach I wind up on a phonecall in which I learn that the company isn't someone I want to work for, the JD isn't one I actually want to work on, the comp isn't nearly enough, or some combination thereof. Generally the comp is so far off it has no change to even be negotiated to something I would consider. Often they try to sell me on a 40%-60% pay cut, because a slice of that is worth a lot to them (it's happened twice this month).
At this point I'm quite tired of paying optimism's price to assuage the fears of recruiters. The kindness is not returned. I understand others might choose differently.
But isn't that the advantage of the approach in the OP? It shows some more effort and good faith to the recruiter, without actually requiring any additional effort or time on your end.
9 times out of 10 the job description you get from the recruiter is a lazy cut-and-paste from the actual company's input.
It's never anonymized and simply pasting it into Google will almost always get you a lead on the hiring company.
Another lead is if they give you the company location. There is only one company on the planet, for example, that has R&D offices in both Mossvile and Aurora, Illinois.
Also 9 times out of 10 its a bait and switch for a different company. Whenever I've worked with these recruiters they always "see whats a good fit" with my resume and its never the company that was in the job description.
> it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
Unlikely. Its way better for the recruiter to focus on the quantity of hires rather than trying to increase the salaries of a smaller number of them. It takes way more work and makes them less money to help increase your salary by 20% than just finding another role and hire.
>On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's in the recruiters best interest to maximize their throughput in placing candidates, and they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
> they're commission is skimming money off the top of the salary you could have collected if you'd gone direct.
No, the company would pay you your salary and keep the commission itself, it would not have given you that commission simply because you went directly with them.
I think the one time I responded to a recruiter and went through the process was because they told me the company up front. Unless its an internal recruiter, I never get that info. I was interested in the company and I figured they could help speed me through the process (which I believe was true). I didn't take the job but I appreciated this person not BSing me.
> On the other hand, because of commission, it is in the recruiter's interest to get you as much money as possible so you might get a better offer via them than you would if you went direct.
It's in their interest, yes - but it's not worth more than closing a deal quickly.
They generally make more money by seating 3 hires at new companies for 100k than they do seating 1 hire for 300k.
Because of the downside risk of possibly losing a deal, and further - because they're paid over time as an employee remains with a company, it's much more beneficial to place many people quickly than it is to place a few people for more money.
that all depends on the contract setup with the company and recruiter. i've worked at places that had exclusivity contracts with recruiters where we wouldn't even post the positions in hr until the contract expired.
>I've found that this makes 80-90% of recruiters go completely silent. For some reason, asking for this basic information scares off the vast majority of recruiters.
Well, that's not a problem - the whole point of this reply template is to filter out the useless cold-calling spam without wasting time in interviews, so that 80-90% of recruiters going silent is exactly what you want. The only reason why you respond at all is to give a chance to the 10-20% of serious offers.
That hasn't been my experience. I always get the salary range, equity package, and what stage/growth the company is at currently and where they want to take things. All in the first 30 minute call.
I've tried a fair number of those calls. You might be surprised by how many recruiters don't really have salary range or meaningful equity details (preferences, shares outstanding, etc.) but really want me to be excited for the great opportunity to get in on the ground floor of a rapidly growing business.
To my eyes, thirty minutes is a pretty expensive way to find out if a position is in line with my comp and the company one I want to work for. It could just as easily be handled in thirty seconds.
Last month I had a quick 20-minute call with a recruiter who couldn't tell me anything about the company or the position that I hadn't found in thirty seconds of searching. This is not an unusual experience, unfortunately. The only explanation for that call I can find is that the recruiter sincerely expected to impress me with a phone sales approach.
If they are attempting unsolicited headhunting - that is, not affiliated with the company - they almost certainly don't know the expected compensation.
They go silent, or they also give a canned response about being competitive in the market when it comes to comp (without naming a number).
If they do name a number and you reply it's too low, they again go into a canned response of "we're willing to reach (++x) for the right candidate", which is just as much bullshit as before. You'll complete an interview cycle and get the lowball offer of (original x).
TLDR they'll lie about comp and never completely answer you.
Sometimes I say something like "I'm glad to hear you're competitive! I'm currently being offered $REAL_BIG_COMPANY_NUMBER, so I look forward to our conversation." Generally this ends the conversation.
I don't like to ignore recruiters, but it's hard to answer them correctly. I'm always looking for a nice way to articulate "I'm comfortable with my current job, but interested in exploring whether I'm being compensated fairly. I don't want to slam any doors. But, I am also not up for the hazing session of grinding leetcode, filling out online forms, doing take-home tests, phone screens, and 5 rounds of interviews, just to find out at the end of it all what my current market value is."
Late to comment, but basically this is why I just ignore it all unfortunately.
I'm on a subreddit that talks about my profession and basically all interview processes are now broken in my industry. A lot of just nonsense, waste of time stuff. You hire the professional prep companies so you know the right buzzwords to say and how to show you follow the "framework", but almost nothing from the interview actually really determines how well you'll do day to day.
Instead of going to an interview, they should just call my dev team and scrum master and ask how things run with me and use their feedback as the evaluation.
It's amazing how these basic questions are often like kryptonite to these people.
Protip: If you want senior people to respond, you should probably include that information up front.
I've done several interviews at places only to get to the stage we're talking money and suddenly it becomes clear they were expecting to pay about a third to half of what I currently make for someone in a senior position. Each time I think it could genuinely save a lot of time and effort (and thus money) by just being up front about that stuff.
I've started getting very firm with them. I respond to each email with "no thank you, also stop contacting me, also here's the last person I asked to stop contacting me, but who didn't." We'll see how long it works, if at all, but after 3 separate Amazon recruiters contacted me last month I was fed up.
I replied to a first follow up (~'I don't think I'm a good fit', nevermind anything else) this morning as it happens. Almost always ignore; took one as far as interview a few years ago, which I never heard back from (no result/feedback) until a week or so ago! But I might make that a policy, if they 'just check in' after the first email then may as well try to head it off there I suppose.
"Hi, thanks for the message. I would appreciate as much detail as you can via message. Interested in location, compensation, and what specific problems they need help solving. Thanks!"
I don't take a call unless the work description is specific enough. I don't want to work on your "backend". If asked, I tell them my comp expectation is min +50k over what I currently make. And I sure as hell am not moving to the bay area.
Yep, at least tell me who your recruiting for. I have a list of companies I don’t care to work for, so let’s not waist time on those.
A number of recruiters are also just bad at their job. I worked as a .Net developer 12 years ago, but most recruiters apparently aren’t smart enough to figure out that not only is my knowledge horrible out of date, it might also not interest me anymore.
This is what I'm doing so far. I typically answer stating how I would like to work and hint my conditions and let them know that I'm happy to follow up if they see a fit.
"Hey ____. Before we move forward, can you provide me with the company name, a job description, and the expected compensation. Regards"