Dear Developers, a "Free" Headhunter Will Cost You Over $10k

Two things not mentioned: When I was hiring, a resume that came direct (e.g. through an employee referral) was always the first choice to interview. Even a cold referral ("I don't know him, but he replied to my tweet about jobs") was a resume that had a "$0" recruiting fee attached to it, while a similar candidate from a headhunter carried a $10K+ fee.<p>No matter which way you shuffle things, as an employer I want to talk to qualified candidates that don't have a heavy fee dragging them down. Either I save money, or I have more flexibility about pay, it's a win for everyone except the head hunter.<p>Therefore, i always encourage people to network. It could be that you are marginally less attractive than another resumé, but if you don't have a fee, you'll get the interview and that may give you the chance to win the job. In which case, it's worth a lot more than $10K to talk directly to the employer.

Just another dataoint : I <i>just</i> got hired at a new company using a headhunter. Midway through the process of doing interviews arranged by my recruiter I received advice along these lines from my significant other, and was shocked at the typical size of a headhunter's commission. Given that it seemed like my particular headhunter couldn't have spent that much time hooking me up with interviews, 20-30% of my first year's salary still sounds ridiculously high. But ultimately, I was pleasantly surprised by the offers I received, and it seems to have helped that the headhunter made sure multiple companies were providing offers within days of each other. Also, he recommended me to companies that I wouldn't have considered otherwise, one of which I am very happy to be joining.

As someone who's trying to recruit developers for our startup, Hirelite looks interesting. Is there any way to target only people within a specific location (like San Francisco)? Or only people who are willing to relocate?<p>I'd definitely pay to interview 20 "screened developers"* if they were all in the SF Bay Area already. Much less interested if they could be anywhere.<p>*What does "screened" really mean? Are you only showing me people that match the skillsets I mentioned?

An experienced web developer where I'm living at (Western Canada) contracts at about $60/hour, with the recruiter taking away usually $10/hour. Yes, it's a decent chunk, but the bigger picture is that companies paying the highest contract rates almost exclusively go with recruiters from a convenience and insurable standpoint, and the fact that good engineers are not plentiful. That adds up to around $1500 to the recruiter every month for their bounty.<p>If you want to avoid this overhead and the luxury of contracts being offered to you on a regular basis, and you don't have a solid network of peers that can fill you in on opportunities, you'll need to spend quite a bit of time on your own scrounging online ads, or the Careers sections of companies you'd like to work for, or market yourself some other way, all of which require effort.<p>Now we play the opportunity cost game. Frequent contracts are offered to you making you around $10,000/month by headhunters looking to make a buck off you. Or you can spend a few more months looking by yourself, and save yourself that $1,500 cost per month that you're unemployed, but ultimately taking longer to land a contract. Is every month spent 'looking' and being without a contract worth the $10,000 in lost revenue?

There's also another side to this story: headhunters benefit from "selling" developers at a high price, and usually they are way better negotiators than the average developer. Most of the time, that money saved doesn't go towards a signing bonus or a salary bump, but stays in the pockets of the employer.<p>Also, if you're confident about your development skills but not so much about your interviewing skills, having a good headhunter basically doing the initial salespitch for you can be very helpful.

I'll gladly advocate for people to go directly to companies in the hopes of finding work.<p>What about, then those companies that <i>want</i> a recruiter to go out and find someone? Hirelite is definitely an interesting approach to the game of finding work, and this post is accurate in some respects of the recruiting model.<p>It misses though that most companies operate with a lean model, and simply do not have the resources to source, identify, isolate, and shrinkrap a by-line procedural methodology for finding new hires. Enter us recruiters.<p>For what it's worth, hiring is rare unless you're with a firm that places 500 people or more a month. If you, like me are a solo virtual recruiter, factoring in just operating alone (the costs of subscribing to job boards, paying to post ads), the ends justify the means.

I don't think it really works that way. Or at least it shouldn't if the company doing the hiring is smart. If a good candidate comes across a startup's desk, are they really going to risk losing them by paying them $10k less to make up for the cost of the recruiter? If the company doesn't want to pay these kinds of expenses, they shouldn't use a recruiter. They shouldn't shortchange their people because of it.<p>Besides, if the candidate truly is good, they will more than make up for the extra 10k.

this site is blocked at my company, btw. thanks company! no idea why and not sure what software my company uses.

This is terrible advice. You're setting a precedent right off the bat that you're just in it for the money. If someone said "hey I see that you often use recruiters, but I came to you directly, so how about you give me $10k" I'd retract my employment offer immediately.