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Ask HN: Would you work with an “Agent” to help you find your ideal job?

• elviejo 9y ago
  yes... I've looked for such a service in the past. I thought they were called jobhunters (search for the right job for me) VS headhunters (search for the right person for the job). But I couldn't find anything, apart from recruiters (ie headhunters).
  • louisswiss 9y ago
    I'm working on this currently. Would you mind answering a few questions for me? Happy to buy a beer in return. My contact details are in my profile.
• helen842000 9y ago
  They do exist however, there are difficulties in this business model in that the candidate rarely wants to pay.
  • ig1 9y ago
    In many countries such practices are illegal because they're considered exploitative.
    • davelnewton 9y ago
      That doesn't make much sense to me.
  • mrburton 9y ago
    This wouldn't be a service that the candidate would pay for, instead, it would be companies.
    • dasmoth 9y ago
      For what it’s worth, I’d probably be more interested if it was something I paid for. Otherwise, ends up looking a lot like the existing contingency recruiter model.
      • louisswiss 9y ago
        I'm working on this currently. Would you mind answering a few questions for me? Happy to buy a beer in return. My contact details are in my profile.
    • CodeWriter23 9y ago
      How is your idea different from the current headhunter ecosystem?
    • helen842000 9y ago
      You can't say you will find the best job for someone and then magic up a contract with every company they want to apply to. Why would a company pay for a candidate with an agency fee attached when they probably have other similarly qualified candidates that have applied directly. That puts the candidate that has applied through you at a disadvantage and encourages the employer & candidate to swap details and circumvent the service after an introduction has made. Whoever requests your services is the one that payment should come from and (from experience) candidates do not want to pay.
• davelnewton 9y ago
  I consider the recruiters I work with (there aren't many) to be my agents. They know me, they know what I like, and they're familiar with the jobs they submit me for. They're a different breed than what I consider run-of-the-mill headhunters who shotgun jobs more or less at random. They don't use a lot of technology--agents require personal contact and an understanding of both the developer and company culture. It's nothing different than agents for actors--they know people, they know roles, they know actors.
• muzani 9y ago
  Definitely. The whole process is tedious and time wasting. If an agent can help skip one interview out of five and increase odds 10%, that's good.
• bitwize 9y ago
  Yes, definitely. My problem with crooters is not what they are ostensibly supposed to do, so much as that most of them are hopelessly inept at it. Good ones are hard to find. Ones that know their technical shit almost impossible.
  • louisswiss 9y ago
    I'm working on this currently. Would you mind answering a few questions for me? Happy to buy a beer in return. My contact details are in my profile.
• codegeek 9y ago
  Companies mostly don't hire because there is that perfect talent/match out there. They hire when they need to. The current model works for the employer and recruiter because whenever there is a need, the company will create a job opening and the recruiter fills it in. Candidate doesn't pay anything out of their pocket. The only way for an agent to work is for companies to be open to good talent and keep them on their radar even if there is no current job opening. This is usually difficult and not worth to companies. If you become an agent, you will also be at the mercy of asking the companies "hey do you have an opening yet, I have this great guy/gal". So that model fails. Also, don't forget that there is that tiny population of good recruiters out there who are directly connected to employers and have a rolodex of candidates they have worked with in the past. They can match the candidate to jobs that fit them. Rare but out there. I know a few. So yea, I don't like the status quo but I struggle to come up with an alternative yet.
• cweagans 9y ago
  Yes. https://www.10xmanagement.com/ https://www.10xmanagement.com/ went down this road a while ago. I don't know how they're doing, but their site is still online, so maybe that says something? Maybe not. Who knows? I don't think I'd be interested in an agent for finding full time work. If I had an agent for freelance work, I'd be a very happy person. For me, enjoyment of this field comes from meeting new people and solving new problems in creative ways. I start to get itchy if I feel like all of the major problems have been solved - that's when I start looking for new work.
• louisswiss 9y ago
  Yes! I'm working on exactly this problem now, although with a slightly different angle. We should get in touch and compare notes/ideas. My contact info is in my profile.
• EnderMB 9y ago
  The problem I see with the "agent" model is that it either short-changes the recruiter, or results in an agency that manages too much talent to offer a personalised service (i.e. reverting back to being a bog-standard recruiter). A lot of people slate the "fire and forget" cold call approach that many recruiters take, but it works, especially for the more sales oriented recruiters. It's not uncommon for many recruiters in Bristol to make tens of thousands a week in sales for their company through essentially building up a database of developers, a database of available jobs, and essentially recruiting for roles that they don't represent. I worked for several agencies that have interviewed and hired developers via recruiters they had never shared a job spec with. All these recruiters had done was find a public job opening, cold call until someone answers, and send that person in for an interview. If that developer is earning £40k and they're getting 10-15% of that salary as a fee, that's £4k for a bunch of emails. Repeat that for several roles a month and you've made a fair amount of cash. The biggest issue from a candidate perspective is that using a recruiter tends to limit yourself to a subset of companies that are willing to deal with recruiters. A lot of great companies either hire internally, or receive enough spam from recruiters that they threaten day-rates on those that waste their time on cold-calls. The agent model sounds good for high-end developers, but convincing these people that there is someone out there that can sell their skills better than they can sell themselves would be quite tricky. The vast level of domain knowledge someone at that level has built over the years is enough to get them the job.