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I have been freelancing in Europe for the last 10 years and I have learned to avoid recruiters as much as I can. In the last 4 years I have managed to get contr

by koevet 16y ago

I have been freelancing in Europe for the last 10 years and I have learned to avoid recruiters as much as I can. In the last 4 years I have managed to get contracts through connections and skip middlemen all-together. It takes more time but it's rewarding. Few rules I use when I deal with recruiters (in Europe): 1) There are really an handful of recruitment companies with a good reputation and history. By default, I distrust a recruiter calling from an unknown agency. There must be thousands of small recruitment agencies in Europe, I get a fairly high amount of emails/calls every week and I mostly ignore them. 2) Be suspicious when a recruiter knocks at your door or publish a job ad with an out-of-market rate. Rates are low these days. They just want to harvest CVs. 3) If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview. 4) Don't waste time talking technical stuff with a recruiter. They don't know shit. In 10+ years I have met maybe 2 recruiters with a real technical/dev background. Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else. 5) Most of the time jobs coming from recruiters suck. A company with a decent vision on how to build software will never use zombie recruiters. Maybe they will contact one of the big player or, more likely, they will go on the market themselves. Recruiters jobs are mostly financial/telco crap where Java 1.4 is the standard. 6) Be aggressive when it comes to rates. Recruiters markup is around 20% (again in Europe). It may vary dramatically. So think about it: You are giving 20% of your salary to a guy who phoned you one day, sent you to an interview the next and disappeared. Also, some recruiters (very few) are transparent about the markup. They are normally worth your trust. 7) When you leave a contract, keep good relationship with everyone at every cost. It will pay back.

britman 16y ago
Complete agree with "If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview." They're always fishing for people (a major alarm bell should be if they're asking for hiring managers or persons of authority) who they can then spam with offers of services.
KoZeN 16y ago
Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else. Ouch. You cut me deep koevet. In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here. Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number). If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency. Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens. TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.
- koevet 16y ago
  Again, I may sound harsh here, but, given a couple of exceptions, my experiences with recruiters are nothing short that horrendous. That is why now I resort only to personal connections and on networks like Linkedin. I'm also noticing a worrying trend recently: (caveat: I'm not an native English speaker but I have lived in the UK and I use English as my working language. I can recognize UK accents pretty well). More often than not, I'm getting phone calls from recruiters with a very strong cockney accent that clearly have no idea of what they are talking about and they sounds like they just landed on that desk without any previous experience in the industry. These are particularly pesky. They go straight to the flag-raising questions and they make you feel like a complete idiot. Honestly, these cowboys are just damaging the image of an already deeply wounded industry. I don't know how your industry deals with dishonest or unprofessional behavior, but if you want to get the trust of people like the one hanging in this community you have to work on some mechanism to keeps the bad apples out of the basket. I can actually smell a business idea here, like a guild of super-hero recruiters, who never let you down and do actually find you your dream job.
- paolomaffei 16y ago
  That's the same trick as "you're not paying more for using a credit card, the SELLER is paying for it", except of course the seller will have higher prices because of this.

by koevet 16y ago

britman 16y ago

Complete agree with "If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview." They're always fishing for people (a major alarm bell should be if they're asking for hiring managers or persons of authority) who they can then spam with offers of services.

KoZeN 16y ago

Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else. Ouch. You cut me deep koevet. In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here. Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number). If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency. Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens. TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.

koevet 16y ago
Again, I may sound harsh here, but, given a couple of exceptions, my experiences with recruiters are nothing short that horrendous. That is why now I resort only to personal connections and on networks like Linkedin. I'm also noticing a worrying trend recently: (caveat: I'm not an native English speaker but I have lived in the UK and I use English as my working language. I can recognize UK accents pretty well). More often than not, I'm getting phone calls from recruiters with a very strong cockney accent that clearly have no idea of what they are talking about and they sounds like they just landed on that desk without any previous experience in the industry. These are particularly pesky. They go straight to the flag-raising questions and they make you feel like a complete idiot. Honestly, these cowboys are just damaging the image of an already deeply wounded industry. I don't know how your industry deals with dishonest or unprofessional behavior, but if you want to get the trust of people like the one hanging in this community you have to work on some mechanism to keeps the bad apples out of the basket. I can actually smell a business idea here, like a guild of super-hero recruiters, who never let you down and do actually find you your dream job.
paolomaffei 16y ago
That's the same trick as "you're not paying more for using a credit card, the SELLER is paying for it", except of course the seller will have higher prices because of this.