>Secondly, negotiating an offer is the quickest and easiest part. It hardly consumes any time at all by comparison to the amount of time and effort invested jus

>Secondly, negotiating an offer is the quickest and easiest part. It hardly consumes any time at all by comparison to the amount of time and effort invested just to get to the point where there is any offer at all. I'll buy that; the recruiters I've worked with have certainly put in a lot of time getting me to the point of having an offer. The point of serious mismatch is when you're working with more than one recruiter (at different agencies). Some years back, I was almost at the offer stage from company X through recruiter A; recruiter B pushed me to apply at company Y, too. Problem was, X and Y were founded/funded by the same people, and had an agreement (possibly illegal) not to compete on candidates. B somehow convinced me to go ahead anyway; I talked to Y, and X dropped me.