Your recruiter is not your friend (opens in new tab)

This is an obvious one. I've dealt with a ton of recruiters over the years. If they're not willing to discuss a range upfront with you (amongst other things), they're lying to you. THERE IS NO JOB. They're just building their virtual rolodex for future sales.

If they want to grill you about what you do, who you know, references, etc. before revealing the name and location of the client... THERE IS NO JOB. (Hint for my younger colleagues: never reveal your references until you get an offer. They're just hitting you up for warm bodies that they can then probe.)

Recruiters do this to play some weird game of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I have no idea why. They swing in the extreme direction of sales and remove the technical aspects of it. We're treated like fodder for the job position sacrifice. And worse yet, a lot of them seem to think we're too stupid to know better.

I never expect a recruiter to be technical; they're a form of HR, not engineering. I wouldn't expect one to know how to read a TCP dump, or analyze a Nessus report for false positives. However a base understanding of what you're pushing for is to be expected. I had one recruiter almost shy away from me because he only saw a keyword listed once or twice on my resume...even though it's a core technology used in every single role I've done that's industry-wide.

I use them to boost my salary when asked how much I’m making. I say 1/4 more then reality. From there they boost their offer.

Why not use recruiters to give yourself a big fat raise? They are after all coming after you.

Only downside of recruiters for me has been they are distracting and blow up your ego thinking you can find any job. Yet their offerings are only prospective.

Incredibly good advice as usual. I used your information when negotiating for my current position (internal HR), and earn ~20% more than my colleagues because of said advice (our team shares our compensation info amongst ourselves).

EDIT: Also, fantastic use of the analogy to real estate agents. Highlights what happens when incentives aren't aligned.

I had several recruiters alter my resumes before I went into an interview. It was unbelievable.

MY recruiter is often somebody i have a working relationship with, i trust to some extent, and I've vetted. The author seems to not understand this dynamic.

I love my recruiters i work with. I make sure they understand and specialize in my industry, have a good reputation, have good connections, i can't talk honestly too, and other intangibles.

Of course a recruiter isn't trying to get you the very best offer in purely numeric terms, and neither should you. But both of you have the same problem and your incentives are aligned: you shouldn't take two more months to secure and extra $5000 since you are giving up way more in foregone salary.

There are a lot of bad recruiters out there, but you need to make am effort to deal with good ones. Don't treat your resume like buckshot and spray it everywhere. Work with good recruiters and you'll be fine.

And stop the recruiter hate. If you treat your recruiters as enemies, instead of valuable business relationships, I expect you'll probably have problems.

That said, the best recruiters I've known don't look at the game like that. Imagine how the real estate business would change if homeowners were selling a house every couple of years. Realtors would want to attract and nurture relationships with homeowners selling the most expensive houses in order to secure many recurring high-value payoffs. They'd also know that "high-value" homeowners are likely to be friends with other high-value homeowners. If they do their best for one homeowner, that one will likely lead them to other homeowners and high-value payoffs.

Of course, there are precious few recruiters who truly take that approach (even though they all claim otherwise.) Recruiters aren't a free lunch. It takes time and effort to find the rare recruiters who truly want you to maximize your career potential. If/when you find one who truly gets it, however, you should try to nurture that relationship. (You both stand to make a lot of money off of each other over the course of your careers.)

My last job hunt ended in an offer through a recruiter. The offer was a 40% raise from the job I was working at the time. The recruiter was initially skeptical about my desired salary range (which was actually lower than I ended up getting offered), but she listened when I said that I'd be able to get that number.

I wouldn't have been able to get that much money without this recruiter's help. I had another offer at that time where the company asked me what I thought was reasonable and just gave me that. The number was ~15% lower than the offer through the recruiter. She had all the data on what other engineers with comparable skills/experience were making, so she was able to help me realize that I was undercutting myself.

To be clear, this recruiter is an exception to the rule. She's certainly not the only recruiter I've worked with, but she's the first and only recruiter I'll reach out to when I'm looking for new opportunities. She's been a tremendous help in my career, and I try to help her whenever I can by introducing her to great engineers that fit roles she's looking for. Pretty much every other recruiter I've worked with has fit the description laid out in this article.

(full disclosure: I consider this recruiter to be one of my closest friends, so my views are surely biased.)

“I’m a salary negotiation expert. My goal is to maximize my clients’ salaries with simple, proven salary negotiation tactics.”

Which is hilarious really