The money on the other side is ‘finite’. You could go direct and suggest getting a signing bonus instead of the recruiter getting 20-25% of your first annual salary.

I’m currently hiring for a bunch of roles and recruiters are aggressively reaching out that they “have the perfect candidate for your vacancy”. Even though I’m looking for experienced ML specialists and they’re offering someone with 1 year of Java CRUD app experience… they’re playing the numbers game on both sides of the market.