Generally, recruiters work for specific client companies and try to fill seats at those companies. Because the companies are paying them, their interests are fundamentally aligned with them and not with you. The kind of recruiter you describe is more of a talent agent, but until there's a shortage of engineering jobs, this probably won't happen for full-time roles because the financial incentive for engineers to pay an agent simply isn't there.
Agents make sense when it's hard to find a job or when the opportunity cost to looking for work is high enough to justify paying someone else. Recruiters make sense when it's hard to find workers or the opportunity cost of looking for workers is high enough to pay someone else. In some sense, it's almost like recruiters are talent agents for the companies they're representing.
Freelance engineers do have talent agents (e.g. http://www.10xmanagement.com/). When you're a freelancer, your time is split between doing actual work (coding) and drumming up business, so the less time you spend on drumming up business, the more time you can spend doing work that pays. In this model, paying someone to find work for you makes perfect sense because the opportunity cost of not working is high enough to justify the payment.
Full-time engineers are a different story from freelancers, however. I found this out myself when I first started my own recruiting firm. At the time, I really wanted to explore the talent agent model. This model was really interesting to me because I was convinced that having engineers pay for an agent's services would swiftly rectify many of the problems that run rampant in technical recruiting today (e.g. wanton spamming of engineers, misrepresentation of positions, recruiters having a very shallow understanding of the space/companies they're recruiting for).
I dedicated a good chunk of the first few months of running my business to talking to engineers and trying to figure out if a talent agent model would work. Engineers were super excited about this. Until I mentioned that part where they'd have to pay me, that is.
These days, I try to work in this weird hybrid way where I start with finding smart people, figure out what they want, and then no matter what it is, try to give it to them, while still getting paid by the company. This works for me because I maintain relationships with a lot of companies at once. And it also works for me because, as a former engineer, I can grok what people want at hopefully a deeper level than non-technical technical recruiters and also be able to filter talent somewhat effectively.
This still isn't ideal because my incentives are still kind of misaligned and because companies don't always love this approach -- it's great for candidates, but from their perspective, flow is unpredictable and haphazard. And I think this model works for me primarily because I used to code.
So, tl;dr, while what you want sounds awesome, and I want it too, I don't think it's going to happen in any real way anytime soon. At least not until a product comes along.
- Get unsolicited email by recruiter. I ignore if it's generic but if it looks like they've read something about me I answer (now I demand company name & salary range upfront to save everybody's time)
- Recruiter follows up asking for resume or call. I have linkedin complete public profile, blog, twitter, Stackoverflow, Github etc, with all linked to each other, almost never they notice.
- If somehow I'm still interested and I can't get out of the call ("my favorite call hours is email"), I schedule for a short call. I always write short, clear polite emails.
- Already here the communication stops sometimes. If there's a call they invariably want to qualify me with the salary question. I've used both the "won't say at this stage" and "inflated salary" strategies.
- Next if there's a first company phone interview (basic screening/basic tech) I always pass it, tech questions seem too basic, we schedule remote tech interview
- In the remote tech interview I tend to fulfill the objectives but maybe I'm too slow or I'm not good at communicating or something. They say they'll call me for the next interview.
- Then they stop communicating.
General issues or "Top 10 Mistakes Technical Recruiters Make":
- Not selling their company (or the position)
- Not looking into the prospect’s web presence
- Sending “cold call” vague email
- Not understanding basic technology
- Not disclosing basic information (an idea of salary, company)
- Using buzzwords, offering silly perks
- Not asking relevant questions
- Radio silence, not being responsive
- Not being clear on the process, what to expect
- Not understanding what motivates people beyond money
OfferLetter is adding real value to people's lives and careers. We have a lot of great data on market rates, career trajectories, and company cultures. And because of our tip-as-percent-increase structure, the incentives are totally aligned.
Shoot me a mail if you have any questions, or I'll be hanging around the comments here! mallyvai AT offerletter.io
We have a lot of advisors right now - there's a culture in the Valley of proactively wanting to help and connect with good people who need guidance. So even my friends who are busy founders, PMs, and leaders in their own right, are more than willing to make time to serve as Advisors. (It also helps that they get compensated well for it - and compensated proportional to the value they deliver :-).
The more interesting question is how we get the word out more aggressively to get more individuals on-board. If you have any ideas about that, let me know - mallyvai@offerletter.io.
How? Because I can browse the companies that are hiring, see the compensation levels, and apply. The companies can find me and express interest directly.
No recruiters involved whatsoever. I think THAT model is truly the future. It's changing the world of tech recruiting because it's challenging that idea that recruiters need to exist at all... and it's a pretty convincing argument.
http://tech.firstpost.com/news-analysis/interviewstreet-disr...
I am not a fan of the mathematical challenges on Hackerrank, mainly because I haven't done much interesting math in years and if I get all ambitious on math stuff, I'm going to dive into functional analysis and stats modeling and probably not from a coding viewpoint. Algorithmic challenges are much more engaging to me.
Hackerrank has a very interesting option for hiring companies to sponsor a challenge or set of challenges. Based on what I read here, if I was a hiring company I would be doubling down on this approach (eg coding challenges as a feed for potential hires like you guys were doing as well). Heck, companies would probably pay five to six figures just for a curated list of candidates from these sites, right?
One specific gripe - sometimes I had the vague feeling that the programmatic challenges encourage non-idiomatic language usage. I did a very fun challenge that involved range-minimum-queries there and to ultimately to have runtime under the JVM cutoff and pass all the testcases, I kind of optimized away from the way Clojure normally looks like. I think my point is code that works well for a programming challenge may not look much like code you would want in production.
I can probably spout off more opinions but this is probably already more than you were looking for for someone who didn't use the site for actually finding a job.
If getting hired via it, I do have. So far, 5 out of 6 jobs I applied used hackerrank for initial level screening on programming knowledge.
I ve also worked with them in creating few interview questions, but its via freelancing.