It's amazing how fast you can get tired in a situation where you're going all out
This is a point that gets overlooked far too often. I have seen plenty of people in peak physical fitness run out of steam after 2 to 3 minutes.
What most people forget is that as well as physical exertion your body releases a massive amount of adrenaline the second a punch is thrown and that wipes you out. It's called an adrenaline dump and it honestly feels like your legs have turned to jelly and you feel like you have zero power behind your punches.
I've lived & worked in Ireland, New Zealand and the UK and I can categorically say that the UK online banking system is by far the worst.
My biggest issue is the time delay between making a purchase and that purchase reflecting on your account. The EFTPOS system in NZ is incredible. Almost all transactions are reflected within an hour on your account.
I think a lot of my issues are probably specific to my current bank so forgive me if this doesn't apply to the company you work for but one thing that really winds me up is that I have to physically attend a branch if I want to print of an official statement. On my online account I can print off a list of transactions but only after the transactions have been exported to an excel worksheet.
How hard is it to pop up a PDF document with the banks header & footer and my transactions in between that I can print off on the spot?
It is the same over here - I can print off Statements but they are not 'official' instead they are a list of transactions with the bank logo but they can not be used as a means of identification which is sometimes needed. I used to work in a call centre and this greatly frustrated people.
I'm surprised this hadn't had more attention here!
APPLE-1 -- Personal Computer. An Apple-1 motherboard, number 82, printed label to reverse, with a few slightly later additions including a 6502 microprocessor, labeled R6502P R6502-11 8145, printed circuit board with 4 rows A-D and columns 1-18, three capacitors, heatsink, cassette board connector, 8K bytes of RAM, keyboard interface, firmware in PROMS, low-profile sockets on all integrated circuits, video terminal, breadboard area with slightly later connector, with later soldering, wires and electrical tape to reverse, printed to obverse Apple Computer 1 Palo Alto. Ca. Copyright 1976
The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you’re in a hurry or it’s a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into 'Express' mode by pressing the 'Door Close' and 'Floor' buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.
27 here. I thought I would do better to be honest. I make a pretty decent amount of pocket money playing poker and I consider my biggest strength to be my ability to read people in an incredibly short period of time. Then again, I am a bit of an arrogant git.
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.
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.
I accidentally upvoted instead of downvoted. It it of course nonsense that you are adding to the salary. If the employer is willing to pay £600, then you are taking X% of £600 and giving the employee (100-X)% of £600. The £500 figure that you are "adding" to is just an imaginary number that has no real significance.
Do recruiters really take as much as 20%? This seems ridiculously high to me. How much of their time are they investing compared to the employee?
An employer is willing to pay an extra 20% to save themselves the time and effort of having to source & interview the hundreds of applications themselves.
As for recruiters taking 20%, that's a comparitively low figure for such a high daily rate. If one of my clients was requesting a £500 a day calibre candidate I wouldn't touch it for anything less than 30% in reality.
We are providing a service, plain and simple. The service fee is calculated in relation to the calibre of candidate as the more senior the candidate, the more difficult they are to find.
I'm sorry, but this is an accounting fiction. The cost of an employee to an employer is the total cost; dividing up the total cost and ascribing it to this or that is irrelevant from the perspective of the employer, and disingenuous from the perspective of the employee.
In the US we have social insurance taxes which are sold as having an "employee" portion and an "employer" portion, but this too is just accounting fiction:
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 20%. If you get an employee for a year, do you get 20% of the yearly salary? So you have to find 5 people per year to get paid as much as the people you find? (on average)
If so, does that truly not sound ridiculous to you? If all people got employed through recruiters then the recruitment business would make up about one fifth of the total economy!
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.
We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.
KoZeN, I also hate sounding harsh because I think I've read comments of yours in other places that sound very clueful -- but this very comment of yours is a perfect example of the rampant, rank slipperiness which seems to exude from every corner of your profession.
The bottom line is that recruiters make the transaction significantly more expensive for both parties -- without adding a heck of a lot value (other than an endless appetite for trolling job boards and screening emails) to either side.
For example, if the client says to you, a recruiter, that they're willing to pay £500, that already means that their real, true, internal budget real budget is £600. As in, they'd be happy to pay that £600 for someone they found for someone they found through their own channels.
Or if you look at it the other way: even I, as a developer, decide that it's fine (if not great) to take £500 per day, I still pay (through the nose) for it, in that I know I'm being billed at a significantly higher rate, and corresponding I have to walk an eggshells in every meeting with management knowing that they're paying through the nose more for each day of my time then they should have to, and with fellow developers also (resentful of the fact that their company is paying significantly more for a unit of my time than for theirs, also). Plus the additional, very substantial risk that I will get laid off sooner than I otherwise might, precisely because of the higher rate (and the fact that they have to walk on eggshells, or otherwise deal indirectly with me because I'm branded as coming from an agency).
All of this, aside from the fact that the 20% overhead you're quoting is a very low outlier, in my experience. In fact, in all cases when I've had direct knowledge of a recruiter's overhead, it's been 30% or higher - with 50% being not uncommon.
I know I'm fudging a bit: recruiters do provide some value (much of it psychological, in that they serve as proxies, or foils more like it, in various parts of the negotiation process); it does take time to sift through those job boards (and many employers just don't know where to post, or how to post effectively); and a very small portion (less than 10%) of recruiters -- it seems you may be one of them -- do seem to have natural talents, and are capable of adding substantial value to the negotiation process (in terms of knowing the market, sizing up candidates, etc).
But the vast majority do not (again, other than serving as a psychological buffer for a highly nerve-wracking process both ways). Many seem to add substantial negatives (either through obfuscations, outright cluelessness, general slipperiness and stuffiness, etc).
And either way, it's simply intellectually dishonest for you to claim that we, as contractors, don't pay for your hefty fees. Of course we do (and so do clients) -- we both pay through the nose. And we just don't seem to get all that much in return.
tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit.
This statement acurately describes 95% of my colleagues.
I will happily accept the challenge of changing your perception of our industry. I'm a technical recruiter that covers the London market. Feel free to send me your CV. My details are in my profile. Also, feel free to have a look through my comment history. I'm not on this site to pick up leads or push for business, I'm here because I have a legitimate interest in the industry and I find that HN is a fantastic gauge as to the pulse of the industry.
I have heard of you on HN before actually, a recruiter with moral integrity and a clue, i remembered it because its like finding a unicorn. My respect to you sir.
I was actually hoping to read a reply from a recruiter. Good to hear that there is someone in the IT European recruiting business with a genuine interest in doing the job properly.
How would you go regarding changing the current "95% of my colleagues suck" situation?
You can't. My industry is driven by one thing only, money.
Recruiters get paid incredible bonuses for placing candidates and are less interested in how you feel and more interested in ticking off keywords fed to them by their client.
Example: One role I have on my books right now is for a 3rd line support analyst. My colleague, a guy who makes about £50k to £60k, submitted a candidate who he listed out the tech requirements to and asked the candidate to answer 'Yes' or 'No' if he had exposure to those systems/languages. No probing questions, no challenge of his competencies, no understanding of what the various languages were but purely and simply ticked the boxes.
People like him are the norm so when I get on the phone and ask the same guy to explain the difference between powershell and the command prompt and why the powershell is more advanced, a straightforward question for a techie but not what you expect from a recruiter, it throws him for six and those who know what they are talking about stand out from that point forward.
How much do you guys make per placement in general?
Lets say you have someone with a salary of £60-70k. On average, how much do you earn when you place them and how long do you spend to fill a position? I know that there are extremes, but still.
Looking at the amount of spam I get on LinkedIn, I'm always under the impression that recruiters are looking for like 100 different positions at a time, but that's probably wrong.
Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:
Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.
From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.
Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.
A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.
As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.
Interesting, why not start your own firm then? Is it that hard to get the actual vacancies?
If you know what you're talking about in comparison to 90% of the other people, wouldn't it be a lot easier to place one candidate and get £15k from him rather than the £1k you're getting now.
You say that the general aim is to earn your salary in bonusses, so that means that an average recruiter has to place around 60 candidates per year. If they earn around £15k per person for the company, that makes +- £900k of which they take home £60k. Rough calculations of course, but seems like pretty good margins for people that know what they're doing.
Part of the reason agencies command such high fee's is because of the influence their brand & network has with candidates. There are thousands of self employed recruiters fighting over the scraps and a lot of highly successful self-employed recruiters earning a mint by utilising the personal network they have cultivated from being in the business for many years. I personally haven't been in the game long enough to be able to rely on my own contacts to build a business.
That is really decent of you. I am on the wrong side of the Atlantic to take advantages of your services or else I would ask permission to send on my CV.
All in all I have found my contact with recruiters to be helpful in a few ways. The short semi-technical phone interview is a low pressure way to practice one's spiel. It is a good exercise to explain the tech to someone who doesn't know much about it. Also good practice for the soft questions: "Tell me a little about yourself" "Strengths and Weaknesses...blah, blah" "So why are you looking to leave your current position?"
I have interviewed about 8 times in the last year and have gotten one offer. All but one came through recruiters. In my experience the recruiters put me in a position to get the job. My failures I associate with not quite selling myself - or lack of knowledge in a key area and also with the level of the competition.
It has been a learning process and recruiters have been helpful at points.
I wish sometimes I could get brutal honesty from recruiters/HR. After you have gone through 3 interviews and have the indication that they are considering you - you wonder what went wrong?
It would be great to get such input from the other side. How do recruiters see tech candidates? What are common pitfalls, etc?
I think recruiters would do a better job if they spent more time reading HN. You probably understand your "product" better than most of your competition ever will.
As tempting as it is to think they just need a clue, maybe the reality is that HN readers tend to already have jobs or own their own businesses, and they aren't as good a target for recruitment which is more of a numbers game.
This is a point that gets overlooked far too often. I have seen plenty of people in peak physical fitness run out of steam after 2 to 3 minutes.
What most people forget is that as well as physical exertion your body releases a massive amount of adrenaline the second a punch is thrown and that wipes you out. It's called an adrenaline dump and it honestly feels like your legs have turned to jelly and you feel like you have zero power behind your punches.
Moral of the story; hit hard and be accurate.