> Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).
After a layoff I went through a recruiting/contracting firm that converted to full-time at my job. After that I kept an eye out on recruiters, and male or female it was the best looking set of people I'd ever seen in person.
It's an emotional thing. When you spend formative years in a financial condition where food expenses were significant, and free food significantly eased financial pressure on you, that reaction to free food can stick with you long after you have the financial freedom to make your own choices.
Source: finally realized that half the reason I went to technical talks that bored me was for free pizza and beer that were bad for me anyway
goddammit it's free stuff who turns down free stuff.
Your opinion is wide spread, but it erks me. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is an adage millennia old, and true.
The rule is, nothing is free. Nothing. There are exceptions the rule, but that is exceedingly rare, and if you think you're onto one, it's probably a scam.
"strings attached" is another adage, and often you get "free", by having the strings attached to you.
There isn't a free lunch, but there certainly is a lunch you've already paid for.
E.g. I was at an 'all-inclusive' resort for work and some of my colleages seemed to think it was their duty to get as much value out of the meals as possible, even trying to calculate the actual cost of different dishes.
This is a pretty expensive present not a free lunch. Please note if you work for a regulated industry you may be liable to report this as well and may even price-wise be well above your allowance
I was briefly a dev lead responsible for hiring contractors. The company I worked for already had a contract with a certain recruiting agency - the same one I came in through.
The brief stint I was at the company, the recruiter gave me tickets to the local professional baseball team that included access to premium suites and tickets to the local professional football team.
But yeah I get it, having a free meal wouldn’t mean much to me.
I work in finance and we have lots of mandatory training about to do about "gifts". Game tickets are a specific example used to illustrate corporate corruption...
The company I worked for already had an exclusive contract with the recruiting agency.
We weren’t going to hire contractors outside of that agency.
Heck, my manager asked me did I know someone with the same skillset I had, I had a friend who was looking for work and asked for a rate of $80/hour. They wouldn’t hire them directly. I had to negotiate with the recruiter and my manager until we also settled on paying the agency $120/hour to hire my friend so he could get $80.
No my manager also wasn’t responsible for choosing the agency. That was chosen on higher levels.
How badly are you paid?