Monster.com literally owned this space, and had so much potential. I worked in a few startups at the Clocktower in Maynard, MA, where Monster was also based. Their offices had all the SV amenities and vibe, and for the longest time they were the default job search/resume database. Now, I can't recall hearing anyone mention Monster, or seeing anything about them online in over a decade. They're like the 3Com of job search.
This model is still alive and (trying to) thrive in the tech space adjacent to finance/hft. Not sure what it's like for other mid-to-senior engineers in non-finance-adjacent tech shops.
IMO the cold calls (or, these days, linkedin messages, god help you if you ever give any one of them your number, you'll never want to answer an unknown call again) are a bit insane.
They feel like used car salesmen. Incentives are definitely misaligned with the employee -- from what I understand they're usually paid a percentage of first year salary, so they just want to move as many people as possible for the most money.
Not that candidates don't also benefit from a drive to increase offers, but I get the feeling people are pushed into taking jobs they might otherwise would not have.
>They feel like used car salesmen. Incentives are definitely misaligned with the employee
A lot are spray and pray, and because of those bad eggs, these people overrepresent the field. Poor fit jobs throughout, they don't vet you until you reply. Gives the whole vocation a bad reputation.
I will entertain a very thoughtful, personal message that shows they chose ME specifically as a good fit. Generally these people are more honest matchmakers who will warn you, for example, if it's a rough work culture. Tough to say if a spray and pray recruiter will start using AI to emulate this, would be sad
Heh I think we'd all looking for the mythical diamond in the haystack. I'm not sure any of them are worth recommending, really.
Full disclosure, I haven't switched jobs in a while, but I got the impression I could "get to the interview" for any of these companies even just reaching out directly to the in-house recruiters listed on LinkedIn. At that point I'm not sure what a head hunter provides in terms of value-add (for me) -- maybe they know more secrets about salary negotiations or conducting bidding wars? But on the whole it seems my application would be less attractive coming through a head hunter since now the company is shelling out an extra 30% to the HH just for forwarding on my resume.
I'd be interested to know what you mean by "exhausted the potential" -- have you applied and not found a fit with any of the gamut your current LinkedIn recruiter spam would recommend?
I get the impression that 95% of external agency recruiters are all shopping some slice of the same openings from the same ~10-15~ firms.
> I got the impression I could "get to the interview" for any of these companies
In my case I feel like most big name companies I can find wouldn't be that great of a fit. Also, due to spam and fraud epidemic currently happening (on both sides of the process) I feel like even if the job ad wasn't fraudulent, it's unlikely a human would even see/consider my resume under all the spam.
Ideally I'm looking for headhunters who would bridge the gap towards an unknown, smaller company (that I wouldn't have heard of myself - and ideally also one that isn't spammed to death by fraudulent applicant), where I could have a lot more impact than at a big name.
> I'd be interested to know what you mean by "exhausted the potential"
My current network is mostly tech recruitment agencies operating around EU/UK slinging your average "staff augmentation" roles - often no different to an FTE software developer. While they've been paying the bills fine, I feel like I'm stagnating and no longer learning anything, so looking to go upmarket, with either a bit of management or a deeper technical role, and those recruiters just don't have anything in that area.
> Ideally a headhunter would bridge the gap towards an unknown, smaller company (that I wouldn't have heard of myself - and ideally also one that isn't spammed to death by fraudulent applicant), where I could have a lot more impact than at a big name.
That's exactly what happened with me.
In my case, the name was quite big, but the company was very small, and quite exclusive.
On the hiring side, Motion Recruitment had good communication and good results for me. The agent tremendously improves the signal/noise ratio in the beginning of the hiring funnel.
I got jobs in 1999,2012, 2016, 2018 and 2023 from outside recruiters.
The job I got in 2008 was via CareerBuilder.
My jobs in 2014, 2020 and 2024 came from internal recruiters reaching out to me.
But in 2023 the first time I explicitly looked for a remote job:
Plan A: reach out to my network - 2 offers almost immediately
Plan B: targeted outreach based on my background and fit for a role: 2 interviews almost immediately and one offer
Plan C: randomly submitting resumes to job boards. I submitted hundreds of applications mostly to LinkedIn Easy Apply and my application wasn’t even looked at. LinkedIn shows you.
In other words, all job boards are a shit show every applications gets hundreds of submissions and in my niche, I’m objectively very qualified and credentialed. But it’s hard to cut through the noise without going through a recruiter or using your network.
From what I can tell it never went away. I've worked with these types of recruiters and most of my friends have. That's how I landed my current job although I'm a decade in.
I still get calls and emails from them regularly. That model is still working in NY.
I haven't even considered using Monster in at least two decades though.
The recruiter I worked with is ~50 and he's a former software engineer running his own agency employing several people all using tools he wrote. He specifically targets software engineers and NYC market. We still chat and I send him candidates and he's helped friends of mine find jobs.
I know younger recruiters working in the fintech space and yeah have some mostly negative impressions.
I actually think that a large part of the nosedive is that many tech companies have stopped working with external recruiters because they don't want to pay the extra costs. My company included. And hiring has suffered for it.
I do agree, but it's non-trivial to get a good one, and from the candidate side it's very hard to know if the headhunter is good before investing a bunch of time with them (I am OK talking on the phone so know a lot of recruiters).
Since I had to Google it, 3Com was the company behind Ethernet, a wired networking standard that revolutionized offices in the days before remote work. Like with GUIs, the work started at Xerox PARC.
Since I had to google it, Metcalfe was one of the inventors of Ethernet.
Fun fact, he predicted in 1995 that the internet would collapse entirely within the following year, and said he would eat his words if it didn't. In 1997, at a web conference, he put a printed copy of the words into a blender and drank a smoothie made with that paper.
