A few months ago, I went to a let's-see-if-you're-presentable-to-my-clients interview with a recruiter for a contract. I wasn't working at the time, so it wasn't as costly as it would be now.
The rate quoted to me was absurdly low, so I asked what the bill rate to the client was. Middle-men I've worked with in the past have disclosed this to me (and the margins are lower than what one might expect), so I didn't think much of it. The recruiter told me that I was arrogant and asked me to leave. You can bet that I'll never refer anybody to his firm.
The irony was that the guy was an idiot. When asked if the quoted rate (to me) was W2 or 1099, he said, "Well, whatever you'd like" and was perplexed when I remarked that I would surely insist the he take on the payroll taxes if the nominal rate was the same. Very odd for a guy who claimed to have been in the business for years. It's too late for me to give this story much justice, but it was genuinely surreal.
I never get stories that start out with "This really annoying stranger called me and wouldn't get off the phone so I spoke to him for about 5 minutes"... The easiest way to deal with these idiots would have been to hang up the phone and delete the emails.
Yup, just hang up: it's not as rude as they're being to you. As for the unwanted emails, I set up Gmail filters to forward emails back to the sender (and delete the original) if I don't want to hear from them. Most of the time, I think they assume the message bounced, even though it's not a bounce message. I suppose additional mischief could be made by forwarding the email to everyone at that company, or to a rival recruitment agency, etc.
Someone out there needs to create a recruiter rating site. Whether I'm looking for a job or hiring, I need to know whether this jerk is actually providing good matches, or if he's just shopping around the resumes of the most desperate.
I think this is a pretty great idea, but the main problem is it's going to be very mixed. I used to work for a recruiting firm. I wasn't there long enough for people in my market to form opinions of me (I think), but if you took one of the managing partners you'd get a pretty good number of people who would sing their praises for legitimately helping them make a big leap in their career, and an equal or probably greater number who'd just view them as a phone annoyance.
And if it caught on, you can bet the recruiters would have some lower level person on every team who'd be tasked with gaming the site.
I've thought about this before, and the ideal place to do it would be via a linkedin application. It would make it much harder to game and most recruiters are already on it.
Is it in fact the longest post you've ever written or just similar to the longest post you've ever written which also happens to be on this same topic?
This was one of those blog posts where I read every word. Rare these days. Great story. Well worth reading if you're here reading the comments wondering what it's about and want a laugh.
A pretty good example on how two people talk on the internet much less polite then they'd never do in real life. Should be a cognitive bias name for this.
A lot depends on where you sit in the industry you work in, what the industry is like (for example some large firms will have 2 or 3 recruiters and won't take direct applications) and how many players.
In our industry (Information Security) some recruiters are useful and do provide a service for both sides, but there are a lot that are like the ones this guy had to deal with. Thankfully our end of the industry is quite small and the shoddy ones tend to have a reputation that preceeds them.
The rate quoted to me was absurdly low, so I asked what the bill rate to the client was. Middle-men I've worked with in the past have disclosed this to me (and the margins are lower than what one might expect), so I didn't think much of it. The recruiter told me that I was arrogant and asked me to leave. You can bet that I'll never refer anybody to his firm.
The irony was that the guy was an idiot. When asked if the quoted rate (to me) was W2 or 1099, he said, "Well, whatever you'd like" and was perplexed when I remarked that I would surely insist the he take on the payroll taxes if the nominal rate was the same. Very odd for a guy who claimed to have been in the business for years. It's too late for me to give this story much justice, but it was genuinely surreal.