There are two kinds of recruiters working in the tech industry: contingency and retained search.
A contingency recruiter only gets paid if they place a candidate. Companies that use contingency recruiters tend to use dozens of them, because it's free until they actually find someone. The recruiter stands to make so much money that it's in their interest to spam the universe trying to throw any and all candidates at the company hoping that one of them sticks in which case they hit the jackpot and make, typically, 1/4-1/3 of the first year salary.
A retained search recruiter is paid to fill the position whether or not they are successful. The retained search relationship is also exclusive, meaning, only one recruiter will be hired by the company to find someone to fill a position.
In general, you will find that:
- most of the problematic recruiters
you have dealt with as an employee
are contingency recruiters, because
they are literally just looking to
throw as many resumes as they can at
a company, without much regard to
quality, which is why they're so
annoying to good candidates
- the companies that do not know how
to hire tech employees and wish to
outsource that will use retained
search recruiters, who have a much
higher standard and work to a higher
standard of ethics--they are, for
all intents and purposes,
indistinguishable from the hiring
company's own employees
- it is very easy to detect
contingency recruiters, as they will
not reveal the name of the company
they are recruiting for, out of fear
that you will go straight to them
and they will lose their fee.
Because of fact #3, there's an easy way to get contingency recruiters out of the system: (a) charge them money, and (b) require that they disclose the name of the company for which they are hiring. We're going to do both, so I don't expect to see many contingency recruiters in our system.