Comment by Cthulhu_

1 hour ago

This is not in the recruiter's interest though, because you may just go past them and apply to the company directly, so they miss out on their revenue.

I love picking apart a recruiter's emails, in a handful of cases I see the advert and I'm like "Oh yeah I used to work there". Go and React in a telecom company in NL near where I live? Yeah I set that up. No I don't want to go back, not unless they hire an actual team.

Every recruiter I have dealt with (on the hiring side) has had a provision in the contract: if they have a documented exchange with a candidate whom we hire during or within (a month, two months...) of the contract end, the recruiter is deemed to have done the work. Contrarily, if we have a documented exchange with a candidate before the recruiter does, the recruiter is not owed anything.

So: the recruiter has an incentive to mention the hiring company as soon as they get a response from you.

If they don't do that, they are either bad at writing contracts or don't actually have authority to recruit. Mostly the second: you would not be surprised at the number of cold emails I get saying that they represent a candidate (or a pool of candidates) who are exactly right for the position that we filled last month.

  • That's like domain brokers that contact you, saying they have a certain domain, and would you be interested?

    They don't actually have the domain. If you respond, they reserve it, immediately, so you can't get it.

    A fun thing to do, is respond, then block them.

My favorite was the game of trying to figure out if multiple recruiters were trying to forward me to the exact same job/hiring company and trying to get them to stop stepping on each other's toes and try to a pick a "winner" recruiter for that specific role.

It's a weird thing to miss, but this layoff cycle so far I haven't seen any recent recruiter emails at all, which seems strange on multiple levels.