John: Hey, John Sonmez from simpleprogrammer.com.
I got another video for you, another question I'm going to answer.
This question comes from Jeff and Jeff says, “Hi, John.
I recently had a situation that I was wondering if you had any experience/input on.
I saw a job listing that I was interested in and it was posted several times.
Once straight from the company doing the hiring and several others through recruiting firms.
I wondered whether it’s better to apply straight to the company or through one of
the recruiting firms.
Does going through the recruiting company offer any advantages or could it be a disadvantage
because of now hiring me could cost more than a similar candidate who just applied directly?
Curious what your thoughts are there.
Jeff.”
Jeff this is a great question, right?
I think a lot of people are going to face this.
There’s definitely some pros and cons to either approach, right?
If you go directly to the company, they’re not going to have to pay as much for you.
Recruiting companies, the way they make their money typically is that they’ll get some
percentage of the top of your first year salary.
Usually, that’s somewhere around 10 and it can be even as high as 20% or more.
There’s different models obviously that operate.
If you think about it, if you got a hundred case salary, someone might pay you $10,000-$20,000
to the recruiting firm if you come through there.
Now, there’s a couple of things to think about.
If you’re talking about a really big company here, right?
A big company is going to pay that fee and they’re not going to pay you necessarily
a higher salary just because they didn’t have to pay that fee if that makes sense.
Think about in HP or in IBM, or in Apple.
They don’t care about the 10 or 20K.
They have certain salary bands and you’re going to fall into that band, and it doesn’t
matter that you apply directly.
There’s not going to be any advantage there.
In that case, there’s no real advantage of applying directly.
If you had a smaller company where they are very conscious of that cost, they might be
willing to pay you more or pay you a bonus if you go through them directly.
You might have more negotiating power and you might be considered just to be a better
candidate because of the cost.
Because if someone is a small business owner and they say, “Well, I could pick up this
guy for X amount of dollars.
If I go to this other person that was referred through the recruiter, they’re going to
cost me an extra 10 or $20,000.”
That’s the first consideration.
The second consideration is the power of agency.
I’ve talked about this a few times in different videos, but this is sort of a powerful concept
that you might want to consider.
If you go through a recruiter, you may get benefit from the fact that they have relationships
inside that company and can help boost you up to the hiring manager or to present you
in such a way that you’re going to look better.
Also, when it comes to negotiating, you’ll also be able to take advantage of the power
of agency.
If you are going directly and you get a direct offer from a company, when you try to negotiate
with that company, it’s you versus them, right?
If you reject their offer or if you propose something higher, it can be perceived as greed.
You have to put your cards in the table.
Anytime you’re negotiating, if you can get an agent or use the power of agency, you’re
at an advantage because you don’t have to reveal the emotions and the feelings and the
thoughts behind your negotiation process.
A recruiter acting as an agent for you could potentially help you with negotiations.
An offer comes in, you tell the recruiting company, “No.
I'm looking for X amount of dollars,” and then they say to the company, “Oh, no.
My client is looking for this and here’s why that it would be worth paying him this.”
They can bargain on your behalf and that usually ends up in a better –Hopefully, you haven’t,
but if you’ve ever been to court or mediation, or something like that, that’s where a lawyer
comes in and negotiating a settlement.
You would not want to do that yourself like a lawyer is going to get you a lot more money,
and that’s the power of agency.
With that said, all that, some certain recruiters are unscrupulous and going through a recruiting
agency can actually make you look worse.
They could be just blasting different resumes of anyone that matches the jobs.
You’ve seen that now if you’re on LinkedIn where you get all these recruiter spams.
I would look at the quality of the firm as well.
Yeah.
There’s a lot of things to consider.
I can’t give you like absolute advice here, but I can give you some guidelines.
Like I said, depending on the size of the company, if I were going with a large company,
a corporate type of thing, I would probably lean towards going through finding the best
recruiter, finding the one that has the least overhead that I'm going to get the largest
amount of money that has success placing people, has the best reputation and I would go with
them.
If it’s a smaller company, I'm probably going to go direct.
Either way though, if you’ve listen to my advice on job seeking, don’t even go in
the front door, right?
We’re not going to go into this in this video, but get a personal referral.
Go and find someone works at the company.
Go and find a way that you can get a relationship before you have to go and just cold interview,
cold email your resume.
That’s just the worst way to get a job ever.
Don’t do that if you can avoid it.
If you want to check out my soft skills book here and I’ve got a chapter on cracking
the interview process, hacking the interview.
I talk all about that.
Definitely, check that out if you’re interested.
Thanks for the question.
This is a good question.
I think everyone has to face this at sometime in your career.
Thanks again, Jeff.
If you’ve got a question for me, email me at john@simpleprogrammer.com.
If you got a comment about this, some input, leave a comment below.
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Take care.