I have heard of you on HN before actually, a recruiter with moral integrity and a clue, i remembered it because its like finding a unicorn. My respect to you sir.

I was actually hoping to read a reply from a recruiter. Good to hear that there is someone in the IT European recruiting business with a genuine interest in doing the job properly.

How would you go regarding changing the current "95% of my colleagues suck" situation?

You can't. My industry is driven by one thing only, money.

Recruiters get paid incredible bonuses for placing candidates and are less interested in how you feel and more interested in ticking off keywords fed to them by their client.

Example: One role I have on my books right now is for a 3rd line support analyst. My colleague, a guy who makes about £50k to £60k, submitted a candidate who he listed out the tech requirements to and asked the candidate to answer 'Yes' or 'No' if he had exposure to those systems/languages. No probing questions, no challenge of his competencies, no understanding of what the various languages were but purely and simply ticked the boxes.

People like him are the norm so when I get on the phone and ask the same guy to explain the difference between powershell and the command prompt and why the powershell is more advanced, a straightforward question for a techie but not what you expect from a recruiter, it throws him for six and those who know what they are talking about stand out from that point forward.

How much do you guys make per placement in general?

Lets say you have someone with a salary of £60-70k. On average, how much do you earn when you place them and how long do you spend to fill a position? I know that there are extremes, but still.

Looking at the amount of spam I get on LinkedIn, I'm always under the impression that recruiters are looking for like 100 different positions at a time, but that's probably wrong.

That's so hard to quantify but I'll do my best.

Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:

Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.

From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.

Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.

A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.

As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.

Interesting, why not start your own firm then? Is it that hard to get the actual vacancies?

If you know what you're talking about in comparison to 90% of the other people, wouldn't it be a lot easier to place one candidate and get £15k from him rather than the £1k you're getting now.

You say that the general aim is to earn your salary in bonusses, so that means that an average recruiter has to place around 60 candidates per year. If they earn around £15k per person for the company, that makes +- £900k of which they take home £60k. Rough calculations of course, but seems like pretty good margins for people that know what they're doing.

Part of the reason agencies command such high fee's is because of the influence their brand & network has with candidates. There are thousands of self employed recruiters fighting over the scraps and a lot of highly successful self-employed recruiters earning a mint by utilising the personal network they have cultivated from being in the business for many years. I personally haven't been in the game long enough to be able to rely on my own contacts to build a business.

That is really decent of you. I am on the wrong side of the Atlantic to take advantages of your services or else I would ask permission to send on my CV.

All in all I have found my contact with recruiters to be helpful in a few ways. The short semi-technical phone interview is a low pressure way to practice one's spiel. It is a good exercise to explain the tech to someone who doesn't know much about it. Also good practice for the soft questions: "Tell me a little about yourself" "Strengths and Weaknesses...blah, blah" "So why are you looking to leave your current position?"

I have interviewed about 8 times in the last year and have gotten one offer. All but one came through recruiters. In my experience the recruiters put me in a position to get the job. My failures I associate with not quite selling myself - or lack of knowledge in a key area and also with the level of the competition.

It has been a learning process and recruiters have been helpful at points.

I wish sometimes I could get brutal honesty from recruiters/HR. After you have gone through 3 interviews and have the indication that they are considering you - you wonder what went wrong?

It would be great to get such input from the other side. How do recruiters see tech candidates? What are common pitfalls, etc?

I think recruiters would do a better job if they spent more time reading HN. You probably understand your "product" better than most of your competition ever will.

As tempting as it is to think they just need a clue, maybe the reality is that HN readers tend to already have jobs or own their own businesses, and they aren't as good a target for recruitment which is more of a numbers game.