Why don't recruiters do our salary negotiations for us

Salary negotiation is complicated and recruiters are mostly useless middlemen.

They're sort of used car salesemen (with used car being you :) ) that need to move inventory off the lot.

It less important to spend time to get extra 5% then sell two cars quicker.

No offence but it's a good analogy.

They're paid by the company that hire you. That's a pretty huge conflict of interest for you to let them negotiate "for" you. It's also why they don't want the job (do well and piss off your client, do badly and piss off the employee).

Also no one can really negotiate for you because ultimately you have to know what you will accept and that depends on feelings as much as facts.

Recruiters just want to close deals. They don’t care particularly if you get an extra 5-10k, they work in volume.

Recruiters have a conflict of interest. They get paid by the company that hires the tech. So in theory they should work hard to get you a great salary, if they negotiated it. But, what ends up happening, when there is a conflict of interest, is that most recruiters would try to get the best salary that would get you hired and keep them from losing the opportunity of a commission. Which is not always the best for the tech.

I think that the salaries of some programmers and such have gotten high enough so that something similar to an agent should be available to negotiate salaries. There are some programmers that should be called superstars and they should be paid as such.

I had a recruiter who did this once. He got me 30% over market rate by telling the company I was a senior engineer whom he had known for years.

As someone who had graduated from uni about a year earlier, I had a very bewildering year at the company.

The good ones do that. I think many recruiters here charge based on the candidate's salary. I once applied for one job directly and via a recruiter. I didn't realize it was the same job. The recruiter basically pitched me about 30% higher than what I'd aim for when applying directly. Direct applications can often result in HR trying to lowball you, but recruiters know the range.

Some recruiters might see it as a violation of trust telling the candidate the salary range, and often they value the one who's giving the money, so they usually let you handle the negotiations.

I think that would be an agent, which would basically be a recruiter working for the candidate.

I have had some who pushed the upper bounds of the salary range for me.

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