HACKER Q&A
📣 ninetax

If you're working with an agency recruiter, let them negotiate for you?


Agency recruiter being a recruiter who is independent of the company with whom you're interviewing. This recruiter likely has an arrangement to be paid ~15-30% of your first year's base salary.

If you're a candidate who found a company through this recruiter, do you prefer to let them help with the negotiations be pre-screening the offer, sharing comp expectation with them, or even letting them negotiate on your behalf?

How about the other way around? If you're a hiring manager working with a recruiting agency, do you shop the offer to them before the candidate? Do you just negotiate directly with the candidate and sideline the recruiter (even if they ask you not to?)

There are multiple incentives at play here and I'm curious how folks approach this.

  👤 crate_barre Accepted Answer ✓
I always got the impression that they want to close the deal as soon as possible. They won’t make much more money if you squabble over 5-15k, so they will usually advocate that you just accept the initial offering by telling you ‘this is a great deal’. It’s much better to let them know ahead of time what your salary range is because they don’t want to deal with the negotiation, I think. They just want to close.

Just make it clear so they don’t waste anyone’s time trying to land you in a gig that doesn’t fit your expectations - all that work for nothing is no good.

👤 GianFabien
In my experience (Australia) you cannot negotiate directly with the potential employer you have no choice but to go through the recruiter.

I have heard of people who got a "signing bonus" at the end of their probation period which was kept a secret from the recruiter.

Personally, I usually asked for a condition in the contract for a review at the end of 6 months. In that, I would negotiate a 10%+ increase. Which is usually easy when they see that you are competent and do good work. In my experience, that approach works in small firms and hardly ever with large firms.