
Ask HN: Anyone know of Denver, CO jobs that offer relocation? - samjc
Hey everyone,
I&#x27;ve been trying to find a good job as a backend dev in the Denver, CO area for a while now, with little luck. I live in Florida.<p>I have gone through recruiters as well, and it just seems really difficult.<p>Today I got another rejection just based on the fact that I&#x27;m not local.<p>I&#x27;ve done Full-Stack development in PHP+MySQL, Node+MongoDB on the back-end, and JS with JQuery on the front-end.<p>For the past 2 years I&#x27;ve been working as a Backend Java Software Engineer (6 months of that as a team lead of 5 and growing).<p>Any help would be much appreciated!
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brudgers
My advice is that if you want to live and work in Denver move there. The
reason I say that is that I imagine I'm an employer reading this post. The
risk of hiring and relocating a person who wants to move from Florida to
Denver is that once I've invested the time and money to bring the person
onboard, they've achieved their important goal and will quickly start looking
for another job or quit to ski or breakup with the significant other that
lives in Denver or decide that the beach is better than the mountains or
decide to move from Denver to Pittsburgh or whatever.

That's particularly the case in terms of the listed skillset and experience.
This says nothing about how good you are at what you do. It is a statement
about the market for people with similar profiles. The good thing is your
skillset is portable but it also means that employers can be more selective if
they need mid-level Java backend developers.

Finally, most recruiters are more likely a hurdle between you and a job in
Denver than a facilitator because most recruiters operate by scanning "we're
hiring" pages and job boards, throwing candidates at the open positions, and
then negotiating payment if something sticks. If the recruiter cannot
negotiate payment, then the candidate won't get the job no matter how good a
fit they are.

Some recruiters, as in relatively few, work on an exclusive contract for the
employer. By which I mean that one recruiter is the only recruiter for a
specific position. Typically, the exclusive contract is contingency, but the
terms are agreed upfront and the working relationship with the employer tends
to be stable and long term. The best recruiters work on fixed fee and get paid
whether or not the position gets filled. Exclusive contracts correlate with
more specialized skills and experience. Retained contracts further correlate
with very senior positions and tippy top talent.

One of the keys to working with a recruiter is to figure out if the recruiter
is actually worth working with. The no-relationship recruiter may completely
remove any chance of your working with the company due to the risk of
litigation should you get hired through another channel. Or if the outside
recruiter can't close the deal, their message to the company may cast you in a
poor light, heck recruiters may entirely misrepesent you.

Some tells are if the recruiter asks for your resume in an editable format.
That means they send it without your name and that means that they probably
don't have a contract. Another tell is simply to ask the recruiter for the
name of the company. If the recruiter balks it means you can get the job on
your own. Finally, the best way is to simply ask the recruiter about the
nature of their recruiting relationship with the company and their track
record of placing candidates with the company. Recruiters with an exclusive
agreement have no problem telling you and their answers will make sense.

Circling back to my original point. If the economic risk of of moving to
Denver is too high for you to take personally, then moving you is an even
bigger economic risk for a business.

Good luck.

