I wish I could say I have a better experience with recruiters but I haven't. I've heard there are good recruiters, I don't doubt it, but it doesn't seem easy to find anymore than the next job is.
There really isn't a "good" recruiter from a candidate perspective. Their incentives are to support the firms they recruit for, and screen candidates. They do not work for your benefit.
My experience early in my career was that I needed to work with many of these recruiters until I found a gig. My experience at the time was weak, and my resume reflected that. I had to take the gigs which had lower competition e.g. systems administration.
Sort of. 3rd-party recruiters get paid on commission: they make money when their candidate gets hired in favor of the other recruiters' candidates. In that sense, the incentives are actually aligned in your favor when you're applying for a job that you really want: the recruiter is motivated to work to get you hired, and is only constrained by the need to not annoy the hiring manager. The incentives turn against you when the recruiter doesn't have any jobs that you really want, but is trying the numbers approach and putting you forward for things that you aren't really qualified for, "just in case" it's a good fit. You need to be aware that both of these scenarios can occur, so you can steer yourself away from the latter and towards the former.
The recruiter is still not really working for you, and the incentives are not aligned enough in your favor.
What we need is more of an "agent" like actors have: Maybe I don't have a full picture of what a Hollywood agent does, but I imagine they're constantly working in the background, looking for gigs for their busy actor, doing all the toil and paperwork and research on their behalf. Their end product is: "Studio X wants you to work on film A this year, and then Studio Y wants you to work on film B next year."
I could see a software engineer agent who gets paid by the engineer to do all of the application-filling-out, all the LinkedIn clicking, all of the company research, all of the pavement-pounding networking and paperwork toil, and all the interviewing, and then out comes: "Companies X, Y, and Z have these offers for you, which one do you want?" I'd probably pay a fortune, or maybe even a percentage of my comp, for a service like that.
Out of frustration, and because this now validates what I was thinking but couldn't put my finger on, I sat an AI agent down to 100% tailor cover letters and which resume to use based on the description of the job in question.
Turns out none of that actually mattered if the whole point is to generate busy-work and turn HR into another function like sales/marketing afraid to lose their budget for the year, or even worse to evaluate market conditions poorly. This entire thing should be illegal with the study at hand as evidence to make it so.
The good recruiters are the ones who won't put you forward for a job that you're not qualified for, and will advocate for you during the hiring process in a job that you are qualified for. I have worked with recruiters like this before. But you need to screen the recruiter a bit, at least make sure that the jobs they are proposing for you actually make sense for you. If you are asking for SRE jobs in New York and they send you a DB Admin job req in New Haven, don't waste your time with that recruiter or that job.
