Working With Recruiters

I have an extremely love-hate relationship with recruiters. Regardless whether a recruiter is first-party or contracted, rockstars or incompetent, the incentives between the job seeker (you), the hiring company, and the recruiter are all out of whack. Sure at the end of the day everyone just wants an open role filled, but the recruiter is optimising only for time. Door to door sales people don't care/know if your house is a good fit for their product or if the product is any good, but they'll do anything to connect the seller and buyer.

The Good

I've had a handful of recruiters that truly have fought for me and have forced a relationship that in hindsight was a perfect fit. Whether its them connecting dots on my experience that I hadn't thought to or forcing me onto a hiring manager because they saw past my resume. I had a contracted recruiter reach out to me for a Support Engineering role, this is something I never imagined for myself but on my resume I had a section about how I spent time embedded in customer teams and helped them onboard and move past blockers on software I had developed. After going over the job description with me I realized this is totally something I could enjoy and excel at. I have always wanted to land a developer advocate role and this is just a corporate version of that. In the end I didn't get that specific job, but it opened a lot of doors for me when I realized I should look into those types of roles.

Another example that has come up a few times is getting buy-in on my Simple Stock Bot experience. The aerospace industry really hates this on my resume, but tech focused companies love it. Unfortunately, applying is a numbers game so I don't tailor resumes to roles so everyone gets the same one. I've never tried to leap frog into a senior role with this experience, but like maybe I'm better at managing a big Python project than your standard new grad. I find that its really hard to work in things that make me a standout engineer in interviews so I'm always really happy when I get buy-in from a hiring team that this experience has relevance.

The Bad

Recruiters, especially contracted ones, really love to change facts to make you stand out without understanding what they are talking about. I will often stretch facts just to make sure they don't block me for something dumb like not having Jenkins experience when I have extensive GitLab CI/CD experience.

Yeah I've migrated build systems from Jenkins to more modern tooling.

- Me who has never touched Jenkins

And I'll always come clean with the engineers, and never stretch the facts in this way for like a "Senior Jenkins DevOps" role. But more often than not this ends me up in an interview where the notes say that I have 10 years experience with a tech that came out like last year. So doing the recruiters job is a delicate balance where you have to gauge if they are already stretching facts for you. It also never hurts to just tell them like it is that while you don't match exactly is on their bit of paper that this isn't a blocker for you being a good fit.

Another big frustration with this last job hunt has been when multiple different recruiters reach out to me for the same role. The contracted recruiters will pretty much never tell you any details until you get on a call with them so when a company hires 6 different firms to fill in one role I will end up with 5 wasted calls and an overflowing inbox. This has happened at least once every two weeks while I had my LinkedIn set to looking for work.

Lastly, poor communication and organization. I've had a handful of times where I didn't know I wasn't in the running for a job anymore until I reached out, or where a recruiter has tried to make me try multiple times in succession for the same job. Or even worse, I end up in an interview for a completely unrelated role, but I think thats more the hiring managers fault.

The Ugly

I've had a few egregiously bad experiences where I got burned pretty bad. Luckily I have still forced jobs out of some of these situations but they are still incredibly demoralizing.

One company I interviewed with had a 7 step process. Take home projects, reviews of my personal projects, multiple multi-hour interviews. The second to last step was really the final interview, it was a few hour long behavioural before they would fly me out to headquarters where I would meet a bunch of teams and the owner of the company, just to fully sell me before we signed any documents.

At the end of the interview I was told that I got the job. We penciled in a start date, salary, and my day to come out and meet CEO who would give me my offer. I was told that the final step was more for them to sell themselves on me and that I wouldn't have to worry about failing. So, I reached out to all my other companies and told them that I had just over a week left on the market and if they wanted to give me an offer I would work with them but we needed to hash things out soon. Now I'm posting this way later, but during this time the DOGE was at its peak, and Trump was gutting NASA funding so the space market was really really bad. Almost every company I reached out to replied letting me know they were dropping my application.

While impressive, your skills don't match the current needs of our company.

This role likely doesn't exist anymore, if you get another offer I would take it.

Worrying but at least I had a job locked in. The weekend passes and they still haven't reached out to me to schedule my travel to their HQ. No response to my follow ups. Then the night I was supposed to travel, I got a generic automated message that they wouldn't be moving further with my application.

Nothing personalized or any feedback, just a cold robot telling me I was rejected. This was a small company with a single recruiter that had been around for most of the companies existance, so I took their word with a lot more weight than I usually would. It's not really their fault that this totally reset my job search but this was a pretty big blow to my career.

My takeaway from this is to always play your cards really close. Given the current market I totally understand that companies who are already drowning in applicants wouldn't want to engage in a bidding war or push off other candidates to accomodate me. Another great takeaway is don't count your chickens when you only have a handshake deal with the hen, which is kind of relevant to my next example.

Before I accepted at Blue Origin, I had been waiting for an offer from another large space company for about 3 months. They had been bought out right when my interviews were coming to a close so they weren't able to sign any contracts until the deal was done. When they finally got me my offer I reached out to my Blue Origin recruiter, and told them that if they didn't do their final full day interview on Monday and get me an offer shortly after that I would be off the market. Miraculously they came back and said they would interview me Tuesday and have an answer for me Wednesday Morning.

My recruiter for my other offer was a real rockstar and immediately sensed that I was trying to work the timing so I could have another offer on the table and came back with a much better offer, so by the time Blue came back the numbers were a bit stale.When I told Blue that I would need bigger numbers to consider them, the hiring manager said no, but the recruiter emailed me separately confirming a better offer and said that there is a standard sign-on bonus that is non-negotiable and locked to my level but it was big enough that I was pretty happy.

I accept the Blue Origin offer, and a few weeks pass. I was under the impression that I would be getting relocated to Seattle, and I was even coordinating the move with their relocation agents, but it turns out the program wanted me to be at the new Denver office that was just opening. So, to pump the numbers up the recruiter gave me a Seattle salary, knowing that they weren't willing to relocate me and one of the reasons for hiring me was staffing this new office. So, before even starting I took a pretty big salary hit. Luckily they acknowledged the "mistake" and gave me a much higher salary than I was initally offered so I was well above market. Not how I want to progress my career but I'll take it I guess.

Then on my first paycheck I didn't get my starting bonus like I was promised. After reaching out to my manager I was told that there is no standard bonus, and that my offer didn't have one attached. Luckily, I had everything in writing and HR fixed the issue immediately without any drama. So at this point everything about my compensation had been lied about, but I still came out ahead. Until I got my promotion.

I was hired at a lower level with the promise that if I did well I would get promoted at 6 months which generally isn't allowed, but I was right on the cusp of the experience so we had a solid handshake deal that my director would make it happen for me. And they did, except what I thought would be a huge XX% increase turned out to only be 2%. They reset me based on my market and didn't give a flat increase like I thought I would get. This is why I wrote The Rat Race is Linear since it made me question if I should even bother negotiating at this point in my career. tldr; companies are just going to try to keep you at their targets for your experience and market and breaking that cycle is really difficult. You definitely still should fight for better compensation, but its not as big of a win as I once thought.

Conclusion

After writing all of this out, my 2025 Job Search came to a close thanks to recruiters that reached out to me. I had a couple of offers on the table at the same time, and all of them were for companies who reached out to me first. I think what I alluded to earlier about the markets being in turmoil around the time I got laid off is to blame for much of this nonsense, but I still think its incredibly important to vouch for yourself at every oppurtunity.

As far as how to handle lining up offers. One company I kept completely in the dark, the others I told varying amounts of information. So, there isn't an exact script to follow.

To wrap this up I just have to say be the master of your own destiny. If you want a job don't be scared to break the script and tell them what needs to happen. Reddit and the internet at large are full of poor opinions and suggestions to be incredibly formal and timid. I'm really proud of the career I've had out of college and I think a lot of it can be attributed to really fighting for yourself.

Make sure you get everything in writing, and especially make sure your offer letter is exhaustive.