Related https://clojurians.slack.com/archives/C0CB40N8K/p1670932560901809

@U017MP4D71R Isn't in #C0CB40N8K to answer that so I'm tagging them to get their response. I will note that the folks who post from Functional Works use almost identical wording in all their posts -- it's pretty common "recruiter speak".

For many of us, recruiters are considered a "necessary evil". People in the community need jobs and recruiters offer jobs -- and it's always "caveat programmer" as there are a) a lot of clueless recruiters in general, unfortunately, and b) some genuinely shady business practices fronted by recruiters -- so we (programmers) have to do due diligence and make our own decisions about who to work with and who to avoid. And I will say that this is really more a discussion for #C0KL616MN since it is much broader than "what happens in this community".

Thanks. I recall our conversation about this some time ago. I see where you're coming from. Personally I don't feel at ease at the thought of people getting advantage of, precisely in these times. Clojurians Slack has some non-trivial influence in the job market itself (at this point most of my jobs came from here!) so we could use that force for good.

"Recruiter" is a broad term. In-house or known-firm recruiters are clear categories that everyone understands. Individuals that tell you after-the-interview that they'll take a permanent cut seem off. If such actors didn't exist, final customers would simply use other means (traditional recruiters etc) so their effective value is zero.

when you say “permanent cut”, do you mean this “recruiter” demands a cut of every paycheck the applicant gets for as long as they stay in the job? is this demand made of the employer or the employee?

From my personal interview with this individual (a couple years ago) I recall that all final customer payments would go through him, then he would forward most of it to the given developer. Forever and ever. While this person isn't a project manager or other value provider. I don't think he has a website.

That seems like a fairly standard subcontractor arrangement to me. I've done it a couple of times in the past -- and it's only "forever" for that particular job (or any future jobs you taken on through that intermediary).

Normally those who subcontract also provide some sort of value e.g. project management. This is just being a middleman. It doesn't seem justified to keep more than a one-off cut. Because this is clearly shady, it's never advertised in the job posts or explained in a website. I don't find it ethical to disguise this subcontracting as vanilla job posts.

It's quite standard in the UK for a recruiter to receive payment from the company, take a cut for themselves and then pay the rest to the contractor. If a big company has 20,000 tech contractors working for it - they don't want to have 20,000 'suppliers'. Each supplier needs onboarding, KYC, procurement, contract negotiation, check they have the right insurance, ethics checks, ESG checks, tax checks, visa/legal checks etc. So instead of all this hassle, they have just a few recruitment firm as suppliers. Having a bad supplier can be very damaging to a company's reputation - so by having just a few recruiting companies as suppliers they can protect their reputation. If something goes very wrong in the contracting relationship then the company can sue the recruitment office much more easily than the individual contractor (who may not even be able to pay out millions in damages). Contracts might be short e.g. 6/12 months whereas the recruiters contract may go on for multiple years/decades.

I'd like to remark that I'm not agaist the practice itself, but against the deceptive advertisement. The broader pattern I see is that anyone can make an account, with no avatar, website, etc, and get people to send them their PII via DM or gmail (not a company email). There could be a simple rule e.g. All job ads must point to at least one website . i.e. "DM me for details" should be an option, not the only way.

I agree that I would at least like to know which recruitment company they are working for. Because job postings are just messages (not a form post with validation) - it's quite hard to enforce rules except manually. Slacks is also not great for communicating rules (e.g. threaded vs non channels debate). So I think increasing the standards for job posts (and other posts) is a great idea (including your idea about including a website link) - there is some human/manual cost to enforcement.

You're right that there are a couple of posts in jobs/remote-jobs that are quite low quality. Perhaps ignore this time - but take action if it becomes common.

Hey @U45T93RA6 and all here. We subcontract a number of Clojure devs for various clients. and lots of the guys on here can vouch for me. We’ve hired many Clojurians from here and they love their projects and we take small margins plus most of them are actually good friends ie. we speak and meet all the time 🙂 Most clients choose to engage subcontractors through other companies as it eliminates the risk and paperwork, no need to call me out, I was very clear on the margin and the way of working and offered you to speak with other contractors we have. Sorry @U45T93RA6 if you took offence. But I’m sure you would also admit I’m not clueless and also not shady, there is really no need to call me out when there is a lot / much much worse out there 😄 Actually, this is one of the reasons my name and website is not here as there is actually shady recruiters on here who 1) try to steal projects 2) try to scam you etc 3) That Fo Hussain in jobs copied my post and spammed it out into jobs channel, most likely a scam… 😄 Hope that clears up the topic 🙂

Thanks for the input. I think your ways are still a bit bait-and-switchy. You only let know how your intermediary company works (or that it exists at all) after the interview. It's a waste of time at best for those of us who won't give away their hard-earned money (or simply put it in 3rd hands for no real reason). For comparison if I visit or anything like that I know what I'm signing up to when opting to interview. And probably there's no client/project list others could 'steal'. I hope you can take this suggestion constructively. Surely there's a place for your company but as it is today, whenever it popped up in conversation I couldn't recommend it to my contractor friends.

@U45T93RA6 Thanks for your reply, I appreciate your views.

In my experience as a contractor, the arranging intermediary always took a cut. That was for their effort in beating the bushes, prequalifying me, setting up interviews, handling the payments, etc, etc. Nothing shady about it, from where I sit. That said, my first job was a checkout boy at a supermarket. I was aghast when the deductions for the union came out of my paycheck. I just did not know how things worked. hth

I also have the feeling the #jobs #remote-jobs channels are escalating with recruiter posts. Would it be an idea to seperate inhouse and non-inhouse jobs (i.e. hiring manager vs recruiter) into different channels? At least this would make it easier for people to decide if they want to go along with a middleman. If you look at the posts now you have to sort of debug if it is a from the original company or not.

I don't think separate channels make sense here - it would make it easier for some but harder for others. IMO it makes more sense to require job posters to be more transparent.

Promotion of Clojure jobs in general is good. I don't think we want to chase recruiters away. Agree that some of the recruiters should be a little more transparent - but I would say most job postings are fine.

I am not afraid the recruiters will be chased away, they have strong incentives to stay. I’m afraid that hiring companies will be demotivated to use this channel to post quality jobs, hiring is not their core business. I’m also afraid quality candidates will stop looking at these channels when we don’t maintain high standards.

Agree with your concerns. It's a balancing act. There's also the Slack moderators to think about (I'm not one) - we don't want to burn them out fighting something that's not an issue yet.

When recruiters post jobs and even provide a "link" then most of the time it doesn't really say anything at all and you only get to the actual contract that they would sign only when you give them a week of work for free and "negotiate" the contract three times from their side without them adding any benefits to you by only retracting the ones in the "draft". This was my worst case with a recruiter where an almost alright contract magically became 3 month contract with everything slashed (they even "changed" the style of the doc). They even moved the salary into the attachments of the agreement. And then the recruiter was raging that I declined as if he would sue me and so on. Because I almost accepted the contract and it's unacceptable thing in the negotiation. The thing is -- if they decide to counter-offer then you can bail and not come back because they cancel the previous offer without a rollback. Also they ask to say "the number" first because this acts as your offer to them. Then they either Call or Fold, as in games. So sometimes the posts themselves have more information in fewer words than the link because if it comes from person that actually needs a developer then they don't have time to beat around the bush and go straight to the point. Last time I was hired in a weekend, in two non business days. There was no BS and no HR and no recruiters. And those people were really happy about the work that I did (at least they wrote 2 emails that contained this and then the guy that hired me said that he meant it). But well... yes of course it's important to not have 20k suppliers... except that you don't need 20k clojure devs. 🤷 This BS middleman, increased costs and reduced morale is the price of when your business wants to have only a single paycheck to the supplier. They simply moved the complexity into this invisible cost to avoid hiring that additional one person that would send the invoices on behalf of the company.

> Each supplier needs onboarding, KYC, procurement, contract negotiation, check they have the right insurance, ethics checks, ESG checks, tax checks, visa/legal checks etc For some reason nobody has ever asked me about this ever. Maybe I'm special. Do suppliers also need to vet their suppliers? Why don't they need to do it? Sounds like a legal loophole.