Yes, recruiters have accounts with companies, but in my experience the recruitment fee is a percentage of salary, and the individual recruiter compensation is on a commission model. In short, I personally have no problems in believing that the higher the salary, the higher the payment to both the recruitment company and individual recruiter.

However, I think we all know that closing the deal is far more important to the recruiter than negotiating small changes to the salary, so your point stands.

I haven't worked with a recruiter, so this is pure speculation, but it seems to me that a recruiter's greatest incentive would be to close any deal at all as quickly as possible, because they're competing against the alternative of you finding a position on your own first (or otherwise no longer requiring their services). Getting you a high salary is just gravy.

It’s more complicated than that.

You’re an engineer with a certain degree of experience and the recruiter will have an idea of how much that’s worth when they start the conversation with you, so they know up front how much money they stand to make as a ballpark figure, and how much work is worth putting into getting you an offer.

Once they get you to the offer stage, and most of the work is done, they want to close the deal as soon as possible for as much money as possible. They know the band for the position so, if you’re lowballing your ask, they have every incentive to bump that up.

On the flip side, if you’re asking for something on the top end of the range, and it looks like a long negotiation, they’re looking to spend a lot of incremental time for not a lot of incremental money, so it’s better to get you to accept an offer - any offer.

> they're competing against the alternative of you finding a position on your own first (or otherwise no longer requiring their services)

Almost every recruiter will constantly ask you if you're interviewing anywhere else or working with any other recruiters. They do this so they can be sure nobody else has the right to represent you to a client but also to gauge how much effort to put into presenting you to any of their clients. If you're not working with a a single recruiter exclusively, you'll often find that the amount of work they put in to get you in front of their clients drops dramatically to the point they no longer return your calls/emails.

I have actually had a recruiter negotiate a salary bump on my behalf though.

As in they did it without you asking or they were the go-between during negotiation?

It's one of those things that are technically true, but doesn't matter as much as the candidate is led to believe.

Negotiating $10k more for a candidate might see them get some percentage of that. But if they place you now, they can move on to another candidate and get a percentage of $100k or more.

Churn is far more important than min-maxing any single candidate.

Yep, recruiters like other middlemen make most money with volume not price/quality. It's not the size of the deal it's the constant flow of deals which makes them money.

For them to pay lots of attention on a single deal it has to be rather large, so that's why head hunters exist for top CxO type personnel, but not really for rank and file positions.

> You are in no position whatsoever to make determination as to what incentives drive the recruiter's business.

My god, how patronising.

My view on his comes from speaking to several hundred recruiters and owners of recruitment agencies as part of research for a product targeted at those businesses.

I also have close friends who worked or have worked in that industry and we have had very frank conversations about what their incentives are.

Maybe they all lied to me, but none of them wanted to put anybody forward for an interview who would make them look incompetent.

Their ideal flow for a deal was as follows:

- Receive brief from client.

- Find about 3 good candidates and get them booked for interviews. Could be more or less, depending on the role.

- Interviews take place and the client considers all candidates to be at least somewhat suitable, but decides to pull the trigger on one of them.

- The recruiter manages the candidate's salary expectations within a range based on their experience of placing other people in similar positions so that the deal gets done. Generally this means that they will try to get it closed within one or at most two offer-counteroffer loops. That may mean disabusing candidates of unrealistic salary expectations. It may also mean convincing clients to increase the previously agreed salary range to accommodate a candidate who is significantly more attractive than the average.

- The recruiter receives a placement fee equivalent to a percentage of yearly salary in most cases.

This does not mean that individual recruiters or agencies may not have other incentives. I know that sometimes interviews of external candidates are a procedural requirement and are conducted just for show so that a preferred internal candidate may be offered the position.

But in general, I am quite sure that the above is a reasonably accurate account of what the usual incentives are.

About 4 years ago I outright fired a UK agency over that, told them delete my contact details and never call me again.