Situation one: recruiter tells me about job, is close to setting up interview.

Second recruiter tells me about job, it dawns on me it's the same one. Second recruiter knows more about job.

What do I tell second recruiter: that I'm not interested, or that I'd love to go with her but am already going with recruiter one?


Situation two (entirely different pair of recruiters): recruiter three hundred miles away calls me, wants to submit my name at a fixed hourly rate. I agree that rate is do-able, he sends me an exclusivity agreement to sign. I haven't faxed it back yet.

In the meantime, he passes my name along to second recruiter, who is in my town; it turns out second recruiter has the job to fill (for a client).

Everything further will be done directly between me and second recruiter, but if I sign the exclusivity, I'll have to let first recruiter skim a portion of the hourly for as long as I'm doing the job.

I really wish second recruiter had contacted me directly, but second recruiter didn't.

What do I do?

No exclusivity ever. I am not sure what the guy is about but I have been dealing with recruiters for more than a decade and I have never heard of exclusivity before.

Thank the second recruiter and tell her that you would love to go with her but you realize now the job is one someone else has set you up for. Tell her you are still interested in talking about any other jobs she may know about.

Always stay on good terms as she might be the one to find your next job.

I think you've got to stop seeing recruiters as the enemy, and either see them as the competition, if you are trying to market yourself directly to the firms for which they are trying to hire, or, see them as the gatekeepers they'd really like to be. Let's take those cases, one at a time.

If you are good with marketing yourself for purely technical positions, recruiters may offer you little. But for those senior positions ("C" jobs, like CTO, CSO, etc.) where a personnel firm has been engaged to do all the recruitment, testing, and vetting of applicants, up to the point of providing a "short list" of candidates to the board or to management, for final interview and selection, they truly are "gatekeepers" with absolute make or break authority for individual applicants at initial stages. At lesser levels, sometimes, a skilled recruiter, of long experience, will be able to present a marginal candidate, and force a hire on EEOC grounds, if an employer isn't careful, but those guys don't do much for you as a purely technical person, if you are a solid candidate, and not a member of EEO classes. The best you can hope to find down in the technical ranks, in my experience, in these Internet days, is someone who is concientious about what they do, and that tries to efficiently match good people and good employers in smaller firms, who don't want to deal with the deluge from Monster.com, with one another.

Unfortunately, that happy model is fast collapsing, if it hasn't already, due to fee collapse brought on by Monster.com and similar direct hire sites, and the automation behind them. No longer is a 30% of first year earnings fee a standard for recruiters; some independent personnel firms doing volume business with large employers are working on 5% margins, which doesn't buy much love, in either direction. To a great extent, I think the newer, more efficient hiring processes are providing both the employers and the prospective employees, exactly what expertise they both are not paying for, in terms of services and industry/position knowledge.

If you're seriously working the direct hire model, work it, and don't waste your time with recruiters. If you're working with recruiters, work with the best of them, and don't try farming them for info about specific leads, but supply those you choose to work with, with a full profile and portofolio. If they konw their clients, they should be able to send you only on assignments for which you have demonstrated competence, and avoid all kinds of screening interviews/tests/hiring committees, etc. You may not maximize your earnings compared to directly marketing yourself, but you should spend little time marketing yourself, in compensation. Somewhere, the curves for earnings, job change costs, and self marketing intersect, and only you can decide what the value of your time spent marketing versus earning at technical work is.

The one area the volume recruiters have pioneered in technical recruiting is temp-to-hire, which is where they provide "rent-a-man" deals to employers, much as they've provided warehouse workers for years. It's a good deal for employers, who get to see 90 to 180 days of performance before incurring hire costs, and it's a good deal for people willing to do the temp-to-hire dance, waiting to catch on in a new geographical area, or career area. But it may not be appropriate for you, if you are well established in your area, and looking for senior positions.

Still, if you've done realistic self-examination, and decided that working through recruiters is your best strategy, focus your energies on those personnel firms in your area with the best reputations, and present yourself as strongly as you can to the top 2 or 3 local or regional firms in your area. And then work with them, as they advise, without giving any fence-sitter vibes.

Turning now to the direct marketing route, where you essentially see recruiters as competition:

Recruiters won't be so much help, I think, to a person wanting to make a career change, or to make a level move in a particular field. If you are a competent DBA, and want to become a datacenter manager, and feel you have the additional skill set, you have to get somebody to bet on you, and that is tough to find a recruiter to do. You really have to market yourself for those kinds of opportunities.

User group participation, industry visibility, successful consulting history, and meaningful publication history are all factors in putting together a meaningful self marketing campaign. You really do have to be able to build relationships that aren't all about self-promotion, and which may not "pay off" for months or years. And at the same time, you have to be able to cold call impressively, and be able and willing to appear at industry events, where you can meet colleagues, peers, and business contacts. You may need to move from the client side of the world, to the vendor side of the world, meaningfully. You may have to accept travel situations.

Salesman have long run "lead swap" meetings at local restaraunts and bars, and you might be able to get something similar working in your own area, as an example of the kind of person to person networking I'm talking about here. Basically, you find 4 or 5 other people in fields related to yours, but ideally not _exactly_ yours, looking for opportunities, and you all agree to share news and leads. You could do this on a mailing list, or forum site, but traditionally, sales guys do it in restaurants and bars. They just bring in 1 story at each meeting, of a real business prospect they can't use themselves for the group, in exchange for which, they get 4 or 5 leads about opportunities that may be very meaningful to them, from other people doing the same thing.

These are the kinds of things you need to feed, if you're going to be successful in directly marketing yourself, assuming you don't still hope to have your Monster.com resume magically fly through the buzzword filters in every HR department which will downloaded it.

Long reply, I guess, but I hope of some use.

exclusive contracts == B.S. Only the shadiest recruiters do it.

At least around here, who represents you has a lot more to do with whether or not you get the job then your resume.