Yes. I met with a recruiter who offered to buy me coffee. He gave me resume advice and talked about the tech scene in the city I was new to. He didn't expect anything in return, and I found an internship through my own networking later.
edit: Also, fecak on /r/cscareerquestions is an amazing wealth of knowledge.
Yes, I know a few that are "good" (i.e. not scum or annoying). I'm a developer in London (finance), and using recruiters, I learned about interesting positions that I wouldn't know about otherwise, I saved a lot of time (talking to different employers and organizing interviews), and got some interesting advice and insights that only people with lots of experience can give. I was lucky that the right ones contacted me :)
I think they're talking about some other recruiter.
Cause the one I'm thinking about gets a commission base on the salary the company agrees to pay you. So it is their goal to try to get you a good salary.
In general many of those type of recruiters have no loyalty it's a shot gun approach and throw as much people at the company and perhaps they'll hire one.
I had one that were asking for answers of the questions given during the job interview. I gave it and asked for a call back. Never got the call back and realized later on they probably giving it to their next interviewer. They gave me a tip before hand to study the questions in w3schools website. Roughly over a year later they call me back and I basically told them I'm not doing business with them.
There are a few job recruiters that are professional enough. Nothing that stands out but they gave tip, didn't lie to me, nothing fishy, set up an interview or phone call and went from there.
In general, all my job I got was from me, direct. The job recruiters never got my skill set right or the company were too corporate-ish.
99% are scum, 1% are good. I've received a couple of jobs through headhunters.
I have a rule that works surprisingly well. When a headhunter contacts me, I search my gmail for past interactions. If I sent them my resume several times without getting an interview, no response. The more annoying ones get an auto-archive filter.
If it's someone I haven't heard from before, and the posting is relevant to my experience, I'll respond.
I treat all headhunters as if they're competent and honest until they give me evidence to the contrary. Fortunately, the spammy ones make it clear pretty fast.
One common red flag: The headhunter wants to meet you in person before sending your resume to the client. I don't waste time on those anymore. All the good interviews I've gotten through headhunters were from ones that didn't insist on meeting me in person first.
Interesting why do ou feel that way? A real head-hunter not a fancy name for a standard recruitment agency employee will want to see who they are sending.
That has been my experience. I've gotten better interviews from headhunters who don't insist on meeting me first.
A lot of the ones who insisted on meeting me are shady body shops, where they're just looking to build a large candidate pool in case something comes up later. They also tend to be fishing for leads, asking who my hiring manager was at former jobs so they can hit them up to sell other candidates.
For the headhunters who insisted on meeting me, they either never sent me on an interview or sent me on a lot of low-quality interviews.
It's just like a pre-interview screening test anti-correlates with good interviews/jobs, to the extent that I usually just pass now.
