[mhzsh]

Years ago, my previous employer had a few listings on Indeed for software engineers (some were very long-running). A recruiter reached out to us with a candidate they had, who had experience in the areas we were looking for, which was enticing because people like this were not so easy to come by for a small company not based in a major city. By chance, we found out during the interview process with the candidate that the recruiter was playing both parties. This very shady recruiter cloned our job listing (removing the company information) and was able to out-rank us in the search. They presented themselves to the candidate as if they were working for us, and to us they presented themselves as trying to place this candidate, effectively collecting a recruiting fee for hijacking our listing forwarding a resume. They ended up with nothing but a warning from lawyers, but they _almost_ got an easy paycheck out of it.

[a2tech]

I don’t think this is uncommon—in fact I think it’s the way many recruiters work.

[raverbashing]

Hence why most companies don't accept placements by recruiters unless it's the one they specifically hired for the job

[gumby]

Nowadays you can often use a search with some text from the ad to figure out who the real company is. Though who would bother?

[mcv]

I would love to do business directly with the company, but often they don't reach out to me, while these intermediary recruiters do. I guess the value of recruiters is that they reach out to companies and to developers, and they connect the two.

Recruiters who merely repost the same listing that the company posted without adding any value, deserve to go out of business. Mind you, if every listing contained the hourly rate or pay range, they'd have a much harder time inserting themselves where they don't belong.

[m463]

recruiters have all kinds of shady tactics.

A friend asked me if he could use me as a reference, and I said sure.

A few days later I got a call asking about my friend, and I readily engaged because I took being a reference seriously. As we were winding up, he suddenly asked if I was looking for a position. I then began to realize it was the recruiter - who was recruiting off the reference list of my friend. I was gracious (but pissed off, because I think the whole thing might have not been about my friend but recruiting).

[thih9]

And many real estate agents, and sadly perhaps more occupations.

[ricardobayes]

Color me naive, but why is this a bad thing? If your listing reaches more people, it's ultimately better for you. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something.

[gnicholas]

It's the fee, which is a percentage of the employee's salary. That's much more than the listing fee on Indeed, likely by orders of magnitude.

There's also the downside that some scummy person is representing themselves as being affiliated with you, when they're not. So if they do scummy things to the candidate (which they likely would, given what they're doing to you), then you are painted in a bad light. Think of situations that HNers complain about here, and then imagine that it's your company being (wrongfully) dragged for having lousy interviewing practices.

[tshaddox]

I would imagine it's for the same reason that many big musical acts go to lengths to make it difficult for concert tickets to be resold. It's important to them to manage their relationship with their customers, and they simply don't want all or most of their tickets essentially being auctioned off to the highest bidders even if that is technically the most economically efficient allocation according to some extremely short-sighted interpretation of an Econ 101 textbook. Heck, it's the same reason Apple sometimes has long wait times for a new popular iPhone model instead of holding an auction and shipping to the highest bidders first.

[JacobThreeThree]

If the recruiter is saying he's been hired by a company to find people for a given job posting, and he hasn't actually been hired by the company, that's fraud.

[kayxspre]

I have a strange case about this. Several years ago I was looking for a job. I found a listing for a position in a company and apply for it, then it went silence for a couple of weeks. I later searched for a posting that seems to be identical to the listing of the company I first applied (though it was presented in recruiter's name and at the time, I was naive enough not to check that it's identical to the previous one. Granted, the company hasn't advertised the position at the time the recruiter did)

It wasn't until the recruiter tell me to proceed with the on-site interview would I learned that in fact, the company the recruiter is seeking candidates for is the same company I applied and failed earlier. This leaves me scratch my head why the company didn't respond to job posting I applied directly, but decided to pick me up when I was referred to by recruiter. They could have turned down recruiter's referral about me and I won't be surprised one bit.

[dredmorbius]

Fraud, misrepresentation, front-running, and a potential avenue for further scams (e.g., demanding payment from candidates, collecting personal information). For both candidates and companies, this may mean exclusion from consideration due to misrepresentations or concerns over exclusivity.

See:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeshumanresourcescouncil/202...

Incidentally, the search for "recruiter (fraud|scam)" turns up a distressingly high number of hits, many from companies targeted:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=recruiter+(fraud%7Cscams)&ia=web

[PragmaticPulp]

Because you don't want an unrelated 3rd party inserting themselves between you and the candidates.

How many good candidates were scared away by the sketchy recruiter? There's no way to know.

[nextstepguy]

I always get contacted by recruiters who rarely work full-time for the company they hire for and hide the company name when they reach out.

[ako]

It is shady, but at the same time it sounds like the recruiter succeeded where your company failed. He was able to find a candidate for your position, where your employer was unable by just posting it to indeed.

He did a better job, and maybe that is worth the additional money? Do you think your employer would have found the same candidate by just relying on the job listing on Indeed?

[theamk]

The recruiter copied listing as-is, with only company name removed. If thir listing wasn't there, candidate would find the company directly.

So they provided no positive value; in fact they provided negative value by adding duplicate listing and making them harder to navigate. I don't thin