Recruitment fees

After posting that we are hiring a Frontend engineer I got immediately flooded with messages from recruiters. Most of these follow the same pattern of not really understanding what we are looking for, even when we are quite explicit about it. Moreover, the sticking point is always the same: the recruitment fees. Because at this point I have a number of people telling me numbers between 18 and 25, I decided to post this. So let’s break this down:

1. We have a few people engaging with us at 10.5% providing good candidates. These companies are a) known in the industry and working with big players or b) people I know for sometime and have worked in the past with success or c) freelance recruiters that are ok with such rates because they don’t feed into a larger / bloated agency.
2. I have worked with several agencies asking for 20% in the past. At no point did I feel that the caliber of candidates coming from an agency/recruiter at 20% is better or worse than one at 10%. I have a hard time seeing such correlation, but more than happy to be proven wrong on this one.
3. I posted the role in the hope of getting contacted by candidates directly, versus recruiters. Based on my experience with LinkedIn, I rarely get quantity or quality candidates. There are certainly better platforms for that (e.g. Otta). Because I have a non-trivial number of connections, the cost of posting on LinkedIn is nil.
4. The analogy of “pay peanuts, get monkeys” and similar ones are ridiculous. This would be true if there was no venting system (i.e. the actual interview process) between getting a candidate and making an offer.