Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview Full Text: Chapter 3 (What Recruiters Won't Tell You)

By Aline Lerner | Published: October 6, 2026

Hello! I'm Aline, founder of interviewing.io and one of the authors of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview. We're making all of the chapters I wrote freely available on our blog. I'll be publishing chapters every few weeks.

If you don't like reading, here's me reading this chapter out loud. Pick your poison.

Author Reads Chapter 3 of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview Out Loud - YouTube

Now, without further ado... the full text of chapter 3 is below.

Chapter 3: What recruiters won't tell you

Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.
— Charlie Munger
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
— Upton Sinclair

Even though recruiters try to position themselves as your advocate, remember this: recruiters are not your friend, and they don’t work for you.

I (Aline) used to be a recruiter. I ran my own third-party agency, and I also worked in-house before starting interviewing.io. That means I’ve had to struggle with the tangled incentive structure that comes with being a recruiter. There’s always tension; recruiters are, by and large, good human beings who genuinely want to help their candidates, but they also have an employer they’re beholden to, as well as a comp/bonus structure that rewards certain behaviors, some of which run counter to candidates’ best interests.

There’s some distinction between in-house recruiters and third-party recruiters (recruiters who work for an agency that does placement, rather than a specific company that’s hiring engineers)

THIRD-PARTY RECRUITERS

Working with third-party recruiters (also known as agency recruiters) is, at best, mixed. The most important thing to realize about them is that you are not the customer. The employer is. As such, even when they're paid a commission based on your salary, their incentives are, at best, sometimes aligned with yours.

Ultimately, a recruiter's incentive is to get the deal done, not to get you the best possible deal. Here’s why.

A recruiter, depending on market conditions, gets anywhere from 8% - 25% of a candidate’s base salary when they make a placement. However, that cut is going to the recruiting agency as a whole rather than to the individual recruiter; you will almost always end up working with large agencies rather than a single person.

Let's say that you get an offer. You talk to your third-party recruiter and tell them that you would like more money. The recruiter may go to the hiring manager and try to advocate for you, but they're not going to push very hard because the incremental difference in their cut is going to be pretty small1, and to them the thing that matters is making the hire. After all, they're evaluated on the number of hires they make, first and foremost, independent of compensation. Third-party recruiters are incentivized to get the deal done, not to risk the deal by negotiating hard for you.

This means:

If they have multiple clients potentially matching the same company, and they know you're less likely to take their offer, they'll fight for the other candidates more than you.
They may expose information to the company that reveals whether you'll demand a high salary. Remember: they're paid by the company, not you. If the company likes them, that's good for them.
They may encourage you to take a lower salary. Sure, they get a slightly higher commission if you negotiate a higher salary, but they get no commission until the deal is done.
They may encourage an employer to lowball you, if they think you’ll take it.2

So, when you work with third-party recruiters:

Do not tell them anything about your job search.
Do not share your compensation history/expectations.
Always deal directly with the companies they introduce you to, once you establish a point of contact there.
Assume that anything you tell your recruiter is going to get back to every company you’re working with.

IN-HOUSE RECRUITERS

Some in-house recruiters get a bonus for hires, but this bonus is rarely tied to your compensation. In fact, in some cases, they may get a bigger bonus if they’re able to negotiate you down.

At big companies, in particular, in-house recruiters follow a playbook, and are evaluated accordingly. They’re trained to make offers within specific bands, and they’re trained to mobilize such that they don’t lose candidates to other big companies; if you wave a Facebook counteroffer in front of Google, they will act. If you tell them you’re interviewing at a startup, they will not, because they know that startups don’t pay as much.

Because of this playbook3—and because they are working for the employer—their incentives do not align with yours. They’re incentivized, first and foremost, to follow the rules their head of department sets for them. This is true for how they evaluate candidates, who they let through, and how they read resumes. And it’s definitely true for how they negotiate.

Generally speaking, recruiters want to help, and many are rooting for their candidates. But they’re also operating inside a box, and that box isn’t set up to put your interests first.

A NOTE ABOUT IN-HOUSE RECRUITER TENURES

Many recruiters at FAANG companies are contractors. The longer a contractor works, the more their role may resemble that of a full-time employee. To avoid legal risks, companies often limit contract durations to around 6 months. While this practice is most common in California due to its strict labor laws, similar limitations are applied in other states, though the typical contract length may vary.

Why do recruiter tenures matter to you?

Never assume that the recruiter you're talking to now will still be there in a few months, when you're ready to interview.
Build good rapport with your recruiter. Odds are good that, even if you don't pursue their current company, you might be interested in their future company.
Don't lie about other offers—it’s not super likely your recruiter is checking whether you have the offers you say you do, but chances are, because recruiters have short tenures and work at lots of companies, your recruiter knows someone there. We’ve seen it happen.

We’ll talk a lot more about how to work well with recruiters in future chapters, and now you’ll understand why we give the advice that we do.

RECRUITERS WILL TRY TO CALL/TEXT. USE EMAIL INSTEAD.

Recruiters are notorious for calling and texting instead of using email. Why?

The generous interpretation is that recruiters generally want to move things along quickly. If they can get you to respond quickly, through a synchronous medium like phone or text, then they can likely move you through the process faster as well.

There is one other, less generous interpretation—phone and text give recruiters the upper hand. Even the worst recruiters, if they have any work experience at all, quickly become seasoned negotiators. Even inexperienced recruiters have an edge because they are following a script and playbook. They’ve been told what to say in a variety of situations, and they interact with candidates multiple times a day, over years.

You, on the other hand, do one job search every few years.

Email lets you level the playing field. You can craft every word, and figure out what to say and how much to reveal. Over email, you can play it cool, and you can take the time to get advice from friends or experts.

When a recruiter calls you on the phone, they get your impromptu responses. They can see if you're excited about the money, and possibly get you to answer questions that you might not have otherwise answered (e.g., your salary expectations). The phone will keep you off balance.

While texting allows you to think longer about your response, its casual nature lulls you into a false sense of security. Moreover, the fact that texts interrupt you from something else puts you at a disadvantage—when you get interrupted, your instinct is to quickly respond to make the interruption go away. But knee-jerk responses are rarely the right ones, and you end up giving away information you shouldn’t have.

We encourage you to stick to email as much as possible. You will have to get on the phone eventually, of course, likely when they are ready to extend an offer, but you never have to text.

Footnotes:

Understanding that, let's do the math anyway. Let’s say your offer has a base salary of $150k. Say that your recruiter goes to bat for you and tries to get you up to $165k. Before, the agency would have gotten paid $15k. Now the agency gets paid $16.5k. That incremental $1.5k isn’t worth risking a deal over (even a few thousand dollars would not justify jeopardizing the deal). On top of that, the individual recruiter is only going to maybe get a few hundred dollars total from that increase. ↩
Why would a recruiter recommend that an employer not pay you more? It seems counterintuitive, but remember that the employer is their customer, not you. A savvy business person will often take a short-term hit in the service of building an enduring relationship with their customer. Telling an employer that they don’t need to pay a candidate more (even though paying the candidate more would get the recruiter marginally more money) builds trust and makes it more likely that that employer will keep coming back to them for future searches. Employers often work with several agencies at once and cycle between agencies, so anything agencies can do to retain employers is a win. ↩
For more insight, watch this video on how recruiting leaders think about looking at resumes, debriefing interviews, and extending offers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHSufqvgUqY ↩