salary negotiation - head hunter involved
 

holding a specialist position in a niche industry. For about one decade, the trend in this industry was to outsource the position to overseas and fire the local people, but recently the industry realized cheap foreign labour cannot produce the quality they demanded, so started to source for home-grown talents or expats.

one month ago, a head hunter approached me and informed me of an opening from a respected player in the industry. My first question was the budget of the hire, and the head hunter was up front with me and let me know the figure, which is 30% higher than my current pay. And so I told him I expect +20% more than enough to me. The head hunter said he is on my side, as his commission based on the pay, and will fight for me for more.

then we proceeded for interview at that company. it all went well and the head hunter said I did the best among all candidates (quite a few there).

Then come the salary negotiation phase, I maintained +20% which should be well within their budget. Then the next day. The head hunter said this is actually not they are expecting and they are considering other candidates (younger and inexperienced) who can also start work immediately compared to me (as I haven't tendered and they need to fill the position fast), unless I am willing to lower my expected pay, and that I "only look at money" and does not consider the job as a long term career. I got infuriated by this and said a few nasty things which I later regretted.

Anyway, how to make sense of this? and what is the best next step?

This is typical recruitment agent behavior, the person you are dealing with is definitely not a headhunter in the real sense of the word. Which agency is this?

At the end of the day, an agent will try to maximise your pay for his/her commissions, but not to the point of jeapordising the whole deal. If the company change of mind tell him they prefer cheaper options and not willing to pay that much, they are not going to risk pissing off the client by insisting your expectations.

You are getting too emotional over typical salesman talk. Now that you burnt bridges by being nasty, what else can you do? There is no next step. Just move on to the next opening.

Next time learn a bit of humility and be more measured in your response. Since you are in a niche industry, you won't want to go around racking a bad reputation in a shrinking professional circle especially you already know many of counterparts are being offshored to cheap countries.

You fcuked the recruiter upside down and now regret also no use. Game over.

Recruiter and head-hunter are just different words for the same profession. They only act in the interest of the company. salary negotiation is best done with the company directly.

That's like saying personal banker and private banker is the same profession. Correct to a small extent, but the level of interaction and the whole hiring process is completely different.

Same profession, but nature of their job differ quite greatly. A proper headhunter will have their commission already settled by the company who is hiring so they will find the best candidate for the job.

In this case, it's just a normal recruiting company hoping to get a cut of the candidate's salary as 'recommendation' fee.

used to be different, but now almost same.

recruiter used to be just "outsource HR" personnel who performed recruitment process
headhunter does little of what a recruiter does, instead, focuses on building their network of contacts in an industry so that they can locate a good candidate.

because of LinkedIn, a recruiter can easily build a network of contacts just like headhunter does, a headhunter is also required to perform HR function like screening and interviewing as a value-added service.

how they get paid is usually subject to the contract, mostly a fixed monthly fee + commission.

Nope that's the wrong layman misconception.

The main reason is many agencies like Robert Walters, hays, Hudson, Michael page etc are falsely branding themselves as headhunters. This causes a lot of confusion as you end up with typical junior / middle professionals earning less than 500k get approached by all sorts of 'headhunters'.

Real headhunters do not talk about stuff like salary budget, think long term for career, coordinate multiple meetings and candidates and openings at one go. Similarly most of their candidates are not in LinkedIn and randomly cold calling and messaging these execs will not work.

It's a different world.

what happened after that day was that, the headhunter went back to explain things and got the same reply from the company. Basically they considered me a job hopper. That really baffled me as nothing I have done indicated that I am a job hopper. Every job candidate would like the highest pay.

That's just a standard rejection reply. You probably overplayed your hand and thought you were way better than what the market thinks. I'm surprised you conducted yourself in such an arrogant manner when you already know most of your peers have lost their jobs due to overseas outsourcing.