u/freakierthanzoid

I used to think staffing agencies were just adding a small buffer on top of contractor pay.

Then I saw the numbers.

A contractor earning something like $50 an hour is often part of a deal where the client is paying significantly more once you include agency margin, overhead, risk buffers, and everything else that never shows up on the contractor’s side of the conversation.

What gets me is not even the markup itself, it’s how disconnected the three perspectives are. The contractor thinks in hourly rate, the client thinks in cost center budgets, and the agency is sitting in the middle turning both into a workable margin.

It feels like the same work exists in three completely different financial realities depending on where you are in the chain.

There’s a startup I’ve seen repost the same roles for almost a year now. The same titles, same descriptions, same talk about growth and expansion. Meanwhile people are doing assignments, multiple interviews, waiting weeks for updates, only for the job to quietly get reposted again like nobody just wasted their time on it.

After a while it stops feeling like hiring and starts feeling like performance.

A company with a constantly active careers page looks ambitious from the outside. Investors see momentum. Candidates see opportunity. But sometimes I honestly think the company is more committed to looking like it’s growing than actually building a team.

https://preview.redd.it/0sgw80x6o2zg1.jpg?width=769&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f560dc0f80bdf506a8c6fa88efb8c285242f382a

As a job seeker, you can feel it pretty quickly. You’re answering questions, walking through experience, maybe even doing a task… but no one can clearly say what success in the role actually looks like. So you get vague prompts, shifting expectations, different interviewers pulling in different directions. One cares about speed, another about polish, another about culture. You’re not being evaluated against a standard, you’re being compared against whatever each person thinks matters in the moment.

Then decisions stall. Or feedback contradicts itself. Or you get rejected for something no one mentioned until the end. And it makes sense, because the role was never fully defined to begin with.

From the outside it looks like candidates are competing for a job. From the inside, it feels like candidates are helping the company figure out what the job even is.