I feel like sometimes it's out of the applicants hands if they come by way of a recruiter / head hunter. Sometimes non-junior devs who aren't quite to senior developer status yet have no control over the recruiters mistaking your pay at previous jobs and the pay you could make next time for the level of job you should be applying for / able to handle.
I've run into this issue in different specific ways earlier in my career and no matter what I'd say about skill level / lack of knowing required technologies / being willing to take lower pay in order to justify aiming for another role it didn't matter in the face of the possibility that the recruiter could obtain a larger % for themselves off of that senior / higher-than-in-my-range job's salary.
Maybe this isn't as applicable for senior dev role applicants as it is for some lower level dev roles but at the point an applicant is actually physically there in front of the interviewers I'm sure one of the last things they are going to want to admit is that they wished they were interviewing for a lower paying / easier job even if it's 110% in the favor of both parties.
I'm a senior engineer and have worked with recruiters many times before, and I've pretty much come to the conclusion that they're a big waste of time unless you want to do the 6-month contracting thing to avoid resume gaps or you just like moving around the country and renting rooms.
I've tried working with them before, have gone on job interviews through them, and then generally found that the jobs that hire through recruiters pay peanuts, and I end up finding a permanent job paying much more and taking that instead. I think if a company only works through 3rd-party recruiters, that means the company has no idea how to hire people, and doesn't want to pay much either (because they're paying the recruiter a huge commission).
It's not in their favor to find you an ideal, direct hire / non-contract gig. There is no chance for future money from a client if they find you your perfect fit / long term career type job.
Not to mention most of the one's I worked with early in their career not only had no idea about any of the technologies they were checking to see if I was fluent in but they also acted like they DID know everything about programming and beyond that they tried to flaunt this fact and treat me like I was trying to overstate my skills to sneak my way into a job out of my pay range.
Such a frustrating ecosystem in order to find a career job.
In ten years I can count on 1 hand how many times I've gotten a reply from a non-recruiter job I applied for (applied on my own without a staffing agency submitting / representing me).
It's really crazy how that works.
Another thing I dealt with was people who hired me saying (TO MY FACE):
In this situation I'm making $35.00/hr as a Regular Developer (non-junior / non-senior dev, just a middle of the road contract developer):
CEO of company in front of everyone: "scoggs we are paying way more for you than we are for our senior developers so we are expecting top notch work from you."
Me (used to it by now, unfazed but I hate this situation): "Sir with all respect I'm only getting less than 1/2 of what you pay my staffing agency for my contract/"
CEO: "well they don't really do anything / didn't really do anything but introduce us and get you a phone and in person interview with us."
Me: "But you guys didn't have to pull programmers, HR, and design / copy writing people off of their normal work to create interview materal, submit interview material, review resumes, vet candidates, plan phone interviews and schedule them, set aside time for phone interviews, review phone interview candidates among 'hiring team', review candidates references, plan in person interviews and schedule them, execute in person interviews and have meetings with 'hiring team' to pick who to hire', make offers to people you want to hire, or hire them. All you had to do was tell the staffing agency what skills your were looking for and what kind of company you were. I'm not an employee of your company. I don't have insurance, I don't get paid for sick days, I don't get paid for holidays, and I have no job security."
Of course I didn't say all of this, I said something along the lines of "They take care of the majority of the process" but in my head I feel like I'm always having to live up to the expectations of the people paying the total bill. The same way they think the staffing agency doesn't do any real work and isn't worth the cost / price of doing business -- most of these people feel the same way about developers. They don't understand what we do, they just expect us to solve anything and everything to do with computers / programming / technology and this is ALWAYS the way it is regardless if the final product / project outcome is directly tied to the company suddenly turning a profit based on the success of this project / programming endeavor.
These companies want to underpay contract developers, pile stress on their shoulders, guilt them for the situation they have little to no control over, and then stick them with the majority of the blame if things don't go 200% well (because they are expecting work that's 2x as good as the amount of money I'm being paid).
I've found it impossible to truly and personally (mentally) live up to the majority of expectations laid upon my shoulders by non-technical CEO's / Presidents / Bosses of companies I've worked for.
This is the majority of what I deal with right outside of NYC in Northern New Jersey. There is the rare company that truly respects the programmers they hire (usually companies where programmers have become CEOs / Presidents / people in powerful positions within the company who wield influence).
I love the money I make in this market but I truly hate the way everything makes me feel even when the situation is like this yet I am able to deliver above and beyond expectations. I hate working for people and in situations where it feels like I'm being told I'm robbing the company when meanwhile the recruiter is robbing us both yet they have us pitted against one another -- and beyond that the staffing agency has a 2 year lock on me being able to accept a job from that company without them "buying out" my contract.
The cost of buying out a contract? A university wanted to do that once early in my career (I wish I was still working there frankly, 10 years later), but the staffing agency wanted 2x the amount the university was paying the staffing agency! I was making $60,000/yr at that point so on top of the University paying me somewhere in the realm of $60,000/yr they would have also had to pay the staffing agency ~$240,000 just for the right to hire me. That means they would have had to shell out $300,000 total including my salary and the buyout.
Nothing about that seems right and / or legal. Under no circumstances would I ever be worth that much to the staffing agency and honestly with the amount of work they actually do I feel like it's damn near criminal.
No State University that pays employees with citizen's tax money is ever going to be able to justify spending that type of money on 1 employee. It's just a fantasy of epic proportions.
I lived in northern NJ for a couple of years. You need to get out of that place; it's a terrible place for software engineers. The cost of living is ridiculous but the pay for engineers is mediocre at best. Move to Silicon Valley: the cost of living is only slightly more, but the pay is far higher, and the weather's a lot better too. And $35/hr 1099 is ridiculously low in that area, those are poverty wages.
Anyway, you make it sound like you can't get a job there without a recruiter. There's still plenty of companies hiring directly, I even interviewed at a few when I was there such as Alcatel at Bell Labs and some wifi company in Manhattan. My current gig is with a large company (in the DC area) that hired me directly. Stop wasting time with recruiters and just look for companies that do their own recruiting; there's no shortage out there that I've seen. I've had 8 jobs now that were not contracts and not through recruiters: 3 large corporations, 3 small companies, 1 mid-size, and one a state university research division. Am I apparently special that I'm able to find these jobs?
I've run into this issue in different specific ways earlier in my career and no matter what I'd say about skill level / lack of knowing required technologies / being willing to take lower pay in order to justify aiming for another role it didn't matter in the face of the possibility that the recruiter could obtain a larger % for themselves off of that senior / higher-than-in-my-range job's salary.
Maybe this isn't as applicable for senior dev role applicants as it is for some lower level dev roles but at the point an applicant is actually physically there in front of the interviewers I'm sure one of the last things they are going to want to admit is that they wished they were interviewing for a lower paying / easier job even if it's 110% in the favor of both parties.