Best of luck. I have a feeling the incentives for hiring are out of whack and need a correction.
What is your fee structure like? Do you take 25% of what an engineer would make their first year like other recruiters? How will you avoid becoming corrupt like most other recruiters?
We have a flat fee structure that's less than the 20-30% that regular recruiters take.
We're trying to avoid being corrupted by 1) only working with companies we know, like, and respect (so we're not tempted to encourage people to work at bad ones), and 2) the fact that our advantage over regular recruiters is that we're not like them. Good hackers know one and other. If we started doing the crap many recruiters do, people would (and should) call us out, and good people wouldn't want to work with us.
You'd probably want to avoid working with companies you don't know/like/respect to keep your filter in place.
On the other hand, I've made referrals to companies I wouldn't want to work at but the fit was simply perfect for the person in question. They're very happy there.
It depends on why it is you didn't want to work there. The set of companies we know/like/respect is a superset of the companies we'd personally want to work at.
A trivial example is a company in the bay area: It could be an absolutely fantastic place to work, but my strong personal preference to live in a city means it'd be a poor fit for me. That doesn't mean it's a bad place to work, it just means it's a bad place for someone who wants to live in NYC :)
What is your fee structure like? Do you take 25% of what an engineer would make their first year like other recruiters? How will you avoid becoming corrupt like most other recruiters?