You can work with third party recruiters. They are incentivized to find you a good job as their payout is coupled to your salary and you staying there for at least a given time.
Yea, but most of them scale too much and have 1,000 clients looking for 1,000 jobs. That's not enough focus for me to pay for. I wouldn't pay $10K or even $1K for that level of service.
Ideally, my "agent" would have max 2-3 other candidates, and offer a totally white glove service: They know my comp preferences, my location (or remote) preference, my ideal company size, industry, desired job level. They would know my schedule and go out and do all the searching and filtering, the application legwork, and basically only get back to me when the interview is scheduled and I need to show up. Then, afterward, they would take care of all the salary negotiation/maximization and let me know the offer and starting date. I'd probably be willing to pay 5-15% of my first year's salary for that level of service.
Don't quote me on that, but as a rough approximation, I feel like the toil of job hunting is so extreme that I'd be willing to part with a significant chunk of change for someone who could actually reduce that toil and deliver a real job offer or two.
