Apologies, this is long.

I was laid off back in October and have been trying to get a new job, without much luck. I often get calls from recruiters for jobs, who do the searching for candidates for employers. The employers decide who interview, and the recruiter would eventually do the salary negotiation.

I got contacted by a recruiting firm yesterday for a job at a financial firm that looks fantastic. It's right in my skill set, an acceptable commute, and pays amazing (almost 2x what I was making before). But the communication with the recruiter was AWFUL. His native language was not English, but that's usually isn't a problem for me as I work in the software industry where that's pretty much standard. It was extremely difficult to communicate, as he didn't seem to understand my answers. One of the miscommunications had to do with the pay rate I was looking for - I told him twice I was happy with the range in the description, but I found out later he passed on that I wanted the top of the range. He never told me that the job was contract to permanent, which is extremely important to know. Later another recruiter from his firm called and asked me a bunch of questions, half of them repeating what I already told the first guy. She also asked if I would consider the bottom of the pay range since I didn't have expertise in the financial industry.

So this afternoon another recruiting firm calls about the exact same job, and I told him I wished he had called first. He was a lot easier to communicate with, wanted to advocate for me to be at the top TOP of the pay range, and he was the one that informed me that it had the possibility of being permanent. He called me back later and said he talked to the company and could represent me if I told the other recruiter to withdraw my application.

So I emailed the first recruiter and said I'd like to be withdrawn. They called me back and and insisted I should just let them run with it since I was "already on the short list" meaning the hiring manager already had my resume.

If you've gotten all the way this far, basically I'm not sure if I should just go with the first one even though they didn't seem super competent, or if I should go through with having them withdraw my stuff, and have the 2nd recruiter handle it. Ugh, I HATE looking for a job.