For quite some time, I've been wanting to write a blog post about the state of the technology job market as I see it. From my perspective as a senior developer, recruiters have a stranglehold on much of the job market. To me, the majority of them are right between a used car salesman and a real estate agent. They are quite often hurried, uninformed and many times downright rude. When I am being placed in a job I want the person placing me to be concerned about the ultimate fit between the company and myself. In many cases, I feel the exact opposite from these recruiters. They will lie through their teeth about 'the absolute highest rate' that they can offer. In some cases I've had three different people from the same recruitment company call and pitch me the same job at different rates, all claiming that it is the most they can offer.
This concerns me, in that...as a more senior developer I have what's considered on the high end of salaries or freelance rates. With the shady practices I've seen tech recruiters exhibit, It is no doubt that in this economy they are more likely to pitch junior developers who come to them with lower rates, rather than the person who's right for the job. Faced with no other options the companies will take these junior applicants, and pay senior rates for them while the recruitment firm walks away with a much larger profit. Meanwhile, senior developers are faced with the decision to either give the recruiters the cut they want, or hold out and face possible unemployment. I would hope that most companies realize that if their prospective employees are being lied to, they are also being lied to. They should also realize that the vast majority of these recruiters are no more qualified than their ten year old son to recruit technology candidates. With a little more work on their behalves they could forgo the shady practices of many of these recruiters, and the staggering fees that are charged (especially for salaried employees this can be up to 20% of the first years salary), and most assuredly find higher quality candidates.
This post is by no means meant to paint EVERY recruiter as terrible, considering that I have run across a few that have seemed honest, diligent and focused on placing candidates based on skill and not based on how much they will make them. I am simply stating that in many cases, the process as it is now seems to hinder the process of finding a job.
If any of you have similar concerns, or experience ... or disagree with me please feel free to share below.
JesterXL
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 10:57 am:
It isn’t all sad. IBM had that happen with me 6 years ago. There were 3 “Flash Developers” who prided themselves on being experts in ActionScript 1. Each was completely full of it, and the product manager interviewing them knew it. Upon my turn, I knew this too, and told the recruiter as such.
What I didn’t know was that those 3 previous candidates had mentally scarred the HR lady and the PM doing the interview. As soon as I excuded confidence in my abilities, the HR lady walked out with a sigh, and the PM acted like he wasn’t interested. Pissed they didn’t even ask to “see my code”, I demanded they look at it. They were surprised I actually had code with me.
The point here is, what goes around comes around. Time and time again, I’ve had recruiters ignore my story of how things will go down. “Company meets employee… employee doesn’t work, out, company asks you again for another candidate that doesn’t suck… you then come to me again, respecting my rate….”. Happens every time.
So, don’t fret that junior devs will get the gig and you won’t. If they do, and you never hear back from the recruiter, then you REALLY don’t want to work at that company! Anyone who can let a junior dev work on large Flex/Flash projects is either A) not caring that no software see’s the light of day or B) the projects aren’t at your expertise level and thus you’d be miserable.
That said, it’s a game; if you do get near getting the gig, just remember that if they are offered 200k for the position, they have NO qualms about offering you 30k while they pocket the rest; AND offering the next guy 50k if he asks for it. This isn’t unethical, it just is; they are making money. Therefore, stick to your guns. You know what you are worth.
diamondTearz
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 10:57 am:
I recently worked with several recruiters. Some of them are excellent at finding jobs that I had not come across regardless of how much searching I had done. The transaction does take on a used-car purchase feel at times though. I know that they get tens of thousands of dollars for getting a developer signed. They do, however try to convince you that you have enough of a skill when you know that based on the decription it is not what you do!
There’s also a “party line” coming from recruiters that flex developers are only charging $40 an hour right now. They’ll talk it up but at the end of the day I wonder how they slice the paycheck.
When I was in high school I toyed with this job where they would give you a crate of imitation colognes and drop you off in a parkling lot. Essentially, anything over $20 that you sold the cologne was yours to keep/per bottle. The price that you sold had more to do with how boldly you wanted to overprice Obsessed, or Dark Car Noir! That experience came to my mind as the numbers started swirling around during job opportunity discussions.
eric
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 11:06 am:
@diamondTearz
One thing I try to never let recruiters do is dictate how much my work is worth, as it is in their best interest for your work to be worth a lot, but you to think it isnt.
eric
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 11:09 am:
@Jesse
hah.
You bring up a lot of good points here. And I understand that to be resilient and steadfast is important. But I think for a lot of people they would like a more no nonsense way of seeking employment. By the time youre the 5th employee in you are almost looking down the barrel of a gun. I understand this is the reality, and I’m not gonna be changing it with one blog post, but I’m just voicing a few gripes
Tom
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 11:19 am:
I force recruiters to go through e-mail first. If they do get ahold of my # somehow, I’ll politely tell them I cannot speak at the moment but if they’d like to contact me via e-mail I can get back to them asap.
This filters down a lot of the cruft, and allows me to respond with what I really think of the job (not high enough salary, not my skillset, etc) without much effort or time wasted hearing a pitch on the phone. Also lets me express concrete expectations (”Must be in Manhattan”) that they’re not meeting with the jobs being pitched.
Craig Kaminsky
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 12:50 pm:
“the majority of them are right between a used car salesman and a real estate agent.”
You’re letting (most) of them off way to easy and really insulting real estate agents and used car salesmen :)!
My biggest beef is that when these recruiters contact me they make it clear that they have not read my profiles in any way, shape or form. I clearly mark that I will only work remotely (I live in the mountains more than 350 miles from the nearest city) and am not willing to relocate. Yet, I still get a ton of calls/emails about moving to NYC for a job.
I realize this is their game, send a hundred blanket emails to potential workers based on resume keywords and hope to get one or two responses back. However, not even paying a little attention to the individuals you’re bombarding is just disrespectful and rude (IMO).
mycall
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 1:01 pm:
Wouldn’t the easiest thing to do is to ask your new employer/boss how much they think they are paying you? That way, you can do simple subtraction and know if they are being ripped off, which could be dealt with.
Craig
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 1:21 pm:
Any tech company who is even thinking about hiring more than two people in a year might as well hire their own part-time HR person because it will cost them less, and the HR person will actually care if the employee fits well into the company. Recruiters are a waste of space.
Josh
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 2:20 pm:
diamondTearz: “There’s also a ‘party line’ coming from recruiters that flex developers are only charging $40 an hour right now.”
*amused snort* That’s a cute figure. They’re either lying to themselves, or they’ve been very successful at convincing the newbies who don’t understand how much a Flex dev can make that it’s normal.
In 2007, I wrote a blog post An Open Letter to Silicon Valley Recruiters where I complained about many annoying recruiter strategies that only hurt their efforts to recruit developers like me. It still seems relevant today (although I’ve edited it a bit since the original posting to be a little more polite with my feedback).
Stephan Schmidt
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 2:51 pm:
From my recruiting experience in recruiting (senior) developers for some years, 90% of recruiters are not worth their money. I knew one who was worth every cent, I could have hired every developer he suggested. But most are definetly not worth the time you invest in them.
Cheers
Stephan
http://twitter.com/codemonkeyism
Gabriel C.
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 2:54 pm:
The real option is to become your own headhunter.
A good place to start is Nick Corcodilos’s AskTheHeadhunter ( http://corcodilos.com/blog). It has some interesting ideas…
If you can go to the hiring manager and explain the value you provide, is easier to get hired.
Binil Thomas
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 8:52 pm:
Eric, good luck on your job hunt! Once you land a job, your opinion might be valued by the manager or whoever who makes hiring decisions at your new place of employment (it could be you, too). When you have such an opportunity, please express your feelings about recruiters to that person and try to make sure that they do something about it. If enough developers did this while they are on a job (as opposed to noticing the problem when they are looking for a new job), the recruitment malpractices should eventually go away.
cak
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 8:55 pm:
Yes, everybody hates recruiters, because they can’t find you the right people, or they can’t find you a job. They want recruiters to be experts in ALL of it, and anything they happen to handle as well. They basically want recruiters to be IT experts, who could actually do the work themselves… it doesn’t work that. way.
I have met lots of people like this, and some people who actually give a shit and really helped me. But lets not all heaps shit on recruiters, just because this blogger has a theory about why he can’t get a job.
If during your interview you can’t prove you are good enough, then you don’t deserve the job, nothing to do with recruiters. If the company isn’t smart enough to see that they are hiring somebody inexperienced, then they would be a shit place to work anyway.
Companies are hurting, so maybe they are only looking for cheaper labor now, not senior people, in the hope that they can get by.
Eric Cancil
on Mar 25th, 2009
@ 9:24 pm:
@ cak I never asked for recruiters to be super technical people, only that when they talked they had some idea what they were talking about, and that they took some care in reading my resume / monster / dice account. It’s also not about not being able to find a job, it’s simply a commentary on the process of finding a job in the technology community, and how it becomes greatly hindered by recruiters
Adam L
on Mar 26th, 2009
@ 3:11 am:
I think that any company that is using a recruiter is just being lazy.
You can advertise on a couple of websites for not very much money and then you just have to sit down and sort out the several hundred CV’s that come in. Do phone interviews and then organise people to come in.
I think any IT department should be able to d that that task in a way that costs the company less money than it gains by not paying a recruiter.
Vic
on Mar 26th, 2009
@ 5:09 am:
Recruiters are the part of the technical industry I loathe the most. I’ve had nothing but horrible experiences with them (maybe its me?).
They often change resumes around in order to get better placements, lying to the company saying an applicant has specific experience when they don’t. To counter this, a manager I read about once asked for a technology that doesn’t exist to be part of the job requirements. Of course, because it didn’t exist, no real applicant would put it on their resume, however, the hiring manager would receive resume’s with that technology as experience proving the recruiters were modifying resumes!
I’ve often compared them to used car salesmen too.
MARK I
on May 12th, 2009
@ 6:47 pm:
I am an a technical recruiter and a former network/programmer. I completely understand the loathing for my profession. There are a lot of poeple that ‘fall’l into this business who really should be selling cars or insurance. Technical Competency is a big problem with recruiters.
And unfortunately, programmers have become a commodity traded on the open market.
But on the flip side:
Clients dictate rates and salaries not recruiters. And yes we get a ‘cut of the action’ but then, if it weren’t for the recruiter how else would the candidate know about the job?
Here are some tips I give to my technical friends. Questions to ask about a recruiter and in this order.
1. Ask them if they know what you do–have them explain it back to you.
2. How old is their company, how long have they been recruiting. Ask the what the dif is between C and C++…or, what is the ORI model.
Things not to do:
NEVER–give out referrals or references before you are hired.
CONTROL YOUR RESUME AND KEEP a spread sheet of who you sent a resume to and for what job, the date, the recruiter and the result—interview, no interest, no feed back, etc.. Having your resume submitted by two or three people does not look good.
–CHOOSE your recruiters. There are a lot of programmers-turned recruiters–they are the best to sell your skills and overcome objections.