1

Has anyone ever used a career placement firm for IT sysadmin and not entry level tech stuff?

5 Spice ups
2

yes and no

the problem with many recruitment consultants is they actually know noting about anything, so they spend their time using word matching software to match your resume to what their clients job description say, and try to place candidates from there.

try to find one that specialises in IT only (not a IT branch of an existing recruitment agency), and then try to define what sort of market they actually cater for. IT tends to be a very wide career path - programming to analyst to web developer to sys admin

3

I’ve talked to a lot of recruiters but it’s never lead anywhere concrete. Most (in my experience) are looking to fill contract or contract to hire positions. I’m at the place in my career where I don’t entertain those options. For some people it can be a great option.

4

The replies above are absolutely correct, the recruiters are generally pretty ignorant to your needs, they only look at buzzwords and ask basic questions. That said, they do perform a fairly good job of only presenting a set of resumes that are at least viable candidates. Not all recruiters are terrible either, some actually have a pretty good candidate pool.

You still have to do your fair share of interviews and pick your new staff carefully, but it is easier than posting the job yourself, then going through all the garbage resumes, then contacting the potentials and doing a phone interview, then an in-person. Recruiters tend to take a lot of the tedious, waste-of-time questions off your plate and save you a good chink of time. You can actually establish a pretty good relationship with some recruiters and they will feed you decent talent, but that is fairly rare. Good luck.

1 Spice up
5

They suck plain and simple, better off trying to find a gig on your own.

1 Spice up
6

Hi there! I’m Sarah with Caringo. I’m a tech marketer, but formerly a tech writer and a savant (I’ll omit the word “idiot”) at resume writing and job hunting strategy. The stats I’ve heard are that 80% find their jobs through networking, 15% percent through headhunters and 5% through randomly applying on the internet. That tells me that networking is where it is at. If you want to chat on this, feel free to PM me. If you use a placement firm, make sure you know the conditions up front and always make sure that the employer pays the placement fee, not you! There are some good, reputable firms out there…you just need to vet them carefully.

7

Yes we’ve used one. We’ve had varied success.

8

Last 2 jobs (NOC engineer and systems engineer) I’ve had I found through recruiters. In both cases, though, they were recruiters who had a long-term relationship with the hiring companies and were looking for candidates for the specific roles. I was doing a wide-area job search and had my resume posted on Dice and Monster, which is where the recruiters found and contacted me. One job was contract-to-hire, one was contract-only that turned into a full-time hire offer.

I have also worked with a few recruiters who found opportunities that led to interviews but did not pan out for various reasons. These were what I would consider “good recruiters”, who took the time to talk to me, understand what I was looking for, and market me in various roles. If I were to go back on the market or recommend friends, I would be contacting these recruiters again as part of a large-scale job search effort.

I’m ok with a short-term contract-to-hire at this point as the job market is full of them and it doesn’t necessarily look bad on the resume. The contract period allows both me and the employer to evaluate each other and determine if it’s a good fit. If not - well, the contract ends and a new adventure begins.

There are plenty of shoddy recruiters who keyword search your resume and then spam you out to various clients. I don’t even reply to those guys; no point in it.

TL:DR - good recruiters are good, bad recruiters are bad.

9

Thanks for the replies. All are good insights. How have you found a good job/employee? Ones you enjoyed working with?

10

My networking skills have never really done me much good and I’m pretty social. The guy I hired here a couple years ago was someone I had worked with in the past. Networking worked for him. :wink: