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Just posted this on Linkedin. Thought you guys might like a laugh…

After a horrendous experience with a recruiter this week, I thought I offer some top tips for recruiters contacting people about positions, it appears the quality of some recruiters is going downhill. As with every industry, most recruiters I spoken to and had dealings with are professional, able and conscientious, this individual I spoke this week is really letting your number down.

  1. Don’t ask someone to leave a contract early, unless of course you ask your client if they would be happy if someone did this to them to go on another contract despite them still requiring the contractor. It’s not professional and I wouldn’t want to rely on someone who would do this if I was your client.

  2. Feel free to ask (if I’m unavailable) if I know someone who is suitable who I could recommend. I’m happy to provide your details to my contacts, but I’m not just going to give you names or recommend peoples to you unless you give me some idea of the skill set you require. This is to help you as much as me…

  3. Then stating “as long as they have security clearance” your client will employ them as their skill set, abilities and experiences aren’t really important, they would be willing to train them, indeed they just need someone to be on site. This would be fine and a potential awesome opportunity for someone, except 2 minutes ago you were telling me they had specific requirements, and that you had contacted me based on my Linkedin profile as it listed the skills requested and expressing your client needs someone on a client site who will be the “go to guy” for all things networking, including VPNs, routing and switching and who is dealing direct with their customer. Except now, your client just needs someone who has passed a Government security check, and no real experience in the the area your are recruiting for, just the ability to be able to attend a location.

  4. Last and most importantly, definitely do not tell me that you had a meeting with your client that morning, and that they stated that this (see number 3) is fine, and that your client said to you in that meeting that morning that they don’t mind if they don’t have a networking background at all as they will passing the cost on to their client (a Government department) and laugh, as if wasting a Governments departments time and tax payers money is a joke. Please don’t further justify it by stating “Well that’s what they said” when challenged about this (by a tax payer - me).

As a professional contractor I take my roles seriously and I have written to this company’s head office with my concerns, I’ve also asked them to never contact me again (probably to my detriment), they are a large international recruiter. I’d rather have pride in my work then deal with companies who employ people like this, they are truly doing their customers a disservice.

Apologies and rant over.

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I will say some, but not all recruiters are just looking at putting a warm body in a chair at a client’s workplace, requirements be damned. I can see how it can happen with gigantic HR departments that are barely aware of the requirements they need to fill the position, this is why they hire recruiters. The majority of the tech recruiting firms need to shrivel and die. My worst experience was with Robert Half…terrible.

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I’ve been in IT for 25 (working at 2 different companies) years and as a “professional” contractor now 5 months. Everything you list seems status quo for the things I’ve dealt with in the past year now being hit by dozens of these guys. Didn’t take me long to figure out the #1 rule of contracting:

  1. You are a slave with absolutely no worker rights and the place you are working for could care less about you as well as the contacting company you work for… Even more so the other contractors you work with.

If you are an IT person out there considering contacting… Just don’t do it.

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Anyone have issues with Robert Half? How good are they? Would I be better off not having a recruiter?

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So, want to post your linked in profiles so i can see how i make mine better so they at least try and contact me? . haha

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Unfortunately, it looks as if a lot of companies are now relying quite heavily on recruiters instead of doing it themselves. Partly because they feel that they don’t have the skills to be able to identify the right people for the role.

However, I’m going to say (again) that from experience, many companies don’t actually know what they do need. It may sound crazy, but far too many businesses have no clue as to what their requirements for IT are, or what IT skills would be the most appropriate for the roles that they offer.

The recruiters should, in theory, be able to bridge that gap for them; but it’s clear that for a lot of the recruitment world, it’s just a case of placing warm bodies in a vacancy to earn the maximum amount of money for the least amount of work. Not all cases; a few years ago, I was working with a recruiter that had done almost everything she could to get me placed in a job that would have been a perfect match for both myself and the business.

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In their defence, most who contact me are, I get at least 2 emails a day and maybe 3 or call a week from recruiters, most are very good. They know the questions to ask their client, and to be fair their clients know what they want. I normally have one “main” contract with a big company and this enables me to take on other work with smaller companies and I also employ a few guys who I trust and know are good, and I outsource to other companies, again who I know can deliver.

This guy was abysmal, he works for a massive company, and his attitude was awful, he was in no was professional. Laughing when stating a Government department would be picking up the bill really got me, I do a lot in that sector and I’m sick and tired of working with people who clearly would not survive in a commercial environment. Government departments by their nature tend not to be profit making by their nature.

The number of IT contractors in there who cannot do their job is offensive, and it’s the big IT companies that employ them. Add security clearances in and the pool of resources becomes a lot smaller and the number of people who have no skills in the actual role they are employed to do (Databases, mail, networks etc.) increases. Many are their as the company requires (by contract) to have x number of people employed and there are penalties if they don’t.

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I’m sorry you’re not enjoying it, The way I view work is simple, I have two gauges:

1, Would I be happy with the effort I’m applying if I was the guy paying the bill (or simply, would I be happy to pay for the result I’m achieving).

  1. Remember You are not there to make friends or socialise, you there to do a job. You don’t need to go socialising with the people you work with, you’re being paid to deal with them, and no one like all aspects of their job. I have a re-occurring contract where I work closely with a guy, we both acknowledge we think the other guy is a complete and utter twat, however when we bring are parts of work together they work, and I’d happily recommend him to someone or work with him as he is reliable, excellent at his job and has a professional attitude similar to mine. Basically you are being paid, you are hired help, deal with it.

Contractors only exist for two reasons, a short term skill gap or personnel shortage, contractors who drag jobs out or get miserable towards the end of a contract or winds down, really get me.

If you employ someone to paint a room in your house or build a wall, you expect that they know what they are doing, and if they quoted you two days to do it, you don’t expect their attention to wander at 11am on day two and the work to be sub standard compared to day 1.

I love contracting, it suits me, I don’t get involved in company/department politics, I have int he past brought my experiences into to places and reinvigorated a well established team to seek out new way of working that completely changed the way they delivered things, without any new equipment, just a viewpoint. They became so efficient they were able to reduce their hours and their company were happy with this and paid them the same regardless.

Contractors can be a force for good, or leeches and anyone who thinks contracting is easy and that they are rich are fools. Here I am on a Sunday morning on a IT forum on one screen and GNS3 on my other screen about to spend the next few hours swotting up on BGP (use it or lose it) for no other reason then I need to, not for work for me. This afternoon I going to be revising for the GIAC GFNA exam using SANS on demand, did the course, now the revision.

As a contractor I don’t have 4 weeks to learn a role, I need to hit the ground running to help the company that has brought me in. Lazy contractors shouldn’t be employed, but somehow, they are… That really pisses me off…

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I have yet to have Robert Half do anything useful for me, but that’s pretty normal for the headhunters and agencies I’ve worked with. The vast majority of them have used me to meet their metrics and not been of any value.

I’m working with a recruiter now who’s actually been very helpful and extremely communicative; once I land the position I’m going for via his agency I intend to broadcast far and wide how good he’s been.

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I’ve never heard of Robert Half before, it is unfair to name names just because you have had a bad experience. The company I refereed to are international.

If I am looking I tend to just use jobsite or jobserve. Here’s a tip, if looking for a job, delete and upload your CV every Sunday, the recruiters come in on a Monday and check these sites and a lot of them check for new CVs uploaded recently. You will have greater visibility to them.

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“Good” is definitely a relative term. This, like many things, is going to vary office by office and recruiter by recruiter. I did some work for them several years back and the person I worked with was only concerned with having a warm body and billable hours. That was just that recruiter. A good friend of mine also worked with them through the same office and a different recruiter. He loved them. Always had great experiences, completely professional, etc. When we used them a couple of years later to bring on some short term, temp help, well, it wasn’t a great experience. We needed some folks who knew about technical writing and we got two warm bodies. One was motivated and professional and the other wanted to sit around and tell us stories of his glory days.

Basically it’s a crapshoot and you should be interviewing your recruiter intensely. These people are now representing YOU to get YOU a job. If they are in the habit of just placing a warm body for revenue, then you are better off finding someone else.

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Nice i got a couple recruiter stories following a bad business decision on my part. (Bad business decision was leaving the job I had)

  1. First one was with americas favorite news. Recruiter said “We need someone with a strong cisco networking background, a network engineer with at least a CCNA as a requirement”.

-The job required no networking skill what so ever, hands down. ONce I got in, you weren’t even allowed to look at their networking devices, let alone SSH into one. On top of that the gentleman I was being “supervised” by got tangled up with HR for being a little too comfy with some younger female employees. So here I am with no real scope of what I am supposed to do, no boss and a 12 hr night shift. YAY! The night shift part was supposed to be the only down side, but the pay was nice… cool right? Then they appoint this dude to be a team lead that literally spends all of his spare time dressing up like a my little pony showing me pics, so I learned real fast what a Bronie was, and that he was a member of this whole Bronie sub culture! AMAZING… I quit a week later. I told the recruiter who was the news channels in house guy that it was really really irresponsible on HR’s part to hire someone into a dept that was in such shambles because I really enjoy my job, and anyone who had real cisco or networking experience would probably feel the same way as me about this position.

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I had to Google Bronie, clearly |I have lead a sheltered life…

12 hour shift with nothing to do? Study, and get paid for it…

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I think there might be 2 versions of contracting being thrown around in this thread. Short-term contracts, absolutely, get in, get things done, get paid, get out. But a lot of us are in longer term contracts where the employer is basically treating us as employees with regard to expectations but as contractors in regard to benefits/etc. Part of the industry landscape these days, unfortunately.

Best advice above was to interview the recruiter. Often it’s pretty easy to find out in this setting whether they are legit or just looking to throw resumes/bodies at jobs. Like anywhere else, you’ll have your spectrum of awesome to good to OK to really crappy.

It’s pretty funny some of the stuff recruiters try to throw at you sometimes, though. I just laugh and put it in the (virtual) circular file.

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All my contracts are 3-6 months, I have had re-occurring contracts with some companies, but for different parts of them. In the UK, if you are contracted to one definable position you cannot claim expense (via your company) after 2 years.

Also I avoid getting treated as an employee, I won’t take time of in leiu, any training from them (after all they got me in sas they don’t have some trained in something!) as there is IR35, a tax rule that make working not worth while.

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Right that was the first logical option, and given that it was just a chill quiet place to do that, I would have done just that. Ended up getting a Senior Network Engineer role that is indeed the opposite of what that place was…

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When a recruiter’s acts devious around me, then I assume they also act devious about me to the potential employer.

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I love it when the recruiter contacts you since, “you seem to be a good fit” and proceeds to ask you if you specialize in three different things. Don’t the recruiters do some form of expectation management for their clients? They always seem to be looking for a unicorn of IT.

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Half the time “you seem to be a good fit” means “your resume contained these keywords and I automatically contacted you without looking at it in any more depth”.

I don’t bother to respond to those recruiters. If you’re really trying, I’ll talk to you. Half-baked keyword match, no thanks, you are not the kind of person/company I want to represent me.

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It’s been a long while since I’ve worked with any recruiters, but as I recall the larger companies would hire mass quantities of new graduates, train them in specific procedures, and basically treat us as inventory, like soup on a supermarket shelf, while dressing nice to appear “professional.” Those who lasted any length of time in this process would learn to protect their sources and sell their inventory, and would go off to their own company, sometimes not so successfully.

A few would learn the value of long term relationships, but like any production sales job, success is measured short term. So they would quickly learn to concentrate on people with a couple years experience in whatever skill sets are “hot,” that is, have lots of company requirements coming in.