Hooray, once again I am an honorable mention in the Recruiting.com Post of the Week. This week I lost to… Barbara Ehrenreich? Seriously? She blogs now?
I suppose I could do far worse than be bested by a published author. Thanks for running the show, guys, and thanks for the feedback.
Just want to take a moment to call attention to the tips in Niniane’s How to Write a Killer Resume, for Software Engineers.
The tips themselves are kind of no-brainers in the abstract, but difficult to put into practice when you’re actually writing a resume.
If Jeff Clark wants to come to DC, I bet I have some clients who would love to talk to him.
At the recommendation of one of the guys over at Recruiting.com I’ve been reading Gurus, Hired Guns, and Warm Bodies by Stephen R. Barley and Gideon Kunda. I’ve been finding it pretty interesting so far, though I haven’t gotten that deeply into it yet.
Something I noticed, however, as they were talking about their “itinerant experts” who work with staffing companies, was that there were several sort of offhanded digs directed at the markups charged by staffing companies, as though we somehow “hijack” people’s earnings.
To Barley & Kunda’s credit, they do address this question more fully later in the book and do begin to explain exactly what service the agency provides that justifies the markup. Now, realizing that I am biased, it seems to me that they don’t fully understand what it is that the markup pays for, and the comments from some of the workers interviewed for the book indicate that a lot of candidates don’t really understand it, either. That’s regrettable, because it causes a lot of distrust between candidates and recruiters, which isn’t in anyone’s best interests. So let me explain a little bit about markups and staffing generally in hopes of clarifying it.
A word about how pay/bill rates are figured. I generally determine what the pay rate is based approximately on what someone would get to do the same job as a regular full-time employee. Ideally, I’ll base it on what the client would pay per year for that job, but if the client doesn’t know, I’ll use whatever the approximate market salary would be. If it’s a $50,000 per year job, I divide $50,000 by the number of hours worked in a year, and that’s the hourly rate I offer the talent. From there, I have a standard markup that’s based on all the costs I have to cover, and I charge it to everyone. Only rarely do I deviate from it, and then only in special circumstances. It seems to me that if a talent working on a W-2 for me is making approximately the same amount of money that he or she would be making in a full-time position, I’m not “hijacking” anyone’s potential earnings with my markup.
I realize that there are plenty of agencies out there which place less of an emphasis on paying talent a fair rate. That’s generally because they compete with other agencies on price, and my particular company tries not to play that game. If my client gets rate-shock, I’m pretty confident about the value of both the talent as well as my own work, so while I can usually provide a few dollars of wiggle room, I don’t participate in “how low can you go” contests. After all, if I’m paying my talent fairly, there’s less chance of them getting offered significantly more money somewhere else since they’re already being paid well, and talent who feel like I’m taking good care of them aren’t just going to jump the first time someone offers them another $2 an hour. So if you think you’re working with an agency that doesn’t care about paying you fairly, I encourage you to shop around for another agency.
Now let me address the question of how I earn the markup I charge.
Attention managers: Your employees are customers too. Take a lesson from this guy/
So there’s this guy. He’s a .NET developer based in San Francisco. How do I know of him?
He spams his resume to my coworkers.
Not to Stephanie and me, mind you. This developer has somehow gotten the email addresses of both creative recruiters in my office, and the email address of the branch manager in the Office/Finance office down the street from us, and spams his resume to them regularly, but he has never managed to figure out who the IT recruiters are.
Having their own work to deal with, each of these coworkers individually opens the resume, sees that it’s for a developer, and dutifully forwards it on to Stephanie and me. So we end up with three copies each of a resume from a dude who can’t be bothered to figure out who to send it to, thinks nothing of sending spam, and doesn’t even bother to geographically focus his search.
I wonder how that’s working out for him.
Usually I don’t do this, because most of the jobs I place for are in DC and most of my readers are not. But this might be a job worth moving for.
I need a senior developer. Maybe two, actually. If you’re a Java/JSP expert with experience in a *nix environment, as well as strong Javascript chops, I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you NOW if you have all that and Ajax as well. My client is willing to pay a fairly significant amount of money to just the right person. Also, the job is not in the government/military contracting industry (which happens to be gobbling up all the good Java people lately, hence my frustration), so in case you were wondering…
Want more details? Contact me privately- tiffany -!at!- magicpotofjobs.com.
Welcome, O’Reilly readers. I’ve gotten several great comments and helpful emails from many of you today, and I’ve enjoyed reading them all. As always, you can leave comments on entries, or reach me privately at tiffany -!at!- magicpotofjobs.com. It’s clear from some of the emails I’ve got that there’s a lot of frustration out there with the job search process in general and with recruiters in particular. My friends, you are preaching to the choir- believe me when I say that I hate bad recruiters as much as you do, because I have to work that much harder to earn the trust of both the candidates and the clients.
It’s late, but just a couple of spare thoughts on the original article that brought you here:
There are essentially two kinds of HR gatekeepers: the ones who are just trying to separate the crap resumes from the ones with potential, and the ones who seriously think they’re in a position to evaluate an IT resume.
When dealing with the first type, your best bet is to mirror the language of the job description or posting as much as is reasonable in your resume. Just try to spell out as plainly as possible exactly how your experience relates to the job, using their own words if necessary, in order to help a non-technical HR person see that your resume is worth passing on to the hiring manager. Ultimately, though, this type of HR person understands that his or her job is really just to weed out the obviously unqualified/illiterate/unsuitable candidates and let the hiring manager decide which of the rest look worth the time to interview.
When dealing with the second type… well, good luck. The above technique will help to an extent, but there will always be HR people who think it’s their job to insert themselves into the process between applicants and the hiring manager. If you’re lucky enough to have a good third-party recruiter who specializes in IT working with you, your recruiter may be able to push through that obstacle for you, by convincing the HR person to rely on the recruiter’s IT expertise. My personal favorite TPR trick is to start asking the HR person lots of technical questions about the job over the phone. I can actually hear their eyes glaze over. If all else fails, you still have to ask yourself if you really want to work for a company that lets HR decide who IT should hire, no?
And above all, have reasonable expectations. In any given company, the HR department has to recruit administrative staff, technical staff, executives, marketing, etc. They can’t possibly specialize in every area, and especially not in IT. It’s an unfortunate fact, but there aren’t that many good ways around it. Does it excuse bad hiring practices? Of course not. But there are certainly plenty of the first type of HR people who are doing the best they can with what they’ve got. So be nice.
Anyway, thanks for coming by. I hope you stick around.
Ego-boosting and self-referential: Seeing your own blog come up in one of your del.icio.us feeds.
Over-the-top ego-boosting and self-referential: Discovering that it’s happened four times and you’re just late to the party.
I know, it’s not that big of a deal, but even though I’ve been blogging for four years at various sites, I’m always tickled when people I don’t know read it.
I received feedback on a help desk candidate yesterday that gave me pause. The corporate recruiter who had interviewed him had asked a series of technical questions, and she said he had gotten some of them wrong.
Now, I’ve heard about this before. What happens is, some HR person who probably doesn’t know anything about IT (and to be honest, most of them really don’t- it’s not their specialty, after all) sits down with a list of questions and answers they’ve printed out, and starts firing them at the candidate.
Words cannot adequately express what a poor way this is to evaluate an IT candidate.
What non-IT people fail to understand about the IT field is that the person who comes to fix your computer doesn’t have some stored list of problems and solutions in his head. The successful practice of IT support is essentially nothing more than understanding the fundamental principles of the systems you are supporting, and interpreting their behavior to determine what’s causing it.
In other words, you can’t reliably answer a question about how to fix a computer without having a computer in front of you.
Thus, a help desk tech who is attempting to fix your computer can be brilliant at her job while also being atrocious at answering questions about how to fix a computer in the artificially contrived environment of an interview. This is just like when my mom tells me that her iTunes has once again stopped being able to retrieve track names from the CDDB. I know enough about iTunes to know that it needs an Internet connection to do that, but I can’t figure out what the specific problem is on my mom’s computer without sitting down in front of it (or using a remote desktop client to access it), checking her iTunes settings, checking her connection settings, and finally checking her firewall’s list of allowed applications- I can’t ask her to do that herself because I don’t have her firewall application’s menu structure memorized. I just have to sit down and look at it and figure it out. That doesn’t make me incompetent- it just makes me a troubleshooter.
It’s unfair, and more than that, it’s fundamentally inaccurate, to try to evaluate an IT person’s skills without actually sitting him or her down in front of a test environment, because even the best IT support staff don’t have a series of memorized screenshots stored in their brains for instant recall whenever a question arises. You wouldn’t ask your mechanic to describe how to fix your car without looking at it, and you shouldn’t ask a tech to describe how to fix your computer that way, either.