Necessary Evil??

Jay Kimble — Fri, 09 May 2008 19:30:01 GMT

I want to write today about the 300lb Gorilla that none of us really wants to talk about. I'm talking about the people we use to find new jobs. As you may be aware I closed down IntraDynamics, LLC (well, I have greatly curtailed my company's offerings),and got a new job (at Answers Systems, Inc.)

I was "exchanging notes" with my new boss regarding the process and discovered some things (none of this is surprising, but you may want to think about it next time you are pursuing a new job).

I had two recruiters that were aware of my interview process with Answers. One was the company who placed me and the other was a company I trusted (in the past) who appeared to be working hard to place me somewhere else (even asking about where I was in the process with Answers). In fact I was actually told that Answers (who offered me a job in less than a week) was slow in their hiring process. All this makes sense (the other recruiting company was trying to get the fees for me and wanted to do the placement with Answers, so they needed me out of the way). They inappropriately asked Answers about me.

There's that side of things. The other is that it took a long time to get my deal finalized (almost another week). Why? Recruiter placement fees. Now mind you there was a slight change in things with me (I went from "contract to hire" to just "hire"). The company wanted as much as 35% of my yearly salary for placing me (now mind you it wasn't because they did a great job finding me, etc.. they were in the right place at the right time).

To be honest all Answers needed was someone else to pre-screen candidate's technical abilities. All that the placement firm did was monitor Monster.com and send out an email. There were a few additional things they did (like call me everyday regardless of whether there was new info or not).

I don't mean to be trashing on someone (that's why I left the company names out), but I was in shock of the fees they wanted to collect. My boss, Perry, and I started talking about what would be better.

Eric Wise' idea of having a computer programmers trade association seems like a good idea. We would pay dues, but the organization would allow us to take tests and "prove" our abilities (or at least allow it to be easier to pre-screen applicants). Maybe there would also be a mechanism for referring.

I've been thinking about this. We could do it now you know. We could set up a site to create the organization. There would need to be a set of testing sub sites (maybe you would only be allowed to test every 6 months or every year). When the companies we work for are looking for people we could simply look in the organizations site to see who is currently available and match up test thresholds to what we are looking for. We could then refer these folks to our companies avoiding the whole recruiting industry.

Maybe I'm just dreaming...

JSP

Necessary Evil??