On 05/24/2011 12:54 PM, Simon Rumble wrote:
You're talking to the wrong people. Lemme guess, recruitment agents with
English accents, straight off the plane from England but claiming to have
extensive contacts in the industry? They're idiots. Every last one of them.
They'll be reading your somewhat eclectic CV and see that as a liability,
which is idiotic of course but they're idiots you see. Since they have
absolutely no understanding of what we do, they just parse a checklist of
skills against your CV.
There are two discussions I know of on LinkedIn regarding IT recruiters.
One in the "Australian IT Industry" group asking for your top five
complaints about recruiters. (If you are going to post have a read of
all the comments first - you might learn something [and grab a large
coffee first its rather long])
...and secondly in "Australian & New Zealand Recruitment Network" where
recruiters are discussing how they can *fix and address* the *valid*
complaints IT (and other) candidates have.
The comments about imported recruiters have been made on both LinkedIn
groups.
Try to find companies that advertise direct.
In some (many?) cases recruiters are filling positions you are
interested in so dealing with them is part of the employment landscape.
My advice:
* Make an effort to build a relationship with smaller numbers of
recruiter who you get better service from, find them, stick with them.
* They are time poor and dealing with 100's of different people each
week - give them a break and start every phone conversation with a
couple of words to job their memory "Hi its David, the DBA candidate for
the North Shore role..."
* Vote with your feet - walk away from recruiters that mess you about
and tell them eg: "You told me the role was paying $80k but in interview
the employer said it was $70k" (it might be that the *employer* made a
mistake or lied - give the recruiter enough feedback to mend their evil
ways.
If there's a job you really want that's got a recruitment agent in the way,
put in a custom CV that ticks all the mandatory boxes, plus something
ridiculously wrong but funny (12 years Ruby on Rails experience). Hopefully
you'll get through to someone with a brain who'll find it funny and decide
to call you.
That's not good advice. (I find it funny and can look past it but I
wouldn't bet you career on the recruiter or employer doing so....would you?)
The IT recruitment agency slogan:
If you can, do. If you can't, have you considered a career in IT
recruitment?
Most engineers and IT people make lousy recruiters, one of the biggest
complaints that IT candidate have is that the recruiter doesn't
understand the job (aka they are not an engineer / IT person).
Now just some caveats:
* I've been in the Recruitment Industry since 1991
* Most recently as a developer of recruitment software
* I manage the "Australian & New Zealand Recruitment Network" group on
LinkedIn and kicked off the discussion so that recruiters could fix
their own back yard - and OF COURSE they want to!
* I have hired engineers a number of times (grad, ord, masters and up to
professor level) and without exception none of them could do the
recruitment role, but I know of people in the industry who are engineers
and can
* The discussion on "Australian IT Industry" has much larger feedback
from both sides - most of which is valid - and if you care about this
topic then I suggest you read it.
The reason I have posted a reply is that in all the LUG's their are
people with a wealth of experience and knowledge and also young people
starting out on their careers. It would be unfair to the latter group to
have Simon's opinion (which he is perfectly entitled to) go uncontested
since - IMHO - the problems won't exactly go away so people might as
well know how to deal with them.
Trust me - I've been using Linux years before I was in recruitment!
Cheers
P
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