“The
musicIT recruitment business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” — Hunter S Thompson
You’re bored with your job and your boss is driving you nuts. With the year coming to an end, you’re thinking of moving on and you’re updating your CV. But then what? Who do you send it to? Sometimes you have to deal with recruiters and that, unfortunately, can be a minefield.
In my career I’ve had to appoint many software people and I’ve probably seen about three hundred CVs in the past three years. We got recruiting down to a fine art while I was CTO of MXit where it was particularly competitive to get a job a few years ago. Here’s how it works:
How recruiters make money:
Recruitment agencies make their money through a legal agreement with each company they recruit for. When they successfully place someone, they typically require a payment worth 15% of the annual salary of the person they placed. So for a Java software developer earning R40 000 per month, or R480 000 a year, the company would have to pay the recruitment agency R72 000 soon after appointing you. That’s a lot of money for e-mailing CVs around. (IT people earn comparatively high salaries and there is an undersupply of good people. As an IT recruiter you’re basically printing money by simply using MS Outlook and running ads on PNet).
The corollary to that is that if you can manage to contact the company directly, and they appoint you, you just saved that company R72 000. (Note: if you want to do this, make sure you’ve not recently spoken to an agency that has an existing agreement with the company in question. The recruiter may have legal grounds to STILL claim his 15%).
If you really must use a recruiter, here’s what to look for:
1. Meet the recruiter in person. You’re appointing a personal sales agent – interview THEM. All they are going to do is circulate your CV around and for that they are going to profit hugely when they place you. Be utterly anal about who you appoint. Hint – if they look like they would be more comfortable selling expensive apartments in Clifton, or second-hand cars in Goodwood, avoid them!
2. Look at THEIR resume. You spent years sweating through an engineering or comp sci degree, and even more time perfecting your skill through many late nights and deadlines set by irrational managers. Do you really think someone with a matric certificate and one-year training course of some kind is going to be able to represent you properly? Would he know the difference between Java and Javascript? So check out their LinkedIn profile or “About” description on their website or ask them directly for their CV.
3. Ask around. There are some horrible people in this industry. If you end up with the wrong person or company, it’s quite likely that the more savvy CTOs have long since stopped taking their calls. Associate with them and you just end up tarnishing your own good reputation. There are agencies whose CVs I have simply deleted the moment I received them. (Good ones in Cape Town: Quiglies (Steve or Lisa), Recru-it (Lionel), Annie Mercer. Shitlist (email > dev/null): Communicate, Hi-Tech).
4. Approve the CV they send around. I have often seen recruiters take the basic CV provided by the candidate, and then edit and hack it to their hearts content leaving out important information, sometimes even inserting things they dreamed up. Make sure you have the right to approve the final CV they send out to potential employers.
By the way, a skills matrix is BS. PLEASE don’t bore someone by listing every single software package you’ve ever used, with your “out of 5″ rating for each. It’s nonsense. I have NEVER paid any attention to it, or discarded a candidate because they’re a “4” c++ coder instead of a “5”. That’s the stuff you quickly figure out in an interview.
5. My best tip altogether: bypass agencies completely. We live in the internet age. You should conduct your own marketing campaign and should preferably have been doing so for quite some time. What happens when you Google your “Name Surname” (using the quotes)? Do you have a website within the first four pages of results?
Showcase your own work like this guy has done: www.daxfrost.com (wrote his own popular MXit client).
Give a talk at www.spin.org.za.
Target the company you want to work for, and email the CTO directly. Don’t bore him with a CV – send him a piece of software you wrote and ask if you can demo to him or list the open source projects you’ve been involved with. For example: “I was a Debian Linux developer from November 2000 to August 2003. My other code contributions have been accepted and integrated into the Linux kernel (2.4.x and 2.5.x), JED (programming editor), DOC++ (source code documentation system), VTK (Visualization Toolkit), ITK (Insight Segmentation and Registration Toolkit) and XFree86. I am also the developer of the pwdfile PAM module, the buildpage web site building scripts, im2avi movie conversion package and Linux kernel drivers for selected embedded hardware watchdogs.” from cpbotha.net. It sure beats a lame skills matrix!
This last tip is particularly valid if you want to work at hot startups. The founders aren’t going to spend money on recruiters until they can help it. By the time a recruiter refers you to a start-up, it’s long past the phase where you can get in early, make a difference, and get a decent equity share.
Finally, take the time over the holidays and read Seth Godin’s “Linchpin” and Chad Fowler’s “Passionate Programmer”. Happy hunting!
