[TamDenholm]

This is really interesting. I'm a contractor so i deal with recruiters a hell of a lot. I've never come across a good recruiter to work with, 90% of them are an annoyance but harmless and 10% are outright scumbags.

Its really interesting to see this honeypot information. I think recruiting is an industry thats ripe for disruption, especially for tech contractors and i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy.

[bartonfink]

I mentioned the exact same thing to someone a couple of weeks ago - I think her name was Stella, and she's been posting for a startup recently. I'm not a professional contractor like many, but I do like doing freelance gigs to supplement my day-job income. However, finding suitable gigs, dealing with negotiations and chasing down deadbeat clients make it really unpleasant given what I really want to do is make some extra cash after hours. I don't want to deal with all the overhead of running my own business atop managing my own career and family.

I would happily give up a percentage of my rate to someone who could get me ~15 hours a week worth of work at a market rate and insulate me from a lot of the overhead that I simply don't have time to deal with. Just like Hollywood stars focus on being Hollywood stars and leave the business of Hollywood to agents, I'd like to focus on my strengths and leave the business to someone else.

[mark_integerdsv]

15 hours a week? Jesus... I spend half of that in meetings. I really need to reconfigure my schedule!

I'll warn you though that the type of arrangement you suggest does exist, it's called: 'a consulting house' as opposed to: 'a software bouse' and it is the worst kind of scam.

First off, your 'market rate' ...that you can forget. The Firm sees to its own needs and those needs are fat salaries and bonuses to (non technical I might add) management. You'll get a salary and a fancier title than 'contractor' something like... Say... 'consultant' yes! Consultant! That's gonna bump up the hourly rate... But not YOUR hourly rate of course, that of the Firm my friend.

I guess my bitterness in this regard is quite obvious but here in South Africa, this type of thing is utterly rife. You have a few managers who have swept in over time on the winds of apathy and who for some I fathomable reason have good, big contracts and a slew of underpaid 'consultants' who run around doing their bidding.

You seem to believe that this relationship will play out the other way round where you are earning that 'market rate' and for a small percentage of that you'll have in your employ not only someone who'll ensure you're always employed but who is also a personal assistant that runs your admin?

That's called: 'a boss.'

Please correct me if I'm wrong here but it seems you have the world (as I know it) bass ackwards and programmers are not Hollywood stars, not where I come from.

[smackay]

Any wave of disruption cast towards recruiters is going to have to destroy consulting houses as proof of it's efficacy. The time and effort required to find work/workers that bartonfink mentions has to be expended by either the employer or the employee. In both cases this a poor use of time so the heavy-lifting of placing people is either done by recruiters or temp agencies. Anything that disrupts this has to make the process effortless, or nearly so, and generate better results so the employer/employee can by-pass the middle-men completely. An unlikely outcome but one which would be welcome almost universally, excluding the obvious casualties of this change.

[lifeisstillgood]

But Hollywood stars sit on set 12 hours a day, for a 16 week shoot, as does the rest of the crew.

If they only did 15 hours a week the film would not get made.

I would be interested In knowing what gigs you do take on and how the code integrates with the work being done elsewhere

if you are doing maintenace and bug fixes on a codebase you know I can see how it would work.

My apologies if this seems overly aggressive I am just interested in how this could work - we could alll fit in 10 hours a week for beer tokens

[greghinch]

I'm a full time freelancer. I work on several projects at a time, from large companies to startups, and most of them I only give 10-15 hours a week to. You can get a lot done in 15 hours a week if you put your mind to it. The trick in this case would really be the scheduling, 15 hours a week all done after a normal job schedule (say after 6pm) would likely not jive as well, and your productivity would not be nearly as good.

[lifeisstillgood]

My question and same to @bartonfink is still what is the work? If I am say design and build a rest backend for a company, and its say two months work at 45 hrs a week, doing 15 hrs a week telling them it will take six months cos I have other clients is a sure way not to get the gig

So I amwondering what the actual meat of the work you do is? How did you land the work - is it maintenance from past fulltime gigs, is it real consulting where you are training g the in house teams,

I am honestly interested because I am at a bit of a loss as to how to get such gigs myself

thank you

[greghinch]

the work is designing and building web applications. almost all coding, a small amount of training/consulting. generally i come into projects that were already built at least part way by someone else and need to be fixed up and have features added. though i am also doing one right now from the ground up with a small team. most of my projects involve small remote teams as well.

right now i work with 2 startups and 1 large company, as well as do occasional consulting with another large company (this is usually less than 5 hours every month). i'm all about simplicity and breaking things down into small pieces, so on all projects i am able to deliver and launch features regularly with 10-20 hrs of work a week on each. my total billable hours for the week usually are in the 40ish range.

i've found all the work through referrals pretty much, so i can't say exactly how to find it for others. i will say put as much as you can out in open source, that is the best "sales" technique i've had (often "referrals" have come from someone i've only interacted with in the open source community). also, be consistent with your deliveries, and open and honest about scheduling, as well as when something is going to take longer than you estimated. surprisingly few contractors are good at communication it seems. often i come into projects for people who were abandoned by a developer and even when they were working together only got spotty communication from that dev.

[lifeisstillgood]

Thank you

good points on the communications side - something I can easily let slide

[bartonfink]

I think you've overlooked the point that I already have a job. I'm "on set" 10 hours a day already.

[shalmanese]

10X Management is trying to do this: http://www.10xmanagement.com/

[altay]

Thanks for the shout-out, Hang!

Altay from 10x Management here. Yup, we're doing this, and ramping up quickly. Feel free to get in touch (email in profile) if you want to learn more.

[bartonfink]

Interesting. Doesn't look like they're up and running yet, but I'll keep my eye on them. Thanks for the link!

[shalmanese]

Last I heard, they were not quite ready to take on more clients at the moment so they closed signup until they could scale their services better.

[snowwindwaves]

Try http://www.evisors.com they match clients to consultants and take care of the payment side of things

[shpiel]

I recently worked with a recruiting agency that operated like a talent agency. The receiiters were not paid on comission. Instead, a team worked with me, and each pitched different companies to me. They prepped me for interviews, analyzed my strengths and weaknesses, and reviewed my past work and projects.

In the end I had to choose between two offers. They encouraged me to take the slightly lesser paying one because they thought I would be happier in that position.

Talent agency model is definitely the way to go.

[salemh]

Where was this geographically (San Fran? In the US at all?)

I was a Contingent (third-party) Technical Recruiter for 2.5 years (and hopefully never again, sans a cool company such as the above) and would love to work in that model. I only had the opportunity with something similar when our sales (the folks who got the requisitions / open orders) had many openings in similar "verticals." E.G. five different companies all looking for Java SE developers, with slight variations, but, for strong candidates I/we could get them several interviews, sometimes multiple offers.

Would be much more fulfilling. In most markets, however, this is (if the relationships are not established with multiple companies (which it sounds like the case in your situation)) "skill marketing" or trying to gain a sales foothold into a company by "marketing" a candidate to the company. At one of my former employers, the relationships were solid enough to where we created a few positions for some great candidates as we understood the departments needs. This is not typical at all, so finding a few companies actually making this a standard model would be fascinating (I imagine boutique retainer-model recruiting).

[shpiel]

This was in Boston. But the company is national. My understanding is that they did try to build relationships with employers and would do a site visit with the employer before taking them on. (I had to go the receiiters office for a mock interview.) They have also been around for a long time.

Granted I am also relatively inexperienced. Self-taught and only worked in the field for 2 years. Maybe it would not work as well for someone with more experience. Their name was Jobspring btw.

[greghinch]

I've often thought the same thing since becoming a full time freelancer, the talent agency model. The problem to overcome is that, much like most recruiters I've dealt with, it's hard to find someone who isn't a technical developer to understand how to fill a technical developer role. There's a lot more complexity to understanding the work from the outside than there is understanding the work of say an actor. I no more want someone representing me who's saying "ok I have a guy here who has HTML, PHP, Javascript, and CSS, and I see you have all of those on your job requirements, this is a match right?" than I like hearing the opposite from a recruiter. Essentially you're going to need to find developers who want to do sales, a tough find if I've ever heard one.

[altay]

This is what we're doing at 10x Management (http://10xmanagement.com). I'm a YC alum and experienced web dev freelancer. I also play a lot of music so, through serendipitous connections in that world, met some music managers, and realized what they do for their music clients would be really useful for me as a freelance programmer.

So we started with them representing me -- taking care of the business end of my freelancing -- and it worked out so well that we've partnered to create 10x Management, to expand the model. I bring the tech experience, and they bring the talent agency experience.

[zavulon]

Non-developer recruiters who really want to understand technology can learn it. My girlfriend is one, I've got her this book - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004V9HC48/, which her boss since made mandatory for all recruiters in their company.

Of course, that's not enough by itself, and it's a long process, but there are recruiters who do go through all the trouble of learning technology.

[cliftonmckinney]

So I think you have to look at why external recruiters are successful:

(The following refers to most, but certainly not all)

They're generally loathed by developers for a multitude of reasons, they charge ridiculous rates, they come back and poach their placements, and commit a plenty of other sins. Yet they're still out there, plugging away and jamming my LinkedIn feed...

The only reason they still manage success is because the alternatives have to be even worse. Despite the ridiculous environment we're in right now, there are still folks out there who are interested in leaving their current jobs for greener pastures. But Dice.com isn't getting it done for these folks, and even if it is their resumes are getting buried beneath piles of unqualified candidates and/or getting filtered out by terribly built filtering software or, even worse, HR folks who mistake Java for Javascript.

I think the way you disrupt the recruiting industry is by significantly improving the alternatives. That or providing a completely new alternative that's wildly better.

Word of mouth has always been the better alternative. It works like a charm until networks are exhausted. Maybe that's the place to start.

[gruseom]

i've got a theory on how to do it, one day i'll write a blog post on it but the basic premise is, instead of a sales strategy, i'd like to see a talent agent strategy.

That's actually an interesting idea. Please write it!

[brc]

Well, my disruption idea is to break the entire recruiting process into a value chain, and create little markets for each piece. So a company can list a position on the site (or maybe even on an existing site). But, instead of either a recruitment agency doing everything, or the company doing everything, they can break down the process and take bids on each step.

So maybe one person is really good at sorting a pile of CVs into a shortlist. Maybe another is good at phone screening. The company can outsource (via the site) any or all of the parts that go into filling a position. Providers (which would be individuals or small companies) bid for these tasks in an open marketplace along the lines of elance.

Effectively it is taking the roles of the recruiter and busting them down into pieces, and allowing different people to specialise into different things.

It's no more fleshed as an idea than that, but the basic concept is that a recruiter is considered by many to be overpaid, but fulfills a necessary evil. By allowing companies to directly outsource individual pieces they can utilise what they need from a recruiter without having to pay for the whole amount. And a skilled recruiter can get good work under their own banner without all the overhead of having to get an office and form a company, and themselves become freelance agents for hire.

[dennisgorelik]

Who is going to glue all these pieces together? I think overhead of managing all these small steps would exceed time savings you get from outsourcing.

Overhead would be in:

1) Teaching ALL participants about job to fill.

2) Dealing with job seeker's frustration when he would need to answer the same questions to different people in the process.

3) Restricting access to potentially sensitive personal information.

[brc]

The site manages the entire process. It's both workflow manager and marketplace in one. The process of filling a position is pretty generic - you could satisfy something like 90% of hirings with a standard process. Think of it like a series of boxes on a page. The choices are 'Do this myself' and 'outsource' this.

As the tasks get completed the next step happens, and the site manages the whole process.

The job seeker would not have to answer questions at each step of the way. The information would be saved in the system so that each person managing the step (whether internal or outsourced) can see the output from the previous step.

The steps are something like : write ad, sort responses, initial screening, organise interviews, interview, negotiate offers. The company would choose which of these they want to handle in-house, and which they want to outsource. You could come up with a few templates to cover a large proportion of hiring in industries.

Restricting access is just done with the same types of legal terms that existing recruitment agents use. The site would include a reputational factor, the same as any other online marketplace. So someone who wants to have a at-home job sorting through CVs isn't going to start leaking the information if they want to get more work from a client.

Ideally the jobs would be listed on the site itself, but there's no reason it can't be used to manage jobs that are listed on existing (and popular) sites. The idea would be to leverage the network effect of other sites while building a base of clients for the site itself. So initially listings would be on the site as well as other popular sites. Over time, a strategy would be devised to drive the popularity of the site itself as a place for jobseekers to find work.

[dennisgorelik]

So every participant would have to read information accumulated in previous steps? That's your overhead right there.

If so many users access your information - how do you know who leaked your sensitive data?

Outsourcing such small pieces could make sense only to the web site itself (which is fast, cheap, secure and reliable) - not to external human players.

Traditionally humans tend to manage computers, not the other way around.

[alttab]

4) waiting on the right bids when you just need to hire someone.

5) Outsourcing the DNA of the company to the lowest bidder.

If your idea or your management team suck a recruiter can only do so much. Once you are worth your salt you can hire one full time recruiter and be done with it.

Recruiting is more important, not less important. Commoditizing it means you don't know how to build a company.

[brc]

Good points all.

On (4) this is a fatal flaw unless the market can provide enough liquidity that there is fast turnaround on bids. Overall I think it is a killer of the idea.

On your (5) I would say that many organisations have no DNA worth speaking of. This is the market I would be speaking to.

I have done contracting work for many different companies over my years. Rightly or wrongly, it's seen as a cost centre rather than a strategic issue in many cases (despite the rhetoric, of course).

[alttab]

Thats really sad. To me, the hiring process determines the day-in-day out culture and performance of the entire organization. Sure they have the right 'skills', but do they mesh well personality wise with the rest of the development team? This would be impossible for an out-sourced bidder to determine with any accuracy.

What you get then is a bunch of randomly selected people (essentially). They really could be random given the fact you could have many different "recruiters", without any true consistency on how they were chosen outside of process.

A hiring manager could use this service for a handful of hires. Individually all the employees look great on paper. But something weird will happen when you put them all on the same project, and you are going to wonder where you went wrong.

Personally, I wouldn't see a web application commoditizing the hiring process as disruptive (in any good sense, anyway). LinkedIn was already disruptive because it changed the recruiting industry and well-qualified highly-skilled people don't stay unemployed long because of it.

Recruiters jumped on LinkedIn because it was built correctly and it made their job easier. Trying to commoditize the process further is going to be difficult because any recruiter worth their salt isn't going to take a pay cut and fight for bids. Most recruiters I've worked with take a commission on the hiring salary anyway.

I understand that the concept is disruptive from a hiring managers point of view ("Great, I don't have to hire HR, recruiters, or pay out the ass!"), but my guess is its going to be difficult for them to take the jump into an untested service to literally have anonymous bidders ala ebay doing their hiring.

As a manager myself I wouldn't use such a service.

[charlesdm]

Had this idea as well. I assume this could work for highly sought after consultant/contractor profiles, more than pure developers. Might also be quite hard to scale this up to many people as the fees you can collect from agreements will be limited (as opposed to actors).