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We are moving to the area next year, preferably with jobs secured beforehand. My husband is in IT with 15 years of experience. Can anyone recommend a recruiter or firm he should contact? Has anyone has a good or bad experience they'd like to share regarding recruiters? Feel free to send me a direct message if you'd like. Thank you!
Do you really? I just was thinking it might be helpful. We'll be new to the area and my husband wants someone with knowledge of the job market to kind of help and direct him. We've never used a recruiter before.
I find recruiters distasteful because they are basically selling people jobs or selling companies workers. Neither is necessary because the workers want the jobs and the companies want the workers. There may have been some utility to this in the past, but with the internet and job sites, workers and jobs don't have much trouble finding each other.
That said, I'm sure it wouldn't hurt to entertain some recruiters, but I would not put all my eggs in that basket. Some companies use recruiters, but many (I'd say most) do not, so you would be limiting your options.
I find the whole recruiter thing distasteful, and I think most employers do too. Why not go direct?
Not true about employers. I've been on both the hiring side and the employee side, and there can be advantages for both.
Some of the things I've seen from the employee side: Going in through an agency allows you to get entrenched, prove yourself, and learn the job which gives you a great deal of leverage when your contract is up and the company wants you to go permanent. You're worth WAY more to them in salary offering than a nobody off the street at that point, and you can and should demand premium salary after you've spent 6 months or a year learning the job. The interview process tends to be less painful because they are not making as strong a commitment to a contractor, adding them to the benefits pool, and so on. I've known people who stayed in exactly the same position for over 20 years as a "temp", simply because the actual client would have never given them the same % raise each year or level of benefits.
Some things from the employer side: Sometimes you just have such an incredibly incompetent group of people in HR, or above HR, that have all sorts of weird corporate policies or procedures that no talented individual would possibly tolerate. Or maybe the problem is with the parent company. Agencies can sometimes offer better benefits, which can attract better quality of talent. They can try before they commit, so if the person is the wrong fit they have an easy way out that doesn't affect their "official" employee turnover numbers. Sometimes because of the way their benefits are tiered, they have a cost savings using contractors even though they pay the contractor more per hour.
Really I could go on but the bottom line is sometimes direct is the right thing to do and sometimes through an agency is better. Those who are good stand to make a killing through agencies, those who want to sit on their thumbs all day probably won't succeed as a contractor.
There's nothing distasteful about a recruiter. However, the majority of recruiters do not work for the candidate, they work for the employer (think about who's paying them). They are happy to chat with your husband but if he doesn't fit the needs of the employer who has retained them, they won't really have any incentive to help him out.
As far as I'm concerned, you're reinforcing everything I already know :-) Would you rather have a salesman or a job?
I've never had a problem finding a job. I like to maximize my income when I'm looking for one. Sometimes through an agency is the way to do that, and sometimes not. Some recruiters are pimps that add no value, but to think that direct is the way to go always and unconditionally is short-sighted. Whenever you use "I already know" in a sentence, be careful, because it usually indicates something you've gotten comfortable in the *belief* that you know.
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