You would think that this would be an easy task wouldn’t you. Five Universities all pumping out IT graduates. And Manchester is supposedly second only to the capital for digital companies.
Well recently for us it has been very difficult. Our recruitment agencies haven’t been able to find us a suitable candidate with the right skills, experience and qualifications at the right price. Moreover we had a bad experience with a Leeds based recruiter RMI Recruitment UK, who helped us to hire a senior .Net developer. The candidate lasted exactly 5 weeks, got into difficulty with the development and then left for another job. RMI Recruitment UK refused to refund our money but agreed to replace the candidate free of charge. To date the agency hasn’t been able to find us a replacement. That was 6 weeks ago.
This whole debacle has cost us the recruitment fee, the salary costs (without a result) and the cost of doing the job properly by one of our existing developers. All in all we calculated that this “mistake” cost us over £13,000. Something like 80% of the inward calls to our agency are recruitment consultants touting their wares and quite frankly we don’t feel comfortable that any of them give us value for money.
We have found from experience that clever, self motivated people are best suited to the organisation. We would want to pay this new developer about £25,000 based on skills and experience. Reporting to the Head of Development the candidate will be responsible for
• Developing code to a fulfill a specified scope of work
• Feed input into the design process
• Feed into the process of constant improvements
They must have a digital agency experience, a good understanding of C#, Ajax, SQL server, XML, web services, CSS level 2, experience of CMS systems (Sitecore CMS would be an advantage). Java websphere and Domino skills would also be desirable, but not essential.
We are now convinced that the way forward is to blog about this and to use the social networks to try to attract our candidate. So if you know anyone who would like to work for us in web development, or can suggest any useful blogs or social sites where we can get in touch with good candidates please let us know by contacting us below.
Obviously this isn’t a signal for recruitment agencies to get in touch
7 Comments
as a contractor agencies are the bane of my life, but a necessary evil. I’ve worked with RMI (http://www.rmirecruitment.com/) before though and been put under pressure to try and get my timesheet signed off before the end of the week.
Client turned over tens of millions a year and was not particularly impressed. At getting invoices on a Friday afternoon before I had finished the week. I am hard pressed to justify agencies £20 an hour over my hourly rate especially when they tell you the client wants you to lose £2 an hour – and if you refuse you have no idea what they are telling the client about you.
I think Intapeople are probably the only agency I would work for voluntarily again – but if you need the work what choice do you have?
In fairness, the “service” granted by agencies to candidates can leave as nasty a taste in the mouth. I’m a fairly specialised guy looking for a specialist role, so I approached a “digital” recruitment agency to help me find a job when I moved back to Manchester from London 18 months ago. Initially, I was dealing with the head of the recruitment team, who while was personable and full of advice, she clearly lacked a book of appropriate jobs for me (not the agency’s fault). I was then passed to one of her underlings, who took issue with me from the start for no reason. He made it extremely clear that he wasn’t bothered about helping me as I wasn’t an “easy win” (IE an SEO, an Account Handler or Business Development Exec). Basically, I didn’t want to do sales, and he didn’t want to help. The result: I spent more time searching recruitment websites and found the company I currently work for on there, who had advertised the position I took on there themselves.
My advice to recruiters would be to advertise through websites like Totaljobs or Reed who, while charging for an advert, won’t give you a load of spiel, and won’t be looking to fit their square shaped candidate into your circular entry point. And for candidates, if you use one of the job sites, making full and proper use of their alerts, it won’t take you forever to find the right job, and it’ll be an altogether nicer process than by entering the cattle market that is recruitment.
You will, sometimes, find a nice and decent and capable and specialist agency who will be able to find you the person or company you require for a fair price, and you’ll know that the person or company you’ve become acquainted with are good at their jobs. The rest, sadly, are just in for a fast buck, and don’t care about offering a good level of service to either the candidate or the recruiter.
Have you tried Krop (http://www.krop.com) or Authentic Jobs (http://authenticjobs.com)? UK sites of a similar nature might be Roome (http://www.roome.co.uk) Some good people use those sites both to recruite and get work.
Hi Bill – we used a different approach at Yuuguu to build the dev team – by testing people personality and ability using psychometrics – you can identify people that you’ll get on with and can do the job. I believe in this approach so much – have set up a business psychology consultancy called ‘psycuity’.
Cheers Philip
Bill, I know what you’re saying. Here’s our experience
http://blog.pushon.co.uk/blog/bd-recruitment-ltd-of-manchester-i-will-never-use-your-services/
wonderful sharing thank you very much /paylaşım için çok teşekkürler iyi çalışmalar
thnaks