One Factor that might be contributing to Recruitment agency frustration...

On any given job you apply for, your odds of landing the role are pretty low. Even for a good candidate, maybe one in every 7 or 8 applications leads to interviews, one in every 15 or 20 to a job offer.

That makes for a lot of wasted effort and frustration.

It's probably a safe bet that over half of these roles are being advertised by recruitment agencies. Different agencies, but we all kind of look the same to candidates. As such recruitment agencies become the common factor in people's frustration during the job hunt.

People don't though realise their application is in fact far more likely to disappear down a black hole when they apply direct, as it's a rarity to apply multiple times with the same organisation, and as a result they don't see the pattern.

My wife was in the job market recently, and she kept a close track of responses for direct and via agency. She definitely got faster response via Agency (and by response I mean a phone call, not a generic auto-response). It was an interesting exercise. Yes, some applications did go into the black hole for some agency roles, but far less than with direct.

So are you guilty bundling all agencies into one basket?

Tips for the job hunt

Lot of people hitting the job market at the moment who haven't been out there for a while, so here are a few tips that will help out with the hunt:

• Don't ask too many people you evaluate your CV. You ask 10 people you'll probably get 10 different opinions. There is no such thing as a perfect CV, so don't waste time trying to perfect yours. Here are some useful guidelines if you don't know where to start.
• Don't hang your hopes on a single application. Recruitment is fragile. Jobs can evaporate quickly. Don't have all your eggs in one basket
• Keep a spreadsheet to track all the applications you send. It's a good way to track your activity, and can also be a useful analysis tool if you are searching for a while.
• Get into the habit of following up applications with a phone call approximately 24 hrs later. You can check your application has come through, and it gives the employer/recruiter a chance to assess your communication skills (which is often a big factor in hiring decisions).

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Looking after #1

It's funny, on Whirlpool and similar job discussion forums,  a frequent discussion is a person wanting to back out of a job offer they have verbally accepted or have even signed paperwork. Posters will often jump on with the comment "you have to look after your career" or "you have to look after number 1".

Yet these are the very same posters that rant about recruitment agencies and recruiters having no morals.....

457 Visas - impact on Australian IT Job Market

457 visas (that is Temporary Work (Skilled) visas) have been getting a lot of press of late, largely due to the downturn in the job market and the upcoming federal election.

457s aren’t though well understood, so I thought I’d shed some light as to how and where they are being used, and how they are impacting on the local IT market.

It’s not just a simple case of Johnny Foreigner, the Java Developer, arriving in Australia, applying for a bunch of Java roles on SEEK, pricing himself sharply, and an employer hires him over the local options and sticks him on a 457. In fact it’s far more complex.

In the scenario above, the employer would be highly unlikely to be able to sponsor Johnny’s 457s visa (few companies are approved to do so). And even if they could, there is no guarantee than Johnny would be offered a visa. In fact, he almost certainly wouldn’t.

So how does all this 457 stuff work?

The companies that tend to be approved for 457s are outsourcing firms. Not though companies like IBM & Fujitsu. Rather outsourcers like Wipro, TATA, HCL– outsourcers with their roots overseas. These companies are coming in a competing with IBM and Fujitsu and the like. And when they win the pieces of business they largely use overseas resources. Hence they are very cheap and win a lot of business.

Now offshoring isn’t new, nor does it explain where 457s fit in. The connect is the business model these companies like TATA, HCL and Wipro now don’t run a purely offshore model with the entire team sitting offshore. Instead they bring a small though significant percentage of their team to Australia (on 457s). This gives their people a good insight into the culture of business they are working with, enables them to put some faces to names of the local stakeholders, and also provides a handy channel of communication should problems arise. Combined it makes the offshoring/outsourcing model run far more efficiently.

And that’s the thing about the new model off offshoring/outsourcing. It gives far better outcomes than going down this path has yielded previously. The technology has also gotten better. It’s no longer a massive headache.

The cost savings are massive. A developer of around 5 years experience costs around $90000 per annum in wages in Australia (give or take). In India – less than $10000 per annum. When companies are looking at a 10-15 person project team that becomes a massive gap. It makes it incredibly easy for the offshore based outsourcer to outcompete local options.

The 457s are a key piece of the puzzle though. By bringing some team members to Australia, it makes the projects run far more smoothly and yields superior outcomes to where the team is100% overseas. Yes it is more expensive for them than 100% offshore, but they have a lot of wiggle room on dollars.

So, yes, the 457s are denting the Aussie job market, albeit you are unlikely to be in direct competition with the visa holder. These offshore outsourcers are beating the local outsourcers to projects, and that in turn means less jobs for Aussies. That role that would have been with IBM is now with TCS, and they aren’t hiring someone locally.

So would a crackdown on 457s help the local IT job market? In short, yes, provided the crackdown targets the right businesses.

I do though think local IT people need to be aware of this phenomenon, and lift their game &output accordingly. IT departments don’t enjoy the best of reputations in Australian business, and at a time when the local MD is being pitched far cheaper IT options, you need to make sure your IT department is delivering.

(note – even though I have used developers as my example above, the same is equally true of infrastructure engineers)

Not the right time to be changing careers…

If you’re contemplating trading your career in, our strong recommendation is don’t. Unfortunately the softening job market now means there is something of an oversupply of available qualified candidates in most sectors. Why would a company take a punt on the person with no experience in Project Management when there is a bunch of experienced Project Mangers available? It's not the time to push into a new sphere.

 Over the last couple of downturns people have considered it quite a good time to re-skill. The logic being: why fight the market? Now is a good time to be out of the market while it is a little flat, and I’ll make sure I’m well positioned when the market does improve. Previously I’d regarded this as a good idea, but this time I think we’re facing not only a downturn but a major change in the market. I actually can’t point to a single sector of the market I think is a certainty to fire when the market does improve.  As such spending time and effort trying to re-skill into a new sector doesn’t make much sense when you can’t be sure the new sector won’t be a healthy one.

Now is the time to batten down the hatches, stick within your current domain and fight for roles in the market, even if it is a bit tough. The grass isn’t always greener.

LinkedIn: the downsides

LinkedIn has gotten a lot of positive press. It is oft cited as the death of agency recruiters. "Why go to an agency when we now have access to all these great people?" I can't help but have a chuckle because the reality is sourcing people via LinkedIn is a major headache

LinkedIn is quite seductive. You plug in a few search terms and come up with all these great profiles. It seems very powerful, but that’s deceptive. We’ve used it every day for the last few years, so we know its foibles. It’s no magic bullet in terms of recruitment

The problem being the people behind these profiles are rarely looking for a new role and thus aren't open to a move, and even if they are looking they often have very different expectations around locations, rates, who they want to work for, the nature of projects they will tackle, etc . Chances are that won’t fit your role. And many candidates don't live up to their profile.

Finding a good profile on LinkedIn means nothing until the person behind it is engaged and interested. Even contacting the profile owner is non-trivial. Lots of people connect their LinkedIn account to a rarely checked Hotmail address. We often have people coming back to us from our initial Inmail (LinkedIn’s means of reaching out) months after a role has closed because the inmail (which has a cost attached to it) has sat there gathering dust for months.

People you manage to initially contact via LinkedIn, can also exhibit what we call “Papuan Fever”, unrealistic expectations as they have been “headhunted".  Candidates often regard being approached via Linkedin as headhunting and thus (for some odd reason) the candidate can put unrealistic expectations in place. Being approached via LinkedIn is not a licence for a 7 figure salary or company lear jet.

Between the dead Inmails, candidates not being interested in your role and those suffering Papuan fever, souring via LinkedIn is very time consuming. Good luck building all your candidate sourcing around it. It’s part of our sourcing arsenal, but thankfully not the only channel

A lot of companies are thinking of dumping agency recruiters and trying to go DIY using LinkedIn. My feeling is that won't last long

LinkedIn has also diluted the market. 5 years ago everyone looking for a new job poured their time into the job boards, now they might spend that hour a week tweaking their LinkedIn profile. You no longer find everyone in the same place, so that adds complexity to the search.

It’s not like 100% of candidates can be found on LinkedIn either. Much like some people are strongly anti-Facebook, many are anti-LinkedIn. Or they set up an account and don't keep it current. We've also heard of people on LinkedIn getting fed up with being approached when they aren't looking, and detuning or removing their profile.

Linkedin is powerful but is not a consistently good way to source people.

Why we don't look outside the square

Recruiters are often accused of being too narrow minded in their candidate search, not "thinking outside the square". I certainly do agree that we tend not to deal in left field candidates, but there's a number of reasons for this:

(1) When a client is paying for you to find x, y and z, you don't then go and send them a, b and c. Imagine if you paid the premium of going to a restaurant, ordered the fish and the chef brought out some chicken. You'd be rather annoyed, in spite of the fact both are white meat, both are healthy and both are tasty. Same goes for recruitment - if they want a great C++ developer, don't send them a Java Developer and talk about both languages being similar unless you want to piss them off. Just send them good C++ developers.

(2) Candidates generally over estimate how (a) how good they are, and (b) how quickly they can adapt. It's probably worth taking a punt on your top 3 or 4% of people cross skilling into a new domain, but are you actually one of those 1 in 25 or 30 people who will make the leap quickly and successfully?

(3) Left field is a euphemism for "don't have the required skills and experience". And while people can indeed learn and grow, chances are they have a bunch of people internally who want the role yet don't have the background to fill that seat. Why would you go external to find someone who doesn't fit your brief?