[LRUG] [JOBS] Ruby on Rails Developer - 6month contract - STARTING ASAP

Sam Livingston-Gray geeksam at gmail.com
Mon Mar 12 10:28:33 PDT 2012


It's very easy to read Paul's first sentence as implying that
recruiters have no actual value, but on second glance, he makes an
excellent point.

At pdxruby.org, our meeting space is provided by Robert Half.  They
sometimes show up at the meetings to announce Ruby jobs when they have
them, but have specifically made a point of *not* posting jobs to the
mailing list -- precisely because they don't feel that approach adds
any value to their clients.

One could model a recruiter's added value as a power-law relationship,
where the variables are "number of contacts" and "depth of
relationship with each contact".  Some recruiters use a
wide-but-shallow approach (spam ALL the lists!); others try to build
stronger connections with fewer candidates.  (Personally, I'm much
more likely to consider jobs coming from the latter.)

Those using the shotgun strategy have the most to lose from
disintermediation.  Fortunately (for us!) that disintermediation is
easier and easier to do -- I've had a better-than-50% success rate in
finding the hiring company within three minutes just by searching on
key phrases from the posting.  (I think Amazon used to call these
"statistically improbable phrases" and would show you SIPs from books
you were looking at.)  The only real counter to this strategy is to
make the job posting so hopelessly vague that no-one will apply (and,
ironically, this would require more effort by the recruiter).

-Sam


On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 8:19 AM, Paul Doerwald <paul at liquidmedia.ca> wrote:
> Maybe that says something about your actual value. Perhaps there is no value to posting/reposting a job
> advertisement in a mailing list. Perhaps your real value is in directly pursuing potential candidates.
>
> On Monday, 12 March, 2012 at 12:15 PM, Anna Burchfiel wrote:
> > Exactly. As a recruitment consultant, I won’t post the company I’m working with unless I am working
> > exclusively on a role, because if someone applies directly to them I get nothing for passing on the
> > information about it and having them get the job. Perhaps we could come to some sort of gentlemen’s
> > agreement of giving the company name in the first instance someone contacts you, since you would
> > then already have their details to confirm your interaction with them?



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