Anyway, if anything, I’d say that the activities of some recruitment agencies *has* got considerably worse over the past decade. There are a lot more cowboys out there now who rely on nothing more than a keyword search and a copy of Outlook to facilitate the ‘service’ that they provide. As long as one in ten thousand of the e-mail recipients they send unsolicited job descriptions to is vaguely relevant, and so long as one in a hundred of them is up to the job, and so long as one in ten of those is what the end user is actually looking for in terms of skills and budgetary fit, BCC is their friend and cowboy recruiters are happy to spam away. It’s getting even worse now, with some of the worst offenders switching to SMS spam, knowing full-well that most developers are now smart enough to set their spam filter to block blanket e-mail messages to which they are a BCC recipient.

The sad thing is, it’s us – you and me, developers and hiring managers – that are most responsible for having allowed this state of affairs to develop. Companies are so bad at technical recruitment it’s laughable. The job adverts they put out (whenever they can be bothered to actually advertise themselves) frequently reveal that most managers mistakenly believe themselves to be solely in the business of selection, and not also in the business of attracting the right candidates by having something worthwhile to offer in return for what they seek. I regularly attract interest from prospective clients/employers who’ve heard I’m a good software developer, who want to “meet for coffee” in a public place that affords no privacy to the process. When I try to pre-qualify such approaches, to decide on whether I can help or not, I regularly find that, despite having seen my CV, the prospective client/employer can’t even provide a job spec for the role they claim they want to interview me for. Do you think they’d be interested in me if I didn’t have a CV?, or if my suggestion for a meeting venue to discuss our prospective mutually-beneficial business arrangement was during my hairdressers appointment or during a noisy film at a cinema? (both of which activities I find personally relaxing, but am intelligent enough to realise are activities it’s best to keep separate from serious work!). I don’t think that they would be very interested either, so why they think that I’ll be prepared to bellow my private career history and salary expectations, and strain to hear their confidential business needs as they shout above the hubbub in a noisy Starbucks I’ll never know.

On the developer/potential hire side of the recruitment table, there’s also plenty of blame to go around. As technical professionals, most of us really don’t know how to market ourselves effectively. Most developers don’t maintain a technical blog (which I personally find a rather more effective communication channel to prospective clients/employers than LinkedIn, which is basically the world’s biggest chain letter and of interest only to recruiters and salespeople). I can’t imagine why people maintain a LinkedIn profile merely to facilitate contacts with *people that they already know*. Personally speaking, that’s what my mobile phone is for. Maintaining a LinkedIn profile has only one direct effect, so far as I’ve been able to tell: it increases the amount of spam you get from recruiters exponentially. Also, you will find that every single salesperson for every organisation you ever provide technical expertise to suddenly wants to be your LinkedIn BFF: it’s not you they’re interested in, of course, but your contacts, which is both insulting to your intelligence and yet another activity that we do that encourages and facilitates spam.

So, bottom line, the only ‘cure’ to cowboy recruiters is to become better hiring managers and candidates ourselves. If you’re in the latter category, get out there and make sure you have a demonstration of your abilities available online; you’ll find that the work then comes to you instead of you having to actively seek it out. As hiring managers, stop letting intermediaries such as HR departments, non-technical staff and cowboy agencies ruin your chance of securing the services of the most marketable and effective developers. Treat the process in just the same way as if you were looking for a job yourself: market the opportunity, describe its benefits, and provide something that the best people can be attracted to. If instead you just sit back and expect technical talent to line up for you as if you were some managerial version of Simon Cowell, don’t be surprised when the best people just aren’t that into you.

” We have an error: The context is already trackinga different entity with the same ressource Uri.”

Ihave only one Projekt on the machin. exact this Day 14… what can i do?

Please anser her or to rainer@borchmann.de

Thanks

Rainer

The water quality is terrific. I love this water conditioner. If this is the extent of problems after 27 years, I think they’ll have a customer when I need to replace this one.

~Mike