8 ms·

Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist

121 points by leeny 12y ago

desireco42 12y ago
I used to have an agent. We tried really hard but companies pretty much refused to work with us or worked very reluctantly. I thought the deal was really good, I do my awesome work and my agent gets me in front of best places I could do that work, but unfortunately we couldn't make it work. When I say hard, mostly we tried for few months and it didn't work. P.S. To clarify, I would happily pay a cut from my rate to my agent, that was the deal. I wouldn't mind upfronting as well, but we both knew each other well.
- mallyvai 12y ago
  This things take time :-) If either of you are really phenomenal and well-known then it should be possible - good people have a lot of leverage. It's not unusual for certain directors, C-level people, etc, to bring in third parties to negotiate on their behalf or work with them during the process, for example. What's your background? are you still looking?
  - desireco42 12y ago
    That was my thinking and certainly would help to have someone negotiate and present you properly. I am not looking but if you ping me, we can be in touch. My background is rails/javascript, I am lead at parkwhiz at the moment. I always felt that relationship between recruiters and us was not right, both sides are not motivated to build relationships. I did build some and got some really nice people to help me when I need it. But this is more exception then the rule.
    - mallyvai 12y ago
      I started http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io to help with this :-) http://linkedin.com/in/mallyvai http://linkedin.com/in/mallyvai - add me! -Vaibhav
- leeny 12y ago
  What did these refusals look like? How were you presenting to these companies? I'm surprised; if I approached companies and offered them talent without asking for money, they'd jump all over it. Or was the issue that this person was trying to negotiate on your behalf as well?
mallyvai 12y ago
Aline, this is a fantastic article. I agree with many of the points in principle, but I don't agree with the outcome. I believe a model where candidates pay 3rd parties for precise jobhunting help is economically rational, and can work - it's effectively what we're doing at http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io. Here's where you and I diverge: 1) Yes, engineers and other in-demand workers have ready access to jobs. I remember when I was looking for a good engineering job out of Amazon, I was basically spammed nonstop by virtually every party on the planet. 2) But the opportunity cost for poor job selection is enormously high. The difference between choosing between a good startup on good terms, and a less-good startup on less-good terms, can literally mean the difference between retiring 20 years early having your work used by millions of people, and just puddling around for a few years with, say, the occasional PyCon lightning talk for visibility. At http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io , we are doing precisely this - we are getting paid by engineers, designers and PMs for value added - in this case, during the negotiation process. Our team of Advisors guides candidates on the "last-mile" of offer selection and negotiation in exchange for a cut of the increase. It makes too much sense - there's massive information asymmetry during the process, companies are full of shit, and many people outside of "the club" - however you choose to define it - just don't know what they're worth, or how to get it. While we can't justify charging the $10k-$30k that recruiters make, the incentives are still incredibly strong for us to do what we do. And of course there's the ethical and human component, which is very strong - I tried more traditional recruiting for a while and just raw selling of companies is so tiring. I like helping people first - all of the Advisors do.
- leeny 12y ago
  I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing. OfferLetter.io works precisely because you're focused on the negotiation part. There, your incentives are aligned (it's always in your interest and the candidate's to get them more money). And there, it makes sense to pay you because you're only paying if you do end up with a higher cash salary. If you were to branch out into helping people find jobs, I don't think it would work. All of a sudden, you'd always be incentivized to find people cash-rich, equity-poor positions, largely limiting the pool. Money is important, but at the end of the day, it's just one of many factors. It just happens to be the most easily quantifiable one. Moreover, if we ignore this disincentive for a moment, if you were to branch out into end-to-end job search (rather than just the negotiation part), you'd quickly become frustrated because for a lot more effort, i.e. everything before the negotiation, you'd be getting much less money than you would if you just struck a deal with the company side o the market instead.
vic_nyc 12y ago
I wish agents existed, at least for the contract market. Once a contract is finished, it could take a while until one finds the next gig, so having an agent would definitely help. A dream of mine was (before getting married and 'settling down') to be able to work contracts 6-9 months of the year, and to travel the rest. Temporary contract work would be ideal for that scenario. I understand why the recruiting market is skewed in favor of recruiters and companies, yet I wish there was a bit more quality for engineers. In my 10+ years in IT, I have only met one reliable recruiter - someone I could call upon when I had a need, and who knew my background and skills. 99% would forget about me as soon as that particular position was filled.
- mallyvai 12y ago
  Freelance and contract engineers do have options - Aline mentioned http://www.10xmanagement.com/ http://www.10xmanagement.com/ in her post. There's also http://toptal.com http://toptal.com.
  - mrfusion 12y ago
    Can anyone vouch for those services? Are they worth it?
- jobu 12y ago
  The only good experiences I've had with recruiters has been with those employed directly by the company they're hiring for. There probably are good independent recruiters out there, but they're overwhelmed by the shysters.
- fillskills 12y ago
  It is very hard to find a good recruiter who is actually concerned about their engineers. Haven't found one yet
- usernamepc 12y ago
  The best recruiters at staffing agencies function like talent agents and prefer to place contractors on gig after gig because they know what they are looking for and won't waste their time with irrelevant opportunities. The spammers you see are usually newbie recruiters from bad agencies. Our website http://www.oncontracting.com http://www.oncontracting.com aims to help contractors discover the best staffing agencies and recruiters based on the clients they have. The idea is if you are interested in contract jobs at Google or eBay, you should be able to discover and connect with only recruiters that can get you gigs there.
jamesdutc 12y ago
If the distinction is who writes their cheques, aren't they just called marketing people, and they work on the scale of selling consulting teams?
rquantz 12y ago
Another difference between actors and the engineers the OP is talking about is that engineers are salaried employees who do a job search every few years at the most, and actors are self employed freelancers whose jobs last at most a few months. In that sense it almost doesn't make sense to talk about the unemployment rate for actors. An area where it may make more sense for engineers to have agents is in the freelance space. Any dev shop that has a sales team is doing essentially the same thing. I would consider paying a finder's fee to an agent-type entity who could find me decent projects and keep my pipeline full so I didn't have to worry about it.
- chatmasta 12y ago
  That's a difference now, but should it be this way? Realistically, any engineering project you work on should only be lasting a few months. If you built it correctly, you should finish it and hand it off to contractors for maintenance. Top-level engineers should be spending their time implementing hard new projects, not maintaining old ones. Is there any inherent reason why companies could not hire top engineers on a contractual basis for 6-12 months at a time? Given how specialized many projects are, it seems it would be more efficient to do this than hiring a new specialist full-time for each new project. The only reason I see that companies do not do this now is because it simply isn't the norm. Also, as an engineer, I would prefer to work on a new project every couple of months.
  - nickff 12y ago
    Many engineering projects (especially outside of software) can last many years, making engineer (knowledge and understanding) retention quite valuable, and the engineers involved wish to see it through. In addition, we should keep the nature of the firm in mind, and remember that keeping a team together has the potential to greatly reduce transaction and switching costs.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
    - chatmasta 12y ago
      I'm familiar with that essay (did you also just watch Aaron Levie's stanford talk?), and that's a good point. How greatly are transaction/switching costs affected when segmenting projects in 6-12 month intervals? I would guess, that when you're throwing senior engineers at projects, the switching costs are non-trivial, but low. It's probably an acceptable tradeoff to pay when developing specialized projects you don't expect to carry over to future ones. There's also the argument of developing a labor force to compete with other enterprises. However, if the best engineers are in sufficiently high demand, it may be more economically rational for them to move between projects every 6-12 months, gradually increasing their pay-rate and improving their portfolio after completing each one. If this is the case, then companies would be forced to hire top engineers on a contractual basis (or pay them a significant markup annually), purely to compete in the labor market for top talent.
ghaff 12y ago
Interesting read although it seems overly focused on the differences between Hollywood and certain types of engineering in the average difficulty of finding a job. I suspect it's more about the huge differences in how the market works for typical actors and typical engineers as opposed to their relative employment rates. And some of it probably boils down to "it's just the way things are done."
chatmasta 12y ago
This business will only grow in the next couple of years. Programming, as a skill, has little-to-no barrier to entry. More and more classes are teaching people how to program. On one hand, it's great so many people are learning to code. I'm a firm believer in the cause. However, it will also inevitably flood the engineering labor market with a lot of noise. Companies don't want to spend time sifting through piles of resumes from people who started programming in rails six months ago. "Talent agencies" offer a nice value prop to companies: filter out the noise. I suspect we will start to see more of these companies popping up in the next few years, and the business model will gain traction as more of the labor force moves into engineering.
pashabitz 12y ago
Another niche that can theoretically exist is the "superstar" engineers. If the best engineers got paid 10x more than the worst, the best agents could obtain salary improvements in the 100k's for their clients, for which a commission would make sense. This will probably not exist, for reasons "we will leave for a future blog post" (tm).
- leeny 12y ago
  Heh, I wish 10X engineers got paid 10X more.
fillskills 12y ago
Would a Talent Agent work for remote workers? Lots of engineers I know would love to work remotely, but when they tried, they couldnt find high paying consistent jobs without putting in considerable effort marketing and building relationships. Could be worth looking into.
- leeny 12y ago
  This is an interesting idea. I expect there may be some opportunity here, at least while working remotely isn't ubiquitous.
  - fillskills 12y ago
    Only a few people can make remote work for them. Its hard, you have be very focused and well planned. And you have to find other social opportunities. I dont see a lot of companies, specially startups allowing it.
    - dselmanovic 12y ago
      I would suggest joining Toptal. It's not that hard and you do have a flexibility regarding working hours and availability. You can read about Toptal experience at http://cakecoded.com/article/toptal-review http://cakecoded.com/article/toptal-review or https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141023135603-26354472-why-have-i-joined-toptal https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141023135603-2... I wrote the last one, and I'll be happy to connect you to my co-workers that can answer any other question.
- mallyvai 12y ago
  Check out TopTal.com. They're a marketplace, not an agency, but achieve similar outcomes.
programminggeek 12y ago
Agents can and should exist if only for bargaining on salary and benefits. The average person in just about any field could benefit from an agent to negotiate on their behalf. Most people simply don't negotiate any part of their job beyond initial salary. Sometimes people might negotiate benefits, but that is somewhat rare. More importantly, unlike traditional contracts with expiration dates, the average person doesn't renegotiate their deal very often or at all. They take what they get from their boss, hoping to get at least a cost of living increase, which is more and more rare. All of this means that each year you are effectively earning less if you don't renegotiate your deal. What was maybe a good deal 5 years ago is now worth 11% less than it was when you started. So, unless you are renegotiating your deal, you are agreeing to keep a deal that is less valuable each year. Knowing that, having an agent or any mechanism to force negotiating on an ongoing basis would be a huge step in the right direction for most people.
- ryandrake 12y ago
  It would be awesome to have a professional negotiator bargain for salary/benefits. But, I'd be worried that most, if not all, employers would simply refuse to speak with them. How would that even work? Company: Here's your annual cost-of-living increase. Me: Ugh, I think you should talk to my AGENT! Company: Our policy is to only discuss compensation with the employee. Me: ???
  - mallyvai 12y ago
    http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io takes a similar but distinct tack - we generally find that advice tends to work better. A little bit of coaching and mentorship can go a long way here. Drop me a line if you want to chat! :-) mallyvai at offerletter.io
vonmoltke 12y ago
> There are people who still have trouble finding work in the status quo. Examples might be engineers who: > don’t look good on paper but are actually very good I think (hope?) I fall into this category. She talks about five on-site interviews being the usual limit for a single job search. After twelve years I have only ever had five, and it isn't for lack of trying. Actually I think my interview performance history is pretty good. I have had about twelve phone/live screens, of which I passed nine, resulting in five on-site interviews.[1] Those on-sites yielded three offers, of which I accepted two. The problem is, the response rate to my resume submissions is horrid. Even when I have an "in" at the company. I heard too many times while switching between programs at my first employer something to the effect of, "We would have never hired you by looking at your resume, but I'm glad we did." I have other, similar statements concerning underestimation of what I am capable of. Maybe what I need is more of a marketing specialist than an agent, but I have always imagined that to be the primary job of an agent. I really need someone to help me figure out how to present myself better. I would actually pay for that service; I guess, as she says in the post, there are not enough of me to support a business. Is that something that could be combined with a conventional recruiting operation, though? [1] Two on-sites I declined, one on-site didn't happen because the company decided not to hire for the position[2], and the third on-site never materialized because the company just stopped talking to me. [2] Or so they said. Maybe they switched me from "pass" to "fail" after telling me I passed.
- spiritplumber 12y ago
  It has happened to me that I was turned down for an engineering position whose main focus was working with a tool that I had developed the year before, because the other guy had a MSc and I didn't. HR people are weird.
  - pja 12y ago
    Maybe you should have offered them a support contract instead :) The credentialism in this industry is often infuriating though, I agree.
  - vonmoltke 12y ago
JSeymourATL 12y ago
> Engineers were super excited about this. Until I mentioned the part where they’d have to pay me, that is. It's a curious thing in an age where people prefer to cut out the middleman-- e.g. stock brokers & travel agents. Some people still want (need) their own Jerry Maguire to find a job.
- AceJohnny2 12y ago
  Depends on what the middleman provides. If it's domain expertise that'll take time and money to gain, they're useful. If it's just connections, well, the Internet is making that obsolete. And if it's just storage, Amazon's breathing down your neck. ;)
bentigg 12y ago
Headhunters use this same sort of model. For example, take a look at the finance industry. They interview talented, young people with 2 to 5 years of experience for specialized positions (private equity, investment banking, corporate finance), then try to match up that person with one of the positions in their database. The potential new hire isn't charged a dime. The headhunter charges the hiring firm a percent of the new hire's starting salary (30% to 50%). The assumption behind this model is that: 1) Companies are willing to pay for the best talent 2) No in-house capability to recruit or choose to spend their time on the core function of their business rather than screen individuals 3) (Salary + placement fee) > cost to recruit that person themselves
barrkel 12y ago
I've never been through a job application / interview process that didn't result in an offer. 4 interviews, 4 job offers, 3 taken, in about 11 years in this industry. That probably means I haven't been aiming high enough. But I'm also very selective about who I'll consider interviewing with, yet I'm not particularly active in searching. Unless a company comes to me, and I like the company, I'm unlikely to interview. This pretty much guarantees that I'll never work for a big company unless via acquisition. I think there's definitely a problem in "matchmaking". I'd like to be approached by more interesting companies doing interesting things, but I'm not interested enough to spend the time to actively seek them out. Most approaches are by startup of the week types. And I was never contacted in the first 5 years I lived in London, while I was working remotely for a California-based company (Borland then Embarcadero) - it wasn't until I switched to a local job that I turned up on their radar.
- ryandrake 12y ago
  Your experience is probably well outside of the norm. I remember both tech downturns, and I would have given and arm and a leg for some kind of "agent" during those periods.
pnathan 12y ago
Remark: If I could pair with a "engagement specialist" who would find me a reliable stream of contract work at the usual rates for contract work (i.e., adequate to handle benefits) & skim off the percentage, I'd be extremely open to that idea. Marketplaces like, e.g., odesk, are simply worthless to me.
lsiebert 12y ago
Frankly, I'm surprised that instead of recruiters or agents, there aren't firms dedicated to employee assessment. The value add to employers would be a standard assessment tool, reduced screening time for employees that can be eliminated quickly based on lack of skill, and using an assessment that is potentially better correlated with good employees than things like degree and school, or previous employer (decreasing both false positives from people who can't hack it despite their credentials, and decreasing false negatives by letting people with the skills demonstrate them). For prospective employees, you get a single assessment that may open up a lot of jobs. Since the company doing the assessment isn't the one hiring you, they can tell you what you need to work on, even provide training opportunities. Imagine someone telling you, "You aren't quite what we need, take these onlike courses and pass them and we will almost definitely be able to find someone to hire you." And by acting as an intermediary between prospective employees and employers, the time cost of submitting resumes to employers that aren't well matched is decreased. Further you might be partially eligible for a job, but lack specific skills, and they can ask if you are willing to take a temporary pay cut in return for on the job training as you work. One of the things personally holding me back, is that you really need to be in school to get an internship. I already have a degree, just not in CS, and I'd love to be able to learn on the job at the intern level, instead of feeling stuck unless I go back for a master's degree. I think there is a real opportunity, not just for such a company, but for a company that creates a standard or standards for assessment and licenses it/them to different companies. Further, such assessments would be useful to assess not just individuals, but educational programs. Compare performance for people who graduate from different programs, including online training.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  > I'm surprised that instead of recruiters or agents, there aren't firms dedicated to employee assessment. It's a very hard problem that hasn't been solved yet. What are you going to test? Logical problems? Programming puzzles? Knowledge of algorithms? Knowledge of technical details? GPA? None of them strictly correlate with how productive / useful a programmer is.
  - lsiebert 12y ago
_random_ 12y ago
It sort of happens for freelancers in UK. Recruiter gets the cut of what employer is paying, frequent job changes are very likely (2 years in a "worst" case) so good candidates are worth taken care of.
altay 12y ago
(Cofounder of 10x Management here.) Thanks for the shout-out, Aline! You point out the main difference in our models, which is exactly what makes our talent agency work: the key is the focus on contract/freelance placement. Recruiters who do full-time placement optimize for the short-term -- a single transaction -- which leads to all sort of misaligned incentives and shady practices. With 10x, we work with the same talent over the course of years, so we optimize for the long term and help the people on our roster for (ideally) the duration of their careers. And the talent is more than happy to pay for our services. >>> "Agents make sense when it’s hard to find a job or when the opportunity cost of looking for work is high enough to justify paying someone else.... For engineers, because the shortage is in labor and not jobs, paying out a portion of your salary for a task you can easily do yourself doesn’t make much sense." This reminds me of the "adverse selection" argument we hear a lot, i.e. the best programmers have no trouble finding work, so wouldn't an agency only attract people who aren't good enough to source their own opportunities? The simple answer to this: Tom Cruise has no problem finding work, but he still has an agent. He wants to spend his time acting, not negotiating, invoicing, collecting, etc. You also mention that the talent agency model works for niche skills, but then you say there isn't a big enough market for these skills. I'd disagree with the second half of that. Technology is getting increasingly specialized. Software, hardware, electrical, all have sub-fields and sub-sub-fields and sub-sub-sub-fields. The same general model applies to most of these sub-sub-sub-fields, and there are absolutely enough of them to justify a market. In fact, the niche skills lend themselves especially well to the talent agency model, since companies don't necessarily need to employ those people full time. Data science is a good example of this... a lot of companies could benefit from the insights of a data scientist, but most of them don't need a salaried data scientist on staff. Through 10x, companies large and small have a la carte access to pre-vetted specialists (and generalists), on demand.
simonebrunozzi 12y ago
I think that assessing technical talent is fundamentally different than other types of talent, because technical stuff can be measured more effectively, and talent for writing code or designing and then implementing an architecture is also easier to measure than, say, social skills. However, there are other aspects that we should not underestimate: 1) How well this person works in a team? 2) What's his/her goal in life? Is he "done", and looking to "park" in a job until retirement? Or still very willing to learn a lot? 3) How professional is his work? I mean: does he write documentation, does he care about shipping software that is elegant and functional, etc. Etc. There are two companies that I admire for what they're doing in this field, at two different stages: Gild.com - a very unique approach to measuring technical talent, by using a proprietary algorithm that takes your github, stack overflow, etc, mixes all up, adds some juice, and voilà: you have a score. A successful, estabilished company. CloudAcademy.com - younger and smaller, they mix tech snippets, videos, and an amazing quiz system to assess your skills (currently focusing only on Cloud Computing stuff, e.g. AWS, Azure, Google Compute Platform, Rackspace, VMware vCloud Air). They also added practical labs. What's interesting is that after 20-30 minutes of assessing your skills, they get a very clear picture of what you know and what you don't, which I believe is very hard. (Disclaimer: I am an advisor and investor in the latter.)

121 points by leeny 12y ago

I used to have an agent. We tried really hard but companies pretty much refused to work with us or worked very reluctantly. I thought the deal was really good, I do my awesome work and my agent gets me in front of best places I could do that work, but unfortunately we couldn't make it work. When I say hard, mostly we tried for few months and it didn't work. P.S. To clarify, I would happily pay a cut from my rate to my agent, that was the deal. I wouldn't mind upfronting as well, but we both knew each other well.

mallyvai 12y ago
This things take time :-) If either of you are really phenomenal and well-known then it should be possible - good people have a lot of leverage. It's not unusual for certain directors, C-level people, etc, to bring in third parties to negotiate on their behalf or work with them during the process, for example. What's your background? are you still looking?
- desireco42 12y ago
  That was my thinking and certainly would help to have someone negotiate and present you properly. I am not looking but if you ping me, we can be in touch. My background is rails/javascript, I am lead at parkwhiz at the moment. I always felt that relationship between recruiters and us was not right, both sides are not motivated to build relationships. I did build some and got some really nice people to help me when I need it. But this is more exception then the rule.
  - mallyvai 12y ago
    I started http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io to help with this :-) http://linkedin.com/in/mallyvai http://linkedin.com/in/mallyvai - add me! -Vaibhav
leeny 12y ago
What did these refusals look like? How were you presenting to these companies? I'm surprised; if I approached companies and offered them talent without asking for money, they'd jump all over it. Or was the issue that this person was trying to negotiate on your behalf as well?

mallyvai 12y ago

Aline, this is a fantastic article. I agree with many of the points in principle, but I don't agree with the outcome. I believe a model where candidates pay 3rd parties for precise jobhunting help is economically rational, and can work - it's effectively what we're doing at http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io. Here's where you and I diverge: 1) Yes, engineers and other in-demand workers have ready access to jobs. I remember when I was looking for a good engineering job out of Amazon, I was basically spammed nonstop by virtually every party on the planet. 2) But the opportunity cost for poor job selection is enormously high. The difference between choosing between a good startup on good terms, and a less-good startup on less-good terms, can literally mean the difference between retiring 20 years early having your work used by millions of people, and just puddling around for a few years with, say, the occasional PyCon lightning talk for visibility. At http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io , we are doing precisely this - we are getting paid by engineers, designers and PMs for value added - in this case, during the negotiation process. Our team of Advisors guides candidates on the "last-mile" of offer selection and negotiation in exchange for a cut of the increase. It makes too much sense - there's massive information asymmetry during the process, companies are full of shit, and many people outside of "the club" - however you choose to define it - just don't know what they're worth, or how to get it. While we can't justify charging the $10k-$30k that recruiters make, the incentives are still incredibly strong for us to do what we do. And of course there's the ethical and human component, which is very strong - I tried more traditional recruiting for a while and just raw selling of companies is so tiring. I like helping people first - all of the Advisors do.

leeny 12y ago
I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing. OfferLetter.io works precisely because you're focused on the negotiation part. There, your incentives are aligned (it's always in your interest and the candidate's to get them more money). And there, it makes sense to pay you because you're only paying if you do end up with a higher cash salary. If you were to branch out into helping people find jobs, I don't think it would work. All of a sudden, you'd always be incentivized to find people cash-rich, equity-poor positions, largely limiting the pool. Money is important, but at the end of the day, it's just one of many factors. It just happens to be the most easily quantifiable one. Moreover, if we ignore this disincentive for a moment, if you were to branch out into end-to-end job search (rather than just the negotiation part), you'd quickly become frustrated because for a lot more effort, i.e. everything before the negotiation, you'd be getting much less money than you would if you just struck a deal with the company side o the market instead.

vic_nyc 12y ago

I wish agents existed, at least for the contract market. Once a contract is finished, it could take a while until one finds the next gig, so having an agent would definitely help. A dream of mine was (before getting married and 'settling down') to be able to work contracts 6-9 months of the year, and to travel the rest. Temporary contract work would be ideal for that scenario. I understand why the recruiting market is skewed in favor of recruiters and companies, yet I wish there was a bit more quality for engineers. In my 10+ years in IT, I have only met one reliable recruiter - someone I could call upon when I had a need, and who knew my background and skills. 99% would forget about me as soon as that particular position was filled.

mallyvai 12y ago
Freelance and contract engineers do have options - Aline mentioned http://www.10xmanagement.com/ http://www.10xmanagement.com/ in her post. There's also http://toptal.com http://toptal.com.
- mrfusion 12y ago
  Can anyone vouch for those services? Are they worth it?
jobu 12y ago
The only good experiences I've had with recruiters has been with those employed directly by the company they're hiring for. There probably are good independent recruiters out there, but they're overwhelmed by the shysters.
fillskills 12y ago
It is very hard to find a good recruiter who is actually concerned about their engineers. Haven't found one yet
usernamepc 12y ago
The best recruiters at staffing agencies function like talent agents and prefer to place contractors on gig after gig because they know what they are looking for and won't waste their time with irrelevant opportunities. The spammers you see are usually newbie recruiters from bad agencies. Our website http://www.oncontracting.com http://www.oncontracting.com aims to help contractors discover the best staffing agencies and recruiters based on the clients they have. The idea is if you are interested in contract jobs at Google or eBay, you should be able to discover and connect with only recruiters that can get you gigs there.

jamesdutc 12y ago

If the distinction is who writes their cheques, aren't they just called marketing people, and they work on the scale of selling consulting teams?

rquantz 12y ago

Another difference between actors and the engineers the OP is talking about is that engineers are salaried employees who do a job search every few years at the most, and actors are self employed freelancers whose jobs last at most a few months. In that sense it almost doesn't make sense to talk about the unemployment rate for actors. An area where it may make more sense for engineers to have agents is in the freelance space. Any dev shop that has a sales team is doing essentially the same thing. I would consider paying a finder's fee to an agent-type entity who could find me decent projects and keep my pipeline full so I didn't have to worry about it.

chatmasta 12y ago
That's a difference now, but should it be this way? Realistically, any engineering project you work on should only be lasting a few months. If you built it correctly, you should finish it and hand it off to contractors for maintenance. Top-level engineers should be spending their time implementing hard new projects, not maintaining old ones. Is there any inherent reason why companies could not hire top engineers on a contractual basis for 6-12 months at a time? Given how specialized many projects are, it seems it would be more efficient to do this than hiring a new specialist full-time for each new project. The only reason I see that companies do not do this now is because it simply isn't the norm. Also, as an engineer, I would prefer to work on a new project every couple of months.
- nickff 12y ago
  Many engineering projects (especially outside of software) can last many years, making engineer (knowledge and understanding) retention quite valuable, and the engineers involved wish to see it through. In addition, we should keep the nature of the firm in mind, and remember that keeping a team together has the potential to greatly reduce transaction and switching costs.[1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nature_of_the_Firm
  - chatmasta 12y ago
    I'm familiar with that essay (did you also just watch Aaron Levie's stanford talk?), and that's a good point. How greatly are transaction/switching costs affected when segmenting projects in 6-12 month intervals? I would guess, that when you're throwing senior engineers at projects, the switching costs are non-trivial, but low. It's probably an acceptable tradeoff to pay when developing specialized projects you don't expect to carry over to future ones. There's also the argument of developing a labor force to compete with other enterprises. However, if the best engineers are in sufficiently high demand, it may be more economically rational for them to move between projects every 6-12 months, gradually increasing their pay-rate and improving their portfolio after completing each one. If this is the case, then companies would be forced to hire top engineers on a contractual basis (or pay them a significant markup annually), purely to compete in the labor market for top talent.

ghaff 12y ago

Interesting read although it seems overly focused on the differences between Hollywood and certain types of engineering in the average difficulty of finding a job. I suspect it's more about the huge differences in how the market works for typical actors and typical engineers as opposed to their relative employment rates. And some of it probably boils down to "it's just the way things are done."

chatmasta 12y ago

This business will only grow in the next couple of years. Programming, as a skill, has little-to-no barrier to entry. More and more classes are teaching people how to program. On one hand, it's great so many people are learning to code. I'm a firm believer in the cause. However, it will also inevitably flood the engineering labor market with a lot of noise. Companies don't want to spend time sifting through piles of resumes from people who started programming in rails six months ago. "Talent agencies" offer a nice value prop to companies: filter out the noise. I suspect we will start to see more of these companies popping up in the next few years, and the business model will gain traction as more of the labor force moves into engineering.

pashabitz 12y ago

Another niche that can theoretically exist is the "superstar" engineers. If the best engineers got paid 10x more than the worst, the best agents could obtain salary improvements in the 100k's for their clients, for which a commission would make sense. This will probably not exist, for reasons "we will leave for a future blog post" (tm).

leeny 12y ago
Heh, I wish 10X engineers got paid 10X more.

fillskills 12y ago

Would a Talent Agent work for remote workers? Lots of engineers I know would love to work remotely, but when they tried, they couldnt find high paying consistent jobs without putting in considerable effort marketing and building relationships. Could be worth looking into.

leeny 12y ago
This is an interesting idea. I expect there may be some opportunity here, at least while working remotely isn't ubiquitous.
- fillskills 12y ago
  Only a few people can make remote work for them. Its hard, you have be very focused and well planned. And you have to find other social opportunities. I dont see a lot of companies, specially startups allowing it.
  - dselmanovic 12y ago
    I would suggest joining Toptal. It's not that hard and you do have a flexibility regarding working hours and availability. You can read about Toptal experience at http://cakecoded.com/article/toptal-review http://cakecoded.com/article/toptal-review or https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141023135603-26354472-why-have-i-joined-toptal https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20141023135603-2... I wrote the last one, and I'll be happy to connect you to my co-workers that can answer any other question.
mallyvai 12y ago
Check out TopTal.com. They're a marketplace, not an agency, but achieve similar outcomes.

programminggeek 12y ago

Agents can and should exist if only for bargaining on salary and benefits. The average person in just about any field could benefit from an agent to negotiate on their behalf. Most people simply don't negotiate any part of their job beyond initial salary. Sometimes people might negotiate benefits, but that is somewhat rare. More importantly, unlike traditional contracts with expiration dates, the average person doesn't renegotiate their deal very often or at all. They take what they get from their boss, hoping to get at least a cost of living increase, which is more and more rare. All of this means that each year you are effectively earning less if you don't renegotiate your deal. What was maybe a good deal 5 years ago is now worth 11% less than it was when you started. So, unless you are renegotiating your deal, you are agreeing to keep a deal that is less valuable each year. Knowing that, having an agent or any mechanism to force negotiating on an ongoing basis would be a huge step in the right direction for most people.

ryandrake 12y ago
It would be awesome to have a professional negotiator bargain for salary/benefits. But, I'd be worried that most, if not all, employers would simply refuse to speak with them. How would that even work? Company: Here's your annual cost-of-living increase. Me: Ugh, I think you should talk to my AGENT! Company: Our policy is to only discuss compensation with the employee. Me: ???
- mallyvai 12y ago
  http://offerletter.io http://offerletter.io takes a similar but distinct tack - we generally find that advice tends to work better. A little bit of coaching and mentorship can go a long way here. Drop me a line if you want to chat! :-) mallyvai at offerletter.io

vonmoltke 12y ago

> There are people who still have trouble finding work in the status quo. Examples might be engineers who: > don’t look good on paper but are actually very good I think (hope?) I fall into this category. She talks about five on-site interviews being the usual limit for a single job search. After twelve years I have only ever had five, and it isn't for lack of trying. Actually I think my interview performance history is pretty good. I have had about twelve phone/live screens, of which I passed nine, resulting in five on-site interviews.[1] Those on-sites yielded three offers, of which I accepted two. The problem is, the response rate to my resume submissions is horrid. Even when I have an "in" at the company. I heard too many times while switching between programs at my first employer something to the effect of, "We would have never hired you by looking at your resume, but I'm glad we did." I have other, similar statements concerning underestimation of what I am capable of. Maybe what I need is more of a marketing specialist than an agent, but I have always imagined that to be the primary job of an agent. I really need someone to help me figure out how to present myself better. I would actually pay for that service; I guess, as she says in the post, there are not enough of me to support a business. Is that something that could be combined with a conventional recruiting operation, though? [1] Two on-sites I declined, one on-site didn't happen because the company decided not to hire for the position[2], and the third on-site never materialized because the company just stopped talking to me. [2] Or so they said. Maybe they switched me from "pass" to "fail" after telling me I passed.

spiritplumber 12y ago
It has happened to me that I was turned down for an engineering position whose main focus was working with a tool that I had developed the year before, because the other guy had a MSc and I didn't. HR people are weird.
- pja 12y ago
  Maybe you should have offered them a support contract instead :) The credentialism in this industry is often infuriating though, I agree.
- vonmoltke 12y ago

JSeymourATL 12y ago

> Engineers were super excited about this. Until I mentioned the part where they’d have to pay me, that is. It's a curious thing in an age where people prefer to cut out the middleman-- e.g. stock brokers & travel agents. Some people still want (need) their own Jerry Maguire to find a job.

AceJohnny2 12y ago
Depends on what the middleman provides. If it's domain expertise that'll take time and money to gain, they're useful. If it's just connections, well, the Internet is making that obsolete. And if it's just storage, Amazon's breathing down your neck. ;)

bentigg 12y ago

Headhunters use this same sort of model. For example, take a look at the finance industry. They interview talented, young people with 2 to 5 years of experience for specialized positions (private equity, investment banking, corporate finance), then try to match up that person with one of the positions in their database. The potential new hire isn't charged a dime. The headhunter charges the hiring firm a percent of the new hire's starting salary (30% to 50%). The assumption behind this model is that: 1) Companies are willing to pay for the best talent 2) No in-house capability to recruit or choose to spend their time on the core function of their business rather than screen individuals 3) (Salary + placement fee) > cost to recruit that person themselves

barrkel 12y ago

I've never been through a job application / interview process that didn't result in an offer. 4 interviews, 4 job offers, 3 taken, in about 11 years in this industry. That probably means I haven't been aiming high enough. But I'm also very selective about who I'll consider interviewing with, yet I'm not particularly active in searching. Unless a company comes to me, and I like the company, I'm unlikely to interview. This pretty much guarantees that I'll never work for a big company unless via acquisition. I think there's definitely a problem in "matchmaking". I'd like to be approached by more interesting companies doing interesting things, but I'm not interested enough to spend the time to actively seek them out. Most approaches are by startup of the week types. And I was never contacted in the first 5 years I lived in London, while I was working remotely for a California-based company (Borland then Embarcadero) - it wasn't until I switched to a local job that I turned up on their radar.

ryandrake 12y ago
Your experience is probably well outside of the norm. I remember both tech downturns, and I would have given and arm and a leg for some kind of "agent" during those periods.

pnathan 12y ago

Remark: If I could pair with a "engagement specialist" who would find me a reliable stream of contract work at the usual rates for contract work (i.e., adequate to handle benefits) & skim off the percentage, I'd be extremely open to that idea. Marketplaces like, e.g., odesk, are simply worthless to me.

lsiebert 12y ago

Frankly, I'm surprised that instead of recruiters or agents, there aren't firms dedicated to employee assessment. The value add to employers would be a standard assessment tool, reduced screening time for employees that can be eliminated quickly based on lack of skill, and using an assessment that is potentially better correlated with good employees than things like degree and school, or previous employer (decreasing both false positives from people who can't hack it despite their credentials, and decreasing false negatives by letting people with the skills demonstrate them). For prospective employees, you get a single assessment that may open up a lot of jobs. Since the company doing the assessment isn't the one hiring you, they can tell you what you need to work on, even provide training opportunities. Imagine someone telling you, "You aren't quite what we need, take these onlike courses and pass them and we will almost definitely be able to find someone to hire you." And by acting as an intermediary between prospective employees and employers, the time cost of submitting resumes to employers that aren't well matched is decreased. Further you might be partially eligible for a job, but lack specific skills, and they can ask if you are willing to take a temporary pay cut in return for on the job training as you work. One of the things personally holding me back, is that you really need to be in school to get an internship. I already have a degree, just not in CS, and I'd love to be able to learn on the job at the intern level, instead of feeling stuck unless I go back for a master's degree. I think there is a real opportunity, not just for such a company, but for a company that creates a standard or standards for assessment and licenses it/them to different companies. Further, such assessments would be useful to assess not just individuals, but educational programs. Compare performance for people who graduate from different programs, including online training.

imaginenore 12y ago
> I'm surprised that instead of recruiters or agents, there aren't firms dedicated to employee assessment. It's a very hard problem that hasn't been solved yet. What are you going to test? Logical problems? Programming puzzles? Knowledge of algorithms? Knowledge of technical details? GPA? None of them strictly correlate with how productive / useful a programmer is.
- lsiebert 12y ago

_random_ 12y ago

It sort of happens for freelancers in UK. Recruiter gets the cut of what employer is paying, frequent job changes are very likely (2 years in a "worst" case) so good candidates are worth taken care of.

altay 12y ago

(Cofounder of 10x Management here.) Thanks for the shout-out, Aline! You point out the main difference in our models, which is exactly what makes our talent agency work: the key is the focus on contract/freelance placement. Recruiters who do full-time placement optimize for the short-term -- a single transaction -- which leads to all sort of misaligned incentives and shady practices. With 10x, we work with the same talent over the course of years, so we optimize for the long term and help the people on our roster for (ideally) the duration of their careers. And the talent is more than happy to pay for our services. >>> "Agents make sense when it’s hard to find a job or when the opportunity cost of looking for work is high enough to justify paying someone else.... For engineers, because the shortage is in labor and not jobs, paying out a portion of your salary for a task you can easily do yourself doesn’t make much sense." This reminds me of the "adverse selection" argument we hear a lot, i.e. the best programmers have no trouble finding work, so wouldn't an agency only attract people who aren't good enough to source their own opportunities? The simple answer to this: Tom Cruise has no problem finding work, but he still has an agent. He wants to spend his time acting, not negotiating, invoicing, collecting, etc. You also mention that the talent agency model works for niche skills, but then you say there isn't a big enough market for these skills. I'd disagree with the second half of that. Technology is getting increasingly specialized. Software, hardware, electrical, all have sub-fields and sub-sub-fields and sub-sub-sub-fields. The same general model applies to most of these sub-sub-sub-fields, and there are absolutely enough of them to justify a market. In fact, the niche skills lend themselves especially well to the talent agency model, since companies don't necessarily need to employ those people full time. Data science is a good example of this... a lot of companies could benefit from the insights of a data scientist, but most of them don't need a salaried data scientist on staff. Through 10x, companies large and small have a la carte access to pre-vetted specialists (and generalists), on demand.

simonebrunozzi 12y ago

I think that assessing technical talent is fundamentally different than other types of talent, because technical stuff can be measured more effectively, and talent for writing code or designing and then implementing an architecture is also easier to measure than, say, social skills. However, there are other aspects that we should not underestimate: 1) How well this person works in a team? 2) What's his/her goal in life? Is he "done", and looking to "park" in a job until retirement? Or still very willing to learn a lot? 3) How professional is his work? I mean: does he write documentation, does he care about shipping software that is elegant and functional, etc. Etc. There are two companies that I admire for what they're doing in this field, at two different stages: Gild.com - a very unique approach to measuring technical talent, by using a proprietary algorithm that takes your github, stack overflow, etc, mixes all up, adds some juice, and voilà: you have a score. A successful, estabilished company. CloudAcademy.com - younger and smaller, they mix tech snippets, videos, and an amazing quiz system to assess your skills (currently focusing only on Cloud Computing stuff, e.g. AWS, Azure, Google Compute Platform, Rackspace, VMware vCloud Air). They also added practical labs. What's interesting is that after 20-30 minutes of assessing your skills, they get a very clear picture of what you know and what you don't, which I believe is very hard. (Disclaimer: I am an advisor and investor in the latter.)