Recruiters 37

When you’re engaged in a job search in the technology field, you face a particular set of obstacles: the never-ending waves of job-shops who work the industry like locusts sweeping across fields of wheat.

There are a number of factors at work here: first off, the client companies—which include Yahoo, Cisco, Microsoft and a lot of other big names—can save money short-term by laying off full-time employees (FTEs), with their attendant benefit expense, and replacing them with contract workers who can be hired and fired interchangeably.

(It’s not that you have much security as a FTE—most corporations hire you at-will, which means they can let you go pretty quickly if they need to show some cost savings to balance out their executive bonuses. Think of the difference this way: FTE is indentured servitude; contracting is chattel slavery. You never make enough to get ahead, much less build financial security.)

It used to be that contractors were hired essentially on a project basis: a company needed extra help to complete a specific project by a certain date, so it brought on extra staff to get the job done. When mission was accomplished, the contractors left. These days, however, contractors are brought on board to do ongoing jobs, like software testing, network engineering, administrative support, etc. All jobs that should be fully integrated with an organization’s long-term goals and corporate ethos. But you’re treated as “other”, while expected to display all the enthusiasm of someone fully vested in the outcome.

Another factor is that the client companies put out their requirements to multiple vendors, who compete with one another to grab up the same talent pool, but also to do the job at the lowest cost to the client, and therefore to the lowest pay for the actual worker. Cisco, Adobe, Google—they don’t really care so much about the quality of the contractor as they do about filling the slot at the lowest hourly rate.

(They also limit the number of hours the contractor can bill for—40 hours per week at whatever miniscule hourly rate is agreed; but, like Walmart, they expect the contractors to work off the clock and are outraged if you explain to them that they themselves placed the limit on your hours and once that limit is reached they have the choice of paying you for the excess or wait to talk to you next week when the clock resets.)

For example, I’ve received multiple vendor come-ons for a couple of product marketing positions at Adobe (some of them multiple emails from the same recruiter at the same company; they’re not big on attention to detail). Their cookie-cutter emails all instruct you to state your rate, but that’s pointless, because they’re going to pay some percentage of the rate they’ve negotiated with the client company, so I always just ask what they’re paying. On the Adobe job their rates varied by $12 per hour. I’m pretty sure Adobe was offering them a single rate—so whoever supplied the selected candidate was going to get $X. But some of them were obviously going to keep more of that rate than others.

The vast preponderance of these vendors are run and staffed by South Asians. The emails have US addresses, and the caller ID shows various US area codes. But the recruiters are in India or Pakistan, and they’re using IP phones. One way you can confirm this is that the “excellent opportunity with our direct client” is frequently in another state—I’ve been solicited for contract jobs in Michigan, Kentucky, Texas, Minnesota, New York and North Carolina. Evidently there are no maps of the US available in Bangalore.

(I’d comment on the fact that the “excellent opportunities” are also often for developer, QA, systems engineer and other completely inappropriate positions, but the home-grown varieties of recruiters also data mine résumés for key words and blast out their emails without thought to the fact that having the words “project” and “manager” somewhere in your CV does not mean you’re a hardcore implementation program manager. But at least they know the difference between California and New York.)

As for meeting the requirements of the client company’s job description—actually, these Indian recruiters would put forward a plate of succotash if it somehow passed the interview with the customer. (Which, in some cases, is entirely possible.) And they’d offer it help getting an H1b visa to get the job.

Oh—and many of these companies are 8A-certified by the Federal government. Those who’ve ever worked in the Federal contracting space know what that means: they get to jump to the front of the queue when it comes to consideration, on account of them being “socially and economically disadvantaged” businesses.

So welcome to the world of opportunity and innovation here in the Valley they call Silicon. Good luck.