A good IT recruitment agency – what should it be? IT recruitment is not for everyone.

Many companies are being established and will still be established on the Polish market, operating in the field of IT recruitment. It's an easy and good piece of bread - as industry amateurs say. After all, this activity means "high margins" and endless profits. According to many, the most important thing is to "earn and not earn", which is why companies recruiting programmers spring up like mushrooms after the rain, succumbing to the illusion of quick earning. But how is it really? Who recruits well and who closes the company after 3 months? Who has a chance to exist for longer by building long-term relationships? I will answer these questions in the sentences below.

1. "Quantity, not quality, dear Lord!"

Many companies believe that the effective recruitment of a programmer consists in sending as many CVs as possible to the client, thus increasing the probability that one of the candidates (speaking the language of the industry) will "fall in" or be successfully recruited. There is no room here for thinking in terms of building positive and long-term relationships with the client - we list programmers like on tape. Quick sale - quick profit. This short-sighted thinking inhibits development - we look at what is here and now without thinking about the fact that the client "tired" of browsing CVs that do not match his dream candidate will stop being interested in us in the future and will go to the competition. Notice that just as you value your time, the client does not have time to talk to everyone. He is interested in a specific professional profile. So you can't make him get acquainted with 20 people who turn out to be incompetent. This is one of the elementary mistakes made by poor recruitment companies.

2. “Why check your CV? After all, a programmer is a programmer…”

Another mistake, directly related to what I am writing about above, is the lack of knowledge of the recruiter dealing with the recruitment of a given specialist (of a given technology). Often, weak recruitment companies employ (if they employ them anyway, they are often commissioned volunteers) students, trainees, interns to represent the recruitment company in front of a potential candidate. In fact - a student can study computer science and be proficient in, for example, JAVA technology. Let's also assume that this student is a born genius when it comes to JAVA programming - he has already written some ambitious applications himself. However, all this still does not give him the knowledge necessary to recruit because his knowledge ends at university, and he has no idea about real life. The example of an IT student is an almost perfect model anyway - in real life, people who graduated from a catering technical school, people studying geodesy and other people completely unrelated to the industry are employed. You can probably guess why this is happening, and if not, I will give you the main reason - thrift and myopia. The lack of business knowledge of agency owners (often recruiters who have left the walls of corporations trying to fulfill their American dream straight from Silicon Valley at all costs) and the desire to earn money quickly do not allow them to hire serious and experienced recruiters, which makes them quickly fall out of the "game" and they cannot afford lasting relationships and regular customers. "Why spend on a good recruiter when a student will do the same?" – these words are the reason why many recruitment companies fail.

3. Technical knowledge

Unfortunately, operating in such a "delicate" industry as IT, you have to take into account the consequences - our lack of competence will be severely pointed out by many candidates we are trying to recruit. Programmers are ambitious people, often graduates of good universities, with many thousands of saved lines of code, hundreds of hours of supplementary courses and many days spent abroad as participants in events and training. Therefore, if you are trying to recruit such a person, you need to know that your lack of preparation and technical knowledge may result in a lower conversion - you will recruit much fewer and much weaker programmers. Of course, not everyone has to be a programmer, but even in this case a good recruitment company verifies programmers in terms of a given technology - it has specialized people, sometimes employed permanently, who verify candidates on an ongoing basis, relieving recruiters from the strictly technical part of the interview. Such a process allows you to maintain good relationships with the candidate, which are just as important as the relationships you build with your clients.

4. Feedback

Everyone likes to receive feedback on topics that interest them. Going to the store and asking for a custom-made suit, we expect the seller to inform us when it will be available, sewn, and we will be able to pick it up. Lack of this information will contribute to the perception of the seller as unprofessional and untrustworthy. The result - we will choose a suit from the competition, even though it may turn out to be more expensive. The same situation applies to the programmer - the lack of quick information about the recruitment process, information when the candidate can expect a response from the potential employer or, finally, what the terms of cooperation look like, the programmer will start looking for a job bypassing us as an intermediary - he will find another agency, which will provide him with this information in a much shorter time. This is another example of a poorly managed IT recruitment company – a company that believes that the client is the most important and the programmer can wait.

5. No distinguishing feature from the competition

I have an agency recruiting programmers - but what makes it different? What will it be like in 5, 10 or 15 years when the economic situation changes? What plan do I have for the "worse moments" when I don't have many contracts with clients? What happens if I don't have programmers and I have contracts with clients? How will this affect me and my company's reputation? How to hire professional recruiters if I don't have capital? These are questions that remain unanswered if the average recruitment agency tries to answer them. What counts is the here and now – no model for the future, no vision, and no perspectives at the same time. Lack of planning leads many businesses to bankruptcy and collapse (as Peter Thiel wrote about in more detail in the book entitled "Zero to One", which I sincerely recommend). A good recruitment company, compared to a bad one, stands out with something, it brings something, it is different than all others. Samsung and Apple produce smartphones, but they are so different that they can meet the needs of separate target groups so effectively that they earn a fortune at the same time. What is your agency? What makes it stand out?

These are just some of the many issues worth addressing when it comes to employing programmers by both good and bad recruitment companies. The problem is deeply rooted in the market, but also in our culture and education, which has not developed good business manners in us - over 27 years of freedom is not enough to gain knowledge that other nations have been developing in themselves for many decades or even centuries. However, we are on the right track.