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Do you want to get a wake-up call at 6am – another one at 7am? At 10am during your weekly meeting? at 3PM when working on some configuration or coding ABAP? Don’t hesitate and give you information to these large recruiting companies. They don’t care that you are working and make cold calls when ever they please. This becomes like annoying pop-up windows on some websites. Fortunately I have an option to mute them and put them directly on a specific voice mail for recruiters only.
If you are a recruiters and read this, please stop wasting our time with cold calls! You can always send e-mails with all the job details, for crying out loud, so that we can delete it if not interested or get back to you. You could even draft personal e-mail and mail-merge it to reach out to even more candidates. I don’t have time to spend time with you talking on customers expenses!
Sorry for my frustration, but I am sick & tired of recruiters calling people out of the blue during business hours. Most of the calls are for jobs posted on a gazillion of websites, such as DICE and other job boards. This means, that the rate is extremely low and you may have multiple layers between you and the client. In my experience, highly advertized postings paid the lowest rate. But this may just be me.
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A recruiter is technically working for you. You hire them to get you into a new project and pay them a fee for it, taken from your hourly rate. In my opinion, recruiters that have time to make cold calls all day long are too expensive. My first choice is to work with clients directly. If there is no other choice, I would only hire anyone my closest network of reputable recruiters.
A few weeks I got 8 calls on the same day – some don’t even leave a voice mail, others mumble something that is hard to understand. Most likely these were all for the same project, posted on DICE and other job boards, and they race to be the first ones to present you to the client. To make it, you will have to go into a rate pricing war and lower your rate as very often, the lowest rate gets the deal – not the best candidate.
Bypass the recruiters and build a strong business network with social sites, such as LinkedIn. Click here for free whitepapers on how to make the best out of it. The important thing is, KEEP RECRUITERS YOU DON’T PERSONALLY KNOW OFF YOUR NETWORK!
The good thing about LinkedIn is, that you can also follow who is hiring and make connections with your old buddies and get you into projects directly.
LearnLinkedIn: How to Build your Living Resume
In this manual, you will see how to set yourself up on LinkedIn (if you haven’t already), establish your account, and develop your “living resume” in an easy step by step process. This manual will also go over the must-know tips and information to ensure you don’t make any mistakes and will provide some new tricks for the more seasoned LinkedIn user.
Maybe I am old fashioned, but I still believe that there needs to be a meeting of the minds. The client should get the best resource at the best rate (and not the worst resource at the lowest price), the consultant should get the best rate that the market can offer and the agency should be rewarded accordingly with a reasonable markup. The good news is, that his is a trend on the SAP Contracting Market. Some consultants don’t want to know how much the mark-up is as long as they get their desired rate. Some recruiting companies pay the consultants every 2 weeks regardless if they got paid by the client yet. This may deserve a higher markup as you don’t have to wait for months to get paid.
Please read our article ‘Still Throwing your money away’ for more information.
I don’t want to say that ALL recruiters are bad by any means. I have a few at hand that are pretty good to work with. One even insisted I should work directly with the client when he learned that I knew the hiring manager already.
One of my best resources is ConsultantBox - where I can place my resume online without having to disclose my personal information. The end-clients (not recruiters) will contact you and make you an offer or ask for a rate. They can select the resource that is best for the project and not best for making lots of dough from you. The catch is that the service is not free, but has a 10% markup for the client hiring you. Basically if you agree on a rate of, say, $100.00/hour, you and the client knows that the rate will be $110.00 (and so do you).
There are other similar sites, such as Connect2Client, SAP Rankings and more.
Click here to sign up and start posting your CV – Another alternative to bypass the recruiters is to use reputable website if you are looking for a permanent job. It seems that the SAP Job market is picking up again. Follow our post to learn more about the trend. There you should be able to deal directly with the hiring managers directly and don’t have to share a hefty portion of your 1st years salary.
Making Consulting and job hunting enjoyable again!
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Well author should say that when you have more than 5 year(or maybe even 3) of experience u don’t need to look for job – job is looking for you. I’m ABAP programmer with few year of experience and i have 2-3 calls from head hunter every week. Ofcorse i have my linkid and other social network profiles.