Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Super PHP search

I needed a little break from finance recruiting, so I've taken on a PHP search for a very well known firm which is super ... energizing. I like dealing with smart people and this search is putting me into contact with all the best PHP people on the planet. What's so cool about this search is that it has taken me years to build a genealogy of Wall Street developers whereas I've been able to assemble a pretty solid taxonomy of PHP in just a couple of weeks. Obviously, PHP people tend to blog and contribute to open source code more frequently than finance folks, so that helps. But it's also fun to follow a thread and then BAM you run into someone else who you knew from another thread.

Friday, May 02, 2008

Why headhunting isn't evil

Well, this is my _apologia pro vita sua_ moment. I dislike many things about recruiters, recruiting practices, etc. but yet I am a headhunter and I don't think it's an evil job. Here's why:

We live in a talent driven economy -- there are not enough people with the skills we need to fill the jobs we have. Even during this economic downturn, layoffs, etc. we have never been as busy as we are right now. Why? Because good people are hard to find.

Now, in the old days, good people were hard to find, but it was hard for them to know how much they were worth. Enter the middleman, he's talking to candidates all day, gathering compensation information, evaluating where people are in the market, etc. He's an information disseminator, telling candidates how much they are worth and telling clients how much they should pay, given the market. Without recruiters distributing this information, you have big disparities in compensation! And I think when there are disparities, the losers are most employees (though some people win by being grossly overpaid, but this generally gets fixed fairly quickly).

So, that's reason number one, information dissemination, which leads to better compensation for everyone.