Company loyalty

Guess he really like his company

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.

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.

Training a new recruiter

Sorry, been busy lately. We're working on bringing another recruiter on our team -- not EASY! It's good b/c it reminds me of why people dislike recruiters -- and reminds me to be empathetic when talking to candidates -- for all they know, I'm just another guy with a phone looking to make buck who doesn't know the difference between Java and C++.

Busy first quarter

Lax on my posting, I've been super busy.

1) We're looking to expand - we're interviewing recruiters to join our team, which is a very odd experience (I'll go into detail in a bit).

2) We're closing deals at an outstanding clip -- I've done some really interesting placements in the last three months, from a couple of developers at start ups, a number of placements at the big three I-banks, and two major quant deals. I like the fact that I'm finding interesting people and jobs that really fit what they are looking for. This is the busiest/most productive I've ever been as a recruiter.

3) Finally feeling better (somewhat).

How many people is it possible to know?

This is the great question I've been wondering -- how many people can a person know. I figure it's possible to know every active pro baseball player, all the hall of famers, and many of the minor leaguers.
Let's suppose you know all the players on the 40 man roster -- that 1200 people (30 teams by 40 players). That seems like a reasonable number of people to know. Let's add a couple of thousand who are are former players -- let's say another 1ooo. And let's say you keep up with the draft and college, so you know another 1000 that way. So all told you know about 3000 players.

How many more beyond that can you know? Where does the limit of memory come into play?

The number of technologists and quants in NYC is finite, but is it knowable? What would be the most efficient way to learn about all these people?