State of the Market

[rocktronAMP]

No, I'm not trolling. :-( Today I spotted offers with range 120-200/day in... London.

The market is dead. The clients are like treacle. Real jobs opportunities are less than before. I found getting feedback from interviews is surprisingly hard, it is not effective. I completed a couple of coding projects for 2 positions. I never heard a word back.

Previous clients of mine are acting up. I tried asking few from the last 2 years and they don't want to know, they excuse with so-called "cost pressure" or have made other plans. I wish I had the power and pleasure of repeat business like other successful contractors.

Besides, it's Summer and every hiring manager is now off on their holidays. I have been looking for 2 months now. Tulip!

[SuperZ]

Just about to start something on Monday and going to pray it lasts a while as the market is frustrating at the moment from various angles including lack of contracts available, unrealistic specs, the chances of an interview being with one of those "lets interview everyone in the world" kinda places is quite high as they are the organisations continually advertising the same position so are easily found when not much else out there.

[anonymouse]

It's been difficult last 4 months, couple of interviews with fussy recruiters and even fussier hirers. Still got an outstanding interview because the programme manager used an agency not on the HR PSL, but he's used them before. In the meantime a previous agent has got me another role, which will pay the bills, but there's a lot of travel involved, they want to pay all my expenses and travel time (IR35 comment anybody?.. No? good....)

[northernladuk]

but there's a lot of travel involved, they want to pay all my expenses and travel time (IR35 comment anybody?.. No? good....)

Yeah. Read up and understand IR35 so you can make your own decisions. There just isn't enough to make a statement on the whole gig here.

[GB9]

Spoken with an agent I do a fair amount of business with. Quiet period up to the vote and now booming again.

Personally I've had 5 serious enquiries in July. As I'm usually in early I would expect a large number of roles forthcoming in the next 2-3 mths.

[suityou01]

Very seriously considering Perm if the money is "liveable".

I had one pimp yesterday call me about a perm gig, for a German speaking C# dev. He spent 20 minutes pulling me, my CV and my Linked In profile apart. I parried all of his comments and he just kept saying "Well these are the sorts of questions my Client may ask me so I want to be prepared".

In the end his beef was that I had too many "purely analytical" roles on my CV and not enough technical. I pointed out that over the past 20 years, I have done 3 years worth of "analytical roles", which also had strong technical skills used throughout, and that 3/20 years really isn't the larger part of my experience. Reluctantly he sent me the job spec and sure enough there was a key requirement for analytical skills, including requirements gathering and end to end solution delivery. Their min experience was just 3 years development, paying £80K, German speaking a bonus.

So 17 years dev experience with fluent German and I still can't get even a telephone interview.

I think maybe I'm either past it or too experienced....

[quackhandle]

Spoken with an agent I do a fair amount of business with. Quiet period up to the vote and now booming again.

Personally I've had 5 serious enquiries in July. As I'm usually in early I would expect a large number of roles forthcoming in the next 2-3 mths.

You just never know with this contracting malarkey, I never expected to be working down in Exeter but I never expected I would be on the bench for six months of this year. tulip happens.

Fingers crossed I can get something closer to home come September but I wouldn't stick my mortgage on it.

qh

[eek]

Very seriously considering Perm if the money is "liveable".

I had one pimp yesterday call me about a perm gig, for a German speaking C# dev. He spent 20 minutes pulling me, my CV and my Linked In profile apart. I parried all of his comments and he just kept saying "Well these are the sorts of questions my Client may ask me so I want to be prepared".

In the end his beef was that I had too many "purely analytical" roles on my CV and not enough technical. I pointed out that over the past 20 years, I have done 3 years worth of "analytical roles", which also had strong technical skills used throughout, and that 3/20 years really isn't the larger part of my experience. Reluctantly he sent me the job spec and sure enough there was a key requirement for analytical skills, including requirements gathering and end to end solution delivery. Their min experience was just 3 years development, paying £80K, German speaking a bonus.

So 17 years dev experience with fluent German and I still can't get even a telephone interview.

I think maybe I'm either past it or too experienced....

Some agents are just tulip, get the wrong end of a request and run with it.. Wait until another agent has the same job and try again if you want it...

It does show how poorly technical skills are paid in the UK, hardly surprising when we have the entire world as our competition, but its still annoying...

[blackeye]

Can someone please explain what a "tulip" is?

[eek]

Can someone please explain what a "tulip" is?

The site does not allow a word for excrement that begins sh.... Tulip is the word used to get around it...