Finding and applying for contracts

[what a life]

I was first contracting between 2002 and 2006, then turned consultancy owner. Having sold that company, I’m not active in that field any more but have been doing a bit of contracting in other fields with small consultancies over the last couple of years.

Other than IR35 it feels like not much has changed in all that time. Jobserve looks like it hasn’t had an update since 2006, us lot still moan about agents and I know for a fact they do the same about us ?

As well as the bit of freelancing I’m doing, I’m also working on creating a company where we intended solving problems in perm recruitment. Being back around contracting though has got me thinking there could be a play here for this new company to provide something new that could do a better job for both contractors and agents in terms of making relationships easier and more fruitful, make it less time consuming and easier to search for roles and save the agent time sussing out skills and availability.

The entrepreneur in me has a picture in my head NOT of yet another outdated job board but of a solution that drives better behaviour, saves time and gets the most suited candidate into the role.

What would you like to see improved in the whole process of relationship building and applying for and getting contracts or does it work just fine for you?

In the interest of balance and getting a full picture, I’m also asking some agents I know.

[malvolio]

I should dig out a proposal dating from around 2008 that aimed to resolve that problem. It broke because the agency side got greedy and secretive in equal measure.

I also had another option that agencies assure me would never work - except it works perfectly well in other arenas.

You have a fundamental disconnect here. The agency model is lucrative (around £35bn a year lucrative) because it is lean and efficient. It does not aim to deliver the best possible candidate - although it usually does - but to deliver the one with the best return for the agent's targets. Given that, we are selling into a market that does not align to our sales points, which are around experience and expertise and achievement. Similarly we are selling our expertise to the agent and, indirectly , the client, but the agency is selling us as their resource in the shape of a specific individual and making guarantees to their client over protection and de0risking the relationship with us.

Ours is in reality a badly broken market, both for the above reasons and the f***ing great spanner that HMG and HMRC keep throwing into the works. We don't have the muscle to change it and the agencies don't need to.

And I fear that most if not all of the above transfers directly to the permie market as well....

[Lance]

I should dig out a proposal dating from around 2008 that aimed to resolve that problem. It broke because the agency side got greedy and secretive in equal measure.

I also had another option that agencies assure me would never work - except it works perfectly well in other arenas.

You have a fundamental disconnect here. The agency model is lucrative (around £35bn a year lucrative) because it is lean and efficient. It does not aim to deliver the best possible candidate - although it usually does - but to deliver the one with the best return for the agent's targets. Given that, we are selling into a market that does not align to our sales points, which are around experience and expertise and achievement. Similarly we are selling our expertise to the agent and, indirectly , the client, but the agency is selling us as their resource in the shape of a specific individual and making guarantees to their client over protection and de0risking the relationship with us.

Ours is in reality a badly broken market, both for the above reasons and the f***ing great spanner that HMG and HMRC keep throwing into the works. We don't have the muscle to change it and the agencies will resist all attempts to do so.

And I fear that most if not all of the above transfers directly to the permie market as well....

FTFY

[edison]

As well as the bit of freelancing I’m doing, I’m also working on creating a company where we intended solving problems in perm recruitment. Being back around contracting though has got me thinking there could be a play here for this new company to provide something new that could do a better job for both contractors and agents in terms of making relationships easier and more fruitful, make it less time consuming and easier to search for roles and save the agent time sussing out skills and availability.

The entrepreneur in me has a picture in my head NOT of yet another outdated job board but of a solution that drives better behaviour, saves time and gets the most suited candidate into the role.

In a similar vein to contract recruitment, the lower end of the perm market up to £100k salary is highly commoditised, ranging from hundreds and thousands of small recruitment firms to large national and international firms. There's little to differentiate many of these firms so again, it's often driven by being a lean and efficient numbers driven model as Malvolio says.

At the higher end of the market you start getting into retained search. There's possibly a solution to improve this segment but there are fewer firms who operate in this space and there is a bit more differentiation. It's very cyclical though, I'm wondering if now's a good time to launch such a business.

A few companies have recently tried to disrupt recruitment with platforms that supposedly provide a better skill based matching service between candidates and recruiters but AFAIK, none have really got the scale to make much of a dent.

[malvolio]

Two disruptive options, as alluded to earlier

1. Link up with a major recruiter as the front end to do the client finding. Verify your availability CV history, insurances and other details. Recruiter gives you a 24-48 hour head start on any roles they receive, plus using their CV database properly to prompt suitable candidates. Would take a while to gain momentum which is why the agency started buggering about with the proposal; they didn't want to risk losing money short term for a longer term market advantage.

2. We pay the agency margin, not the client. Immediate reaction from three agencies was "A contractor wouldn't pass our credit checks". The point that they handle the cashflow didn't seem to occur to them. Nor the one that they would deal with maybe half a dozen qualified applications per role rather than a few hundred.

And I wasn't talking to agents, but CEOs and MDs of the agencies involved. It's clear they don't want disruption in their comfy marketplace - and commercially, why would they?