I bring you a cautionary tale from the dying days of English freelancing, the 2008-2009 period. It is a sad story about poaching and general low-lifery. Get yourself a cup of tea and settle in.
It started in a bar. It was the low season and I was parched. No gigs for miles, thousands of miles. My mobile phone rings. It's noisy but I have to take the call.
It's not somebody I've spoken to before, but funnily enough I know the name. Even though it's just an agent.
You will often hear contractors say, "Yes, most agents are scum, but if you get a special 'boutique' one you can trust, he can be gold..." This was an archetypal example of the "good egg" recruiter that these contractors would recommend. This guy has worked hard to gain people's trust and even runs a "community" thingie for techies. If I were to mention his name, I expect not only would people recognize it but, notwithstanding the anti-recruiter bias on this forum, several CUKers would leap to his defense.
He talked about a company that urgently needed somebody. The project he described sounded really good, and very close to the kind of thing I had worked with recently. Apparently though this was a very secretive organization and he could not reveal its identity. But he wanted to submit my CV anyway.
I wouldn't normally countenance that, but here I hesitated. I knew the guy had accumulated a lot of contacts in the industry, and wanted to begin on a good footing with him. Distracted by the noise around me, I almost agreed, but at the last second, fifteen years of acquired contractor experience and accumulated caution kicked in, and I told him to email the job spec first.
In his email to me, he still would not give the name of the client, but he did reveal the location, which made me wonder, as it was the location of my last contract. I thought, no way, only a total idiot would try something that barefaced with an experienced contractor, but I thought I'd check just in case, and asked him if by any chance it was somebody I'd worked with before. He replied, haha, funny you should ask that!
His line was this company had contacted him first. I was baffled, as my client (with whom I had a good relationship) had assured me that they never used recruiters. Anyway, I asked the goon if he was seriously trying to sell my own client to me or vice-versa, and he condescendingly explained that contractors are not really supposed to have "clients" (his scarequotes) -- clients are things that recruiters have. Actually that didn't go down very well with me either. I made it clear in no uncertain terms that he could not represent me. It was already pretty obvious that the piece of slime had simply got hold of my CV online and was trying to generate some business out of it. I had no more contact with him after that.
A few months later it was high season again. My client were about to start a new project and they wanted me on it. I was in contact with them every few days. On one of these calls, they said to me: "You're already in the loop so for God's sake stop sic'ing this idiot agent onto us!"
I shouldn't have been so startled. The creep was just playing both ends: telling the company that I had solicited his services, and telling me that the company had solicited his services.
Naturally I told them I had nothing to do with guy, but even so I think the matter created a sliver of distrust between me and my client, which may have been a tipping factor in why the contract and me never came together. OK things were more complicated, but that's another story. The point is that even when agents do not succeed in nosing their way into a relationship, they may still create enough interference to push clients and legitimate suppliers further apart, thus increasing the middle space in which they themselves operate. It tulips up the market. It was as if this agent saw me as a kind of competitor -- interesting when you consider that I was providing an actual service and he wasn't?
Anyway, I repeat, this goon is as venerated as far a goon can be. A Senior Architect type even recommended him to me later. I made it clear what had happened, and I'm sure he never looked at this Pillar of the Community the same way again. But he's not the only one who seem to take a somewhat naive attitude towards our friends in the recruitment industry, so that is really why I am posting this.
One practical lesson from this story is simply never to let yourself be submitted for a position unless the name of the client is disclosed. (I didn't and it was a narrow escape.) But there's a bigger lesson. Why did this pimp work so hard to earn people's trust over the years? Answer: so that he could take advantage of it, just like he was trying to take advantage of me.
The definition of a good recruiter is a recruiter you haven't figured out yet.
It started in a bar. It was the low season and I was parched. No gigs for miles, thousands of miles. My mobile phone rings. It's noisy but I have to take the call.
It's not somebody I've spoken to before, but funnily enough I know the name. Even though it's just an agent.
You will often hear contractors say, "Yes, most agents are scum, but if you get a special 'boutique' one you can trust, he can be gold..." This was an archetypal example of the "good egg" recruiter that these contractors would recommend. This guy has worked hard to gain people's trust and even runs a "community" thingie for techies. If I were to mention his name, I expect not only would people recognize it but, notwithstanding the anti-recruiter bias on this forum, several CUKers would leap to his defense.
He talked about a company that urgently needed somebody. The project he described sounded really good, and very close to the kind of thing I had worked with recently. Apparently though this was a very secretive organization and he could not reveal its identity. But he wanted to submit my CV anyway.
I wouldn't normally countenance that, but here I hesitated. I knew the guy had accumulated a lot of contacts in the industry, and wanted to begin on a good footing with him. Distracted by the noise around me, I almost agreed, but at the last second, fifteen years of acquired contractor experience and accumulated caution kicked in, and I told him to email the job spec first.
In his email to me, he still would not give the name of the client, but he did reveal the location, which made me wonder, as it was the location of my last contract. I thought, no way, only a total idiot would try something that barefaced with an experienced contractor, but I thought I'd check just in case, and asked him if by any chance it was somebody I'd worked with before. He replied, haha, funny you should ask that!
His line was this company had contacted him first. I was baffled, as my client (with whom I had a good relationship) had assured me that they never used recruiters. Anyway, I asked the goon if he was seriously trying to sell my own client to me or vice-versa, and he condescendingly explained that contractors are not really supposed to have "clients" (his scarequotes) -- clients are things that recruiters have. Actually that didn't go down very well with me either. I made it clear in no uncertain terms that he could not represent me. It was already pretty obvious that the piece of slime had simply got hold of my CV online and was trying to generate some business out of it. I had no more contact with him after that.
A few months later it was high season again. My client were about to start a new project and they wanted me on it. I was in contact with them every few days. On one of these calls, they said to me: "You're already in the loop so for God's sake stop sic'ing this idiot agent onto us!"
I shouldn't have been so startled. The creep was just playing both ends: telling the company that I had solicited his services, and telling me that the company had solicited his services.Naturally I told them I had nothing to do with guy, but even so I think the matter created a sliver of distrust between me and my client, which may have been a tipping factor in why the contract and me never came together. OK things were more complicated, but that's another story. The point is that even when agents do not succeed in nosing their way into a relationship, they may still create enough interference to push clients and legitimate suppliers further apart, thus increasing the middle space in which they themselves operate. It tulips up the market. It was as if this agent saw me as a kind of competitor -- interesting when you consider that I was providing an actual service and he wasn't?
Anyway, I repeat, this goon is as venerated as far a goon can be. A Senior Architect type even recommended him to me later. I made it clear what had happened, and I'm sure he never looked at this Pillar of the Community the same way again. But he's not the only one who seem to take a somewhat naive attitude towards our friends in the recruitment industry, so that is really why I am posting this.
One practical lesson from this story is simply never to let yourself be submitted for a position unless the name of the client is disclosed. (I didn't and it was a narrow escape.) But there's a bigger lesson. Why did this pimp work so hard to earn people's trust over the years? Answer: so that he could take advantage of it, just like he was trying to take advantage of me.
The definition of a good recruiter is a recruiter you haven't figured out yet.
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