Reply to: State of the Market

[oliverson]

Got a couple of speculative agent messages this week - first time in months.
Both a reasonable rate, outside IR35 and hybrid 2/3 days per week in London.
I'm busy until the end of the year, but perhaps things are picking up a bit.

Perhaps it's the time of year, the 'decision makers are now back from holiday'.

I think we have a window now of September to December when IHMO it's the best chance of landing work (historically). Let's hope those of us looking get sorted and put this miserable year behind us.

[Smartie]

Got a couple of speculative agent messages this week - first time in months.
Both a reasonable rate, outside IR35 and hybrid 2/3 days per week in London.
I'm busy until the end of the year, but perhaps things are picking up a bit.

[sadkingbilly]

Yep. And that's my biggest worry. That we will be getting rusty to existing skills and not exposed to any new tech. A downwind spiral.

The death of the dinosaur!

more like the Dodo. this dinosaur's still truckin'!

[Bluenose]

Many pimps lost their shirts during COVID and then lost their jobs after COVID, in the past 18 months many of my contacts have gone in house HR recruitment or quit entirely. There's not many left during pure play contracting these days.

[SchumiStars]

Is there some kind of time wasting craze going on in recruitment that I'm unaware of?

Another opportunity pinged my way on LinkedIn, followed by an actual telephone call. All sounded very promising and the client moves quickly. 3 days later and sweet f**k all.

This is all that seems to happen these days. I vow not to be part of it again and to stay retired, work on my own stuff, and then it happens, another ping. So I look at the spec. and it's pretty close but it's been several months now since I worked with any of that tech., so off I go and start doing a refresher, then the 'opportunity' dissipates. AGAIN!

Rinse and repeat.

Yep. And that's my biggest worry. That we will be getting rusty to existing skills and not exposed to any new tech. A downwind spiral.

The death of the dinosaur!

[dsc]

You are right. It's a new thing. It's all changed the last couple of years. I do wonder if agents have just become so disheartened and disillusioned by it all that they can't be bothered anyymore.

It's pretty simple, pimps just want to fire away a few CVs and await feedback / see where things go. It seems that most of the time there's no feedback, the job doesn't exist, there's no budget etc. so they move on to a different ad and try to find CVs for that, absolutely not giving a tulip about those who submitted their CVs on the last one. In a market where 80% of ads don't go anywhere, there's absolutely no reward in updating everyone in the chain, hence the silence / ghosting.

[avonleigh]

The last time I was looking (2020/21) I don't recall this type of behaviour and I certainly don't recall it in the years prior, though all my contracts in the 5 years prior to that were through previous clients with no agency or searching involved.

I just find it very frustrating. At least this agent has responded promptly to LinkedIn messages, whereas most don't bother.

You are right. It's a new thing. It's all changed the last couple of years. I do wonder if agents have just become so disheartened and disillusioned by it all that they can't be bothered anyymore.

[oliverson]

Agents have often viewed contractors as insentient commodities to be sold on at a profit.
I hasten to add that when we were in higher demand, many agents adjusted their approach. Asking about our kids, and so on.
But there is more automation now, professional human interaction is less common.

You've been doing this a while, I'm sure you agree.

I wouldn't take it personally. Numbers game, nothingburger, lack of corrolation between posting and actual role etc..

The last time I was looking (2020/21) I don't recall this type of behaviour and I certainly don't recall it in the years prior, though all my contracts in the 5 years prior to that were through previous clients with no agency or searching involved.

I just find it very frustrating. At least this agent has responded promptly to LinkedIn messages, whereas most don't bother.

[Dorkeaux]

Is there some kind of time wasting craze going on in recruitment that I'm unaware of?

Another opportunity pinged my way on LinkedIn, followed by an actual telephone call. All sounded very promising and the client moves quickly. 3 days later and sweet f**k all.

This is all that seems to happen these days. I vow not to be part of it again and to stay retired, work on my own stuff, and then it happens, another ping. So I look at the spec. and it's pretty close but it's been several months now since I worked with any of that tech., so off I go and start doing a refresher, then the 'opportunity' dissipates. AGAIN!

Rinse and repeat.

Agents have often viewed contractors as insentient commodities to be sold on at a profit.
I hasten to add that when we were in higher demand, many agents adjusted their approach. Asking about our kids, and so on.
But there is more automation now, professional human interaction is less common.

You've been doing this a while, I'm sure you agree.

I wouldn't take it personally. Numbers game, nothingburger, lack of corrolation between posting and actual role etc..

[oliverson]

Is there some kind of time wasting craze going on in recruitment that I'm unaware of?

Another opportunity pinged my way on LinkedIn, followed by an actual telephone call. All sounded very promising and the client moves quickly. 3 days later and sweet f**k all.

This is all that seems to happen these days. I vow not to be part of it again and to stay retired, work on my own stuff, and then it happens, another ping. So I look at the spec. and it's pretty close but it's been several months now since I worked with any of that tech., so off I go and start doing a refresher, then the 'opportunity' dissipates. AGAIN!

Rinse and repeat.

[kingmob]

VAT on private schools is not richly deserved. Do you realise home schooling comes under private schooling? More and more parents are home schooling cos state education is failing them. These are normal working class parents not rich people.

Home schooling is exempt from VAT. Private School Fees are not, because they don't deserve special treatment. Its a service.

Items purchased for home schooling do get charged VAT.

I do take the point that some of the parents sending their children to private schools might struggle to afford it with the new VAT charge. Educating your kids at Private School is mostly a choice. For the parents of children in the Forces the CEA rates have been recalculated but so has the parental contribution.

[willendure]

Total jobs seems to be posting a lot more direct jobs from employers, just not great at removing them after the closing date in my experience? But then I cant say Linkedin are any better for that?

I see - You mean the alerts they send out might not even be fresh adverts? Their filtering, search and alerting features are not very well implemented. Still, intrigued by seeing things on there I am not seeing elsewhere.

[kingmob]

Anybody find Total Jobs a useful resource for contracts?

I started getting emails from them, not sure how that happened, and what they were sending was not right for me. But that led to visiting the site and changing the search params to contracts in my skillset and seeing that there appears to be quite a few on there that are not coming in my jobserve feeds.

For comparison, I currently have 0 ads in Scotland on jobserve, and in the last 1 day, total jobs has 7.

Just makes me wonder, what else I might be missing accross all the various possible platforms for finding job ads.

I have alerts from Jobserve, Reed, Total jobs, Monster(though very little coming from there ), Freework (used to be Technojobs?), Hays, Linkedin FTC seem to be making a comeback?

Total jobs seems to be posting a lot more direct jobs from employers, just not great at removing them after the closing date in my experience? But then I cant say Linkedin are any better for that?

[quackhandle]

Agreed.

Regarding CV harvesting, do you mean tulipy pimps getting a copy of your CV by pretending to possibly put you forward for a role, but instead assembling a "virtual team" to bid on work?

If so, why should that bother you? It's getting your CV distributed, all to the good I should think.

Am I missing the point? There are probably a lot of my CVs out there in various versions.

No, posting a gig on jobserve for a few days that you could do in your sleep, is outside, 6M fully remote, decent rate then it disappears.

qh

[Bluenose]

I'll be deleting every thread post the quoted one that is off topic or

If you want to discuss the political reasons for the state of the market, I suggest you start a thread in General. Oh and there's a Brexit subforum if you want to rehash all those arguments.

Thankyou!