Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mgkimsal | Hacker News Reader

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@peroni - this is a little offtopic, but hopefully not too much, and I'd like your opinion.

Many other creative disciplines offer agents/managers/handlers for the 'creative' - think sports players, writers, actors, bands, etc. I've been wondering if a model like this would work in the tech industry for developers. I'm not sure developers would go for it, since many tend to have a 'DIY' attitude about everything.

What I see in the agent model is that someone follows you and your career for the long haul, and finds you work that helps advance your careers (gets you better parts in projects, better gigs for the band, etc). I've never met a recruiter that has kept in touch with me for more than a month or so after a successful placement. They're only working for the employer, because that's who pays them.

Would developers be willing to fork over 10% of their pay to an agent who negotiated better pay and benefits for them, helped get better gigs, etc? As attractive as this model sounds on paper, I'm wondering if this has a snowball's chance of working.

Thoughts?

Oh, and thanks for your offer to the group, even if it was abused by a few people. I do this occasionally for members of our local php user group, and it's fun to help people understand how to promote themselves more positively. :) Never done it on the scale you did, and can't imagine the time/effort involved!

It's a tricky one. Technically speaking it already works like this for contractors.

Example: Say I place you in a 6 month contract where you get paid £500 per day (I'm an optimist!) in such a deal my fee to the client, your employer, would be anywhere from £50 to £100 per day meaning I could place 4 good people and make £2k a week before costs. I work for an agency currently but if I was self-employed (and a lot of successful recruiters are) that would be £2k a week in my pocket.

Your next question will probably be 'Why aren't more recruiters doing exactly that?' and the answer is simple, it's the same as launching a start-up. You become self-emplyed and your income isn't secure. More importantly it is almost impossible to get traction as a self-employed recruiter unless you've been in the game for at least 5 or 6 years and have a littany of highly successful relationships with hiring managers that regularly recruit.

What's missing from that equation are two things:

Incentives for the recruiter to place someplace that's most beneficial to the developer. The person paying for the service is the employer. YOU might not make an bad placement, but many other recruiters I've worked with don't know how to tell a good one from a bad one, and if the employer is initially happy, that's all that matters. If the placement doesn't work out, I've found employers tend to blame the employee more than the recruiting firm (maybe that's not always the case though?).

Long term relationship with the placed candidate. There's no incentive for a recruiter to keep moving someone from company to company every year because they'll get a bad rep with the hiring companies. If the person paying the recruiter is the employee/contractor, the focus would be more on making them happy vs making the employer happy. In an ideal world, all parties are happy, but if it comes down to making a decision, people will come down on the side of the money.

The interesting element to this is taking the cost away from the employer and moving it to the candidate.

Pro's: Employers will be a lot more keen on dealing with an agent if they no they won't ever have to pay extra for their fees.

Cons: When the market changes (and it's already starting to), jobs will become plentiful and the need to use a professional to find you a new opportunity becomes less of a priority.

Employers will be a lot more keen on dealing with an agent if they no they won't ever have to pay extra for their fees.

Maybe, but they may end up back in having to weed through hundreds of agents instead of hundreds of applicants. I suspect that won't be the case entirely, as an agent would have more incentive to be selective about placement opps - they don't want to waste their time either.

Or could a high quality recruiter just start doing this with a small number of select, high quality, recent clients? (developers are the clients in this case)

Starting from the ground up with no clients and trying to build a client base on this model would be difficult. If you can't show results, I'm not going to give you 10% (or any other percentage), mostly because so far I've been DIYing it and doing decent. But if I already had a "relationship" with a recruiter, maybe one who's actually good at technical placement and they found something good for me along with offering to be a long term career guide / mentor / agent, I'd be interested in listening to them much more than if someone just calls me out of the blue. And if the pay was more than I get now, even with the 10% cut taken out, and involved interesting projects, that would get my attention.

I think the long term career guide and mentoring part would have to be a big part of it. I know my skills but I don't necessarily know who out there wants them, maybe there's people out there who need my skills but also don't know it. The agent comes into play here and matches up two people who don't know they really need each other in order to make great things. This takes a lot of work on the part of the agent.

If you have this business model, managing 10 to 20 developers and taking 10% cut of salary, that's enough to make a nice living on and you'd have time to be personal with all of them.

Agreed on all points - it's a chicken/egg situation to be sure up front. It's something I've thought of doing just because of my circle of contacts - I know many fairly well (probably 5-8 pretty strongly), know their strengths, know what they'd like to be doing, and I get calls from both recruiters and companies looking for people with XYZ skills/interest. I'm not sure it's enough for me to do full time, but it's made me think more about this issue, and the state of the industry.

Getting the 10% out of some people would be hard - I guess you just wouldn't use them as clients(?). Would you collect up front? Weekly payments? I don't know many developers who can easily just hand over $8-$10k in a lump sum, so you'd probably have to collect over time, and if they're not good with budgeting, that's a whole other problem.

I think you'd work it into the contract with the hiring company to get a % cut of each paycheck. The hiring companies probably already have a system in place for paying contract houses, this would just be a slight change. That'd probably be the easiest for the developer, too. And the 10% was just a number, you'd probably have to charge less than that. For example, the NBA limits agents to 4% (or so my quick Googling says), which seems like a reasonable fee.

If you start with just a few people you know well, I can see this being a good side job until the client list grows. The hard part is probably going to be that the people you know best are friends, friends may not want to pay you for your help.

I'm an independent web software developer. I work for various clients on an hourly or per-project basis. The highest rate I charge is 50% higher than the lowest rate I charge. If I had an agent that could keep me busy with the higher rate jobs--increasing my average hourly rate and giving me more hours to work because I'd spend less time chasing down gigs--I'd be more than happy to pay him/her 10%.

Pretty easy to make a living on 4% when you're dealing with multimillion dollar (and multiyear) contracts, not so much so when dealing with $80k developers :)

Isn't this somewhat like a consulting firm? Those didn't survive the busting of the tech bubble all that well.

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