Hello, this is my first draft at picthing the weird career change I'm going through, please provide feedback in the comments!
👨🏻💻 I'm a developer
That part is easy to explain.
I have worked for 15 years as a developer, first with Android and then I focus backend stuff, mostly with Java & Kotlin
You can spy my GitHub here
https://github.com/jmfayard/
🤨 I'm a solo recruiter
I switched careers in March 2023 to become a solo recruiter.
I'm often asked WHY?
That seems really strange.
And there is a huge personal story behind.
But the short answer is simple: the recruiting world in tech is a jungle.
The biggest job board in France is called "Welcome to the jungle"
.... and nobody is surprised or asks why?
Everyone understands instinctively.
🥰 Hiring is like seduction.
You have girls on the left, boys on the right
The job consists "simply" in matching the right boy and the right girl.
By simply I mean it's very very hard.
That's an explanation, not an excuse.
It's very hard too to write software with no bugs.
Does that mean that we should not do our best to become better at it?
🙄 Hiring today is like seduction in the 1950s.
Boys and companies on the right are supposed to be the ones who take the initiative and choose and select.
Girls and devs on the left are supposed to make a nice profile in their resume and linkedin
They then just wait to be selected.
Sometime they wait for a very long time.
And when they are selected, they should accept and be grateful.
Because they might never have a second chance.
They think.
🕵🏻♂️ I'm an agent for developer careers
Hiring jus like seduction should be understood as a two ways streets.
Companies have needs and select developers that match them.
Developers have needs and select companies that match them.
So we can do hiring both the usual way by coaching companies and help them find candidates.
Head hunters.
Or we can do hiring by coaching candidates and help them find companies.
Agents.
What that means is that I am doing inverted recruitment.
🙃 Inverted recruitment
We should flip hiring on its head
That's what seniors do, they don't send a CV to the first random recruiters on LinkedIn, they have their networks and they are assective about their own hiring criteria.
But if you are not there yet, well you can take an agent.
Agents are very very rare in tech
We are like 10 agents for devs in France.
That's not much for a huge market...
Not enough.
But agents are common among artists.
Artists tend to be great at art... but they usually suck at marketing and project management and sales.
While devs tend to be great at programming... but they usually suck at marketing and project management and sales.
I hope you see the analogy here :)
💡 Write your candidate specs
With inverted recruitment devs become the actors of their own careers.
Consider your developer life as an IT project.
What are your specs?
Credits to Erik Dietrich, it's the first time I've seen this being done
Today that's one big thing I'm doing.
I help devs clarity what they really want in their careers.
I help them understand their needs, their motivation.
I help them define who they want to work with.
Their red flags too, we are in the jungle.
Everything is so simpler when you have clarity and focus and motivation!
🫣 Double agents like recruiters have a bad reputation
Recruiters have a bad reputation.
There is so much distrust, and it's not helping.
I have a friend who bought a second SIM card specifically to honeypot recruiter calls.
In fact recruiters are often nice and helpful when you contact them directly.
We should talk more, because at the end of the day we have common interests.
But this bad reputation doesn't come from nowhere.
I used to profoundly dislike recruiters,
I don't anymore because I met the good ones, but I did.
Their job is hard and important, and also often done badly, in part because it's hard.
But again it's not because writing software without bugs is hard that we shouldn't try to do it with the best of possibilities.
The fact is that there are too much bad practices.
✍🏻 Writing about bad hiring practices
On the public side, in case you didn't notice, I have written lots of articles about bad hiring practices on DEV.to
“What is your current salary?” is a red flag that you don’t want to work here
Keep Calm And Just Say No To Coding Challenges
And more generally on dev careers.
The Real Imposter is The Inner Judge - On Imposter Symdrome - DEV Community
Who do I Want to Work With? A Simple Framework - DEV Community
That was my attempt at pitching the weird stuff I'm currently doing.
👉🏻 Tell me what you think here or by email at jmfayard@gmail.com
Top comments (15)
:D I liked you thoughts. Multitasking is a great skill to have. And recruiting is a challenge, one thing that I see is tech trends and changing so rapidly. For every job switch you need at least 2-3 add-ons techs in your profile :P
Very interesting perspective, Jean Michel. I'll definitely keep your thoughts in mind. This is kind of off topic but I'm curious as to what the distribution of technology is from the job posts you see. I feel like for fully remote positions it's mostly dynamically typed languages for backend like javascript or python. I don't see much for C#, C++, Java. Do you also see that trend? Maybe you have an interesting theory? 😜
I don't have any insights here :)
I think that's a great idea! There's a huge disconnection between recruiters and devs. We all have horror stories about dealing with recruiters and hiring processes (Java vs JavaScript, X years of experience on a brand new tool). Part of the disconnection is IMHO because recruiters don't know much (or anything) about the area/subject they're recruiting for. They only make sure the skill soup on CVs matches the (often non-existing) job description.
The thing with artists, is that they often work on a gig basis, or as contractors for a gig. The closest similarity to what you're describing for software engineer is 10x. Being an agent for full time positions is unlikely to work as well for numerous reasons.
Having worked in the recruiting industry, many of the issues with recruiting comes from companies with unrealistic demands and being unwilling to devote the proper resources (time and money) and commit to recruiting well.
Don't those companies actually waste time and money by not recruiting well?
Yes, but it's a cost they don't see. Management essently sees recruiting as a sales funnel- and a recruiter's job is to source leads. So a recruiter's priorites are first: provide a steady stream of resumes, and second: within the stream, provide an adequate amount of attractive looking candates. If they fail at either of these, they get fired. At my startup, we called this the "Tinder Problem". Everyone wants to see a lot of "hot people", but most don't have an attractive enough profile to get the quantity and quality of swipes & matches to keep them happy. This means companies churn through a lot of recruiters. They are generally hired as contractors so they can be let go at the end of their contract when they don't produce results. The (dis)incentives just don't line up well with recruiting well.
The good recruiters end up working for recruiting agencies that charge based on successful hire-- often 20-30% of the new hire's first year salary. When a company gets desperate enough, they inevitably end up turning to a recruiting agency, and accept it as a cost of doing business. The reality of what these agencies are doing is matching their pool of "vetted" candatates to the suite of companies they have contracts with and then greasing the wheels to make the hire happen-- essentially a version of your "inverted recruitment".
Mind you this is all US based-- it might be different elsewhere.
Well no it's mostly the same.
My business model will be essentially that of an agency when I'm working with people who want to do have an employment contract.
When I work with freelance devs that's different, I can be paid directly by the developers, like an artist agent would do.
(All of this is very much work in progress)
It's the work on day to day basis that's different.
The "Tinder Problem" has two faces,
both girls and boys at bad at finding their significant other,
companies are bad at recruiting
and developers are bad at job hunting.
Therefore there are loads of good developers that don't get "vetted" by usual agencies.
I am a career booster for those developers.
A lot of the issue with the "tinder problem" is the profiles are so limited-- partly because no one wasn't to read a long profile (resume/cv/job description) which would allow them get into the nucances. Companies these days just throw
keyword filtersAI at the problem and agressively filter out many reasonable match and developers are encouraged to keyword spam their resumes. Your job to grease the wheels. Process information and to get likely matches to agree to meeting once. Not unlike an old school, pre-internet dating matchmaker.Good luck. It can be difficult getting companies to look beyond their "hard requirements". Software developers are usually a little more flexible.
I think it's possible to do high volume or high quality.
But I don't think you can do both, there is a choice to make.
I am not interested in doing the same kind of bullshit than I disliked when I was a dev,
... just now we can do the bullshit even faster with ChatGPT.
It's frankly insulting when you see the sheer amount of practice it requires to become a good developer.
My target would be people who would rather read a 10 minutes document about a candidate than waste a month and lots of money "for efficiency reasons".
At least you won't ask a JavaScript developer to join a company to develop Java apps, so that's an improvement.
Wait, that's different?
Lol
You understand both sides, can this problem ever be solved programmatically? Or we just need more double agents like you to maybe improve things?
Can we solve the seduction problem?
I think we need way more agents, and if you know some, please mention their names /linkedin/whatever in the comments