How can a company legitimately find out who the best service providers and consultants are? You get a service or hire a consultant to grow your business, in which many cases they do. The problem it that everyone's claiming to have the best service or be the industry expert, but whats the proof? Fancy value propositions, all recommendations no complaints, basically companies harvest all the good data and at the same time discard and attempt to hide the bad information. We need a universal source of legitimate data, both good and bad, or a formula to build profiles on the different niche services. This will provide a way to see all the information and not just the info companies want us to see.
How can you tell if the recruiter you hire is worth the money being payed out?
There are several recruiters who have been major influences in successful companies by either putting together advisory boards, all-star development teams, or record setting sales organizations.
AT THE SAME TIME
Way to many recruiters collect money for semi decent work. The same goes for lawyers, contractors, consultants and subscription/service providers alike.
Everything is changing and its all about data mining, utilizing the information and remaining transparent in the process. Technology is too advanced for all these "below average" services/consultants to still be around providing poor work for premium costs. We need to structure and develop a way to prove that the service provider you choose to work with will indeed be an asset to your company providing long term value. It's funny, but in several cases a company is only as smart as their smartest IT guy. Well how do you even know that the guy is smart? CEO's should be able to know if their tech department is constantly innovating and adapting new technologies necessary to be competitive. Services alike, why subscribe to a service for a year unless you're 100% positive that service will constantly be updated, and the developers are constantly working as hard as they did to develop it? That's why I think many technologies fall off and new ones arise -people work so hard to build an app, service, or product, then move on after releasing it or start a new project maintaining the old one on the side. Any company that stops looking ahead sets themselves up for failure at some point down the road. Services need to be worked on non-stop as if they were still being developed.
In recruiter terms we have all these baby boomers with great track records and all these huge numbers, and impressive accomplishments, but are they still relevant? Are the top IT recruiters from the late 90's and early 2000's still constantly innovating? Well of course they are to a certain degree, they have to. My question is how much? Are the guys who staffed the CAD boom on top of iPhone development or have they merely moved on to basic Microsoft and Java? Do they even know how to work an iPhone?
So what about the big firms? Are they focused on training their recruiters weekly on where technology is going, the future of the cloud, is open source safe and reliable, etc, etc? Are they teaching their recruiters who the industry experts are, or how to track Google, Mozilla labs, Adobe labs, Microsoft MVP's & Evangelists, and other communities to see where technology is going? Have they even heard of those communities? I wonder what percent of "tech" recruiters here in Chicago land know that the founders of Ruby on Rails and Django both live in the area.
These big firms have quotas!
X # of Business Development Calls
X # of Candidate Calls
X # of Subscriptions to job boards
X # of incoming Resumes
A problem I see in Tech-Staffing way to much is the lack of innovation. You need to constantly be responding to the market and making changes to adapt. While this is present and known to many people and industries who do "Constantly Innovate", I see a huge lack here in Chicagoland with its big name IT staffing firms. A wide spread hate across Chicago is spreading in the development communities "I hate recruiters" but why? Because none of them innovate - Okay so a recruiter knows .Net and Java but he can't relate to me, he doesn't know anything about mobile applications or open source. He really doesn't know anything relevant at all, He doesn't know what happened at SXSW recently, or any upcoming events -nothing interesting. What he does know is that it's company policy to make 80 calls a day -which is why he is on the phone with you in the first place - not because he has any sort of valuable information to offer.
Now I want to get back to the topic of constantly innovating. In the past it was come up with a good idea, turn your ideas into a product or service, then hit the market. Now it's more to introduce a product or service and whoever can keep their product/service the most "hip" and "stylish" wins. My analogy for this is a fashionable younger person is constantly looking at Celebrities, Peers, and Icons. With so many sources for media and news the "young hipster" is constantly changing and adapting to new styles. If the "young hipster" wears a new jacket to school and gets made fun of chances are he wont wear that jacket again. The jacket gives you an Idea but its ongoing, they never stop, its a day by day bases who knows what will come out but they are constantly ready for change. Companies should strive to innovate in this same manner, surrounding themselves with people doing the same.
