The Incredible, Shrinking Contracting Company

If you, either in the role of a technology job-seeker or a hiring manager, were to design the perfect contracting / staffing / augmentation / solution provider / consultant company, what would it look like?

For example, would you want, in the staffing company you choose, any of the following qualities?

• Young, ill-trained, inexperienced, poorly-paid recruiting staff with extremely high turnover rates
• Zero commitment to the well-being of their contractors, beyond paying them after successfully billing the customer
• Zero commitment to the well-being of their customers, beyond closing the deals and getting money for warm bodies, even if just for a month or two
• Zero knowledge of the high-tech domain, nor what any of the terminology, job descriptions, responsibilities actually mean
• Zero knowledge of the job market, either from the buyers' or sellers' point of view
• Zero knowledge of the hiring companies in the market
• Zero knowledge of, and no accumulation of, available, properly vetted and willing workers
• Automated, key-word oriented software searches on LinkedIn and the largest job sites
• A business model fundamentally based on mindless, superficial processing of large numbers of possible matches with extremely low success rates
• Complete inability to evaluate incoming job descriptions and rate them by likelihood of match or reasonableness, and reject obviously bad descriptions out of hand
• Complete inability to evaluate candidates to screen out phony, exaggerated or outright dishonest, fraudulent resumes or claims to abilities and talent, and reject bad resumes out of hand
• No memory whatsoever, only the present, today, matters. Learning from experience disappears in the rush to close deals or meet unrealistic deadlines
• No business integrity nor ethics whatsoever, only a focus on "successful" sales and/or implementations at any cost
• A mindless willingness to hammer a square peg into a round hole, then lie about it; in other words, knowingly send unqualified workers to a job where failure is almost a certainty?
• Butts in chairs, fingers on keyboards = "success". I beg to differ!

I suspect not. However, all of the above are recent and repeated observations. It has gotten to the point that I don't want to talk to the staffing companies anymore, even when I need a job.

Don't believe me, compare with your own experiences over the last few years. How many of the points above are now routine, rather than exceptions?

Regardless of problems, the staffing industry continues to be very important to the success of companies. Earlier, I created several narratives to expose some of the issues inherent in this vital, but quite challenged industry.

I can tell you, from my own experience, that the staffing industry has declined in quality so much over the last 20 years so as to be nearly useless today on average, even counter-productive. Hiring companies cannot tell the good ones from the bad ones, for the bad ones have learned to tailor their narratives and lie like politicians. The result is failure, on an unprecedented scale.

The good staffing companies are so almost accidentally, and may not be able to sustain their quality over any long stretch of time. What is worse, and much more important, is that the customers (hiring companies) have led the charge straight to the bottom. They stuff their requirements with crazy, unrealistic demands that the market can never fulfill, and do so deliberately.

Needless to say, the failure rate on both sides is high enough so that this enormous issue needs to be re-examined. The market for contractors continues to be extremely important for companies wishing to succeed.

In fact, there is a way to make a staffing company work very well, but it involves a great deal of long-term thinking, ethics, honesty, diligent work, willingness to pass on bad deals, and implementation, prior to results and reward. That is what makes this type of business very difficult.

Tired as I am of employment instability, project failures due to bad customers and / or employers, even when the results produced were demonstrate-ably excellent and project-saving, ham-fisted and moronic legislative mandates that make matters worse, I have resolved to design a multi-purpose company that will work in this crazy industry.

In a future post, I will go through the precise conditions and practices that can make a good, sustainable staffing company. Today, I showed what was broken. Next, I will show how to fix it permanently.

Table of Context