It's not that recruiters are bad, it is the situation
A recent post by someone else highlighted that most recruiters are not bad people nor are bad businesspersons. This post will elaborate on a few examples I've seen.
Any narrative that demonizes a whole class of people should be looked upon with extreme suspicion. The person peddling the narrative should prove it, and that's not easy to do. I routinely reject such broad narratives, and I think others should, too.
Here is the story (and it's just that, folks, nothing more, a story I made up to illustrate some important points):
Manager Jen at start-up company Buzz Turnip is a newly minted manager with a merit promotion. She is conscientious, hard-working, intelligent. She has been handed a few developers and a massive amount of work with an extremely aggressive schedule. Within days, she has figured out her crew will not be able to meet the deadlines, so she talks to her boss about it. Jen is getting anxious.
Darl, her boss, is not quite so conscientious as Jen, has been around for years, and just tosses off a boilerplate suggestion:
"That's easy, Jen. You've got a budget with plenty of unused money, I made sure of that. Just hire some contractors, fast, and get things rolling that way."
Jen sits down at her desk and figures out how many contractors she needs, and adds one extra to help take up the backlog. She calls Trudie at InterGalactic Consulting, because they have the highest ratings on the several websites she checked. Trudie has a good reputation as a straight-shooter.
Trudie posts the positions by noon the same day, and has several resumes by the end of the day. By noon the next day, she has arranged several interviews with Jen for contractors Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice. All of them are bright, experienced, and good at their specialties. Jen likes all of them, and makes offers which are accepted. All are hired as W2 contractors of InterGalactic and placed at Buzz Turnip.
At this point, Jen is beginning to feel relief and is less anxious. She has Bob and Carol start the second day, and Ted and Alice the third day. She plans to do the on-boarding work for one of them in the morning, the other in the afternoon, all while keeping up a crazy schedule involving meetings and other bureaucratic chaos.
Jen has no idea at this point that contractors need to be handled differently than employees. Her employees have been at the company long enough to know where everything is, who they need to talk to, what the vision is, etc. They get it. The contractors have zero context, don't know where the version control system is, don't know the name of the DEV database, etc. While they are competent, they start clueless. Buzz Turnip goes fast, fast, fast, and there is little in the way of clear or sensible process. The place is a chaos tornado.
Jen gives the contractors each a mentor from her small pool of employees, a smart move that will help waste less of her time. She also provides them with a written list of tasks and due dates. They get to work immediately afterwards.
Bob has done this type of consulting before, and knows he has very little time to get oriented. He also knows he's going to find major, major stumbling blocks on his way to getting his work done, and so proceeds to plow right into it, so he can find the problems and slay them.
Carol, Ted and Alice, unfortunately, lack this specific experience and have a hard time getting to the actual work. They are flailing, because they need things that are not easy to find.
Eventually, they get over fear and shyness and start asking questions. First they ask their mentors. Each mentor knows a portion of what all of them need, but not all of it. Intimidated, they don't think to keep asking until they get answers. By the end of the first day on the job, Carol, Ted and Alice are feeling anxious and frustrated.
Meanwhile, Jen has assumed that she has what she needs to meet her goals, not realizing that 75% of her contractors can't get the work done yet for lack of the proper tools. She talks in meetings as though everything is going fine. By the third day of the contractors' tenure, Carol, Ted and Alice are spending their time documenting what is stopping them and their efforts to navigate.
She has a staff meeting at the end of the day, and receives shocking news. Not only has the work not gotten done, but her team is actually behind further now. She starts asking questions, and finds that three of the contractors have produced nothing. Only Bob has gotten some work done. She tries to figure out the problem. Bob isn't talking, he knows better. The meeting gradually descends into an unpleasant blame-game. Jen is overwhelmed. Her boss Darl won't help, saying she is manager now and it is her responsibility to fix this.
Jen has a problem. She does not have time to carefully sort through the plethora of issues here, and she has picked up on the frustration of Carol, Ted and Alice. She is anxious and frustrated, too. She only knows for sure one of the contractors can get the work done, the other three can't. She calls Trudie.
Trudie needs the business from Buzz Turnip, badly. Her contractors ultimately are the resources she sells to get that business. No question what her decision must be. She pulls Carol, Ted and Alice and lets them go. Then she immediately posts the positions again, this time intending to find twice as many candidates. She'll ask each of them about experience getting up and running in chaotic situations at new jobs.
Problem solved?
There's the story. I've compressed it a lot - most of the time, this sort of situation takes a couple of months to play out. Analysis will follow in a subsequent post.
Any narrative that demonizes a whole class of people should be looked upon with extreme suspicion. The person peddling the narrative should prove it, and that's not easy to do. I routinely reject such broad narratives, and I think others should, too.
Here is the story (and it's just that, folks, nothing more, a story I made up to illustrate some important points):
Manager Jen at start-up company Buzz Turnip is a newly minted manager with a merit promotion. She is conscientious, hard-working, intelligent. She has been handed a few developers and a massive amount of work with an extremely aggressive schedule. Within days, she has figured out her crew will not be able to meet the deadlines, so she talks to her boss about it. Jen is getting anxious.
Darl, her boss, is not quite so conscientious as Jen, has been around for years, and just tosses off a boilerplate suggestion:
"That's easy, Jen. You've got a budget with plenty of unused money, I made sure of that. Just hire some contractors, fast, and get things rolling that way."
Jen sits down at her desk and figures out how many contractors she needs, and adds one extra to help take up the backlog. She calls Trudie at InterGalactic Consulting, because they have the highest ratings on the several websites she checked. Trudie has a good reputation as a straight-shooter.
Trudie posts the positions by noon the same day, and has several resumes by the end of the day. By noon the next day, she has arranged several interviews with Jen for contractors Bob, Carol, Ted and Alice. All of them are bright, experienced, and good at their specialties. Jen likes all of them, and makes offers which are accepted. All are hired as W2 contractors of InterGalactic and placed at Buzz Turnip.
At this point, Jen is beginning to feel relief and is less anxious. She has Bob and Carol start the second day, and Ted and Alice the third day. She plans to do the on-boarding work for one of them in the morning, the other in the afternoon, all while keeping up a crazy schedule involving meetings and other bureaucratic chaos.
Jen has no idea at this point that contractors need to be handled differently than employees. Her employees have been at the company long enough to know where everything is, who they need to talk to, what the vision is, etc. They get it. The contractors have zero context, don't know where the version control system is, don't know the name of the DEV database, etc. While they are competent, they start clueless. Buzz Turnip goes fast, fast, fast, and there is little in the way of clear or sensible process. The place is a chaos tornado.
Jen gives the contractors each a mentor from her small pool of employees, a smart move that will help waste less of her time. She also provides them with a written list of tasks and due dates. They get to work immediately afterwards.
Bob has done this type of consulting before, and knows he has very little time to get oriented. He also knows he's going to find major, major stumbling blocks on his way to getting his work done, and so proceeds to plow right into it, so he can find the problems and slay them.
Carol, Ted and Alice, unfortunately, lack this specific experience and have a hard time getting to the actual work. They are flailing, because they need things that are not easy to find.
Eventually, they get over fear and shyness and start asking questions. First they ask their mentors. Each mentor knows a portion of what all of them need, but not all of it. Intimidated, they don't think to keep asking until they get answers. By the end of the first day on the job, Carol, Ted and Alice are feeling anxious and frustrated.
Meanwhile, Jen has assumed that she has what she needs to meet her goals, not realizing that 75% of her contractors can't get the work done yet for lack of the proper tools. She talks in meetings as though everything is going fine. By the third day of the contractors' tenure, Carol, Ted and Alice are spending their time documenting what is stopping them and their efforts to navigate.
She has a staff meeting at the end of the day, and receives shocking news. Not only has the work not gotten done, but her team is actually behind further now. She starts asking questions, and finds that three of the contractors have produced nothing. Only Bob has gotten some work done. She tries to figure out the problem. Bob isn't talking, he knows better. The meeting gradually descends into an unpleasant blame-game. Jen is overwhelmed. Her boss Darl won't help, saying she is manager now and it is her responsibility to fix this.
Jen has a problem. She does not have time to carefully sort through the plethora of issues here, and she has picked up on the frustration of Carol, Ted and Alice. She is anxious and frustrated, too. She only knows for sure one of the contractors can get the work done, the other three can't. She calls Trudie.
Trudie needs the business from Buzz Turnip, badly. Her contractors ultimately are the resources she sells to get that business. No question what her decision must be. She pulls Carol, Ted and Alice and lets them go. Then she immediately posts the positions again, this time intending to find twice as many candidates. She'll ask each of them about experience getting up and running in chaotic situations at new jobs.
Problem solved?
There's the story. I've compressed it a lot - most of the time, this sort of situation takes a couple of months to play out. Analysis will follow in a subsequent post.
Comments
Post a Comment