IT Training Tips

Indian IT Recruiters

In the past few months, I've started getting telephone calls from Indian Recruitment agencies and in some cases, some UK recruitment agencies, who seem to be using Indian based staff, to contact people like me with job offers.

Whilst I'm all for cutting costs, I do however resent cutting the quality of service and this is something I am very much against. My experience with dealing with these 'Indian Recruiters' is not all positive.

"Hello, hello, I got job for you!"

This is not the way I or others for that matter want to be greeted on a telephone call.

I am a busy guy and most of the year I am working on customer's sites, so my time to take calls can be very limited and the time I can devote to a call varies with my work load.

So to have calls which do not conform to a certain level of professionalism I expect, is annoying. I need information given to me concisely as well as quickly, allowing me to make a rapid decision.

IT Recruitment etiquette

When I do get called by an IT recruitment agency, I expect the conversation from the agent to go along the lines of,

"Hello Jas, this is Mark from Top Recruitment Bods, is this a good time to talk?"

Is it a good time to talk? Well, thank you so much for asking, it's polite as well as friendly and I may be on lunch, just about to go to a meeting or on my way home, so asking whether it is a good time to talk is very important to me.

When it is a good time to talk, then I'm all ears and I can have decent chat about what is on offer.

"Are you currently looking for contract work?"

Again thanks for asking, a good recruiter will ask the obvious, otherwise there is little point in continuing the conversation. From letting the recruiter know I am looking for work, the recruiter can now get to the nitty gritty of the opportunity in question.

Now compare this to my experiences with outsourced IT recruiting, where the conversation has gone along the lines of,

"Hello, hello, I got good contract for you",

"Good 12 months contract for you at XXX a day."

"It's in Peterborough, London."

The last point made me laugh, as Peterborough is about 80 miles north of London and this recruiter seems to only know of London in the UK. How can I have confidence, actually respect in someone who doesn't know where the opportunity is in relation to London?

The tone of the conversation was also not to my liking, whereby this recruiter thought they were giving me the opportunity of a lifetime. In fact nothing could be further from the truth, so I replied,

"I am rather busy, could you send me an email and I will look at it later?"

"This a good contract, good money and for 12 months", was the reply back.

At which point I was getting slightly annoyed, so I stated,

"Your rate is too low, I generally work to twice that rate"

The Indian recruiter started replying,

"This is twelve month contract. OK, I can give you 10 pounds more, OK, I can give you twenty pounds more?"

I had to end the conversation and told them politely I was not interested. The audacity to think I would cut my rate substantially, to work on a contract in the middle of nowhere!

I also could not care less if it was a twelve month contract or even a twelve year contract, as for me it is far more important whether the work involved in the contract is to my liking.

Understanding the customer

Like many IT recruiters, this person did not know their customer profile and thought anyone with experience would snap their fingers off for opportunity.

More annoying than not understanding your customer profile was their audacity in assuming that there's was an opportunity too good to miss.

I've also had one outsourced recruiter phoning me several times a day, to try to change my mind. In the end I just stopped answering their calls.