Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist

Another difference between actors and the engineers the OP is talking about is that engineers are salaried employees who do a job search every few years at the most, and actors are self employed freelancers whose jobs last at most a few months. In that sense it almost doesn&#x27;t make sense to talk about the unemployment rate for actors.<p>An area where it may make more sense for engineers to have agents is in the freelance space. Any dev shop that has a sales team is doing essentially the same thing.<p>I would consider paying a finder&#x27;s fee to an agent-type entity who could find me decent projects and keep my pipeline full so I didn&#x27;t have to worry about it.

&gt; There are people who still have trouble finding work in the status quo. Examples might be engineers who:<p>&gt; don’t look good on paper but are actually very good<p>I think (hope?) I fall into this category. She talks about five on-site interviews being the usual limit for a single job search. After twelve years I have only <i>ever</i> had five, and it isn&#x27;t for lack of trying.<p>Actually I think my interview performance history is pretty good. I have had about twelve phone&#x2F;live screens, of which I passed nine, resulting in five on-site interviews.[1] Those on-sites yielded three offers, of which I accepted two. The problem is, the response rate to my resume submissions is horrid. Even when I have an &quot;in&quot; at the company. I heard too many times while switching between programs at my first employer something to the effect of, &quot;We would have never hired you by looking at your resume, but I&#x27;m glad we did.&quot; I have other, similar statements concerning underestimation of what I am capable of.<p>Maybe what I need is more of a marketing specialist than an agent, but I have always imagined that to be the primary job of an agent. I really need someone to help me figure out how to present myself better. I would actually pay for that service; I guess, as she says in the post, there are not enough of me to support a business. Is that something that could be combined with a conventional recruiting operation, though?<p>[1] Two on-sites I declined, one on-site didn&#x27;t happen because the company decided not to hire for the position[2], and the third on-site never materialized because the company just stopped talking to me.<p>[2] Or so they said. Maybe they switched me from &quot;pass&quot; to &quot;fail&quot; after telling me I passed.

Aline, this is a fantastic article. I agree with many of the points in principle, but I don&#x27;t agree with the outcome. I believe a model where candidates pay 3rd parties for precise jobhunting help is economically rational, and can work - it&#x27;s effectively what we&#x27;re doing at <a href="http://offerletter.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;offerletter.io</a>.<p>Here&#x27;s where you and I diverge:<p>1) Yes, engineers and other in-demand workers have ready access to jobs. I remember when I was looking for a good engineering job out of Amazon, I was basically spammed nonstop by virtually every party on the planet.<p>2) But the <i>opportunity cost</i> for poor job selection is enormously high. The difference between choosing between a good startup on good terms, and a less-good startup on less-good terms, can literally mean the difference between retiring 20 years early having your work used by millions of people, and just puddling around for a few years with, say, the occasional PyCon lightning talk for visibility.<p>At <a href="http://offerletter.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;offerletter.io</a> , we are doing precisely this - we are getting paid by engineers, designers and PMs for value added - in this case, during the negotiation process. Our team of Advisors guides candidates on the &quot;last-mile&quot; of offer selection and negotiation in exchange for a cut of the increase.<p>It makes too much sense - there&#x27;s massive information asymmetry during the process, companies are full of shit, and many people outside of &quot;the club&quot; - however you choose to define it - just don&#x27;t know what they&#x27;re worth, or how to get it. While we can&#x27;t justify charging the $10k-$30k that recruiters make, the incentives are still incredibly strong for us to do what we do.<p>And of course there&#x27;s the ethical and human component, which is very strong - I tried more traditional recruiting for a while and just raw selling of companies is so tiring. I like helping people first - all of the Advisors do.

Frankly, I&#x27;m surprised that instead of recruiters or agents, there aren&#x27;t firms dedicated to employee assessment.<p>The value add to employers would be a standard assessment tool, reduced screening time for employees that can be eliminated quickly based on lack of skill, and using an assessment that is potentially better correlated with good employees than things like degree and school, or previous employer (decreasing both false positives from people who can&#x27;t hack it despite their credentials, and decreasing false negatives by letting people with the skills demonstrate them).<p>For prospective employees, you get a single assessment that may open up a lot of jobs. Since the company doing the assessment isn&#x27;t the one hiring you, they can tell you what you need to work on, even provide training opportunities.<p>Imagine someone telling you, &quot;You aren&#x27;t quite what we need, take these onlike courses and pass them and we will almost definitely be able to find someone to hire you.&quot;<p>And by acting as an intermediary between prospective employees and employers, the time cost of submitting resumes to employers that aren&#x27;t well matched is decreased.<p>Further you might be partially eligible for a job, but lack specific skills, and they can ask if you are willing to take a temporary pay cut in return for on the job training as you work.<p>One of the things personally holding me back, is that you really need to be in school to get an internship. I already have a degree, just not in CS, and I&#x27;d love to be able to learn on the job at the intern level, instead of feeling stuck unless I go back for a master&#x27;s degree.<p>I think there is a real opportunity, not just for such a company, but for a company that creates a standard or standards for assessment and licenses it&#x2F;them to different companies.<p>Further, such assessments would be useful to assess not just individuals, but educational programs. Compare performance for people who graduate from different programs, including online training.

Another niche that can theoretically exist is the &quot;superstar&quot; engineers. If the best engineers got paid 10x more than the worst, the best agents could obtain salary improvements in the 100k&#x27;s for their clients, for which a commission would make sense. This will probably not exist, for reasons &quot;we will leave for a future blog post&quot; (tm).

Agents can and should exist if only for bargaining on salary and benefits. The average person in just about any field could benefit from an agent to negotiate on their behalf.<p>Most people simply don&#x27;t negotiate any part of their job beyond initial salary. Sometimes people might negotiate benefits, but that is somewhat rare.<p>More importantly, unlike traditional contracts with expiration dates, the average person doesn&#x27;t renegotiate their deal very often or at all. They take what they get from their boss, hoping to get at least a cost of living increase, which is more and more rare.<p>All of this means that each year you are effectively earning less if you don&#x27;t renegotiate your deal. What was maybe a good deal 5 years ago is now worth 11% less than it was when you started.<p>So, unless you are renegotiating your deal, you are agreeing to keep a deal that is less valuable each year.<p>Knowing that, having an agent or any mechanism to force negotiating on an ongoing basis would be a huge step in the right direction for most people.

I wish agents existed, at least for the contract market. Once a contract is finished, it could take a while until one finds the next gig, so having an agent would definitely help. A dream of mine was (before getting married and &#x27;settling down&#x27;) to be able to work contracts 6-9 months of the year, and to travel the rest. Temporary contract work would be ideal for that scenario.<p>I understand why the recruiting market is skewed in favor of recruiters and companies, yet I wish there was a bit more quality for engineers. In my 10+ years in IT, I have only met one reliable recruiter - someone I could call upon when I had a need, and who knew my background and skills. 99% would forget about me as soon as that particular position was filled.

I think that assessing technical talent is fundamentally different than other types of talent, because technical stuff can be measured more effectively, and talent for writing code or designing and then implementing an architecture is also easier to measure than, say, social skills. However, there are other aspects that we should not underestimate:<p>1) How well this person works in a team? 2) What&#x27;s his&#x2F;her goal in life? Is he &quot;done&quot;, and looking to &quot;park&quot; in a job until retirement? Or still very willing to learn a lot? 3) How professional is his work? I mean: does he write documentation, does he care about shipping software that is elegant and functional, etc. Etc.<p>There are two companies that I admire for what they&#x27;re doing in this field, at two different stages:<p>Gild.com - a very unique approach to measuring technical talent, by using a proprietary algorithm that takes your github, stack overflow, etc, mixes all up, adds some juice, and voilà: you have a score. A successful, estabilished company.<p>CloudAcademy.com - younger and smaller, they mix tech snippets, videos, and an amazing quiz system to assess your skills (currently focusing only on Cloud Computing stuff, e.g. AWS, Azure, Google Compute Platform, Rackspace, VMware vCloud Air). They also added practical labs. What&#x27;s interesting is that after 20-30 minutes of assessing your skills, they get a very clear picture of what you know and what you don&#x27;t, which I believe is very hard. (Disclaimer: I am an advisor and investor in the latter.)

I&#x27;ve never been through a job application &#x2F; interview process that didn&#x27;t result in an offer. 4 interviews, 4 job offers, 3 taken, in about 11 years in this industry.<p>That probably means I haven&#x27;t been aiming high enough. But I&#x27;m also very selective about who I&#x27;ll consider interviewing with, yet I&#x27;m not particularly active in searching. Unless a company comes to me, and I like the company, I&#x27;m unlikely to interview. This pretty much guarantees that I&#x27;ll never work for a big company unless via acquisition.<p>I think there&#x27;s definitely a problem in &quot;matchmaking&quot;. I&#x27;d like to be approached by more interesting companies doing interesting things, but I&#x27;m not interested enough to spend the time to actively seek them out.<p>Most approaches are by startup of the week types. And I was never contacted in the first 5 years I lived in London, while I was working remotely for a California-based company (Borland then Embarcadero) - it wasn&#x27;t until I switched to a local job that I turned up on their radar.

This business will only grow in the next couple of years. Programming, as a skill, has little-to-no barrier to entry. More and more classes are teaching people how to program.<p>On one hand, it&#x27;s great so many people are learning to code. I&#x27;m a firm believer in the cause. However, it will also inevitably flood the engineering labor market with a lot of noise.<p>Companies don&#x27;t want to spend time sifting through piles of resumes from people who started programming in rails six months ago. &quot;Talent agencies&quot; offer a nice value prop to companies: filter out the noise. I suspect we will start to see more of these companies popping up in the next few years, and the business model will gain traction as more of the labor force moves into engineering.

Would a Talent Agent work for remote workers? Lots of engineers I know would love to work remotely, but when they tried, they couldnt find high paying consistent jobs without putting in considerable effort marketing and building relationships. Could be worth looking into.

Headhunters use this same sort of model. For example, take a look at the finance industry. They interview talented, young people with 2 to 5 years of experience for specialized positions (private equity, investment banking, corporate finance), then try to match up that person with one of the positions in their database. The potential new hire isn&#x27;t charged a dime. The headhunter charges the hiring firm a percent of the new hire&#x27;s starting salary (30% to 50%).<p>The assumption behind this model is that:<p>1) Companies are willing to pay for the best talent<p>2) No in-house capability to recruit or choose to spend their time on the core function of their business rather than screen individuals<p>3) (Salary + placement fee) &gt; cost to recruit that person themselves

(Cofounder of 10x Management here.)<p>Thanks for the shout-out, Aline! You point out the main difference in our models, which is exactly what makes our talent agency work: the key is the focus on contract&#x2F;freelance placement.<p>Recruiters who do full-time placement optimize for the short-term -- a single transaction -- which leads to all sort of misaligned incentives and shady practices. With 10x, we work with the same talent over the course of years, so we optimize for the long term and help the people on our roster for (ideally) the duration of their careers. And the talent is more than happy to pay for our services.<p>&gt;&gt;&gt; &quot;Agents make sense when it’s hard to find a job or when the opportunity cost of looking for work is high enough to justify paying someone else.... For engineers, because the shortage is in labor and not jobs, paying out a portion of your salary for a task you can easily do yourself doesn’t make much sense.&quot;<p>This reminds me of the &quot;adverse selection&quot; argument we hear a lot, i.e. the best programmers have no trouble finding work, so wouldn&#x27;t an agency only attract people who aren&#x27;t good enough to source their own opportunities? The simple answer to this: Tom Cruise has no problem finding work, but he still has an agent. He wants to spend his time acting, not negotiating, invoicing, collecting, etc.<p>You also mention that the talent agency model works for niche skills, but then you say there isn&#x27;t a big enough market for these skills. I&#x27;d disagree with the second half of that. Technology is getting increasingly specialized. Software, hardware, electrical, all have sub-fields and sub-sub-fields and sub-sub-sub-fields. The same general model applies to most of these sub-sub-sub-fields, and there are absolutely enough of them to justify a market.<p>In fact, the niche skills lend themselves especially well to the talent agency model, since companies don&#x27;t necessarily need to employ those people full time. Data science is a good example of this... a lot of companies could benefit from the insights of a data scientist, but most of them don&#x27;t need a salaried data scientist on staff. Through 10x, companies large and small have a la carte access to pre-vetted specialists (and generalists), on demand.

I used to have an agent. We tried really hard but companies pretty much refused to work with us or worked very reluctantly. I thought the deal was really good, I do my awesome work and my agent gets me in front of best places I could do that work, but unfortunately we couldn&#x27;t make it work.<p>When I say hard, mostly we tried for few months and it didn&#x27;t work.<p>P.S. To clarify, I would happily pay a cut from my rate to my agent, that was the deal. I wouldn&#x27;t mind upfronting as well, but we both knew each other well.

Interesting read although it seems overly focused on the differences between Hollywood and certain types of engineering in the average difficulty of finding a job. I suspect it&#x27;s more about the huge differences in how the market works for typical actors and typical engineers as opposed to their relative employment rates. And some of it probably boils down to &quot;it&#x27;s just the way things are done.&quot;

Remark:<p>If I could pair with a &quot;engagement specialist&quot; who would find me a reliable stream of contract work at the usual rates for contract work (i.e., adequate to handle benefits) &amp; skim off the percentage, I&#x27;d be extremely open to that idea.<p>Marketplaces like, e.g., odesk, are simply worthless to me.

&gt; Engineers were super excited about this. Until I mentioned the part where they’d have to pay me, that is.<p>It&#x27;s a curious thing in an age where people prefer to cut out the middleman-- e.g. stock brokers &amp; travel agents. Some people still want (need) their own Jerry Maguire to find a job.

It sort of happens for freelancers in UK. Recruiter gets the cut of what employer is paying, frequent job changes are very likely (2 years in a &quot;worst&quot; case) so good candidates are worth taken care of.

If the distinction is who writes their cheques, aren&#x27;t they just called marketing people, and they work on the scale of selling consulting teams?