James Serra's Blog

There is nothing more annoying to me in my profession than getting calls and emails from recruiters who are looking for senior-level BI people at ridiculously low rates.  A common example: they want someone with 10-years experience in BI to work in NYC for $45/hr, no expenses paid.  Seriously?  I get 3-10 such requests each day.  90% of the time the recruiters are from India.  They will email you as well as call you.  And if you make the mistake of replying to an email of theirs, you can expect they will call you immediately and continue calling until you pickup, no matter what time of day it is (somehow they got my home and cell phone and would call both numerous times).  Many times their English is poor and their phone numbers are disguised to show as coming from the US (New Jersey seems to be the most popular one, where they have “headquarters” there with outsourcing centers in India).  They make telemarketers seem like angels.

Most of the time their email does not tell you what the pay rate is.  If you ask, they usually reply “Rate is negotiable please let me whats the rate you are looking for?”.  If you insist they will tell you, and you can expect the rate to be no better than half of what the average going rate is.

My advise is to immediately delete an email from an Indian firm or hangup if they call (but beware they sometimes use fake English names).  The few times I have expressed interest were complete wastes of time.  They always want your resume (no doubt they have a quota to obtain a certain amount of resumes each week), and always want you to fill out a bunch of useless info (i.e. name, address, visa status, expected hourly rate, etc).  And to top it off, many of the jobs are nowhere even close to my skill set (“You are a perfect fit for the opening we have for a K2 developer”).  They never bothered to actually look at my LinkedIn profile, as you would then know I am nowhere near a “perfect fit”.  Sending out these boilerplate template emails is no different from spam.  Often these emails will have a unsubscribe link that will take you to a webpage that looks just like the graphic below, with a different company name and color, but everything else is the same, leading me to believe they are all working under the same company:

Unfortunately these recruiters are all over dice.com now, making it that much more difficult to filter through the job listings to find jobs worth applying for.  Many times you will see multiple postings of the same position from different Indian recruiting firms (just the other day I saw 13 postings on dice for the same exact position).

These recruiters are very bottom-level people who make tons of calls a day to try to find someone who expresses interest.  When that person is found, they then hand you off to their “manager” who will try to convince you to allow them to submit you to the client at some crazy low rate (a recent recruiter asked me if I would be interested in taking a contract in Minnesota, no expenses paid, for $40/hr less than I am making now at a local client.  He knew what I was making and that I did not have to travel, yet he still tried to convince me to let him submit me).

These firms from India are offering low rates because there are so many layers of companies taking a piece of the rate.  Here is a typical scenario: A US company wants to hire a consultant/contractor, so they have a US staffing firm try to fill the position. That staffing firm can’t find someone, so they sub-contract out to a large staffing firm in India. That large staffing firm then sub-contracts out to a smaller staffing firms in India, and on-and-on.

If contacted by one of these recruiters, the first question to ask them is if they are working directly for the client.  If not, they are one of many layers and the hourly rate will be low.  I see similar abuse at large consulting firms offering a low salary.  Those firms pay a low salary and then bill you at triple (or more) what you are making.  The result?  Lot’s of junior programmers doing senior level work.  That is why so many projects fail or go way over budget .

I asked a recruiter who has been in the industry a long time about this:

I’ve actually worked for a few Indian firms and your assessment is pretty accurate.  Sometimes there are many layers to a deal and that destroys the margin.  But sometimes they may just be recruiting for a client that doesn’t care about quality talent and only offers poor rates.  To work with those types of clients, some staffing firms take the approach of throwing as much “bleep” against the wall and hoping some of it sticks.  That takes very little recruiting talent and it is more of a numbers game than anything else.  But you get what you pay for, and the clients that provide these low bill rates usually get the lesser talent (or the talent that is sponsored on an H-1B until that person gets their Green Card).  I hate to stereotype, but foreign national firms are usually the ones that are willing to churn through the “low rate” business, that is why they are the ones always contacting you about low margin stuff.

I’m not a fan of working with these types of firms.  There is very little accountability, a lot of turnover, and it gets pretty greasy when everyone is fighting over a nickel.  When I first got out of school and didn’t know any better, I went to work for a firm like this.  I will say this, it was a great way to get experience and I learned a lot during my time there – it helped me get to where I am today, so I can’t bash it too hard.  At this point in my career I just choose not to work that way any longer.  But if you take me as an example of the experience level of people who work in that space (I had none to very little when I worked there) it is a good reflection of the type of people you’re connecting with.  They don’t know very much about the business, the client, the details of the opportunity, or the staffing industry for that matter.  They are basically reading you a job description word-for-word, and that job description was spit out of a vendor management system where the staffing firm has no inside knowledge.  Not much value there – but there is a market for this type of business and so you’ll continue to see it…

More info:

I’ve Reached an Unfortunat​e Conclusion About Indian Recruiters

Indian Recruiters – What Is Wrong With This Country?

The Big 5 IT consulting companies (Accenture, Deloitte Consulting, PwC (formerly PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP), KPMG, Ernst & Young) have various titles given to consultants along a career path.  Wikipedia had good descriptions of the titles, and using that and a few other descriptions I came up with these levels (most firms have a subset of these):

Associate Consultant
An associate consultant is at the beginning of their consulting career and will typically do work to support the consultants and senior consultants – data collection and analysis, workshop support, etc.  An Associate Consultant can also refer to a day rate contractor at any level, differentiating them from an employee of the firm (e.g. Associate Managing Consultant).

Consultant
A consultant is ‘learning the trade’ within a specific domain of expertise.  A consultant is developing in most competency dimensions and work in different roles on different projects in a specific domain.

Senior Consultant
A senior consultant has developed a specialisation within a specific domain of expertise.  A senior consultant is capable of working independently as well as in teams.  A senior consultant is often responsible for the completion of a part of a project or activities for which he/she leads a small team.  A senior consultant is more client oriented and explores sales activities.

Associate
Business development, Issue owner, Client team manager, Relationship builder

Senior Associate
Engagement manager, Owner of day-to-day client relationship, Aligned to industry or functional domain

Managing Consultant
A managing consultant has started to excel in some of the competency dimensions.  A managing consultant is known for domain expertise and is capable of generating his or her own work and that of others.  As such the managing consultant is often responsible for business volume, through (add-on) sales and delivering a project.  A managing consultant can act as a team lead or counselor for other team members.

Senior Manager

Principal Consultant
A principal consultant has a strong business impact and is often part of the company’s leadership.  A principal consultant is capable of shaping a piece of business being the leader in a specific domain.  A principal consultant develops high-level business relations and high-impact projects.  A Principal is capable of leading large teams

Vice President
Focus on new business development and management, recruitment and career development of employees, and development of the companies national capabilities.​  Vice Presidents propose projects, navigate them through the sales cycle, and then manage project delivery (especially if the firm does not have a dedicated professional sales staff)

Senior Vice President

Director

Partner

CIO/CTO

More info:

Consulting Company Career Paths – A Comparison

The Future and the Big 5

Grade (consulting)

I asked a recruiter to check out my blogs about consulting, and his response is below.  He had some good points on billling rates and what recruiters do behind the scenes:

I really enjoyed reading over your blog you have a lot of really good information in there. I especially enjoyed your articles about billing rates, It’s always interesting to see the topic from a consultants perspective. From what I read everything seems to be fairly spot on. The biggest trouble I run into is most consultants don’t realize that recruiting is a gamble of time and money. A good recruiter will fill 1 or 2 positions for every 10 orders they work on which means that 80% percent of the time we are not getting paid for our efforts so we have to make it up somewhere. An example of this is say my company gets a hot new order and puts 3 recruiters on it being conservative say each recruiter makes about $150 a day in a base salary that is $450 a day or $2250 a week a normal job order can stay open for up to 3 weeks or longer doing the math that is almost seven thousand dollars that my company is betting that we can fill the position with no guarantee that we won’t be beat by another firm or that the candidate won’t decide to go with another position. That number is just off of the base salary of 3 recruiters, it doesn’t calculate our other expenses that enables a recruiter to be effective at his or her job, such as paying for access to the job boards and our accounting and HR departments when all is said and done working on that one job order can cost up to 15k for a small firm with no guarantee of a return.

I also found the subject of if an agency should tell their consultants their billing rate or not to be interesting. I started off working for a firm that did primarily full-time placements where we had a fee of about 25-30% of the first year salary so the more money I negotiated for my candidate the more I would make in a commission. Working short-term placements tends to shake things up a bit, most consultants believe that because we are billing them out at $150 that they are worth $150 an hour which is only half-true. We do everything we can to pay market competitive salaries but there has to be some room to make it worth my time and my company’s investment. The other problem is a lot of the time a recruiter may not know what the billing rate is going to be a lot of the time a staffing company will have account managers on staff who do the majority to the salary negotiations, they will meet with the client negotiate the rate then tell the recruiter to go find a data analyst for whatever the predetermined rate was.

In my opinion you can go either way, but what I tell my consultants is that as long as they are happy with their current salary and they don’t feel taken advantage of then they shouldn’t worry about the billing rate. If they feel taken advantage of then they should address the issue and that they are free to seek employment elsewhere. I believe in being as transparent as possible so if asked about the billing rate by a consultant I will tell them, but it’s not something I would fixate about.