The following is an edited article from a reader who says he has been through the IT employment mill and does not necessarily represent the views of this site. We would welcome a response from within the IT recruitment industry.

As 2005 kicks off, we may wish to remember the upbeat words of IT recruiters in the second half of 2004. In various ways we were told that the IT industry had turned the corner and was now on an upswing. New projects and job vacancies are on the rise, we were told, so dust off your resumes.

What the recruiters did not tell us, however, is how difficult it often is to get a job if you do not happen to be on their A list. The truth is that in professions such as IT, where many employers have effectively outsourced their HR function to body shopping sales people, recruiters virtually hold the power of life or death over the career prospects of highly skilled professionals.

If you speak to most recruiters, they’ll tell you quite freely that when they are asked to fill a job, the first place that they will look for a candidate is on their own database. What’s more, up to 50% of the jobs they fill are candidates placed from their own database. Quite often candidates placed by a recruiter are subsequently placed in other jobs. Thus, no matter how talented, how experienced and how well rounded you are, if you’re not a recruitments agent’s pet, you mostly likely won’t even make it to an interview.

In addition, most IT recruiters have no IT qualifications or experience. They may know a few IT buzz words but, in general, many wouldn’t know the difference between GNU and a CPU (I may be a little harsh – some might know what a CPU is). Therefore, quite often, they are not in a position to judge whether a developer with 10 years C++ experience is more suitable for a senior Java development role than a junior developer who happens to have one year of Java under his belt. All the recruiter sees is the buzz word Java.

Similarly, if you don’t happen to fit the mould because your background is a little unusual then most likely you are way too much trouble for most recruiters. Take two personal acquaintances, whose identities shall be concealed for their privacy. One held a very senior position with a large local IT vendor. He had 15 years of experience and a successful track record of driving numerous big ticket sales, some worth tens of millions of dollars. The other was an experienced analyst programmer who decided to try his hand at sales for a couple of years. Both decided to leave their positions to have a go at something different – quite a common occurrence for someone approaching mid-life. After two years absence doing something completely different, neither was able to get to first base with a recruiter when they decided to re-enter the mainstream jobs market. Apparently, being 40 and having broadened horizons is anathema to recruiters looking for 20 and 30 something worker bees with a limited world view.

An interesting postscript to the above story is that one of the above examples virtually walked into a senior role by approaching an employer directly. The other started an IT company, which is now very successful. Ironically, both are now working in positions where recruiters sometimes ring them to offer their services. Needless to say, neither is very receptive to cold calls from the recruitment industry.

Recruiters will tell you that their interests coincide with those of their clients, the employers. We can safely assume from this that the interests of candidates are not always front and centre in the minds of body shoppers. However, is it even true that all recruiters necessarily have the best interests of employers at heart? It would be fair to say that what employers want is the best talent available for the lowest possible salary. What recruiters want is to fill as many jobs as possible, in the shortest possible time, doing as little work as possible, so they can make as much commission as possible. Do these interests coincide? Sometimes perhaps, but certainly not always. If recruiters think they can fill a role quickly from an agency database with a so-so candidate, in most cases they are not going to look far and wide for the best possible candidate.

Leaving aside the past three years, the IT recruitment industry has been a veritable gold mine for many of its players in the past two decades. The more successful IT recruiters turn over tens of millions of dollars and higher and some of the local players are listed on the ASX.  The growth in the industry has been fuelled to a large extent by the desire of enterprises to outsource as many so-called “non-core” business functions as possible. Both IT workers and IT itself are already casualties of this erroneous concept and HR is rapidly joining the fold. The question needs to be asked: if intellectual property, the people who develop intellectual property and the people charged with the responsibility to keep the company endowed with the best intellectual property developers are not core to an enterprise’s operations, then what is?

IT recruitment is a far too valuable function to be entrusted to third party profiteers and the sooner employers realise this the better off we'll all be.