5 Questions to Expect From an IT Staffing Agency
Stephen Nesbitt | IT Recruiter | Twitter | LinkedIn
I know what you’re thinking! Of course there are more than five questions that you will be asked when working with an IT staffing agency. However, in my humble opinion, these are the five most important and they are the best way to identify whether the job fits for you, and whether you fit the job!
Questions to Expect From an IT Staffing Agency
1. On a scale of 1-10 how seriously are you about looking for a new job?
An IT staffing agency gets paid to help companies connect with qualified IT talent. If you as a job seeker aren’t that serious about looking for a new role, it doesn’t make sense for a recruiter to spend a lot of time trying to get you interviews when this will just end up wasting the client’s time, the recruiter’s time and your time. That’s why it’s extremely important to ask this question. If you are currently in a permanent position and a staffing agency doesn’t ask you this, then they aren’t doing their job properly. If you say 10/10 then we are much more interested in working with you. If you say 4/10, then we will try and explore why you aren’t closer to a 10. This could lead to us recommending you take some time and get back to us when you are more serious or perhaps we could help you work through some of your concerns and have you in a better position to seriously make a job move.
2. Why are you looking? Why are you looking to leave your current role?
If we could bold and star a question to ask you…this is the one – We need to find out your motivation for wanting to change jobs. When we’re on the phone with you and ask why you are looking for a new job, when we hear “because I want to make more money”…thats a red flag. You are ideally not looking to make a career move in order to get a raise.
The problem with this answer is that if we place you, you might jump ship from that job after just a few months for more money somewhere else.
Some fair reasons we hear pretty commonly are:
“I’m looking for something more stable”
“I want to work with newer technologies”
“I would like to work closer to home”
If you are looking for a permanent role, we want to place you somewhere you will enjoy it and will want to stay for a long time. Our primary goal is to make sure that both you and the client are completely happy! Sounds simple…but the industry has a bad rep for a reason. It’s important to do the basics right.
3. What type of role are you looking for?
This question is great because it leaves it wide open for you to respond however you want. Answers I hear range from “I’m looking for a .Net Developer role” or “I’m looking for a Junior position” or “I’m looking for a job in downtown Toronto”. Obviously it is really important to find out what you want right away, otherwise everyone involved is just wasting their time. It is also vitally important to know what you are looking for, so we can incorporate your future plans and goals into our mentoring program.
4. What technologies are you looking to work with? How many years experience with X technology do you have and what percentage of the time did you use it in each of your jobs?
The majority of jobs we search on at WTT are technical. Therefore, it is important for us to qualify your technical skills right away. We need to know what technologies you use, how many years experience you have with those technologies, how recently you have used them, and what percentage of the time have you worked with them. If a client asks us to find a .Net Developer with 6 years of C# experience, they want someone who has been using it every day for those 6 years, not 25% of the time. From your perspective, it is beneficial that we ask these questions so you know whether you want to move ahead with the position or not.
5. What are your salary expectations?
What salary would you realistically consider? I can’t tell you the amount of times I’ve had candidates give us a 10-20k range of what they are targeting. If the client is looking to pay 40-45k and you say you are looking for 40-60k it makes it difficult for to decipher what you really want. The last thing we want to do is waste anyone’s time.
Recruiters ideally need to get it down to a 5k range at most. Of course there might be extenuating circumstances that come up during your interview with the client that might affect your salary range. However, a good staffing agency does everything in its power to try and give you as much info about the job as possible beforehand so that we can submit you at a salary that you would realistically accept. Building on this, recruiters should also ask what you are earning in your current job. If you are making 50k and you are telling me you want 80k, right away… red flag.
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