Job Brokers, Headhunters, Body Snatchers Can't Actually do the Work
There are few good agents out there in the contract for hire world.
Job shops, head hunters, contract brokers, agents, whatever you
call them, there are very few even competent ones.
Most say something like "Oracle DBA, Tulsa OK, 3 years experience."
For that they will take 20-60% of the cash.
To take an interest in a contract, especially out of town,
I need to know a few things like:
What is the project?
What is the schedule and the project history?
What applications, OS, hardware?
How many users, uptime, business area?
What is the team on the project?
What are the jobs of the team members.
What is the budget to work with?
What is the living environment?
What are the expenses, who pays?
What are the rate ranges?
What is the cut of the broker?
How do I get paid?
Most brokers cannot answer even two or three of the above questions.
Many brokers will not give the information even when they know the answers.
Now take the example of "Oracle DBA, Tulsa OK, 3 years experience."
The incompetent broker cannot or will not give more information and
then asks "What is your rate?"
I will then assume that the project is totally FUBAR, eighteen months
behind and everyone has quit except useless eater-breathers.
It is probably 24X7 SAP with 900 simultaneous users,
Arthur Andersen is involved, the OS is NT on a single CPU pentium 90,
64MB RAM, one 2GB disk, using "Personal Oracle 6".
Pay your own expenses and, by the way, Tulsa actually means 75
miles outside of Tulsa and the site is a meat packing plant
in the middle of summer.
And yes, I assume the the broker thinks they will take 2/3 of the money.
So the broker is shocked when I say $250/hour, one month up front cash.