IT Contractors must be aware of these type of call from IT Recruiters

Cold Calling

Most IT Contractor shave those calls, you know the ones I mean, where IT Agencies say that they can get them work but ask for an astonishing amount of information.

In fact they seem desperate for the information.

IT Contractors don't like to say no as they think that they might lose out on some precious work if they don't.

The information that that these agents ask for includes:-

1.  Wanting to know the names of companies that your CV has been sent to.

They say that this is so that your CV doesn't get sent twice to the one company. They say that if this happens potential clients will disqualify you.

Of course, clients won't disqualify you. They'll simply select the first CV they got of yours and dump the rest.

The real reason that the IT Recruiter wants this information is to obtain a lead so that they can contact the company involved and send in CVs of their own in competition to yours meaning that you may well miss out.

2.  Wanting to know what interviews that you have attended.

Again they say that this is so that they don't send your CV out to those companies where you have already attended an interview.

Many inexperienced contractors then reel off a list of companies where they have been for interviews.

This is a huge mistake.

The IT Recruiter then has a list of companies that are currently looking for people with your skills.

They also know the level of skill that you have and so they know what they have to beat.

Once they have this information they will be working furiously to find and put up candidates who are better and more experienced with those particular skills than you.

They may even send in your CV along with the others and then call up to say that they are withdrawing yours as they have had bad references about you.

3.  Wanting to know the name of people who will give you references.

Some of these IT recruiters say that they need these references before they can send your CV out to any potential client.

That's just ridiculous as there are few clients who need references before they will even see a candidate.

If they take references at all is usually late stage, i.e. after they have interviewed a candidate and decided that this is the one they want.

The real reason these IT recruiters want this information is that they want to know the names of people at companies who hire IT contractors.

They will usually ask more information about these people like what position they hold at the company and maybe even contact details.

Conclusion

In my early years of IT Contracting  I got done a lot by these agents and gave them the information.

However, I never got a single contract through any of them.

IT Contractors, although they might feel a bit queasy about supplying the information being asked for, don't like to bite the hand of someone who will potentially feed them.

However, IT recruiters who make these calls are never going to feed them.

Often they are just lead generators for a company.

Their role is just to cold call contractors on the database to find out leads and then they just hand the leads over to the frontline recruiters so that they can out their own candidates up in opposition to you.

Even if they are generating leads for themselves, this is their only concern when doing it - not getting work for you.

The genuine recruiters will contact you about a specific role - if you haven't contacted them about a specific role that they have advertised.

So beware of the lead generators.

It is like Aesop's fable of the Fox and the Crow.

Their sole purpose is to get you to sing loud and clear so that you drop your cheese.

Put the phone down on these frauds.