You’re Losing Candidates and You Don’t Know Why?

October 26, 2008 by roland.

I hear this a lot lately. You see, the OpenVMS world is starting to hop contract wise. There are even new installations happening now and several more scheduled for next year. Unlike the PC world, when I talk about “installation” I’m not talking about one machine on a desk, I’m talking about large scale systems which are going to run a company for more than 20 years without significant modification. What companies have systems that stable? Manufacturing and health care. On the manufacturing side it is companies which need to keep production running at capacity 24 hours per day for years on end without a single interruption. Not only is an interruption measured at around a million dollars per minute, it can be measured in human lives. If a life is lost, not only is it tragic, you are shut down for close to a week while the investigation happens.

Of course, health care is cooking now for different reasons, and not the reasons you might expect. A lot of people are of the opinion that shortly after the upcoming election there will be sweeping changes in health care legislation. I have little doubt there will be sweeping changes proposed, and even less doubt those changes will be tied up in committee for months by lobbyist dollars.

The real reason health care is cooking now is failure. Some major companies had been banking on off-shore development of Java based systems running on AIX being able to replace the VAX/VMS systems which were currently running the company. They banked so heavily on these replacement systems that they sunk years into their development, putting little to no effort into maintaining the existing cash cow. In at least one case, more than four years. Their OpenVMS people mostly jumped ship when they were told just how heavily the company was banking on replacing the existing system.

How is it one finds out about such things? The contracts are posted all over the place. There aren’t a lot of seasoned OpenVMS professionals left out there, so we all get the phone calls from the pimps. When you are lucky enough to actually get a phone call from a pimp that speaks English, you get the story.

Besides OpenVMS, what do all of these positions have in common? Bad management. Oh, I’m not talking about the bad management which lead to the off-shoring fiasco in the first place. We all know that upper management will never be held accountable for such a disaster. I’m talking about the contracts themselves. I’m talking about the management which is managing the poster of the contract.

Over the past two months, all but one contract I have been called or emailed about has had the same management failure. The MBA managing the person posting the contract decided they were going to be an “affective” manager by mandating the person posting the contract couldn’t leave for vacation until they had all of the contracts posted. In only one case did the poster of the contract inform the pimp they were dealing with that they were hurling this contract out and leaving for a week’s vacation.

Most seasoned professionals have a rule, myself included. Unless you tell them up front the person needed to make the decision is out of the office, you get to present them for only one week. Imagine the pimp’s shock when you call them exactly one week later and tell them to withdraw your name. That’s exactly what has happened in each case, and it wasn’t just myself. Some of them volunteered they had lost other candidates for the same reason. It’s not that we aren’t interested in the contract any longer, it’s simply that a message must be sent. We aren’t magazines to be left on a shelf until someone decides they need reading material for the bathroom. Any company willing to do this with a posting is willing to treat people the same way once they start work. Seasoned professionals will not be treated like that.

So, if you posted a contract for five or more consultants and got a big pile of paper, don’t be surprised when you get done weeding through the chaff to find out the wheat you wanted to bring in has told the pimp to withdraw their name.

Posted in Information Technology | Print | No Comments »