Starting an highly specialized IT recruitment company

Marco87

Hi guys,

so, here the idea is to start a recruitment agency specialized in a specific area of IT, in this case 'Mainframe'. The agency will contact people with experience in that area and present them to the clients, but also will form new people, with courses-classes and introduce them to the companies at a fairly low rate, to get them gain experience.
This second point is very important because 80% of Mainframe developers in the world are over 50, so forming new people will be the main business, I guess.

I worked for a company abroad that was doing exactly this, and it worked very well.

It will be ideally a 2 men company mainly. 1 teacher (I could be that guy) that will form people in this specific area and 1 with a good experience in recruitment, relationship with clients, good public speaking etc, to grow the network.

So, you guys think this is actually doable?
Do you think it will work?
How you think the initial costs will be?

Thanks

pedronomix

With so many mainframe users outsourcing the heavy end of IT, is this a market at all?

beauf

Marco87 wrote: »

...I worked for a company abroad that was doing exactly this, and it worked very well....

I guess it will depend on the market size here. Or if you intended supply people outside of Ireland either.

intheclouds

A quick search on irishjobs.ie throws up 9 mainframe developer jobs, mostly COBOL.

It just doesn't seem like there's much of a market.

Mrs OBumble

Do you have the relationships with the key employers, both here and in the UK?

How are you going to motivate quality candidates to be formed by you, and who would pay for this? (Seriously - no one wanted to take a Cobol job when I left college, and it hasn't got any sexier.)

I agree with you that there is a niche, and it will only grow as the existing folks die and/or retire. But finding the sweet spot for filling it won't be easy.

q2ice

Strangely enough there are a lot of Mainframe positions opening up in Ireland lately. A very big one opened lately in Donegal for insurance (not pramerica) and it focuses mainly in Mainframe.
As for the attraction of Mainframe, it is largely to do with the green screens and the method of interacting/writing code. IBM are trying to cater for this by introducing their rational toolset. It provides an eclipse based editor and is geared towards making Mainframe more "sexy".

The big thing I find about Mainframe jobs unlike other IT jobs is that they tend not to be advertised. Recruitement usually happens by word of mouth.

Worth noting that Letterkenny IT provide Mainframe training to companies throughout Ireland. And it is specialised for the company.

Edit: what level of experience do you have with Mainframe? What background - application programmer/DBA/systems programmer/analyst? What type of languages? CLIST/REXX/PLI/COBOL/Easytrev?
Do you have DB2/IMS/CICS?
What utilities are you familiar with? Changeman/Endevor/CA-7/Jobtrak/File-Aid/ICEMAN/ELIT/Cyberfusion/etc?

Marco87

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

Do you have the relationships with the key employers, both here and in the UK?

No, I don't. At all. That's why I think should be 2 men company, 1 with good technical knowledge and 1 with possibility to grow a network.

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

How are you going to motivate quality candidates to be formed by you, and who would pay for this? (Seriously - no one wanted to take a Cobol job when I left college, and it hasn't got any sexier.)

In this company I was talking about, the classes were free, for about 3, 4 months and then the person who finished the course was presented to the client. The contract was stipulated between the two companies, with payslip growing in the first 3 years, so that the candidate is encouraged to stay at least few years.

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

I agree with you that there is a niche, and it will only grow as the existing folks die and/or retire. But finding the sweet spot for filling it won't be easy.

That's a good point, and probably is why this is all just an idea and it's not a company yet. I should start a thread where I ask who is interested to learn that :-)

Marco87

q2ice wrote: »

Edit: what level of experience do you have with Mainframe? What background - application programmer/DBA/systems programmer/analyst? What type of languages? CLIST/REXX/PLI/COBOL/Easytrev?
Do you have DB2/IMS/CICS?
What utilities are you familiar with? Changeman/Endevor/CA-7/Jobtrak/File-Aid/ICEMAN/ELIT/Cyberfusion/etc?

Honestly, I have 10 years of experience overall, so I may not be the best "advanced" teacher, but the purpose of all this is to form people with IT background from school-college and just introduce them to the market. Classes should be 3-4 months tops, so topics should be basic, as in Cobol language, JCLs, introduction to tools as changeman, endevor and interactions with the db2 from cobol programs.
No point in explaining all that advanced stuff to someone that never wrote a cobol program in his life, I think.

beauf

Its a tough sell to get someone to invest in learning a technology that's becoming obsolete. Usually everyone runs a mile from it in the workplace. A lot of it is proprietary systems I would have assumed, perhaps incorrectly.

Stheno

Marco87 wrote: »

Honestly, I have 10 years of experience overall, so I may not be the best "advanced" teacher, but the purpose of all this is to form people with IT background from school-college and just introduce them to the market. Classes should be 3-4 months tops, so topics should be basic, as in Cobol language, JCLs, introduction to tools as changeman, endevor and interactions with the db2 from cobol programs.
No point in explaining all that advanced stuff to someone that never wrote a cobol program in his life, I think.

Would you be paying them while they do these classes or would they pay to do them? And would they get any formal certification s?

Marco87

beauf wrote: »

Its a tough sell to get someone to invest in learning a technology that's becoming obsolete.

Honestly, are 20+ years that people say that's becoming obsolete. From what I see everything is still there, and people that have knowledge in this area are going to be retired in few years.

Marco87

Stheno wrote: »

Would you be paying them while they do these classes or would they pay to do them? And would they get any formal certification s?

That's still a gray area, in this company abroad that was doing this, classes were free.

Stheno

Where are you going to find these people?

Marco87

Stheno wrote: »

Where are you going to find these people?

I don't know guys, I started the thread with this idea, i was hoping in some advice. Contacting people that finish IT schools? Or young IT people that struggle to find a job? I don't know how the situation really is at the moment.

beauf

Marco87 wrote: »

Honestly, are 20+ years that people say that's becoming obsolete. From what I see everything is still there, and people that have knowledge in this area are going to be retired in few years.

Your experience would be vastly superior to mine in this regard. My experience is very limited. But any place with older systems like this are phasing them out, the people who worked on them almost all retired, only brought back for maintenance, or data clean-up or transformation to newer systems.

Most people who get left on older system have a tendency to get sidelined. Which most will want to avoid. But is not an issue if contracting. But you'd want to know its a financially viable route vs learning a current technology.

I'm very curious about the whole concept.

Stheno

Marco87 wrote: »

I don't know guys, I started the thread with this idea, i was hoping in some advice. Contacting people that finish IT schools? Or young IT people that struggle to find a job? I don't know how the situation really is at the moment.

Tbh it all sounds a bit pie in the sky to me.

You've no contacts in the industry, and seem to want to get cheap unskilled resources who after three months of informal training classes, you will try to contract out in a very high skill area

I can't see that it would be successful, all you'd need is one of your resources to make a bad mistake and your reputation would be shot

q2ice

beauf wrote:

Your experience would be vastly superior to mine in this regard. My experience is very limited. But any place with older systems like this are phasing them out, the people who worked on them almost all retired, only brought back for maintenance, or data clean-up or transformation to newer systems.

There are a lot of places that couldnt get rid of these even if they wanted to. Processing power on a Mainframe is still far more powerful than any alternative. It would cost more to port systems over to newer technologies which would provide reduced returns. The life of these newer technologies is considerably less than mainframe also.

beauf

Sure there are. I was only referring to my own limited experience.

ironclaw

Stheno wrote: »

unskilled resources who after three months of informal training classes, you will try to contract out in a very high skill area

That would be my sentiments personally. Someone can have all the certs they like, but its the years of hands on that actually matter. Unless someone was mentored by an industry leader and endorsed by them, I don't see why a company would hire them. You may get the 'We can pay 30k to a graduate as opposed to 100k for that 20 year experience guy' but then I wouldn't want to work for them as they likely don't have a clue what they are at. You can't replace experience with training and hands on. Its a big failing point in Ireland at the moment I feel.

SBG387

pedronomix wrote: »

With so many mainframe users outsourcing the heavy end of IT, is this a market at all?

I think this is a critical point.

I worked in a large industry that still depends heavily on mainframe / COBOL systems. My personal experience is that as soon as a firm can find a way to ship the work off-shore, they do it. It started with the very large firms who had the scale to take on an offshore partner. But these days, there are ways for even smaller firms to do it.

Why offshore? The few times these firms tried to recruit new blood into their Irish teams, they could never find good candidates who wanted to focus their careers on technology that they perceived as being in the sunset phase of its life (even though this is the planet's longest sunset). Hence the underlying need to move this work offshore before the Irish staffers retire.

I don't see these firms being interested in taking in a lot of new blood who have had a few months of training, then training them further on the ins and outs of their specific implementations only to see the better recruits leave them so they can work on "nicer" tech.

I think you will also struggle to find new IT graduates willing to move into legacy tech so maybe you'll be looking at non-tech people looking to switch career. Their age profile (mid- to late- 40s?) means they won't really solve the key problem (existing staff approaching retirement). And you won't be able to do it so much better that firms will be willing to pay you a significant premium over what the perceived cost is to 'just' offshore this headache.

The migration to offshore tends to happen faster than it should, with the Irish-based experienced staffers asked to clean up the ensuing mess. Due to the perceived cost savings (ie hourly rate of an offshore resource vs hourly rate of Irish resource), the decision to send the work offshore is seldom reversed - It's how people learn the phrase 'fix forward'! (aka clean up the mess every time things fail but assume that some day the new lads will work it out and not cause the problem again).

(NOTE: I say 'perceived' cost as I think the real cost is not so low. Just comparing hourly rates is missing a hell of a lot of hidden costs).