250 People For One Job

[flapjack]

Wilkinsons are taking over the old Woolworths store in centre of Exeter. Recruitment underway at moment - reported in local press 800 turned up for around a 100 jobs.

I suppose thats not too bad 8:1 ratio but seems a bit drastic as most of jobs will be at minimum wage. But not much choice down here - temp tourism jobs or care homes!

[lets get it right]

It took us months to find 2 new skilled .NET developers recently. Not that many candidates put through, and of those most were rubbish.

We certainly were not swamped..

Edit: ps. In London

How much were you paying?

In addition to .Net were you expecting serious SQL/Development/DBA skills too?

[lets get it right]

Sounds about right, I just checked we have 112 unfilled positions currently.

What sort of unfilled positions?

[RJG18]

Well why shouldn't they earn £60k if they are able to do the same job?

The market forces of supply and demand.

If the applicants for my job are:

1 x UK Candidate currently earning £60k

and

50 x India Candidates currently earning £6k

...then competition for this position should not lead to the final price being £60k. It's should normalise somewhere in between £6k and £60k. An influx of cheap foreign labour will always drag the average price for a position down.

(* Hint - this is why politicians and business leaders, despite whatever policy rhetoric they come out with, will always be in favour of high volumes of uncontrolled immigration. Reduces costs, increases profit margin. ).

.

[Azbola]

How much were you paying?

In addition to .Net were you expecting serious SQL/Development/DBA skills too?

I'm not privy to that info unfortunately, but I would think about 40K. These are not senior roles, but junior/standard developer positions.

Skillset would be standard stuff; .NET, SQL, D/HTML, Javascript, XML/XSL/XPATH. Not DBA but would need to udpate schemas where necessary and write stored procs.

EDIT: ps. I realise it was not that decent money, but bear in mind these were lower level positions.

Edited August 27, 2010 by Azbola

[Azbola]

The market forces of supply and demand.

If the applicants for my job are:

1 x UK Candidate currently earning £60k

and

50 x India Candidates currently earning £6k

...then competition for this position should not lead to the final price being £60k. It's should normalise somewhere in between £6k and £60k. An influx of cheap foreign labour will always drag the average price for a position down.

(* Hint - this is why politicians and business leaders, despite whatever policy rhetoric they come out with, will always be in favour of high volumes of uncontrolled immigration. Reduces costs, increases profit margin. ).

.

Not if there are 50 other jobs going also offering 60K

[RJG18]

The market forces of supply and demand.

If the applicants for my job are:

1 x UK Candidate currently earning £60k

and

50 x India Candidates currently earning £6k

...then competition for this position should not lead to the final price being £60k. It's should normalise somewhere in between £6k and £60k. An influx of cheap foreign labour will always drag the average price for a position down.

(* Hint - this is why politicians and business leaders, despite whatever policy rhetoric they come out with, will always be in favour of high volumes of uncontrolled immigration. Reduces costs, increases profit margin. ).

.

BTW - £6,000 is still a very good salary in India. When I work in India, the driver I am assigned to drive me around (who incidently often works 14 hour days or more) is paid £600 a year. I usually give him at least a £50 tip when I leave (which makes me feel better about it, anyway )

[ken_ichikawa]

BTW - £6,000 is still a very good salary in India. When I work in India, the driver I am assigned to drive me around (who incidently often works 14 hour days or more) is paid £600 a year. I usually give him at least a £50 tip when I leave (which makes me feel better about it, anyway )

Its funny too with the freelancers I get on PPH, people from India want to charge me £10-£100 an hour to do stuff! Curiously enough the cheapest quotes and some of the better skill comes from the UK. I got a PPH person to do a job for £40 while Indians wanted £600!

[juvenal]

Where?

I applied for a skilled IT job near Newton Abbot, and I was the only one who applied.

We are all rooting for you to make the short list.

[MongerOfDoom]

They are also typically coming from a job that paid the equivilent of £6,000 (5 lakh rupee), yet pricing themselves at around £60,000 in the UK. You have to be very careful phrasing questions like: "Why do you think I owe you 10x what you were previously worth, overnight, simply by getting on a plane?".

So you you need to rely on knowing their previous earnings to know how much they are worth to you?

[Ipodjunky]

I dunno seems to be loads of work for us programmers at the mo. Just been offered a 60k contracting role..........do I ditch the permy role go for the money?

[catmandu]

My OH is an IT guy and after we got back from a recent holiday he updated his CV to all the usual sites. His phone has been ringing off the hook, he has had loads of interviews and got a job about 1 week later. And he is in the "highly skilled" category. The market has definitely picked up hugely. For every 1 call he was getting this time last year, he gets about 10 now.

OP here. Thanks for the many posts.

How highly skilled is highly skilled I wonder? There are certain areas where you will always be in demand. I'd say my skills are fairly general but with industry qualifications that probably put me in the top 5-20% of candidates for the jobs. Location is Scotland so probably less Indian/Chinese applicants compared to London.

[Johnny Storm]

I dunno seems to be loads of work for us programmers at the mo. Just been offered a 60k contracting role..........do I ditch the permy role go for the money?

Yep, you might just be able to buy a house soon

[@contradevian]

BTW - £6,000 is still a very good salary in India. When I work in India, the driver I am assigned to drive me around (who incidently often works 14 hour days or more) is paid £600 a year. I usually give him at least a £50 tip when I leave (which makes me feel better about it, anyway )

I suspect the Asians have got wise to it. Maybe you are looking to employ an Asian programmer to undercut a UK IT worker? The UK IT worker will need £60k per year to live in London, pay a mortgage and live decently. However if you can line up an Asian for say £30k who won't might roughing it in a bedsit, (after all its probably still better that what he is used to) then you, him and the client or quids in. Its only the UK worker that loses out. The times when people in the third world would work for peanuts is probably coming to an end.

[Ipodjunky]

Yep, you might just be able to buy a house soon

Haha yeah I could ya know......but there's more to life........plus once you're stuck in one location and your job ends game over.........not owning a house is a real advantage at the moment. Embrace the chaos it's what us mercenaries thrive on....

[ScaredEitherWay]

I am finding that although I would be great at the job, I'm rubbish at the interviews.... there's a whole new way of interviewing people now that's alien and weird.

It's like you're trying to answer an exam question paper without having ever done the syllabus.

e.g. to put it into IT support terms (not the sort of jobs I am after, but trying to demonstrate something here)... instead of being asked if you've ever supported Windows Operating System, or if you've ever implemented security policies in NT, you're asked "what do you think the challenges of meeting user requirements are in the waste management industry?" ... srsly ... if somebody's a fab IT tech geek and this job happens to be in waste management, then isn't that a job for strategists, not jobseekers.

So, I crash and burn at interviews.....

[Heading South]

Got no applicants under 50 and then only 3 of them.

Advertised for a job for a receptionist. Got 4 applicants, offered an interview to all 4. 2 of which never returned the call, one was in her 40s, other one 18. She got the job by virtue of being the cutest.

And what, precisely, has age got to do with your selection process? Are you suggesting you discriminate on the grounds of age?

I'm sure you know that legislation to prevent this was put on the statute book in 2006 andleaves you exposed to legal action.

[MacGuffin]

View PostJohnny Storm, on 27 August 2010 - 03:57 PM, said:

Got no applicants under 50 and then only 3 of them.

Advertised for a job for a receptionist. Got 4 applicants, offered an interview to all 4. 2 of which never returned the call, one was in her 40s, other one 18. She got the job by virtue of being the cutest.

And what, precisely, has age got to do with your selection process? Are you suggesting you discriminate on the grounds of age?

I'm sure you know that legislation to prevent this was put on the statute book in 2006 andleaves you exposed to legal action.

Yeah I was pretty disgusted by that post as well. Why do people always have to treat jobseekers like shit?

Thank you Labour for the Age Discrimination legislation by the way (that comment ought to put a few noses out of joint).

Edited August 27, 2010 by MacGuffin

[xux42]

..I usually get 50 CV's from applicants from India, for every 1 UK/Other CV..

Get one of your UK guys to program the email system to filter out all emails from chindia where they are a response to a job advert.

Kerr_powie, no more scummy Chindian jobapp spam.

Actually, makes me think - why don't we start a campaign to encourage UK mail engine admins to apply such filters on their own initiative?

Management would have no clue what was happening and if they got suspicious and brought in a nosy consultant - well I'm sure we can think up ways to sabotage their efforts.

Son of BOFH.

[Live Peasant]

You need a few of them if running Windows. Should run Linux on the desktop then someone could log in miles away via SSH

And of course tech support will become an endangered species as people migrate their desktop operations to the "cloud."

I support 40 SME clients with around 50 servers and 550 assorted desktops through a Kaseya platform.

Geographic location is meaningless as long as I have access to an adsl connection and a browser.

Nice little earner - one partner, no staff. Zero hassle.

[Charlie The Tramp Returns]

(* Hint - this is why politicians and business leaders, despite whatever policy rhetoric they come out with, will always be in favour of high volumes of uncontrolled immigration. Reduces costs, increases profit margin. ).

I know of 6 people who have in the past 2 years received huge redundancy payments only to find later their jobs have been filled on half the wages they received by very much younger people. Of course these jobs now have a different title.

[stormymonday_2011]

Geographic location is meaningless as long as I have access to an adsl connection and a browser.

Until the Taliban seize your data centre and burn it to the ground.

[miko]

Yeah I was pretty disgusted by that post as well. Why do people always have to treat jobseekers like shit?

Thank you Labour for the Age Discrimination legislation by the way (that comment ought to put a few noses out of joint).

Disgusted by that post , if I were you I would take no notice , I think the poster talks **** 99% of the time. You only have to read a few of his post's to realize that.

[SNACR]

And what, precisely, has age got to do with your selection process? Are you suggesting you discriminate on the grounds of age?

I'm sure you know that legislation to prevent this was put on the statute book in 2006 andleaves you exposed to legal action.

You can bring in whatever legislation you like to try and eradicate prejudice and 'isms from job interviews. Fact is, they always have, and always will, discriminate on the basis of someone's personal judgement of whether or not your face fits.

If some twerp doesn't want to employ you on the basis of some petty prejudice, take it as a lucky escape from a job in the ar5sehole factory and move on.

Edit to add: Massive demand for all vacancies advertised to the point of having to get application forms printed on cheaper paper. It's a folded A3 four page form with lots of basic questions. They usually start OK with the name and address type bit but, the responses get more and more half-ar5ed with the majority of applicants not even reaching the final page.

Of the forms left that are fully completed you then have to weed out the ones that have been filled in by the job centre and, if you're lucky, you're left with a small number to call in for interview.

Used to have a different colour form to give out to the clearly unsuitable but packed it in a long while back on legal advice.

Edited August 27, 2010 by Soon Not a Chain Retailer

[Johnny Storm]

And what, precisely, has age got to do with your selection process? Are you suggesting you discriminate on the grounds of age?

I'm sure you know that legislation to prevent this was put on the statute book in 2006 andleaves you exposed to legal action.

Of course, people are all the same no matter what age. And a junior doctor is just as good as one with 20 years experience, and a 50 year labourer just as strong as a 19 year old.

Please join the real world with the rest of us.

If you dont want to employ someone who is old, or disabled or whatever. Then whatever laws invented will not stop you. This isnt the public sector.