A few clients & candidates have asked why I now display a discounted retained service on my website so I just wanted to offer some context into why I (& a lot of other agencies) have decided to push towards retained business.
I'm probably not going to make any friends here by sharing these thoughts unfiltered but que sera, sera.
We all know that the tech markets aren't as busy as they were, at a time we had around 20 live Elixir-related roles, some for 1 urgent hire but most were companies looking to hire many & often, meaning our focus was mostly on finding candidates rather than finding clients
In the last couple of years; things have shifted to the other end of the spectrum, meaning the roles we work on are generally for those clients who fit or more of the following:
Too busy to screen candidates before technical stages
Don't have the time/budget/market knowledge to find candidates for a niche hire on their own
Don't have enough relevant candidates coming through their current channels
Aware of Beam it through previous working relationships or recommendations
The niche nature of Beam it Recruitment means that 99% of the client calls I have, I already know that I can bring value to their hiring process
I've spent the last 10 years building my network, learning about the markets I specialise in & trying to build out a personal then eventually a company brand when founding Beam it in 2020. Giving me confidence in saying that our services can help you to solve the aforementioned problems that are giving you headaches, making you miss deadlines & potentially losing your company money/clients as a result.
Am I perfect? Far from it, I'm working 55-65 hour weeks, as well as checking my e-mails constantly at the weekends, many of you will have spoken to me whilst on holiday, I closed a placement whilst on a stag party on the beach in Tenerife last year (recruitment never sleeps!) & I still struggle to respond to all of the incoming messages I get across e-mail, Linkedin, X, Bluesky, Reddit, Slack, Discord etc..
I try my best to get back to everyone but if I'm completely honest, if you're one of the people that send me a LinkedIn message saying 'Hi' with no context or any reasoning for your message then maybe you had it coming.
That would all be fine, if quite often in the past year, it wasn't all for nothing, you might've applied to jobs via our site that you felt you were a perfect fit for but we didn't manage to schedule interviews.. unfortunately you might've been on the end of the ghost chain we were in the middle of. Something that was quite rare until recently, seems to be happening more & more of late, after we've found the candidates they asked us to source.
Now this is not just a rant, I know they say you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you & I'm so lucky to have worked with 100+ great businesses in the BEAM market, I'm just specifically biting the hands that asked us to go fetch the bowl they urgently needed then walked off with the dog food when we got back.
So yeah, to summarise, due to our success rate with retained clients being so much higher, I knocked the % down to promote clients making a small initial commitment to the collaborating, allowing me to rest assured that I'm offering concrete job opportunities to the community rather than leading them up the garden path.
My goal is to continue working in this market for the foreseeable future & try to improve the candidate experience from Beam it's perspective too, hopefully getting more committed clients onboard will allow me to do that.
If you're committed to hire great devs & you think I can help, please visit beamrec.com/employers for more information
Thank you for reading!
Hayden