Is it worth using a recruiter to find a SysAdmin?

Question

At a start-up company where we have probably now grown sufficiently to warrant a dedicated system administrator.

Is it worth using a recruiter to find a good system administrator? Or, would the cost likely outweigh any benefits?

From a technical perspective, we don't have any unusual or significant requirements. The successful candidate would need to support a heterogeneous set of systems (Windows and Linux), with users who are highly computer literate (about half of the employees are experienced software developers). If the candidate has experience in our business domain then that is a bonus, but certainly not essential.

From an recruitment perspective, we don't actually know what the going rate for a suitable candidate would be. This is an aspect were advice from a reliable recruiter might be valuable.

In the current climate, how easy is it to find that one good SysAdmin to join our team? Will we get no applicants? Will we get thousands of poor applicants to filter?

Answer 1

You'll need to filter the applicants either way. A recruiter is going to try to sell you whoever they have available, and the applicants will vary in quality quite a bit. In general, I would only use a recruiter for hard to find candidates (unique skill sets, etc). In this case, I think you'll have no problem finding plenty of candidates - you just need to sort through them.

Answer 2

If not knowing the going rate is the stumbling block, paying a recruiter's fees for that information is a pretty damn steep rate. You can research that for a good bit less.

In general, I'd say do it yourself, especially if you have anyone in the shop who knows a sysadmin from a hole in the ground. Because a recruiter won't. Recruiters match keywords, then check out the candidate to see if he appears to be a conformist, so that if he turns out to be utterly useless, there's nothing for people to point at and say "but you should have known because of his tribal tattoos". So what that accomplishes is to filter out some of your best candidates because they don't look corporate. Awesome.

Answer 3

There are a lot of clowns in the IT market. Clowns with impressive resumes and work experience who, on further examination, don't know the difference between ext2 and ext3. (Or say it's "in the networking").

Unless your recruiter is competent and technical enough to see through buzzword bingo and smooth talking you will either waste a lot of time interviewing idiots or end up with someone less than qualified.

Answer 4

I'd skip the recruiter for now. I'm willing to bet that no matter where you live, your area has been hit with some sort of economic downturn which has flooded the market with a bunch of qualified people needing jobs. Will a recruiter help you find people, yes. Will you be able to get a bunch of qualified people on your own, absolutely!

No matter where the resume comes from, you're going to have to weed out the crap and hire the best person for the job. Figure out what you need and what you are willing to pay. There are plenty of sites out there that can help you determine what sys admin jobs are going for in your area and they will give you a rough range. I think salary.com actually has a wizard for finding this out if I recall correctly.

Now, if you are thinking that you don't want a full time person, it might make sense to find a good consulting company that can come in and give you 4-8 hours of sys admin time a week or whatever your needs happen to be. A lot of times, if you find a good consultant and want to hire them full time, a deal can be worked out depending on the nature of the consulting company. Some are purely there to consult, some play the recruiting side of the world as well.

Answer 5

The successful candidate would need to support a heterogeneous set of systems (Windows and Linux), with users who are highly computer literate (about half of the employees are experienced software developers).

This could make for something unusual if those highly computer literate users are selective and zealous about software or hardware they use. For example, where I used to work a decade ago now, there was a developer that had to have a Quantum Fireball drive in his box which may have been outside a typical machine. Discussing the advantages/disadvantages of hard drive specifications, how much RAM to have, and other features of a machine is something to check on applicants to some extent.

I'd also suggest mapping out what that dedicated SysAdmin would do most of the time and whether you need that to be in-house or could outsource the duties to another company that comes in as needed which may be better in some cases. I used to work at a place where they did this for our system administration and it worked out well.

Answer 6

Warning: potential bias: I am in the UK, things may differ in your locale.

I would say - use a number of recruiters. You can get them to lower the fee, these are hard times. I will not pay anything more than 15%, and even then only for a recruiter who gives a reqal indication of having something > sawdust between his or her ears! Got a bunch willing to work for me at 10%. Generally they are good at getting a bunch o CVs through, you will still need to filter, but importantly, you should share your filtering results with the recruiter "I wanted someone with more linux experience" etc. - otherwise they'll send the same mistakes again. If they persist in making mistakes, bin them. Be harsh.

Using a recruiter doesn't preclude a bit of DIY either - you may still find someone through adverts on your websites, or word-of-mouth/social networking. You never know who your buddies know. Wouldn't bother with the "job sites" tho as a general rule (mind I like jobs.perl.org for perl jobs...) as most recruiters will scrape these anyway, and finding current canditates can be a load of work you would rather not do!

Finally.. I have had good results nicking sysadmins from schools - pop an ad on http://edugeek.net - it will cost you no more than 5 minutes, and whilst there's mostly UK folk on there, it is starting to go global.

Time for jobs.serverfault.com perhaps ;)