I live in the Washington DC metro area and for years it has been very evident that I am working in one of the toughest recruiting markets in the nation. We have one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country which makes it very difficult to find good candidates who are ready to make a career move. However, I never knew what "toughest recruiting market" meant until I recently accepted a position as a corporate technical recruiter for a government contractor. I went from having a choice of candidates (and maybe not the pick of the litter, but it was still a choice) to having no candidates at all. I thought that my years of administrative recruiting and pounding the phones for business had thickened my skin enough to jump into the world of technical recruiting. Sure, I knew there would be challenges and personality differences in the technical candidates compared to the administrative candidates I had been used to working with; although, I never anticipated the lack of candidates that I seem to be facing currently. There is no magic to corporate recruiting. You cannot be as "sneaky" (or creative, whichever verbiage you prefer) with your sourcing in the corporate world as you can be within an agency setting. All of my skills that I had gained at an agency are a good base for any recruiting I might choose to pursue; however, they seem to be somewhat irrelevant in the world of government contracting.

 

Cleared software developers are "money," not only in the sense that they are highly billable employees, but in the sense that they know what they are worth. They know that they have the skills and background to go to any large government agency or contractor at any time. Therefore, recruiting from a small company that hasn't established as much recognition as the "big guys" (such as Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, etc.) is just another nail in the coffin, so to speak.

 

While I am not giving up and will continue to seek new and creative avenues to reach these candidates, there is certainly a huge learning curve in this game of technical recruiting. Administrative recruiting was difficult within its own right, but cannot touch the complexity of recruiting the best of the best cleared software developers in the Nation's Capital Region.