Can someone help me with this?

Great at following instructions, wasn't he?

In my husband's particular case, he would be jumping from one shitty big name corp for another. He needs new experience and title to grow his career and he isn't being allowed to do so with his current job.

In theory this short term contract, due to their inability to fill it, should be more lucrative, right? I'm sure that depends on the job and company, but he has been told that they can't fill it and have seen big turnover due to people job hopping in the tech industries.

They say they want to hire directly afterward. Maybe true or not. He has applied and is applying other places. This is the first thing that's come his way.

 

This may not be true. Recruiters often end up also placing the candidates in temp-to-hire positions. TEKsystems supplies contractors, as well as just placing recruited candidates. If that's the case, they may require personal information, since you're technically in the employ of TEKsystems.

Source: was placed in my current job through TEKsystems.

@bewildered there isn't a whole lot to know - TEKsystems is reputable, but like with all contractor placement firms and recruiters, quality varies by locale and the specific rep you're working with and the company they're hiring for. If Hubby is angling for a temp-to-hire position, he should be super clear with the company he interviews with about that; ask them what duration they expect before he gets a full-time offer, and if he interviews with non-management employees, he should ask if a lot of their coworkers are contractors. Some companies do this "temp-to-hire" thing basically forever, dangling full-time positions that don't exist or aren't approved.

The reality is that TEKsystems is just a middle-man. They work with great companies, and with crap companies. When I first started at my company, they were terrible about hiring contractors - half the workforce was comprised of "temp" employees. They fixed that, and now they do temp-to-hire all the time, with a serious commitment to hire people who are decent.

If you can swing the health insurance and have enough savings to cushion yourselves if his contract doesn't work out, it's a fine way to get your foot in the door. Any universal rule applied to them - like they only market crap jobs - is B.S. They get a cut of your pay; it behooves them to place you in the highest paying position they can. If you've got skills, they'll try and place you in a good job because it lines their pockets. I look at resumes from TEKsystems candidates regularly - if anything, they try to oversell their candidates into better positions than they're qualified for.

What's his skillset?

One thing to look out for is if they polish your resume, I've seen some instances where they've vastly inflated a candidate's skills without his knowledge - or, alternatively, have screwed up a resume with typos or incorrect line items. Make sure you see what resume they're sending to companies.

 

@Binary that was helpful info.

He's at a data center doing network deployment with some specialty project type experience. I'm not an expert in the lingo or job duties. He's open to various career tracks but is looking mostly into technical project management as his next jump, since he's done a huge chunk of the duties for already. The job title for that type of work varies a lot by company.

He'll have to get a copy of what they are sending off. That would be interesting to see.

 

The specific recruiter you worked with asked for your personal information or was it when you onboarded with them as a contractor/T2H? More generally, if it’s the former, that’s a red flag and a pretty well-known recruiting scam.

 

Project managers who are technical and know the subject matter are gold for engineering teams. Does he have his PMP cert?

Check on the resume thing. I had one candidate where I junked his resume without interviewing him - it was almost 10 pages long despite 5-6 years of experience and you couldn't parse out what he was good at. In a roundabout way from the recruiter I found out that the candidate was kind of pushed into an extensive and stupid rewrite of his resume to include every technology he ever even heard about. In that case the candidate knew but sometimes they'll make tweaks and not tell you. But that's only a big deal if you're not getting interviews.

If he is getting interviews, just make sure you're asking about their contract-to-hire timelines. One nice thing about contract-to-hire is you get to try out the company as well so there's less pressure on ferreting out every obnoxious shitty part about working for them. Like I said, it's a pretty decent way to get hired by a big company if you can deal with the interim lack of benefits and pay uncertainty. A lot of companies do contract-to-hire so they don't get stuck with a shitty candidate who just interviews well.

 

@Clutch he has only interacted with the Teksystems guy so far. The next step is interview with the company hiring manager.

It wouldn't surprise me they they have had trouble filling the job. The location is kind of a remote location, like the one we are in now. That is a common problem with data centers in general. They are able to make deals with small town govs to build cheaply, supplied with cheap water and power, but they often have staffing issues.

 

I mean, you shouldn't email your social security number and bank account info to AwesomeRecruiter5647@gmail.com. I'm just saying that the recruiting company may be headhunters, in which case they're just placing you with a company, or they may be doing contract-to-hire, in which case you're working for the recruiting company for a period.

 

He paid a resume writer on Fiverr to rewrite it to get thru the word filters. It looks good. He actually has a couple versions depending on the job type being applied for.

He was contacted by the Teksystems guy because hubs' info was given to the recruiter by his friend, who got employment thru the same Teksystems guy.

@Binary no he does not have his pmp.

 

Yep, I'm regularly surprised at the poor quality of resumes that come from recruiters. As a recruiter, it's in their best interests to represent the candidate optimally, so it always seems ridiculous to me that I ever get resumes of insane length, or with obvious mistakes, or poor formatting, or whatever.

I've got nearly 2 decades of relevant experience on my resume and it's 2 pages long. These dickheads think I'm going to parse a bunch of 10+ page resumes from candidates with 4 years of experience to fill a mid-level position? Nope. It's not even exactly about the length; it's just that you do not need 10 pages to tell me what you're good at, which means most of that is filler, and it's impossible to get through that much information to parse out where your actual expertise lies. If you tell me what you're really good at, I will know if you can learn the rest.

I partly blame these automated programmatic screening systems that companies use. It makes everyone want to list everything for fear that one keyword is missing and their resume will get rejected. But still, there's only so many topics you can cover in an interview. I'm going to pick a few from your resume - if I pick 4-5 topics and you keep telling me you aren't that knowledgeable about that thing that was on your resume, what am I supposed to do?

 

I'm in Canada, so things are probably different here, but I have to deal with the city and the county quite a bit for permits. Let me know if you need a second set of eyes on things.

Also, if you have a connection at City Hall or some other reason to reach out to that department, I've found if the staff knows you to be friendly and forthright you get stuff pushed through way quicker. It shouldn't matter, but it does. Your ideal situation is the most junior person with the authority to approve it sees it, has not issue with it, says yes and doesn't move it farther up the chain. What you don't want is the whole of counsel having a say or this thing going to vote; usually the voting happens every other month and it can really delay issues. Especially if you have a neighbour who decides they don't like the exterior light or something.