I don't think it is that hard to find people; I think it is hard to find the 'right' people. It is not a good idea to get requirements for a contract and, at that point, start looking for people to help you with the work. I've been there and it is really kind of late. You need to develop relationships with people you trust, respect and want to work with long before the contracts show up. The process is really pretty easy. Find their e-mail and send them something that introduces your consultancy and mention that you sometimes get projects that exceed your capacity. Ask if they would please respond with some project they have worked on recently and minimum project sizes that they typically accept. Tell them that you are looking to build a database of companies that you can collaborate with on projects. Be sure to ask how many developers at the firm have the particular skill set. If they tell you only one, get that person's name so if/when they leave the company you can look them up on LinkedIn and find out what they are presently doing.
In my industry I often get tapped to find other consultants, so I use my LinkedIn contacts to find out who is looking for work. I've done the things I've described above personally, so I know that they work, but for me people keep jumping around between different companies so I've learned to just link to the actual consultant on LinkedIn. That way, no matter where he/she is working today, I can find them easily. BTW, I don't recommend that you ask for rates when talking to companies without a hot contract in hand because a) they change frequently b) you might be considered a competitor and handing out rates to competitors is a dumb idea. BTW #2, unless you do not value your time very much, I would not normally look for other people on projects myself unless I'm getting compensated to do so. There are MANY people in the staffing business and lots of them work on commission, so if my immediate list of contacts bears no fruit my next word of advice is to tell the client to use a staffing firm. This is why I maintain lists of 'go-to' people in the first place. I don't want to look like I didn't try to find anybody; but on the other hand being too nice and scouring the earth for developers is a waste of my time. On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 3:06 PM, brian d foy <[email protected]> wrote: > In article > <[email protected]>, Gabor > Szabo <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > a client for some work that will be bigger than I can do alone. The > > interesting part > > was that the client said > > > > "In the Java world there are lots of companies providing > > development services but he could not find any in the Perl world" > > There's two parts to that sort of statement usually. Not finding anyone > can easily be "No one agreed to trade their time for what I was > offering" as "There aren't Perl programmers available". > > I've never had a tough time hooking up customers with programmers. > There are a lot of people out there who are available and do good work. > Because of that, they don't waste their time with loony projects, low > pay, and ridiculous environments. > > On the flip side, finding a lot of Java programmers and companies > providing services doesn't mean that they are any good. And how popular > can Java really be with all of those idle programmers sitting around? > :) > > It reminds me of the marketing guy at the only company that fired me. > He came out to visit us in New York and was annoyed that all the > restaurants we suggested were full of people. He suggested a restaurant > that had no people in it. Um, there's a reason for both of those. > > Gabor's basically right though: it's nice to have a list of people > looking for contracts. I tend to find, however, that the people you'd > most like to hire aren't ever looking because they have quite the queue > already. :) >
