7N The Consultant Collective

If you work in IT and you hire contractors, you'll have dealt with agencies. It starts simply enough. You write a job spec and distribute it to the preferred supplier list.

But then you receive a barrage of CVs to filter, each claiming an entire career of on-time, on-budget projects. You schedule interviews with people who know little or nothing about the job in hand and meet perhaps one in ten you'd hire.

Sounds familiar? We had the same thing. Sometimes we wanted a clone of somebody already on the team, or somebody we had worked with before. If we could find someone like that, we'd hire them in a heartbeat. In fact, we might even shuffle work around or put in a pre-emptive offer to grab them while we could, bypassing the whole job spec, interview, agency thing.

What we didn't want was a bank of CVs which patently didn't fit the bill.

Which got us thinking. We needed us to be the agent, but we were busy with the day job. So we changed our day job.

When we ran and delivered IT projects we knew that certain people on the team made a huge difference. We now spend our time networking within the IT community, finding those kinds of people and connecting with them.

We can do this because we're part of the community ourselves: practitioners and experienced consultants. When we find what we call a '10', we promote them to clients who have a similar need for, and appreciation of talent.

Of course, we can't do this without having an innate understanding of your organisation, the kinds of people you like to hire, what works in your company culture, and what doesn't.

We then sense-check all these things in the people we meet so that you don't have to. We're not saying you shouldn't interview candidates - far from it. But by the time that happens it should be for a final verification of a very short short-list expertly compiled on your behalf.

How many CVs have you read that are almost meaningless documents full of buzzwords because that way they're easy to put into a database and automatically match? For us, there's a better way.

There's no substitute for meeting people, getting to know them, often over a period of time, and finding out how they really perform on projects. It takes time, effort and experience, and it's worth it.

True, it limits the number of people we can know - we don't have a database of hundreds of thousands of CVs as some agencies claim. But we don't want one either - that's just the point. The CVs we hold, we hold for a reason, because the people behind them are special.

Many of our clients need people with a background in blue chip companies or specialist consultancies. Of course you can buy the services of those Consultancy companies direct, but that can be hugely expensive and if you just want an individual or a single, senior person the Consultancy is unlikely to be interested.

Often, you may find yourself being persuaded to hand over control of the whole project, or to hire a team of juniors too; a so-called leveraged team. That's great for the Consultancy but not necessarily what you want or need.

Our structure and relationships are such that we can give you only what you want. Many of the independent contractors we know and promote have experience in consultancy and blue chip organisations but are now available at contract market rates - and come without the need to hire an entire team of juniors, too. So you get the right people and consequently the right outcome.

Simplicity is one of our watchwords. On pricing, contractors set their own rates and we add a margin of 20%. That's it. There are no secrets and nobody is making a killing by filling a £1,000 job with a £300 contractor.

The people we represent and promote are experienced independents, very often with their own relationships with previously satisfied customers. They don't want to be restricted from working for a client simply because they worked there through another agent. Our contracts allow independents to be just that - independent. We have no exclusivity clauses restricting them from working for our clients, now or in the future, directly or through another agent. We want clients to use us because they value our service, not because they are contractually obliged to. And we want contractors to give us first refusal on their time because they know we find them the best matched clients. But if we can't, they should be free to find work elsewhere however they want.

If you want to change the way you source talented IT contractors, get in touch. We don't ask for upfront retainers or any kind of exclusivity, so there's no obligation - just the chance to get some valuable staffing options.

Call us on 0870 766 7715 or email uk@7n.com to arrange a suitable, convenient time for an informal meeting - we won't say we're different, but we hope you'll find we're a whole lot better.