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Are there any recruitment agencies, recruiting for either UK-based roles or telecommuting roles that specialize in the software industry?

I'm specifically talking about agencies whose clients (and thus the roles they fill) are within the software industry itself.

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I have been involved in recruiting from agents for some time (including several mentioned in other replies here), and they are a very expensive approach. They seem to have very little ability to distinguish candidates with different skill sets except on the most basic level ("has this person ever programmed in Java?", that kind of thing). Whilst we would ocassionally get suitable candidates, they would be outnumbered 100:1 (literally) by candidates who were not even really close to what we required, despite myself putting lost of effort into communicating with the agents and sending detailed written and verbal feedback on every candidate.

My feeling is that the agents actually filter out the candidates we required by only searching their database with the most basic and obvious keywords. And being unable to understand what most of those keywords mean (in some cases even basic synonym recognition) If the candidate's CV was not litered with buzz words and names of technologies they wouldn't come through to us.

It also seemed that the Agents would favour their biggest clients. Only offering smaller clients the left-overs (which is, frankly, what I would do if I were in their, commission and target heavy, situation)

From your point of view, that would mean that the companies that might be best suited to you - the agent may never even realise, or deliberately not tell you about.

If you can, I recommend trying to see if you can go more directly to the company (they may even offer you some of what they would normally pay in agent fees as a joining bonus). We now only recruit by advertising directly, to prevent the agents fitering out the people we want. Try searching around for software companies, and see if they have recuritment contact information on their websites?

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From a candidate's point of view this would be my preferred approach too, but far too many companies rely on agents and don't put vacancies on their websites or even post their own adds to Jobsite etc. If they do have a section on their website the vacancies are often out of date. – ChrisF♦ Oct 15 '10 at 9:03
We hire through agencies and although some are much better than others the agents themselves are just doing database searches. The better ones will further filter down candidates before we talk to them (which they're reasonably effective at when it comes to contractors, much less so for permanent staff), but as the agents have no development knowledge there's a limit in what they can do. The candidates I hate are the 'shopping list' candidates whose CVs have 100s of skills listed, and when you actually quiz them it's "oh I shared an office with someone working on that"...hmmm... – FinnNk Oct 15 '10 at 9:23
I agree with what's said here (in the post and the other comments). Agent's do generally just "search" for keywords and acronyms without knowing or understanding the slightest thing about the skills/technologies themselves. I was hoping that, in asking the question, there may be at least a few recruitment agencies who, by specializing in fulfilling IT industry positions, may have recruiters who do understand CV's that aren't necessarily littered with pages of acronyms and keywords. I'm sensing that such a thing probably doesn't exist (although some recruiters are better than others). – CraigTP Oct 18 '10 at 9:44
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There are quite a few in the UK:

http://www.computerfutures.com/

http://www.computerpeople.co.uk/

http://www.gcsltd.com/

http://www.matrixrecruitment.co.uk/

http://www.prospectus.co.uk/

are the first few that spring to mind.

If you post your CV to boards like Jobsite or JobServe and mark that you are interested in IT jobs your details will be picked up by these and many other agencies who will then contact you about any role they have.

This may not be a good thing as you will be contacted by any and all agencies and may end up with two (or more) sending your details for the same job. Good agencies should check with you before sending details anywhere and the best will actually tell you the name of the company.

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Yeah, in most case posting on JobServe is the single step to do in order to get a contact with all of them. – Pierre 303 Oct 14 '10 at 12:12
One problem with a scatter-gun approach such as signing up to JobServe is that employers will see the same CV from multiple agents and that, in my experience, goes against you. – JBRWilkinson Oct 14 '10 at 14:36
@JBRWilkinson - if the agencies are doing their job they should contact you before sending your details over to an employer. Even if they don't give the name they should give location and some details so you can say yes or no. However, they don't all do this. It's one reason I didn't publish my CV on any public job boards when looking this time. – ChrisF♦ Oct 14 '10 at 14:48
Most of the people that we've hired through agencies have been through GCS, generally candidates seem to be happy with them as well. – FinnNk Oct 15 '10 at 9:27
Agreed, they should contact you, but there are still many aggressive/unscrupulous agencies out there and these guys watch the jobsites all day long. – JBRWilkinson Oct 15 '10 at 20:29
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http://www.client-server.com. They are excellent - got me a lineup of interviews for suitable roles within days and fought on my behalf to get the best result possible. Ask for Nick Boulton.

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how about Dice.com ?

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