From Forbes:
When Pete London posted a resume on LinkedIn in December 2009, the JavaScript specialist stumbled into a trap of sorts. Shortly after creating a profile he received a message from a recruiter at Google. Just days later, another from Mozilla. Facebook reached out the next month and over the course of the next two years, nearly every big name in tech–Amazon, LinkedIn, Twitter, Adobe–messaged London in an attempt to lure him to a new employer. He received 530 messages in all, or one every 40 hours.
The only problem was that London didn’t exist. The fake profile was created by Elaine Wherry, a cofounder at Meebo, in a desperate effort to find recruiters to help triage her own talent issues. (The effort is described in a blog post here.)
Such is the sorry, frantic state of recruiting technical talent. “The demand for engineers far outstrips the supply,” says Matt Mickiewicz, the 29 year-old CEO of DeveloperAuction. “Good engineers are never unemployed and never seeking jobs.” The result is the Pete London experience: Any decent engineer gets hounded by packs of recruiters on a daily basis, meaning even tempting offers get lumped in with the spam.
From his perch in San Francisco, Mickiewicz, the cofounder of crowdsourcing site 99designs, observed this sordid phenomenon and decided to flip the equation. DeveloperAuction helps top coders see what they’re worth by broadcasting their resumes to 317 tech companies registered with the site–including Quora, DropBox and Facebook–in competitive, 14-day cycles. After companies make their offers, candidates are free to accept interviews or take in the numbers and pass. Last month’s crop of 88 engineers saw $30 million in job offers. (UPDATE: 153 engineers in the company’s October auction received $78 million in offers.)*See:
Mickiewiz hopes the site will boost the top-end of developer salaries, which remain compressed in spite of high demand. Even inexperienced engineers can make $90,000, he says, but many of the best earn only $180,000 while adding multiples of value to their companies. He thinks that the entertainment industry, where the earnings spectrum spans five figures to eight, provides a better model....MORE
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From Fast Company:
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