Staffing/Recruiting Firms, Friend or Foe?

Yeah, I’ll burn some bridges with this one, but I’m curious

What are people's experiences are with creative recruiters/staffing firms. I find some are more reputable like Paladin or Aquent. But I feel many are just using computers to keyword scan your resume, they call you "Oh I have a job that would be a PERFECT fit for you" you talk to them, and you find out they never really read your resume or  even looked at your portfolio. Even more annoying... foreign recruiting firms using Vonage/VOIP Us numbers trying to recruit you for a job thats not even close to where you live. Thoughts? Experiences?

Dice and Monster seem to be ripe pickings for the “I found your resume on xyz….” But these are more the IT staffing firms, who once again, don’t look at your resume or portfolio and trying to place you in a job where you don’t fit

The other funny thing, they will badmouth the other recruiting firms when they talk to you. They always ask "has another firm presented you for this job?"

Do recruiters work on commission if they place people on jobs, because that’s the feeling I get.

Creative Circle seems pretty much useless. You can send them resume after resume and they will never get back to you

The Difference Between Web Design and Web Development

HR

Hiring Managers

Recruiters

Lend me your ears

There is mass confusion on what the difference is between a web DESIGNER and what a web DEVELOPER is. Then you start mixing in the words UI developer and designer and it gets even more messed up.

I could get into the whole Design Unicorn discussion again, but you can read/research that for yourself

Web DESIGNERS usually are in charge of the aesthetic look and feel of the website. They will use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator (or now, more open source tools) to create a look and feel for the website. Many know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or jQuery. There seems to be a newly minted term in the UI field called VISUAL DESIGNER who also knows about interaction design.

I’ve met UI designers who never touch code, and only work in wire framing tools like AXURE and make some good coin.

A web DEVELOPER does the back end design, which can be all sorts of languages….ASP, JSP, .NET. Coldfusion, Java, databases, mySql

While web designer and web developer should both have a macro understanding what the other does, these are really two different skillets.

Though looking through the want ads you will find a whole lot of Robin Thicke Blurred Lines going on.

For example

http://www.tecture.com/Careers/Web+Designer+and+Front+End+Developer

• Excellent written and verbal client communication skills
• Professional web/interactive design expertise
• HTML and CSS
• JavaScript and jQuery
• Experience creating UI & IA documentation (wireframes, sitemaps, etc.)
• Proficiency in Photoshop & Illustrator
• Active proponent of web standards, usability & accessibility
• Emphasis on clean, usable & sophisticated layouts
• Meticulous eye for detail & style

Bonus Skills:

• PHP, ASP.NET, or other server-side and database programming languages
• iPhone, Android, and mobile web design and development
• Knowledge of web content management systems (Drupal, WordPress)
• You don't use Dreamweaver
• Flash design / ActionScript knowledge

The likelihood this company will actually find someone who knows all of this stuff is pretty much close to none.

Illinois College of Optometry Redesign

At my brief tenure as the web designer/front end developer at the Illinois College of Optometry, I was given the opportunity of doing a full redesign of their website.

Next to my design of http://www.cafescribe.com, this was the biggest project I had ever worked on with a lot of moving parts.

The two major objectives of the project were to a)move it from an ancient Joomla 1.5 platform to WordPress so the content manager could easily update it and b) to make it responsive.

I looked at it as an opportunity to start applying some of the UI/UX theories and techniques I had been reading about, and learning in my User Centered Design class. I also tried to modernize and clean up the design from its previous incarnation, creating visual hierarchy, and fixing one of the biggest pain points, the small type, and the lack of a search bar on all pages.

While very modern in look, feel and layout, I would not say this is purely Flat Design, but very inspired by it, using modern web fonts, large blocks of color. It avoids some of the trappings of the modern Flat movement like parallax scrolling or heavy icon usage.

  

It was a very big learning experience for me.

I had never used WordPress before so it was a quick crash course on it. I learned how to use its backend, all the various plug ins and even got into doing some child themes work.

As I stated above I got to apply some UI/UX techniques I had not done before on other web pages:

Design/Competitive Analysis - I looked at about every Optometry School in North America's website to see what they were doing, how they handled navigation, information architecture, page layout, what they were doing wrong, and what they were doing right.

I also looked outside of higher education, and went through the popular design showcase websites like

Hand drawn wireframes before taking them into Adobe Illustrator for quick iterations

Usability Testing (well it was kind of half assed, but I did record the audio sessions from two students while asking them to perform tasks on the website and think out loud. You need at least 5 for a good Usability study, and to be video recorded, but it was a start)

But perhaps the biggest lesson here was the art of letting go. Especially when you design for a client using a CMS so they can make their own updates or has another developer work on it, a web designer loses control of their "baby" the second they hand the project over. Websites are ephemeral things, with maybe 3-4 years shelf life. Unlike print, you have do have a physical copy to hold on and preserve. Web design can seem like it's out there in the ether.