The banks are very large organizations, with lots of money. Hence, there has been many cases where there have been lawsuits by employees. The full time employee is not a choice anymore because of the risk. Once people get hired full time at the bank, chances are they are going to retire there. When I first joined the bank, we had an engineer that the manager wanted out and she had spoke to human resources. She spoke to me regarding him and I told her that let me see how he works. So I trained him towards agile development and he started producing. The manager felt bad because the complain about his performance went very deep, to her upper management, but she understood that getting a full time hire out is not easy and he is producing, so let’s give him a chance.

We then started moving towards preferred vendors. She introduced me to about 15 different preferred vendors who are specialized recruiters, legally bound by the bank, following all the process and procedures, great folks to be working with. I took over all her contacts and started running with the hiring. My record is 7-8 interviews in a day and I would run with that level of interviewing for days with various preferred vendors, till I get the hire the team needed. We would never interview just for the sake of interview. We always did incremental hiring and have 15 preferred vendors ready to open up their pools of resources. The preferred vendors work with lots of small recruiting agencies, to get them the hires they need. Nobody messes with the bank, when the hiring opens. There are many vendors trying to get their foot in and become a preferred vendor. The preferred vendors work with year and a half full time contract, or statement of work (SOW) which is endless contracting through a specialized preferred vendor.

Once a preferred vendor get a hire at the bank, everybody gets paid, hourly, including the recruiter, the agency and the hire. Then it’s much easier to get the second hire and so forth. Because of nature of the dependency of the banks on preferred vendors, the rates of technical workers are going up. For a senior software engineer, we paid $100 - 150/hour. The skill set is deep software engineering. With some guidance, team leading and project management, that can execute all the software technical tasks, good enough to make the business successful which results in larger budgets. While I was at the bank with the team, our hiring budget went up 5x, in millions. Our managers were promoted and we were on CBS marketwatch for my team. I was responsible for $2 million worth of hiring for our engineering team, the team lead for the mobile team that launched the first android application.