Most programming I do because I'm trying to solve my own problems. One problem in my unemployed life is tech recruiters. They're annoying and they shouldn't come between me and my next employment place. I want to make money without having the recruiters get in my way.
Making them irrelevant is tricky. A good data dump of public business listings by state and category is hard to find. Having something like that at least would offer a way to find out what businesses are in what areas. It should just be a matter of loading up a csv into your DB system of choice and doing a simple query or two. No such luck googling for such a file.
Queries for "business listings" takes you to pages where you're assumed that you know what kind of businesses you're looking for. It's not easy to just say "Give me a listings of all public businesses in Providence, RI" for example. The closest thing out there that I've found were some area Chamber of Commerce listings. Scraping those directories isn't hard fortunately. 10 to 40 lines of Python code and you're done. But it's hardly a complete or foolproof way of gathering information.
Gaining leverage is one goal.
1. Recruiter email says "We have a manufacturing client in Baton Rouge, LA looking for a C# developer".
2. I switch to my database and look for Baton Rouge manufacturing businesses.
3. Narrow the list of possibilities to a small handful of businesses and make my move from there.
Another potential goal is to start some small online SaaS business. In such case, that same local database would help me do some better surveying of what kind of businesses are where. It sounds like a good way to sort out what kind of niches could be served.
So long story short, I'd like to make tech recruiters relevant by learning more about what businesses are where. I want to either do an end run around the recruiters or start my own business. It's a weird way to think of my unemployment situation but it is what it is.
Feedback welcome.
02 Nov 2014, 4:30 pm
