I was tired of recruiters calling me — that's why I started Bluecoders

After leaving school, I had barely updated my role on LinkedIn before I started receiving messages from recruiters — until it was almost every day.

They all found my LinkedIn profile very interesting and wanted to talk so they could pitch me opportunities. At first I was rather flattered because I felt I had progressed and that these recruiters could help me figure out where I should head next in my career. That wasn't the case at all, and the pleasant feeling you get when someone strokes your ego was quickly replaced by annoyance.

My first motivation as a developer was to grow, to take on more responsibility and leadership within the technical team. The few calls and meetings with local recruiters quickly disillusioned me.

No one really cared about my growth, and even less about whether my profile fit what they had to offer. They wanted me for roles I wasn't interested in, and the recruiters were trying more to convince me their opportunities should interest me than to understand what actually interested me.

Beyond not understanding my background or my profile, I also realized that recruiters didn't even understand the projects they were yet pitching so well, and most of them wouldn't even give me the names of the companies they were nonetheless asking me to apply to.

I'd had enough — I had no more time to spend on recruiters. I was fed up.

Yet recruitment as a topic fascinated me, because the choice of a job hugely shapes people's lives, and I loved advising people on their choices — that pushed me toward developer recruitment.

I joined a recruitment firm and quickly realized the legend was true: recruiters know nothing about tech, and that's not really surprising in the end since they aren't trained for it.

Within a few months I had become the top-performing recruiter on my team, and the founders regularly asked me for advice on the choices they had to make. On my side, I loved talking with developers, understanding why and how they had ended up where they were in their careers — I was junior and getting the chance to talk with tech heavyweights. I was passionate about this work and decided to dedicate my career to it.

In five months I had hit the annual targets, while some hadn't managed to in several years. That said, I was junior, and I would have had to wait a long time before being able to influence how my colleagues worked.

That's when I understood I had to forge my own path, leave that company, and build a recruitment service centered on the careers of the developers we support, rather than on the needs of companies.

I've been at it for 3 years, and Bluecoders today counts about thirty people, including fifteen recruiters I've trained — to support developers on one side, and on the other to forge partnerships with companies working on projects that hold real technical interest for the team building them.

Each recruiter is specialized in a technical environment, and we only present opportunities if we ourselves are convinced that the career project of the people we support fits the opportunities we've sourced.

Even though we haven't spent a single euro on advertising, Bluecoders has built a reputation as a high-end recruiter that earns us several dozen partnership requests per week, even though we are the most expensive on the market. We also regularly turn down companies if we aren't convinced of the interest of the projects on offer.