Or could a high quality recruiter just start doing this with a small number of select, high quality, recent clients? (developers are the clients in this case)
Starting from the ground up with no clients and trying to build a client base on this model would be difficult. If you can't show results, I'm not going to give you 10% (or any other percentage), mostly because so far I've been DIYing it and doing decent. But if I already had a "relationship" with a recruiter, maybe one who's actually good at technical placement and they found something good for me along with offering to be a long term career guide / mentor / agent, I'd be interested in listening to them much more than if someone just calls me out of the blue. And if the pay was more than I get now, even with the 10% cut taken out, and involved interesting projects, that would get my attention.
I think the long term career guide and mentoring part would have to be a big part of it. I know my skills but I don't necessarily know who out there wants them, maybe there's people out there who need my skills but also don't know it. The agent comes into play here and matches up two people who don't know they really need each other in order to make great things. This takes a lot of work on the part of the agent.
If you have this business model, managing 10 to 20 developers and taking 10% cut of salary, that's enough to make a nice living on and you'd have time to be personal with all of them.
Agreed on all points - it's a chicken/egg situation to be sure up front. It's something I've thought of doing just because of my circle of contacts - I know many fairly well (probably 5-8 pretty strongly), know their strengths, know what they'd like to be doing, and I get calls from both recruiters and companies looking for people with XYZ skills/interest. I'm not sure it's enough for me to do full time, but it's made me think more about this issue, and the state of the industry.
Getting the 10% out of some people would be hard - I guess you just wouldn't use them as clients(?). Would you collect up front? Weekly payments? I don't know many developers who can easily just hand over $8-$10k in a lump sum, so you'd probably have to collect over time, and if they're not good with budgeting, that's a whole other problem.
I think you'd work it into the contract with the hiring company to get a % cut of each paycheck. The hiring companies probably already have a system in place for paying contract houses, this would just be a slight change. That'd probably be the easiest for the developer, too. And the 10% was just a number, you'd probably have to charge less than that. For example, the NBA limits agents to 4% (or so my quick Googling says), which seems like a reasonable fee.
If you start with just a few people you know well, I can see this being a good side job until the client list grows. The hard part is probably going to be that the people you know best are friends, friends may not want to pay you for your help.
I'm an independent web software developer. I work for various clients on an hourly or per-project basis. The highest rate I charge is 50% higher than the lowest rate I charge. If I had an agent that could keep me busy with the higher rate jobs--increasing my average hourly rate and giving me more hours to work because I'd spend less time chasing down gigs--I'd be more than happy to pay him/her 10%.
Pretty easy to make a living on 4% when you're dealing with multimillion dollar (and multiyear) contracts, not so much so when dealing with $80k developers :)
Starting from the ground up with no clients and trying to build a client base on this model would be difficult. If you can't show results, I'm not going to give you 10% (or any other percentage), mostly because so far I've been DIYing it and doing decent. But if I already had a "relationship" with a recruiter, maybe one who's actually good at technical placement and they found something good for me along with offering to be a long term career guide / mentor / agent, I'd be interested in listening to them much more than if someone just calls me out of the blue. And if the pay was more than I get now, even with the 10% cut taken out, and involved interesting projects, that would get my attention.
I think the long term career guide and mentoring part would have to be a big part of it. I know my skills but I don't necessarily know who out there wants them, maybe there's people out there who need my skills but also don't know it. The agent comes into play here and matches up two people who don't know they really need each other in order to make great things. This takes a lot of work on the part of the agent.
If you have this business model, managing 10 to 20 developers and taking 10% cut of salary, that's enough to make a nice living on and you'd have time to be personal with all of them.