Insane

mick.fr

I contacted an Irish company today to see how much it will cost me to publish 3 IT contract offers on their website at 2pm today.
Everybody was out for lunch, so the receptionist took my details and told me she will drop an email to the relevant people.

In the mean time I registered on their website to get a call back as there is no mention whatsoever of pricing.

5pm, still no call back, no email back.

I call them back, a spoke to a guy.
"So how much please ?" : 4500 euro for 3 jobs and 17.000 euro for the year for unlimited jobs.

WOA!
lol seriously
I know agencies are far to be cheap as well, but still for god sake. I mean this website is even more expensive than an agency. And they do nothing.

I mean for the quality of service they provide is not worth at all.
The agencies do not test the candidates, the steps they take before actually sending you the guy is very very poor, so what is the value added here ?

stepbar

I think a name and shame would be in order. That madness. I would go to jobs / nixers or any of the online agencies (i.e irishjobs, recruitireland etc

mick.fr

The company i called today is precisely one you mentioned...

stepbar

lol. Thats ridiculus. Then I would use free advertising through the colleges and hope something comes of it.

mick.fr

I will give a try to jobs/nixers, they seem to be a lot cheaper.
Thanks for those names anyway, I did not knew them.

leeroybrown

TBH it's not surprising given how difficult it is to get 'good' people to apply for you jobs. I've seen similarly silly figures quoted and rejected previously.

What always gets me is that I always hear people complaining that there are not enough good jobs and companies complaining that that there are not enough good candidates. Having reviewed the CV's I'm tending towards the complaining people being at fault.

mick.fr

Yeah but the recruitment agencies do not do anything, they just collect CV, test the english level, check how the guy looks like and will do eventually 2 or 3 other things, but that's all.
I mean none of the recruitment agency will be able to run a test to make sure the guy who is MCSE, knows really his stuff.
So I have to do this piece to make sure I am not sending a monkey over.

jackbhoy

In my experience most of the recruitment agencies/consultants are p!ss takers. The quality of people they have sent to us recently is rubbish, looking for guys that have 3-5 years relevant experience and they are sending us muppets who can't spell SQL let alone develop apps in it, they are part of a network of companies out there that have no qualms about charging insane fees but have no interest in providing a good product/service in return.

Arathorn

Maybe your expectations are too high, very hard to get someone who will know exactly what you need. Put some effort in training them yourselves, calling people monkeys doesnt seem very professional either

jimmycrackcorm

I got a shock also when I rang up IrishJobs once to advertise. So I went off to Monster.ie who were only charging €300 a pop.

MagicMarker

jimmycrackcorm wrote:

I got a shock also when I rang up IrishJobs once to advertise. So I went off to Monster.ie who were only charging €300 a pop.

yeah but monster.ie sucks.

AARRRGH

Why not put them on staff.ie and gumtree.ie? Both are free. The jobs from staff.ie also appear on dole.ie...

€4500 for three jobs is just... wtf.

nesf

jackbhoy wrote:

In my experience most of the recruitment agencies/consultants are p!ss takers. The quality of people they have sent to us recently is rubbish, looking for guys that have 3-5 years relevant experience and they are sending us muppets who can't spell SQL let alone develop apps in it, they are part of a network of companies out there that have no qualms about charging insane fees but have no interest in providing a good product/service in return.

Perhaps it's because it's easy to bluff your way past people who don't themselves know what the developing SQL apps involves? The problem is, unless you've someone there who knows the area fairly well it's going to be very difficult to separate out all the bluffers from the people who know their stuff.

A move towards more "specialist" recruitment agencies which can actually screen applicants correctly would be a good thing for many areas.


Edit:

The recruitment process is essentially a battle of wits between candidates and the employer. The candidates are (or at least should) be trying to sell themselves and usually they will try to appear more competent than they actually are and the employer needs to ferret out who can do the best job. Usually this involves some kind of compromise between the ideal candidate and the best of what you've got. Once you go beyond the entry level stuff where they can pick up what they don't know on the job and you're usually looking for a candidate who has a lot of potential rather than a lot of experience, you go into the territory where you need experienced people. This creates problems because 3 or 5 or 10 years experience on someone's CV really tells you nothing. Those could be 10 years spent posting on boards or whatever or 10 years working extremely hard and skilfully.

Expecting a recruitment guy, who might only be in his job for a year or two to be able to differentiate between candidates at an experienced and skilled level is asking for a lot. In a lot of areas (not all) it's very hard to be able to tease apart the good from the bad and at best all that can be done is a simple "screening" using number of years worked and professional qualifications etc. At the end of the day you will have to do a second round of screening through interviews once the candidates get passed on, and there will be a lot of duds there and there isn't an easy way around it outside of very specialised (ergo: more expensive) recruitment companies who have the ability to screen applicants thoroughly which is going to require some very skilled people on their side of the fence who know the area that you're hiring in quite well.