Recruitment agents - The lgood - The bad

careeradvise

Hey,

So there have been some pretty interesting threads on this subjects over the previous months. I am extremely interested to get some feedback on the following (without the thread turning into a bashing of the recruitment industry).

1. Top 3 reasons (5 if you wish) problems you have with the current recruitment industry.

2. Top 3 reasons (5 if you wish) advantages you see to working with a recruitment agent.

Just so people know, I am not an agent ( I work in I.T ). I just find this subject quite interesting. To kick things off

Disadvantages:
1. Lack of knowledge in general aspects of I.T
2. Not knowing the role they are recruiting for.
3. Not knowing much about the company they are recruiting for.
4. Being told false information to get you in the door.

Advantages:
1. Having someone sort through suitable roles for free.
2. The good agents do know their clients inside out.
3. The goo agents will give honest advise about the role.

Cheers

mikemac

I don't deal with them if possible but want to get this off my chest.

It drives me mad to hear them call themselves recruitment consultants.
To me a recruitment consultant is someone who works in a business and identifies areas that need staff and then devises the best way to recruit them (website/newspaper/radio), does all the interviews and can do reports on any aspect of this for management.

Someone in a recruitment agency isn't a consultant, there are a salesperson.
So stop inflating the job title :mad:

What's next: recruitment executives? :rolleyes:

Sorry for the rant OP.

careeradvise

micmclo wrote:

I don't deal with them if possible but want to get this off my chest.

It drives me mad to hear them call themselves recruitment consultants.
To me a recruitment consultant is someone who works in a business and identifies areas that need staff and then devises the best way to recruit them (website/newspaper/radio), does all the interviews and can do reports on any aspect of this for management.

Someone in a recruitment agency isn't a consultant, there are a salesperson.
So stop inflating the job title :mad:

What's next: recruitment executives? :rolleyes:

Sorry for the rant OP.

Ha, no problem, thats a valid point. Are they consultants ?. Personally I think there is a small portion who are extremely good at their jobs and can use this title. Unfortunately for them, every company who takes on a newbie with a call sales background calls them a consultant straight off, thus diminishing the meaning of that title.
Oh and i do think some of the more experienced consultants are called executives.

Tom Dunne

Top 3:

1: They are pattern matching monkeys, with little knowledge of the job they are hiring for. I sent in a CV for a database developer job, requiring PL/SQL. I had in my CV that I developed packages for Oracle (which of course is done in PL/SQL), but I didn't actually use the words PL/SQL. Recruitment Monkey said I didn't have the skills for the job. Ok, that was partly my fault.

2: Technically illiterate. I sent the CV in, quote, "some strange format, it seems to be corrupted. I can't open it." This "strange format" was PDF. Monkey didn't know how to open a PDF.

3: They are sales people. I am reliant on public transport, specifically the train/dart to get to work. Monkey tried his best to get me to go for a job, that he eventually matched to my experience, in Dublin Airport. He was not impressed when I convinced him the Dart doesn't actually go to Dublin Airport (he was foreign).

For me, it's the focus on the paycheck/commission at the end of the month that irks me. They don't focus on the candidate.

Nody

Well having worked very closely with a recruitment firm (inc. travelling abroad for doing the interviews directly for candidates) I'll throw my 2c in.

Bad:
1) Will pull close to anything to try to get sell in.
I've had people who've been given the answers to the test we asked the agencies to do before sending any candidate to us (to sort out the people at least partly before interviews).
I've had people who where told what to say in the interview (literally speaking you will get question X and then you should answer Y)
I've had people who've been pumped after the interview by the agency for the above reason (especially to see if we had changed our theme of the interview).
Did I mention that they are also VERY pushy and insistent on feedback and what not directly and if you don't take a person they will throw you another 3 candidates (all less suitable but anything for that sale!).

2) They can be clueless monkies on motivation creating no consistent relationship.
The agency I worked with gave everyone a equal share of the comission if they had ANY relation in the candidate. This meant the people I was with who spent 12h a day getting candidates for me got paid exactly the same as the person who typed in the candidate name and uploaded their CV to the DB (a 5 min job). Obviously the people out on the ground where not to happy to share their comission with someone when they had spend over an hour with the candidate and promptly left. This created a constant need to redo the whole relationship with the agency to stress what we needed etc.

3) They only care for a candidate to the moment the sale succeeds or fails.
We had many cases where people where dropped the moment they where hired or declined. The people would not get any feedback from us (we had to give to the agency and the agency was to feedback the individual) and received phone calls and e-mails from unsuccesful candidates asking for feedback etc.

Good
1) Language skills
We needed someone who was native in a language to do a local recruitment drive there. We did not have anyone speaking the language and a agency could offer this service for us and have the person going over people's language skills etc.

2) Sift through the gravel for you
Popular position came up where we needed to make a noticable headcount increase at the time. With one agency we would hire anything they sent us as they really only sent us good candidates who passed the test, another agency had a 90%+ turn down rate...

dazberry

tom dunne wrote:

3: They are sales people. I am reliant on public transport, specifically the train/dart to get to work. Monkey tried his best to get me to go for a job, that he eventually matched to my experience, in Dublin Airport. He was not impressed when I convinced him the Dart doesn't actually go to Dublin Airport (he was foreign).

That happened to me - and the guy wasn't foreign, just a w**ker. I've found the perfect job for you he says - and have an interview for you next Thursday

like yourself the location was an issue and all this had been explained

the software company was in a sector that I specifically explained prior that I did not want to move into to

and the cherry on the cake

I was actually applying for a specific job - not any job - but the pr**k decided to do a

job search for me.

It all get very ugly in the end, and needless to say I did not attend the interview...

D.

AARRRGH

In a previous job I worked alongside recruitment "consultants".

They are sales people. 100%. Even the good ones. All they care about is their commission and hitting their targets.

They are generally quite nice people. Very personable and good fun. They are not the ***** most people think they are!

They generally know very little about the industry they work in. Very few, if any, bother to learn about the industry they work in.

A personal example of this is when a recruiter refused to offer me a localisation role as it was too advanced for me. Note I am an ex embedded systems developer and also have about 6 years QA experience. When I tried to explain localisation is the lowest rung on the IT ladder (much lower than tech support IMO) she got angry. (Edit: I was desperate for a job at the time, so even a short localisation contract suited me.)

Recruiters do offer an excellent (if expensive) service to employers, but they really need to stop making false promises to candidates. I think if they stopped that ****, people would start liking them.