A brief rant about recruitment consultants

[bad company]

tuffer said:

Give me your number, I will call you twenty times a day trying to sell you something you don't want and see how you like it.

Good recruiters don't need to cold call. I ran my agency from 1989 until I sold up in 2012, our clients to called us when they had a requirement.

The problem comes when the job looks to outsiders like a license to easy money so they start up and have no idea how to find clients / jobs to fill.

[tuffer]

bad company said:

tuffer said:

Give me your number, I will call you twenty times a day trying to sell you something you don't want and see how you like it.

Good recruiters don't need to cold call. I ran my agency from 1989 until I sold up in 2012, our clients to called us when they had a requirement.

The problem comes when the job looks to outsiders like a license to easy money so they start up and have no idea how to find clients / jobs to fill.

Agreed, I use one company, I am happy with them and I like working with them. The trouble is as a startup we have gone from 8 people to 130 people in the last two years so every recruiter in the Country wants to call you and explain how they are different.

[Countdown]

ferrariF50lover said:

I won't condone lying. I'd kick the arse of any consultant I found doing it, but...

Genuinely, if I called your firm and said to your PA, "Hi, it's FerrariF50lover, I'm a recruiter and this is a cold call with a view to taking your boss's money from his pocket and putting it in mine, can you put me through?" How quickly would she put the phone down after she'd stopped laughing?
And if she would put me through, how willing to engage would you be?

The whole thing is self-perpetuating. You don't want to hear from recruiters, so you refuse to speak with them, so they lie about being recruiters to get through to you, which pisses you off meaning you don't want to talk to them, forcing them to lie even more and on and on and on.

There is an alternative option - instead of lying to my secretary, if you've realised that I don't want to speak to you why don't you stop trying to contact me?

If your agency is as good as it likes to think it is then I'll contact you when I need to. But I probably won't if yours is the type of agency that rings up on false pretences.

[bad company]

Tom_C76 said:

What do these people actually offer as a benefit to society? Years ago there were a few specialist technical recruitment firms that acted for agency staff, they'd place temporary technicians or engineers for bigger projects if a firm needed assistance.

Then they started representing permie staff too, offering people looking for a job relocation. Then people just looking to change employer in the hopes of a new challenge or more money. At that point they also started contacting the people they'd placed to try to get them to move on again to land the consultants another hefty fee.

Now it seems even students due to graduate this summer are using these firms to get them their first job. Costing the would-be employer 20% of the starting salary in fees to wave round a digital copy of a CV. In these IT literate days where every firm has a contact email address on their website, why can't these students email their CVs round themselves? Or are they too important to spare the 10 mins that would take? It's not even costing a stamp as it did when I graduated 20 years ago.

RC's are NEVER allowed to contact people they previously placed with you to entice them to move again. If that happens make a complaint.

I don't understand your 'benefit to society' comment. Recruitment is a business like any other.

[8Ace]

Adding to this folowing a particularly frustrating call I had last week,.

I saw a job on LinkedIn that looked interesting. I'm not actively looking, but could be interested if the right role came up.

Now, I don't want to waste my own time, or the time of the recruiting manager if the role's not right, so I called the recruitment agent to get some details - the advert only had the job title, industry and location. No mention of which company it's for, the salary, team size etc.

RA refused to give me any details, at all, until after I'd applied. The logic was "how do i know you're not another recruitment firm ringing up to see who our clients are". I remain none the wiser.

[Hoolio]

8Ace said:

Adding to this folowing a particularly frustrating call I had last week,.

I saw a job on LinkedIn that looked interesting. I'm not actively looking, but could be interested if the right role came up.

Now, I don't want to waste my own time, or the time of the recruiting manager if the role's not right, so I called the recruitment agent to get some details - the advert only had the job title, industry and location. No mention of which company it's for, the salary, team size etc.

RA refused to give me any details, at all, until after I'd applied. The logic was "how do i know you're not another recruitment firm ringing up to see who our clients are". I remain none the wiser.

Why is that such a surprise? It's happens in recruitment all the time. The Agent is just "protecting" the role he/she is working. Once the Agent has your CV they should release all the details to you should they feel you are a match for their client.

[bad company]

Hoolio said:

8Ace said:

Adding to this folowing a particularly frustrating call I had last week,.

I saw a job on LinkedIn that looked interesting. I'm not actively looking, but could be interested if the right role came up.

Now, I don't want to waste my own time, or the time of the recruiting manager if the role's not right, so I called the recruitment agent to get some details - the advert only had the job title, industry and location. No mention of which company it's for, the salary, team size etc.

RA refused to give me any details, at all, until after I'd applied. The logic was "how do i know you're not another recruitment firm ringing up to see who our clients are". I remain none the wiser.

Why is that such a surprise? It's happens in recruitment all the time. The Agent is just "protecting" the role he/she is working. Once the Agent has your CV they should release all the details to you should they feel you are a match for their client.

Exactly right. My agency would never identify a client firm unless we were sure we were speaking with a genuine candidate. Apart from the scenario of another agency as identified by Hoolio many of our client firms wanted to retain their confidentiality. This is standard across the industry for very good reason.