A few people have commented on my obvious dislike for recruitment agencies.
Most people haven’t asked why… some have…
When I left college in the late 90s I ended up going to Italy for a few months teaching English. When I came back in early 2000 the Irish economy was supposedly booming, but I ended up on the dole.
My intense dislike for recruitment agencies stems from my experiences with a very large number of them in Cork, Dublin and Limerick during the period between when I got back to Ireland and when I left again.
Now don’t get me wrong. There are some recruitment agencies that are really good and professional. I can’t speak highly enough of the guys in Careerwise Recruitment.
They actually read my CV.
That was the basic problem that I had with recruitment agencies. They seemed to be incapable of reading CVs. Now, I know from my own experience with recruiting staff that some CVs are deplorable and impossible to decipher. In a lot of cases the layout is so bad that practically hurts to read them.
However my CV at the time was quite simple and easy to read. Skills were clearly categorised. Bullet points were used etc.,
But time after time the followup call from the supposed expert involved them asking me really inane questions. Or worse still, sending me to do job interviews with companies that asked me to fill out application forms where I had to tell them my Inter Cert results (Irish equivalent of GCSE / O Level)!
I don’t believe the world owes anyone a living, but if someone has a college degree it’s fairly safe to assume that they actually made it through secondary level education!
I could go on….
In any case, based on my poor experiences with recruitment agencies as a job seeker I can see absolutely no reason why I’d inflict their “choice” candidates on myself when I’m footing the bill. Maybe some of the recruiters have learnt to read and are now capable of matching job seekers with prospective employers, but I somehow doubt it.
Now if I was going to use a recruitment agency I know who I would use…
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