[ILUG] Important Note

[Waider]

According to Kathryn Cassidy:
> 
> Now, in the current economic climate people might be more willing to
> accept these mails, but I've had to deal with recruitment agencies
> recently, and the majority of them are a bunch of cowboys.  When you

Experience with recruitment agencies in the last, hmm, five years:

* They don't screen candidates before offering them to employers

This, and the points below, are all in my experience, and maybe I've not
yet found Perfect Recruitment Company. However, I dealt with a lot of them
while working for Jobfinder and Stepstone, so I have at least some idea of
what I'm on about. I was fed a stream of CVs from recruitment agencies which
were inappropriate to the job requirements, had not been verified by the
agencies, and in some cases the CVs hadn't even been read by the agencies -
otherwise I'm sure they'd have suggested the candidate correct the typos. As
I understand it, the benefit the agencies are supposed to offer to the
employers essentially amount to an initial culling of people who are simply
not fit for the job at hand, and it seems the agencies don't do that.

* They don't understand the bulk of the candidates they're handling

An acquaintance who worked in a few agencies used phone me regularly to ask
what the requirements for a given position might be, or if language skills
'A' were a drop-in replacement for language skills 'B'. This person had no
grasp of IT, and yet was supposed to be responsible for placing people in
IT jobs. This doesn't make any sense to me.

* They are unable to communicate with either employers or candidates in
  a coherent and informative fashion

I found myself repeatedly asking the agencies the same series of questions
about jobs they suggested - money, location, duties. Now, I may be insane,
but it seems like if you don't know those three things about a job, you can't
really express an interest in it either way. Instead, I was getting emails
like "How about Dell?". How about them, indeed. Likewise, as an employer
I would receive semiliterate emails expounding on candidates I'd already
discarded and, well, presumably because of point one above, any further
questions about the candidates went unanswered anyway.

I dislike agencies. I'm not even sure they're a necessary evil, at this point.
In fact, in a shrinking jobs market, I don't see why an employer should pay
an agency if the agency isn't doing anything the employer couldn't do by
spending the same money on a print advert or a website.

So in a roundabout and rambling way, I'm agreeing with disallowing agency
posts here. Of course, that's just my opinion and all.

Waider.
-- 
waider at dspsrv.com / Chances are I'm not at home right now.