Recruiters...

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Agreed meet lot chancers in IT too, however many people do take the profession seriously and do get academic and vocational qualifications, after all look at this very forum. To land most IT jobs you will need to demonstrate many skills and significant knowledge.

I'm not convinced the same holds for recruitment, many places are body shops where they will take pretty much anyone and pay them on a commission basis. I've had recruiters with a very poor grasp of English, which seems very strange given the job is 90% communication.

So if you subscribe to the argument that they 'add value to the recruitment process' and have a profession (which I dont), then I'd expect all recruiters to have requirements like :-

Expert salesperson
Good English / Excellent communicator
Knowledge of Sector which they recruit in
Knowledge of contracts / employment law
Good Knowledge of NLP
Knowledge of sales and marketing tactics, low ball, bait and switch, door in the face, foot in the door, etc...
Some level of professionalism and integrity
etc

I am not a fan of HR either, but if you look at the levels of professionalism in that field you will see they are higher. This is because they are not treated as unskilled commission based workers.

In reality this simply does not exist for most recruitment positions, they are commission based and entry level, there is no career progression or ladder.

Good recruiters can be sales manager or start their own recruitment shop and kick off the same recruitment body shop model again, generating more positions of unskilled recruiters...

They made Jerry Mac-quire for a reason, and that is 99% of agents / middlemen in all fields are assholes...

I know some unskilled people need to make a living and therefore have little choice, but don't tell me they do it for the love of society or the profession.

 

I like the comparison of recruitment agencies to estate agents it's apt in my book, living on the tails of others as middle men. Still they are there and we get benefit from them when looking for work.

I think one of the biggest things to be aware of is that they are mostly commission based taking anything from 5%-30% of your new salary as payment. This has a negative impact on the employers selection of you vs anyone else and that feeds directly into your offer should you get one. You can argue that it's in the agents interest to fight and push you up but as a previous post points out it's often not worth their while. That extra 5k you want translates as little as £250 gain to them and over the risk of losing you to another candidate they won't fight your corner.

I've found when looking recently you also have to filter them as much as they filter you with regard to job roles. I was looking for a high(ish) level Cisco based role and kept getting contacted about Sys Admin and Windows roles once or twice a week. Usually after a 10-15 mins chat we figure out its not what I want, the skill I developed is cutting to the chase with pertinent early questions; What is the role you have? Where is it? How much is it paying? and not deal with the 'what are you doing at the moment?' and 'tell me about yourself' BS until you know if it's worth chasing. It's the candiate's equivalent of pattern matching imo.

Fortunately my current role was recruited by their internal recruitment agents and was so much easier and nicer and no-one taking a slice of my cash ;).

 

Well, I've had more good experiences with recruiters than bad ones. That said, what pisses me off with them is the fact that you only hear from them when it's to their benefit. Sure they work for commission and they need to always be looking for a candidate for the next position but not hearing from them even to tell you that you didn't get the position is what bothers me the most.

The ones that give you feedback and actually work with you are usually the good ones but as we know, these 2% are relatively scarce. The other 98% (which are referred to generally as pond scum) are only doing what is required of them, trying to fill positions (which happens to be their job by the way). If they can't fill the position with you, you're not interesting to them.


To those of you that are looking for jobs my advice would be to do the same as the recruitment agencies. Look on the internet at company websites and their job sections. Bookmark them and keep checking them regularly. Most companys will post the jobs there, the recruitment agencies will find it and check their database to find who fits all the buzzwords and call you.

You do have a choice whether to use agencies or not. If you don't want to use them then be prepared to do the work yourself.