why do people hate agencies?

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Ive read many people say they dont deal with them..but why? I thought it would be a good way of getting some experience.. I really would like to know why people dont like them.

 

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Now there are agencies and then there are agencies, I have used agencies in the past and some have been good and bad.
You have to understand that for the main part agents are like used car salesman, they generally put numbers across to the client and generally don't care about the person they are putting forward as the important person for them is the client. It's also worth mentioning that you're better off dealing with agencies if you're contracting, you don't want to hire directly with a company if you're contracting.

For the most part dealing with agents only happens during finding the role, extensions and rate increases, as long as the role is going well then you're unlikely to hear from the agent unless you're not invoicing on time.

I have dealt with agents from the hiring perspective as well as being the candidate and I have to tell you that as long as they have a decent resourcer then you have a decent chance of having a great experience in hiring (as long as there are decent candidates about).
I generally don't mind dealing with agents, it's better to have that barrier between the candidate and the hiring company as well from a legal and pay purpose.

 

I have mixed feeling.
I have used agency's before and some have been great. However, some have been awful.

As Simon says, some just seem to blitz you (Be it recruiter or applicant), with either inane pointless CV's or with roles that you are not even remotely qualified for.

Only last week I had a recruiter contact me on LinkedIn asking I would be interested in a Senior Architect role, even though I am working in 2nd Line Support.

The "good" agencies from my experience are the ones that send jobs to me that are relevant to my skillet, not just anything that has IT in the title.

Ron

 

I generally agree with above, that said however I do feel that agencies in recent years have improved a lot in selecting roles against skillsets.

I think it also partly depends what you are looking for, if the agency is working as an agent to fill full time roles then they definitely tend to be better at matching skillsets, contracting or short term roles I still tend to find can be quite hit and miss, but I guess that's due to the nature of the short term role, and likely the agency knowing if they don't fill it quick someone else might do (Which to them then is lost potential revenue).

I'm currently in the new job merry go round due to things happening where I am, and I have worked with a few agencies and so far they have all been very good, certainly compared to how they were the last time I needed to use them about 8 years ago.

I also think some of the onus is on the person applying, as so many people bloat their CV's with skills that they don't truly have, ie logged onto a firewall once, I will put firewalls on my CV and so forth, that makes it much more difficult to really judge applicants before they forward the detail to the Clients, at best these days it's usually a phone call, and many people are placed via an agency without ever meeting anyone physically at that agency. All in all though this can obviously lead to a bad name for an agency if they are not careful and thorough.

 

When there are more jobs than candidates it forces them to be nice to candidates to land their commission.
In a 'sellers market', where there are few jobs and many candidates, generally you get short shrift.

I frequently get the inference that my CV may be lies from recruiters and I have to pull them up on this fact and put them straight. This is just one of many ways recruiters will disrespect you and the profession if given half a chance.
Go and look at a recruiters linked in profile, many will list 20+ technical IT skills and IT domains as their 'specialisms', its a complete joke.
Instead of "Hitting targets", "using the phone", they list "Cloud Systems Expert" etc.

 

I am not sure what sort of a market we are in at the moment, seems like a reasonable amount of jobs around, but also seems like a lot of candidates. I've had in excess of 10 at the interviews I have been too.

I don't tend to look at recruiters LinkedIn, try and keep them off there when I can, but I think recruiters should scrutinise a CV to an extent, that is part of the way things are going. I think that is a good thing though, as historically you would get put into an interview for what you believed to be position X, but the client actually wants someon for something different, but the agency would bend your skillset to the client, and the clients requirement to the applicants. Just saying that I think there is less of that around now. Also whilst the agencies of course are not technical, they do seem to have a better grasp on some of the key terms.

I had one agency start quizzing me on the phone checking I knew some stuff, I didn't mind that though, as will help weed out the rubbish and hopefully make me more competitive when I get to Interview stage.

I suppose everyone has different opinions and experiences though, I just think they are much, much better now than they used to be years back. Personal opinion of course based on my personal dealings with various agencies.

 

I am all for the agencies double checking the ability of the candidates but I know a number of guys now with years of experience that turn down interviews if the client wants to carry out a technical test, the reasons? Well certifications and previous experience should be enough and to a large degree I do agree with that, there are certain certifications out there these days that PROVE your experience and as such don't require inane technical quizzes.

 

Recruiters are seldom qualified to even perform a basic first screen of a CV, they certainly aren't qualified to perform in depth technical tests, anyone believing otherwise is only fooling themselves.

When a doctor or a mechanic goes for a job, do you think they have unqualified people pretending to know their profession testing them ?
IT has become a somewhat peculiar industry in this regard.
Hiring good IT staff is pretty important, you want something done right, do it yourself...

 

pain in thy arse.

Had a call last week about a job i'm really interested in - however no contact for 9 days, apart from a phone call saying that the recruitment manager for the firm is "off sick" - don't really believe them.

Since emailed the company directly enquiring

 

Of course there are always exceptions to any rules, that is a given, although you mention clients wanting to do technical tests, which would not be down to the agency anyway. Or did you mean agency?

I haven't seen anyone say anything about an agency performing in depth technical tests, so I am not sure that is relevant either. I am saying I don't think it is such a bad thing if they ask a few rudimentary questions to just make sure that you do know some basic stuff. Just to weed out any dreamers. Indeed I would say that is a large part of their role in sourcing people to put forward to any clients. It's still the clients that make the decision on who to hire, so still doing it themselves, just saves them spending man hours sifting through CV's etc, which I am sure for some smaller companies especially is very useful.

Of course there are bad agencies out there, terrible agencies, but I don't believe that all of them are bad by any means. Same goes for pretty much anything though. Always good and bad in any area.

Again my opinion and based on my own experiences with them, Certainly the ones I have dealt with recently they have all been pretty good.

 

I have see agencies offer technical tests that the clients ask them to do.

As an example of a bad agency\agent, I got this job description sent to me today.


IT Trainer - 6 month Contract - London - Legal firm


Requirements:



　Microsoft Office 2010/2013 (Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio), Lync 2013 to advanced level

　Windows 7/8.1

　Autonomy WorkSite/Filesite

　DocsCorp compareDocs, pdfDocs and cleanDocs

　Carpe Diem Tracker and Entry

　Lexis Nexis InterAction 6.2

　G2 Digital Dictation/Transcription

　Cisco telephone, BlackBerry, laptop and remote working




Desirable:

　MOS accreditation, preferably Word Expert

　LPI accreditation

　UKDEG associate


I should add, I am not and have never been an IT Trainer and my CV only contains Windows 7 as a technology to certification level, sure it mentions Office but not to MOS or Advanced level.
I also don't have any of the rest of the requirements or desirables, I mean there is nothing on my CV to indicate that this role is suited to me, nothing on my LinkedIn profile to say that I have any of those skills etc, now you tell me, why waste his time and mine by even asking me if this role suits me? It's pretty bloomin obvious that it doesn't.

Its pure laziness and using the 'plenty of fish in the sea' mentality when it comes to agencies posting out jobs.

 

Recruiters do try to assess your level of competence when they aren't qualified to do this. There is no getting around this point.

Like Simon I gets all sorts of spam jobs, either I'm getting roles totally irrelevant to my career like control systems for oil rigs or I do not get put forward for jobs I'm 200% suitable for.

Recruiters provide a lousy service that's less effective than throwing darts at a pile of CV's. Its quite likely that they could screen out the best candidates.

Frequently I am asked to do the recruiters job for zero commission or a lousy referral fee.

Next time they phone up, i'm gonna ask them to write some code for me, I mean if I'm doing their job they might as well do mine...

 

Surely though we are still painting all agencies with the same brush, again I agree there are some bad ones, of course there is, but to say they are all bad I don't agree with, clearly Industry would say the same also, as otherwise surely they would no longer be? If they were all so bad, no one would pay to keep them in business surely!?!

 

There are better and worse agencies for sure. I still think they all oversell what they can actually deliver.

The real reasons they exist are many and varied, mostly not to do with the quality of the service.

1. Company has no HR department (either there never was one or it was subjected to cuts. Paying recruitment agents for results is cheaper than full-time HR hires.)
2. Company has ineffective HR department (HR actually stiffles the hiring process or feels its not part of their remit. Hiring managers sometimes deliberately subvert HR's processes by using agencies.)

So it largely to do with the cost and uselessness of HR, not the quality of agencies, its the lesser of two evils.

The major benefit of recruitment agencies is they help create a more versatile job market with more liquidity.

 

I once worked for an agency directly, (they have since gone out of business) and I have to say that some of the guys there were really very good, others were complete gobshites (I once got called out by one of them asking me if I knew who he was (he wasn't anybody) and that he had big mates, I just laughed at him and said that his big mates wouldn't help him if he wanted to kick off because they weren't there at the time, it dawned on him to shut his mouth and actually afterwards he mellowed out). It's like everything, there are good and bad people in all sorts of roles, so you take what you can, work with it and deal with the people you know you can trust.