I don’t know what it’s like round the rest of the world, but, in the UK most recruitment is done by asking recruitment companies to find candidates. The recruitment companies place the adverts, find CVs that are relevant and submit them to the hiring company.

This makes them salesmen. A typical recruitment company will charge anything from 15% to 40% of the candidates starting salary as a finding fee. That can be a lot of money. The role tends to attract younger people. It’s very high pressure as well as high margin. Very competitive. This all means that your recruitment consultant is worse than a double-glazing salesman.

They are much more like Pimps.

So, that is how they are referred to in my world. I deal with a lot of different agents. They all give you the same spiel, they’re different from the other agencies. They work this way and that way. Not like the others. Which is always a lie. They are all the same at the base of it, they are salespeople. They all work in much the same way. Their ethical boundary is slightly off from most peoples.

That is not to say they are all the same. Some agencies are better than others. Some agents are better than others. The larger agencies tend to work on volume. They want me to give them half a dozen keywords, some as “essentials” some as “Nice to haves”. They plug this into a propriatory keyword search engine and blast you everything they find without speaking with the candidate. Other’s actually take time to understand what you are looking for and try harder to find them.

But, once you’ve shown interest in a candidate, nearly all of them will do anything to close the sale. They’ll miss-represent me to you and you to me. They can see the sale just out of reach and go for it.

Take a little while to read up on hard-sales techniques. Then see how many you spot after an interview where the company was interested, but you weren’t. It’s shocking really.

You must remember, this is your career, the wrong job for you could send you down a dead-end, or a path you don’t want to take. Of course, you might not be too bothered about switching technologies or career path. But if you were then you wouldn’t be reading this.

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This is version 1 of this entry and was posted 1 year, 1 month ago on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Career. It's popularity ranking is Popularity: 32% [?]. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. This is the first version of this post.