There’s a fair bit of recruitment activity being discussed in our house at the moment as my son looks for his first steps in a career. He’s keen to work in Cardiff and with a Marketing and Business Management degree is, I would hope, reasonably employable. He’s applied for a few jobs and is attending interviews this week. But the recruitment experience has astounded me.
One area he’s explored is Recruitment, and he is waiting for an interview for a recruitment company where he will focus on the Welsh-medium education sector.
Having been invited for an interview, he was given nearly a week’s notice. In a follow up call the same day that the meeting had been arranged, he was told that if he came “for an interview Tomorrow, he could start work next week“. This he refused to do as he was working for a marketing company and did not want to disrupt the completion of the project he was working on.
The recruiter’s advice was to “throw a sicky”, and then he could still start his job “next Monday”. My son’s got some principles and refused. So an interview was re-arranged for this morning. He was there on time, scrubbed up nicely, and was ready to give it his best shot.
Sadly, the interviewer had gone out, even though the meeting had been confirmed last Friday afternoon and he is unlikely to be available until Wednesday. By which time of course my lad will be back with the marketing agency finishing the project.
All this made me wonder: I’ve used agencies in the past, and always wondered what I got for my 15-18%, but what I never imagined before was how much damage they could be doing to my brand.
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Having worked in Recruitment before i am not overly surprised.
Ultimately, Recruitment is inherently short term as an industry, that is not necessarily a criticism, but it does hamper its reputation sometimes.
It involves split second decisions, from whether to give the guy who let you down another chance (normally because you are desperate), to putting off people (such as your son) who didn’t fit into that immediate opportunity. You would imagine a client is very keen to get someone in immediately (given they are looking to an agency) but also the agency know there are probably many other agencies trying to fill that vacancy against them, hence the rush.
Personally, I am not sure that a client allowing multiple agencies to compete to fill one vacancy is necessarily helpful for anyone involved. Many of them are pretty much sales houses first, recruitment agencies second. They all purport to be in the game for both the client and the job seeker, but that is certainly not always the case in my experience.