Here are the problems I have with recruitment consultants.
Firstly, they have created an industry where none existed before, based on in-house recruitment being cut to shreds to save money. External recruitment used to be truly specialist - and was confined largely to extremely niche slots in specific professions, or only for senior positions. Since some bean counters in the nineties thought it was a good idea to outsource everything, recruiting (which used to be done perfectly well by personnel departments) suffered the same fate as IT, Facilities, Reprographics, Catering etc. etc. Net result of this is that the personal touch that used to be a headhunter's raison d'etre no longer exists, and it's now all about churn. There are no benefits whatsoever to a company in using an external recruiter for non-senior/specialised roles, other than saving money. Even that is a false economy, since the amount of shite that you get sent by recruiters means you often recruit somebody completely non-suited to the role.
Secondly, the industry relies on bullshit to survive - just like estate agents and lawyers. I'm realistic enough to know that the industry I work in absolutely requires, via the aforementioned fait accompli of cost-cutting in-house functions, the use of recruitment consultants. I am also acutely aware of the utter shite that most of them talk most of the time. I have never once used a recruitment consultant for a role who didn't flat out lie to me on at least three things germane to each role (usually money, sometimes progression prospects and ALWAYS role specifics). Partly this is due to the nature of the role - you have to be a greedy bastard to succeed in the industry by its very nature - but also its because none of them have even the first clue about what my skillset actually is, and whether I'm the right fit for a particular role. I regularly get recruiters ring me offering me a role that sounds fantastic but pays laughably poorly, or one that is so far removed from my skillset that taking it would be akin to an astronaut being asked to perform heart bypass surgery.
Thirdly, the lies recruiters tell you to convince you you're a good fit for a role pale into insignificance when considered alongside the rest of their tricks, snideness and bullshit. This includes (but is not limited to): Getting you to do their work for them by pimping their services out to your pals Never leaving you alone once they place you somewhere looking to get more work out of your new company Ringing the company you're leaving to go and work in their placement - despite you probably not wanting to announce to your firm that you're leaving ahead of a contract being signed Bullshitting you about the salary being offered at a role so they can trouser the difference (I've seen mark-ups of over 40% on one contract) Badgering you every week about moving on somewhere else after they've placed you so they can pocket another fee Lying through their teeth to you about having 'the perfect candidate' for a role, when in reality, they're a fuckwitted muppet who can't string a sentence together (memorable instances of this include a candidate for a senior DBA role whose only previous experience was in MS Access, and a 'Network Engineer' who didn't know what DNS and DHCP were*) Getting the contact name of other people in your firm and telling them you have worked extensively with the IT department in the past and are 'branching out' into sales/finance/marketing recruitment - despite only having myself as a placement , making it look like it was ME that asked them to call up and bother them
I have no doubt there are 'good' recruiters out there. The fact that it's a bullshit industry notwithstanding, every profession has good people working in it. The problem is, just like with IT, there are a huge number of mugs, which far outweigh the good people. The problem comes when the good people try to justify the whole industry, without accepting it for what it is, and using the pitiful nature of most of their contemporaries to set themselves apart from it. If they just accepted that most of the people who work in it are bullshitters, chancers, cheats and scumbags (like I did with IT about ten years ago) - but that this is what sets them apart from most of their peers - everything would be easier for them.
BTW, I have no problem with the original need for recruiting at senior level. This is what networking (the people kind, I mean) was invented for - so people with extreme talent can hoover up ridiculous amounts of personal contacts with the great and good and get to know them pretty well over time, figuring out who would be a good fit for a particular firm so that, when a role comes up there, they are already halfway towards placing the perfect candidate. People that do that with success are incredibly talented. Ditto those that know everyone in a particular niche within a profession, so that when a role comes up, they chuck it out to everyone on their list and wait for the nods of interest to roll in.
* For the uninitiated, DHCP and DNS are fundamental networking concepts. You don't need to understand them to appreciate the point I was making. Think cars and engines, windows and glass, bricks and cement.
You must have missed the part where I said that the industry I work in absolutely requires the use of recruitment consultants. Kind of makes your point that you don't have to use them a bit redundant. (No pun intended).
And nope, not bored. Just finished watching the greatest film ever made - The Maltese Falcon.
I've been in Recruitment (specifically IT) for over 7 years, the money an uneducated person like myself earns is outrageous.
BUT I genuinely understand the ill feeling towards them from some of the things I've seen and the practices that are deployed.
When I first started, the 'candidate' was the commodity, and the relationship with them and the service you provided 9 times out of 10 usually determined whether they would accept your job offer. As such you treated people like kings.
The problem with today's recruitment is that there's 10 x more agencies and 10 x less jobs, so the 'jobs' have become the commodity, and it doesn't matter who you shit on to get it filled.
I won't tell you whether you should do recruitment or not, it's not my place, but I'll tell you three things that I wish someone had told me before I started:
1) Recruitment is the easiest industry to get in to, but the hardest to get out of. 2) 50% of the people you work with you won't respect or like and would flog their own mothers for a fiver. 3) Never tell anyone how well you're doing. If you're under performing you're a target for management, if you're over performing you're a target for peers.
In my world (finance) they are a necessary evil. Some are great, the good ones take the time to know yu and your business and do make recruitment easier. The bad, phone you all the time to see if you have vacancies, cold calling recruitment agents are never going to get anywhere. If the role is with a good reputable company then worth investigating.
You've got to laugh - I never knew that recruitment consultants dealt with matters of life and death.
I'm sure it is a doddle compared to jobs that deal with such matters. Shame we aren't talking about those jobs really to make your comment actually worthwhile.
You've got to laugh - I never knew that recruitment consultants dealt with matters of life and death.
I'm sure it is a doddle compared to jobs that deal with such matters. Shame we aren't talking about those jobs really to make your comment actually worthwhile.
So go on tell us all about the relentless pressure.
Whilst I'll never compare a recruitment consultant to being a doctor or a soldier, I don't think you can narrow down pressure to just life or death scenarios. That's far too simplistic.
I worked at a company for 5 years, and worked with a guy in his 40's, who had two young children and a fairly large mortgage. He'd been at the company for 6 years and only ever missed one target. He then went on a dreadful run of luck and missed two quarterly targets in a row and was dismissed. Because the industry is such that word gets out quickly, he didn't find a job for nearly three months and had a bit of a breakdown.
The pressure isn't 'life or death' but every three months (or otherwise dependant on how each company targets their consultants) your figures get set back to zero and you have to start again. Late nights, early mornings and weekends are pretty much the norm and one bad quarter and you'll be on performance watch.
The industry is unforgiving, and as I mentioned, anyone can do recruitment, but it's very difficult to get out of because of the reputation consultants have.
You've got to laugh - I never knew that recruitment consultants dealt with matters of life and death.
I'm sure it is a doddle compared to jobs that deal with such matters. Shame we aren't talking about those jobs really to make your comment actually worthwhile.
So go on tell us all about the relentless pressure.
Not hitting your sales targets?
How about you start a topic about how hard it is to be a soldier, paramedic, policeman etc and you might be listened to.
Sorry, but considering its a profession that I put blood, sweat and tears into for 2 and a half years - as have 99% of people who have given it a go, I don't see why anyone should just undermine the work that is involved.
A whole two and a half years? Wow - that's dedication.
It's a job finding a job for someone else to do. Get over your self.
No need to be so rude. Whether you agree or not a target driven career can be stressful, especially as said if you miss two consecutive targets in some companies and its goodbye...
I'm confused as to whether to apply now, especially seeing as the whole point in my asking about this role was down to me being made redundant at the start of May, would I be able to be "let go" twice in a year?
I did it for a year when I left uni. Went to find a temp job to pay off some student debt and while registering and chatting to the manager, they offered me a job. Thought I was landed as it was v good money. But I'm not really a salesman so, as a result, I hated every minute of it. Once had an American style training session on handshakes - that ran a whole day. Vile. But it was just the wrong job for me. If you love sales then it's worth investigating.
I work in a very specialised field and to be fair we know most the people within our industry, so we don't really use recruitment agency's, however one was being very persistent and we where having great trouble finding engineers in our sector, so this agency said if we knew a name they would find him and get him to join us. We didn't think we had anything to lose, unfortunately the engineer we where after had a very similar to one that we already employed, you guessed it they arranged for us to talk to our own engineer.
When we asked him why he was unhappy, he said he was fed up being chased by the agency to arrange for an interview, it was the only way he could shake them off. Needless to say we don't use them now,
Recently rationalised my company's use of recruitment consultants for contractors (we were spending £70k a day on IT contractors at one point). Went from about 20 to 3. Before, many that we used were complete sharks, so I can see why there's a view that they're all trash. Now the short list provide a good service, doing useful candidate pre-screening. They're always fine to deal with and provide a very good service and cut costs dramatically. The problem is it's very low barrier to entry with potentially high rewards: 20% of a £1000 per day rate for a year is tidy cash for a couple of phone calls. You need a phone a website a computer and you're off. So you'll get a lot of companies trying to make a quick buck. In any such field you need to develop good relationships with the ones that you can trust and just filter out the others. Like any other new industry the poorer operators will die off.
I worked internally for a recruitment company straight out of college many years ago (not as a recruitment consultant). I met some very good & bad consultants. There was a lot of pressure for them to hit their targets & work long hours under a lot of scrutiny. Some of them didn't handle the stress very well.
The ones I respected & genuinely liked never seemed to last longer than 6 months & this was a time when jobs were not so scarce & less people out of work so the role was probably very different to now.
They did offer me a role as a consultant when I let them know I was leaving but sales roles are not for me I don't have the temperament required. I'm sure the pressure would have intensified from 10 odd years ago & it would be even more of a competitive working environment. If you go for it good luck.
I have to say that in 20 years in the IT contract industry, I know of 3 consultants who can speak to me without setting their pants on fire. They are gold dust.
You learn to play the game. If there's a job going you'll know within the first 60 seconds of the conversation. Ninety percent of the time they are on some fishing expedition.
Sad but true. Like I say, I didn't work in a company that employed such tactics - but the reputation of the whole industry really does work against you. Very frustrating.
Dazzler - don't let me or others put you off, you'll notice from this thread and from personal experience most people have given recruitment a go at some point in their careers.
Personally, I love my job, I speak to some fascinating people everyday, and I have got to a stage where I have a great group of clients who use me so frequently I have my own team to supply to them. It's took me just over 5 years of working my nuts off and practically giving up my social life (one year I only took 6 days holiday), but I'm at a stage now where Recruitment has bought me a house, pays for my holidays and allows me to lead a very comfortable life.
Not one person who has worked for me ever wanted to do recruitment as a first career choice, and naturally this leads to a high turnover of staff (i've probably seen about 500 people come and go in 7 years), but if you're willing to work hard, (not just long days, but so hard you can't talk at the end of the day hard) you'll do well.
On a seperate note, I genuinely think the reason the industry has a bad reputation, is that Recruitment is too easy for anyone to do, without any formal training or regulatory guidelines. It's quite frightening that i've seen roughly 500 people come and go. These people have not a care for the job or service they provide and have access to hundreds of thousands of peoples personal data. I am hopeful there will be a change soon, but i'm not holding my breath.
Comments
Firstly, they have created an industry where none existed before, based on in-house recruitment being cut to shreds to save money. External recruitment used to be truly specialist - and was confined largely to extremely niche slots in specific professions, or only for senior positions. Since some bean counters in the nineties thought it was a good idea to outsource everything, recruiting (which used to be done perfectly well by personnel departments) suffered the same fate as IT, Facilities, Reprographics, Catering etc. etc. Net result of this is that the personal touch that used to be a headhunter's raison d'etre no longer exists, and it's now all about churn. There are no benefits whatsoever to a company in using an external recruiter for non-senior/specialised roles, other than saving money. Even that is a false economy, since the amount of shite that you get sent by recruiters means you often recruit somebody completely non-suited to the role.
Secondly, the industry relies on bullshit to survive - just like estate agents and lawyers. I'm realistic enough to know that the industry I work in absolutely requires, via the aforementioned fait accompli of cost-cutting in-house functions, the use of recruitment consultants. I am also acutely aware of the utter shite that most of them talk most of the time. I have never once used a recruitment consultant for a role who didn't flat out lie to me on at least three things germane to each role (usually money, sometimes progression prospects and ALWAYS role specifics). Partly this is due to the nature of the role - you have to be a greedy bastard to succeed in the industry by its very nature - but also its because none of them have even the first clue about what my skillset actually is, and whether I'm the right fit for a particular role. I regularly get recruiters ring me offering me a role that sounds fantastic but pays laughably poorly, or one that is so far removed from my skillset that taking it would be akin to an astronaut being asked to perform heart bypass surgery.
Thirdly, the lies recruiters tell you to convince you you're a good fit for a role pale into insignificance when considered alongside the rest of their tricks, snideness and bullshit. This includes (but is not limited to):
Getting you to do their work for them by pimping their services out to your pals
Never leaving you alone once they place you somewhere looking to get more work out of your new company
Ringing the company you're leaving to go and work in their placement - despite you probably not wanting to announce to your firm that you're leaving ahead of a contract being signed
Bullshitting you about the salary being offered at a role so they can trouser the difference (I've seen mark-ups of over 40% on one contract)
Badgering you every week about moving on somewhere else after they've placed you so they can pocket another fee
Lying through their teeth to you about having 'the perfect candidate' for a role, when in reality, they're a fuckwitted muppet who can't string a sentence together (memorable instances of this include a candidate for a senior DBA role whose only previous experience was in MS Access, and a 'Network Engineer' who didn't know what DNS and DHCP were*)
Getting the contact name of other people in your firm and telling them you have worked extensively with the IT department in the past and are 'branching out' into sales/finance/marketing recruitment - despite only having myself as a placement , making it look like it was ME that asked them to call up and bother them
I have no doubt there are 'good' recruiters out there. The fact that it's a bullshit industry notwithstanding, every profession has good people working in it. The problem is, just like with IT, there are a huge number of mugs, which far outweigh the good people. The problem comes when the good people try to justify the whole industry, without accepting it for what it is, and using the pitiful nature of most of their contemporaries to set themselves apart from it. If they just accepted that most of the people who work in it are bullshitters, chancers, cheats and scumbags (like I did with IT about ten years ago) - but that this is what sets them apart from most of their peers - everything would be easier for them.
BTW, I have no problem with the original need for recruiting at senior level. This is what networking (the people kind, I mean) was invented for - so people with extreme talent can hoover up ridiculous amounts of personal contacts with the great and good and get to know them pretty well over time, figuring out who would be a good fit for a particular firm so that, when a role comes up there, they are already halfway towards placing the perfect candidate. People that do that with success are incredibly talented. Ditto those that know everyone in a particular niche within a profession, so that when a role comes up, they chuck it out to everyone on their list and wait for the nods of interest to roll in.
* For the uninitiated, DHCP and DNS are fundamental networking concepts. You don't need to understand them to appreciate the point I was making. Think cars and engines, windows and glass, bricks and cement.
Why do people moan so much about a service they can choose not to use ?
Most of the problems highlighted in this thread seem to be around IT recruitment - perhaps the quality of service reflects the industry.
And nope, not bored. Just finished watching the greatest film ever made - The Maltese Falcon.
BUT I genuinely understand the ill feeling towards them from some of the things I've seen and the practices that are deployed.
When I first started, the 'candidate' was the commodity, and the relationship with them and the service you provided 9 times out of 10 usually determined whether they would accept your job offer. As such you treated people like kings.
The problem with today's recruitment is that there's 10 x more agencies and 10 x less jobs, so the 'jobs' have become the commodity, and it doesn't matter who you shit on to get it filled.
I won't tell you whether you should do recruitment or not, it's not my place, but I'll tell you three things that I wish someone had told me before I started:
1) Recruitment is the easiest industry to get in to, but the hardest to get out of.
2) 50% of the people you work with you won't respect or like and would flog their own mothers for a fiver.
3) Never tell anyone how well you're doing. If you're under performing you're a target for management, if you're over performing you're a target for peers.
Good luck with your decision.
You've got to laugh - I never knew that recruitment consultants dealt with matters of life and death.
Not hitting your sales targets?
I worked at a company for 5 years, and worked with a guy in his 40's, who had two young children and a fairly large mortgage. He'd been at the company for 6 years and only ever missed one target. He then went on a dreadful run of luck and missed two quarterly targets in a row and was dismissed. Because the industry is such that word gets out quickly, he didn't find a job for nearly three months and had a bit of a breakdown.
The pressure isn't 'life or death' but every three months (or otherwise dependant on how each company targets their consultants) your figures get set back to zero and you have to start again. Late nights, early mornings and weekends are pretty much the norm and one bad quarter and you'll be on performance watch.
The industry is unforgiving, and as I mentioned, anyone can do recruitment, but it's very difficult to get out of because of the reputation consultants have.
Sorry, but considering its a profession that I put blood, sweat and tears into for 2 and a half years - as have 99% of people who have given it a go, I don't see why anyone should just undermine the work that is involved.
It's a job finding a job for someone else to do. Get over your self.
I'm confused as to whether to apply now, especially seeing as the whole point in my asking about this role was down to me being made redundant at the start of May, would I be able to be "let go" twice in a year?
But I'm not really a salesman so, as a result, I hated every minute of it. Once had an American style training session on handshakes - that ran a whole day.
Vile. But it was just the wrong job for me. If you love sales then it's worth investigating.
When we asked him why he was unhappy, he said he was fed up being chased by the agency to arrange for an interview, it was the only way he could shake them off. Needless to say we don't use them now,
The ones I respected & genuinely liked never seemed to last longer than 6 months & this was a time when jobs were not so scarce & less people out of work so the role was probably very different to now.
They did offer me a role as a consultant when I let them know I was leaving but sales roles are not for me I don't have the temperament required. I'm sure the pressure would have intensified from 10 odd years ago & it would be even more of a competitive working environment. If you go for it good luck.
But then again, as it doesn't involve life and death then it isn't hard work to someone simple minded like yourself.
I have to say that in 20 years in the IT contract industry, I know of 3 consultants who can speak to me without setting their pants on fire. They are gold dust.
You learn to play the game. If there's a job going you'll know within the first 60 seconds of the conversation. Ninety percent of the time they are on some fishing expedition.
Personally, I love my job, I speak to some fascinating people everyday, and I have got to a stage where I have a great group of clients who use me so frequently I have my own team to supply to them. It's took me just over 5 years of working my nuts off and practically giving up my social life (one year I only took 6 days holiday), but I'm at a stage now where Recruitment has bought me a house, pays for my holidays and allows me to lead a very comfortable life.
Not one person who has worked for me ever wanted to do recruitment as a first career choice, and naturally this leads to a high turnover of staff (i've probably seen about 500 people come and go in 7 years), but if you're willing to work hard, (not just long days, but so hard you can't talk at the end of the day hard) you'll do well.
On a seperate note, I genuinely think the reason the industry has a bad reputation, is that Recruitment is too easy for anyone to do, without any formal training or regulatory guidelines. It's quite frightening that i've seen roughly 500 people come and go. These people have not a care for the job or service they provide and have access to hundreds of thousands of peoples personal data. I am hopeful there will be a change soon, but i'm not holding my breath.