the hunt

More on the job hunt today, I'm afraid.

Interestingly, I've already had a couple of good sniffs.  Indeed, I appear to have been asked to interview for a couple of jobs - well, tentatively.  They're not fully confirmed just yet.

I've been a bit surprised, actually, as you obviously hear about how the economy is in the toilet all the time, but there have actually been loads of jobs on the websites I've been using.  In fact there's been sufficient that I've been able to be choosey about which ones I apply for.

Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying there are more jobs than you could shake a stick at, but I've definitely not been desperately applying for all jobs because there were so few around.  I'm guessing this is a reflection of the fact that I now have a good few year's experience and I'm not straying outside of that area of experience.

My guess is it's hard for people with no experience moving into new areas or freshly entering the job market.  Certainly a lot of the jobs I'm looking at are asking for experience, though I think that's something of a reflection of what I'm going for as well - you wouldn't employ a new person in the role.

One thing I would definitely say is that this thing of using recruitment agents is rubbish.  A lot of them really don't do anything like a good job.

Now this isn't borne of bitterness or anything, but you have to remember that I'm sort of in a similar area and if I'd been putting up some of the job description they do I would, quite frankly, be embarrassed.

I mean, if you're advertising a job surely you'd at least make sure that when you copied and pasted the job description the company supplied you with the text was all fully copied across and decently formatted.  I've seen descriptions where the sentences on each item of a bullet list were all cut in half so it became unreadable.

What's worse is they're very protectionist.  They put up the job description but they won't say what the company is, which you can sort of see as being fair enough as they want to stop you going direct, but they won't even put what sector it is.

So in my case I'm really not interested in construction or the company may be in the health sector and want someone with lots of health experience.  So if they don't put the sector and I apply then it's just a waste of everybody's time.

Of course, the worst crime they commit is not replying.

Given that these companies get fees for finding people and that's all they do it's quite poor behaviour.  To me they're kinda on a level with Estate Agents.  They have too much power and are providing a service which really shouldn't be needed.  Especially in this day and age, but the irony is they seem to have actually gained greater power with the internet.

You can kind of understand it from the view of the company that's using them.  They act as a sort of first filter, since I imagine if you put up a job you get hundreds of applications, the vast majority of which are no hoppers.  Of course the problem is these recruitment agents don't really know what the job requires, they're just comparing your CV to the spec, and the spec may not be that good or they may not understand it properly.