Pushy placement agencies can suck it bigtime

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I'm a computer contractor and am moving jobs -- higher pay, benefits, and closer to home -- and now I gotta deal with all the crack munchers from the agency I am leaving trying to convince me to stay. I didn't have benefits at the old place, and now they say, 'Oh, benefits, no problem, we can get you those.' And then, 'So...you're leaving because the new job is ... closer to home?' as if it was not a valid reason. Suckas can go on and suck it.

― 57 7th (calstars), Saturday, 12 November 2005 01:53 (twenty years ago)

The fucking sleazes. I just turned down a job offer through a sleazy placement agency - They wouldn't take no for an answer - I don't want to get started on it. OK, too late... It just wasn't the job I wanted to do. They offered me a pretty large bundle, but without benefits - which after working it all out turns out the money wasn't that great. But it sounded great at the time. But I still didn't want the job. So they offered me more money. And I said that since the first offer was very good, offering more money obviously isn't going to change things. And the marketing guy said, "what else can I offer you?" I said, "I don't know what else you could possibly offer." And he said, "Well if you don't know yourself, then I can't help you." I was polite, but ready to reach through the phone and snap neck. Fuck you, salesman.

― D.I.Y. U.N.K.L.E. (dave225.3), Saturday, 12 November 2005 02:01 (twenty years ago)

Just tell yourself they do it to make comission, like sleazy sales assholes.

― Trayce (trayce), Saturday, 12 November 2005 02:09 (twenty years ago)

Cuz well, they do.

― Trayce (trayce), Saturday, 12 November 2005 02:09 (twenty years ago)

there was this one placement agent who basically never stopped calling with leads, sent me out on a squillion interviews, gave me all sorts of ridiculous advice... but i never got any job offers through her. the job i WAS offered was something i found BY MYSELF, through a listing on a website. when i told the agent about it, she was really pissed off. like, she didn't even congratulate me.

the funniest part was: i sleepwalked through the interview that got me the job! i didn't wear a suit (against the agent's stern advice), i wore black (ditto), and i gave honest, un-asskissy answers to the questions i was asked.

― stockholm cindy is in your extended network (Jody Beth Rosen), Saturday, 12 November 2005 03:04 (twenty years ago)

wait, what's wrong with wearing black?

― tokyo nursery school: afternoon session (rosemary), Saturday, 12 November 2005 04:35 (twenty years ago)

Employers that have to rely on subcontracted recruiting companies for unsalaried/no-bennies positions aren't looking for actual talent (read: productivity) anyway, in my experience (DC/govt is not always the rest of the world, I know).

I don't even know why face-to-face interviews are still involved at that level of staffing, IMO just have the recruiter rewrite the candidate's resume to fit the requirement and let everybody get paid already. The company wouldn't be outsourcing this shit if they actually cared, you know?

I empathize for the recruiters, too, though, because they ARE basically working for quotas; sometimes they even share office space with the employer they're trying to hire for and if they can't at least fake having a quota of qualified candidates every month, much less place people, whoopsy daisy, have fun at your next assignment, when you find it.

At the headhunter levels, for strong techie/mgmt/exec positions, it seems a bit different, thought I have yet to deal with that and from what I can gather empirically the difference may just be quantitative. In several categories of "quantity."

― TOMBOT, Saturday, 12 November 2005 04:48 (twenty years ago)

Anecdote after two years working weird, weird job at the Fedgar BJ Ihoover:

Our best employees bar none have all come from direct hiring by the company with no referral. Our WORST hires to date have come via personnel referrals, especially those from subcontractors who big-upped candidates from their company. And by WORST I mean seriously detrimental to everything they got involved with.

― TOMBOT, Saturday, 12 November 2005 04:53 (twenty years ago)

wait, what's wrong with wearing black?

apparently if you wear black the HR person will think you're a GOTH.

― stockholm cindy is in your extended network (Jody Beth Rosen), Saturday, 12 November 2005 04:59 (twenty years ago)

that's totally untrue in SF, no-one will hire anyone who isn't a personal referral unless they come from an agency. It's basically a free way to test out employees and have someone else do the screening for you.

― kyle (akmonday), Saturday, 12 November 2005 05:15 (twenty years ago)

That seems completely stupid to me.
I guess in my line of work (govt IT) there's just an overabundance of lazy assholes, know-it-alls and generally unprofessional incompetents; I phone-screen every single candidate for my section now, so it's like why waste the money on extra in-house recruiters? Whether you put another layer of filtering between you and the market at large doesn't seem to have saved us from our fair share of hiring disasters (as in 1. we hired people who turned out to be disasters; 2. we can't find enough folks to fill the spots we need so the rest of us "senior" staff can take any FUCKING TIME OFF. BITTERNESS.)

― TOMBOT, Saturday, 12 November 2005 05:29 (twenty years ago)

I understand that two or three or four heads can be better than one for sorting through the morass of resumes out there and searching for keywords and scheduling interviews, but I don't necessarily see the value-added whatthefuckever in any "screening" offered by people who are incentivized to be indiscriminate and/or exaggeratory w/r/t every candidate that they shove in my/my boss's/my boss's boss's schedule.

― TOMBOT, Saturday, 12 November 2005 05:34 (twenty years ago)

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