Tag Archives: recruitment companies

Temple Quay Recruitment – A nice one

I get contacted by agencies a lot.

Sometimes they have “found my details on a job website” yet they want me to send them my CV (despite it being on the same site they found my details on). Sometimes they’ll say “I’ve got your CV here”, then proceed to ask you what qualifications/experience you have.

Sometimes I get emails that start with something like “Dear Ben, I am contacting you because I found your details on Jobsite and am recruiting for a role in…” and ends with something that says “if you think this might be suitable, please reply to this email”. And in between, there’ll be a job specification for a nuclear physicist or a consultant heart surgeon, or something else that involves many many years of training and experience. Do they think I’ve just neglected to mention on my CV the 10 years I spent saving lives in a third world hospital? Obviously I can do a triple heart bypass with just a coathanger and some drinking straws from McDonalds. It’s an absolute piece of piss.

“Oh shit…yes.. I was part of the team that built the Large Hadron Collider. Only I was smoking so much weed during that period, I don’t remember it so good. I knew there was something I forgot to put on my CV”.

There’ll be a bit right at the end saying that if I know anyone else suitable, maybe I’d like to forward this on to them. Are they just sending these emails to everyone they’ve ever spoken to? What is this? The six-degrees-of-separation method of recruiting? Continue reading Temple Quay Recruitment – A nice one

Are recruitment companies a total waste of time?

About 10 years ago, I’d quit a permanent job working in a very repetitive role. I went out to a number of recruitment companies, and after registering in person at quite a few – when my hopes had all but gone, I walked up the stairs of a branch of Randstad. They asked me what my Word/Excel skills were like, and I said something like “probably not great”. Continue reading Are recruitment companies a total waste of time?