The biggest mistake job seekers make is thinking that recruitment agencies are there to help them. Wrong. The prime motive of a recruitment agency is to make money. And the way they make money is by impressing their clients. And, contrary to popular belief, their client is not the job seeker – it’s the employer that is paying them to source staff.
Recruitment companies are not in business to do favours for job seekers. Sure, they will act all sympathetic to your situation and be generous with their suggestions about retraining and have an ipad filled with reasons that you are not suitable for this particular job.
But, the truth is that all they are usually thinking about is how to get you out of the door because the previous client was better and they really have no intention of recommending you for the job.
You can’t blame the recruitment agencies. This is their job. They are in business to make money and they can only do this if they properly represent the people who pay them.
What is wrong, is that these same agencies pretend to be on the side of job seekers.
They waste jobs seekers’ time by making them fill in endless applications even when they already have a candidate in mind, just in case someone better comes along.
They post fake job ads so that they can collect lists of prospective job seekers so that they can tell their employer companies how many people that they have on their books looking for jobs.
And they often don’t even have the courtesy to tell job seekers when a job is filled. They do not care what impact their actions have on the lives of people simply trying their best to find work.
The director of the job-finding agency The Job Factory (www.thejobfactory.com.au), Craig Binnie, says finding a job is a lot easier when job seekers understand the dynamics of the job market.
“If you apply for a job that has been posted on the internet or advertised in a newspaper you could easily be competing with 100 others for one position. These are crazy odds,” Mr Binnie said.
“It’s the same if you go to a recruitment agency. They are going to look at 100 or more resumes and pick out a few people to interview. This is not an efficient way to find a job.”
Mr Binnie says a large number of jobs are filled without ever being advertised. If you can find a job before it is advertised your chances of getting it are obviously a lot higher.
“If you are a small or medium-sized business you don’t want to waste hundreds of dollars advertising if you already have a resume sitting in your inbox or if another staff member knows someone who is suitable for the position. You just need to make sure you are that person. And it’s a lot easier than many people think.
“Being in the loop is difficult for most people – they simply don’t have the connections, but that’s where we come in.
“We have massive databases of all types of companies and we send job seekers’ resumes and cover letters to them in search of a job. We might email 400 companies at once asking them if they have a vacancy for an accountant, IT professional or office worker. The results are pretty impressive. We only need to find one job that has not been advertised out of all of these companies to give our client an amazing chance of getting a job.
“Clients have had calls within 5 minutes of us sending out their resume. Of course, this is not always the case. And we don’t always succeed at getting jobs for clients, but when it comes to finding jobs we talk in hours and days instead of weeks and months.”
The secret to getting a job is to use the correct strategy
