I had a phone screen with Broadridge a financial consulting firm in Jersey City then I had an in person interview the next day. The commute was 1.5 hours both ways for a total of a 3 hours round trip from Harlem. Later on I get offered the gig but decided to only accept it with the following conditions:

• That I be able to telecommute part of the time
• That I be able to leave early if my wife is in court and I have to look after my son
• That I be able to come in after 9am due to the commute and having to look after my son in the morning

The recruitment manager then gets back to me with this:

Hello OD,

I work with Mahwish Ali and the rest of the East West Systems Recruiting
Team.

I’m following up my voice message from earlier this afternoon, and with your
interview at Broadridge yesterday afternoon.

The hiring manager at Broadridge, Imran Siddiqui, was favorably impressed
with the way you presented yourself.

What really impresses me, though, is how you married an attorney, and had a
child, within 24 hours of the interview.  That’s fast work: congratulations!

I’m making this assumption, OD, based on your e-mail message to my team
below.  Based on your professional skills and background, there’d be no way
you’d keep the information about your home office, your school-age child,
and your attorney wife a secret until after the in-person interview, right?
That’d make you look bad, and stain your reputation, as word gets out about
this.  I’m sure you’re too smart for that.

If you really wish to work remotely, as part of this opportunity, there’s a
very smart, very clever, and very professional way to have this presented,
to put you in the best possible light.  Feel free to contact me (my
information is at the bottom of this message), and I’ll be happy to share
with you EXACTLY how to do this.

Thanks!

Tony Mascia

—-

So, basically he insults me and my family then threatens to ruin my reputation if I did not accept the gig. I didn’t know I was required to reveal my personal life before an interview or before even being offered anything which I am pretty sure breaks labor laws. The only reason I brought up my personal concerns was because I got offered and I have a right to negotiate on my terms. 

1) That they’re recruiting for an employer who thinks so little of the role they’re recruiting for that they don’t feel it’s even worth investing their own time and effort in. So, they send some lackey who doesn’t even *work* for the company to ‘screen’ you instead.

2) Less often, it means that the recruiter doesn’t have any type of relationship with the client at all, and are merely trying to ‘get you on their books’ so they can blast your CV off without permission to every role they hear about, no matter how profoundly-inappropriate to your actual skills, experience or interests those roles may be.

Stick to only meeting employers who realise that recruitment is a two-way street, and who consequently bother to actually meet you for the first interview, so that they can present their opportunity to you at the same time as you’re presenting your skills and experience to them. Employers who instead send in the clowns first and expect you to run a gauntlet of their unskilled and ill-informed lackeys before they will even deign to meet you simply aren’t worth bothering with.

I couldn’t agree more with you if I tried. I’ve experienced all of the points that you mentioned and I feel your frustration. I remember one time, early during my time in the Uk, that one recruiter, of questionable quality, rang me up in a rather abrupt and curt tone, attempting to get me to send over my CV straight-away for a role which he claimed to have that “fit me perfectly”.

When I then asked him what the role was about, he said, “I can’t tell you until I’ve seen your latest CV and you agree to an interview with ‘my client’”. I told him that I, naturally, would need to know what the role was before going any further.

The tone of the conversation at this point, from his perspective, became even more abrupt and rude. He, begrudgingly, started reading to me what he claimed were the specs of the role. Part way through this, I interrupted asking him why he was just reading my CV to me. I was completely stunned someone would be this professionally deficient. I knew my CV nearly word-for-word because I’d spent a lot of time on it and had sent it out a number of times prior to this call.

He said he wasn’t doing this and I corrected him saying that I knew my own CV and I didn’t appreciate what he was doing. At that point he grumbled something about me never getting a role in the Uk and hung-up.

Now I’m not saying that all recruiters are this unprofessional, but in discussions over drinks, in casual conversations with friends and generally at any time, the attitude towards them is rarely positive. I’m sure, however, that there must be some diamonds in the rough. Probability and human-nature mandates this to be so.

However the trouble I have is determining which are the genuinely good ones and which are those that just have a smoother/slicker style. I’ve personally had one or two that I like to believe were genuine and they’ve displayed a level of professionalism I sincerely wish was displayed much more. Unfortunately, they’re the exception and not the rule.

Oh, and I’ve had recruiters finally contact me years after I had applied to their firms. I had applied to these places after I graduated college and they are getting back to me now? What gives?

As far as I am aware, recruiters here also don’t generally expect candidates to sign an agreement regarding offers received through the recruiter. Ergo, if a candidate receives information about an availability through a recruiter *and* via direct means, there is no onus on the candidate or the employer to involve the recruitment agency.

My recent experience in switching jobs has highlighted two specific problems with recruitment agencies. Firstly, “CV Hoovering”, which is the practise of obtaining CVs through any means – including re-advertising positions that have already been filled – in order to expand an agency’s seeker database. (Side node: I am not sure whether this phrase translates well on the other side of the pond – American readers might prefer “Resume Vacuuming” instead!).

Second, what I’ve termed the “Rogue Agency Consideration” is a circular dependency in which a genuine candidate suspects an advertisement of existing solely to carry out CV Hoovering. With that in mind, they call the recruiter to ask some preliminary questions about the nature of the role, without submitting a CV first. Meanwhile, the agency suspects the candidate of being another agency in disguise, hoping to steal the position and offer a successful placement to the employer at a lower price. Hence, a barrier has been positioned between the employer and the potential candidate.

Our data protection here is a bit better than the American model, however, which may be why recruiters here don’t tend to ‘blast all over town’ with every CV they receive. My CV going to client without my express permission has only happened once or twice, and these days I’d feel pretty confident about complaining about a recruiter who did this. In fact, reputable agencies state up-front that they ask for permission *every time* they send a CV to an employer.

So, yes, I too am generally not a fan of recruiters – perhaps with one or two exceptions where an individual has really aided my search. That said, part of the dependency of the IT market on recruiters is that most employers – certainly for British IT positions – use recruiters. So, the advice to avoid recruiters if possible is valid, but often job-seekers don’t have a choice. If a move away from agencies is to be made, recruiting managers need to be persuaded to try non-agency methods of advertising first, and to do their own CV filtering.

http://blog.jondh.me.uk/2010/07/tech-job-seekers-howto/

Also I have not found many businesses that will contract with a developer directly. There are a few here and there, but the majority want you want you to be through a contracting firm, and thus through the firm’s recruiter.

I’m suspicious over linkedin, could it be to get at my contacts rather than help me out? after all I’m already in the system.

If you do a Google search youll find lots of agent software used to scan CVs for keyword/skill matches and bulk-mail the hits. This is why when you call an agent back over a job, they ‘personally’ mailed to you, it means spending the next fifteen minutes trying to pin down which job it’s about. You cant simply say ‘the one you just emailed me about’. They’ll have bulk mailed a few hundred if not fully unsolicited, often inopportune and poorly matched jobs. I often find myself muttering RTFCV!

The other damage they do is hidden in the percentage cut they take, 30% for feeding your CV into a mass mailer and a couple of phone calls isn’t acceptable. Not for smaller companies in particular, who’ll often have a blanket no agents policy.

The saddest thing is as technical folk we could fix what is a broken, painful, inefficient process for both candidates and recruiters and yet we put up with the status quo. Why?

I believe HR departments do this to keep the submissions to a minimum, and in the hope that the recruiting firm is doing a pre-screen.

Also I am now a Flash developer, which is news to me :(

I still think there are plenty of good recruiters; ask around and you’ll find them. They can be a great source of knowledge for a job seeker. But obviously, there are far more shady recruiters than good ones. As a long time recruiter, I just hate to see these articles, but I see them often.