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How professional is professional recruitment?

There’s a fair bit of recruitment activity being discussed in our house at the moment as my son looks for his first steps in a career. He’s keen to work in Cardiff and with a Marketing and Business Management degree is, I would hope, reasonably employable. He’s applied for a few jobs and is attending interviews this week. But the recruitment experience has astounded me.

One area he’s explored is Recruitment, and he is waiting for an interview for a recruitment company where he will focus on the Welsh-medium education sector.

Having been invited for an interview, he was given nearly a week’s notice. In a follow up call the same day that the meeting had been arranged, he was told that if he came “for an interview Tomorrow, he could start work next week“. This he refused to do as he was working for a marketing company and did not want to disrupt the completion of the project he was working on.

The recruiter’s advice was to “throw a sicky”, and then he could still start his job “next Monday”.  My son’s got some principles and refused. So an interview was re-arranged for this morning. He was there on time, scrubbed up nicely, and was ready to give it his best shot.

Sadly, the interviewer had gone out, even though the meeting had been confirmed last Friday afternoon and he is unlikely to be available until Wednesday. By which time of course my lad will be back with the marketing agency finishing the project.

All this made me wonder: I’ve used agencies in the past, and always wondered what I got for my 15-18%, but what I never imagined before was how much damage they could be doing to my brand.

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