Thursday 11 October 2012

How to spend £15 and get fuck all in return, or Why recruitment agencies should be better regulated.

So, Tuesday of this week was a day of great joy and optimism, I had a job interview, the first job interview I've had in about 3 months, and things were generally looking up.

As I said in my last scribbling, I'd had to go through to have my first interview at the agencies office in Sheffield, which is fair, no complaints about that, the problem came when against all previous experience, I trusted them at face value.

The agency in question is Concept Recruitment, who are currently based at Velocity house just outside of Sheffield city centre, which as I said is a large new build property development which combines office facilities and living accommodation, but doesn't seem to think that clear signage is particularly important, meh.

During my first interview on Tuesday, the advisor who had contacted me with regards to my application went through the job vacancy in a fair amount of detail, or so I thought.

As the opportunity was presented to me, the job itself was working for Maplin Electronics at their head office, which is based at Manvers in the Dearne valley. My first concern over this was the fact that the Dearne Valley is generally somewhat difficult to travel to using public transport, however a quick check of bus and train timetables showed that I could easilly get there for 8am during the week, and for 9am on a Saturday, so no problems there, I was further reassured when I was told the requirements were simply that I make myself available between 9 and 5, Monday to Friday, this was too good to be true, and, like all things too good to be true, turned out that in fact, it was.

Going to the 2nd interview on Wednesday, I had a really good feeling, and indeed the interview went well, the lady interviewing me said that yes i was the ideal candidate for one of the six vacancies they had available, and would I be available to start the following Monday, to which I replied in the affirmative...and then everything turned to shit when she said the following:- "O.k, good, now, I assume you are familiar with our shift system?"
No, no I wasn't, and when I said that I had been led to believe that the job was a simple 9-5 type affair, she wasn't very impressed. The job spec the agency had been given gave details of the working hours, she showed me it, and it suddenly became clear what had happened here, simply put, the Agency had sent me there hoping I wouldn't notice and end up accepting a job that I couldn't possibly ever hope to be able to actually work the hours.
The "shifts" were described as thus:-

Weekdays 8-4:30, 9-5, 10-6, 12-8 (on a rota)
Saturday 9-5
Sunday 10-5

Everything within that is OK, apart from Sunday, the earliest I could possibly make it there would be about 10:45, and that one fact turned a successful interview into an failure.

The lady who was interviewing me was as upset as I was, as it mean that potentially everyone she had interviewed that day that had been sent over by Concept would need to be contacted in order to make sure that they knew about the shift patterns.

Yeah, I wasn't a happy chappy, because once again a fucking agency had spun me a yarn and I'd fallen for it, I called them about 10 minutes later to ask what the excuse was, and they said they had been told it was a 9-5 type job, when i asked if anyone had made sure, I was told by the smarmy cunt that there was "no need to". When I approached the subject of them refunding the wasted costs of travel, which I cant really afford to be spending, I was told that I'd have to "take it on the chin like a man"... 

He will never know how fortunate he was that he wasn't within grabbing distance.


Anyways, the same smarmy cunt called me this afternoon with "feedback" from my interview, in which he then proceeded to berate me for not just simply accepting the job, I stopped him in his tracks and told him he was a patronising cunt who hadn't got a fucking clue about anything, which he countered by trying to make out that somehow it was my fault that I had been lied to.

At the end of they day, all they, and indeed any employment agency, are bothered about is getting those finders fees and commissions, they couldn't care fucking less if in order to hit their monthly bonus target they have to lie through their teeth, and this is what is worrying, because such casual lies on that kind of scale, and like the usual type of pathological liar, when they get found out, they start playing the blame game, you know, where they reckon they haven't done a thing wrong and you're either lying yourself or some sort of idiot in some fashion.

This isn't the first time I've had an agency tell me a pack of lies which quickly unravel once the actual employer speaks to me, and then when confronted about them, try to make out that I'm somehow at fault.

To be continued....probably.... 

 

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