I have registered with a number of recruitment agencies but with no work to show for yet. However, I do not believe they are a waste of time necessarily. It seems like the key is to get on a semi-friendly tone with one person in the agency, preferably the one that interviews you if you get that far. And then call that person every couple of weeks and remind them that you are still alive and still looking for work. Hopefully this will result in them taking a liking to you and remembering you when they come across a job that would suit your experience and skills.
When you first register, usually online, you’ll most likely get an automatic confirmation and then never hear from them again. A good move next would be to give them a call and ask them what the next steps are. They’ll probably ask what interests you have in terms of work, and then put you in touch with the person working on recruitment for that sector. This is the person that it would be good to keep in touch with on a regular basis and hopefully you’ll meet them face to face at an initial interview.
One thing that is worthwhile to ask that person whether there are specific skills or aspects of your CV that is most marketable for them. That way they can help you with tailoring your CV in the best way for them when they are selecting candidates to put forward for jobs.
Calling recruiters is a fairly less intimidating way of practising your phone-manners. The advise I’ve gotten is to call every couple of weeks. I hate calling strangers and I always feel like I come across as a nervous douche on the phone. However, with the regular calls to the recruitment agencies I feel slightly more at ease with cold-calling on job stuff. I’m still not completely there yet, but hopefully I’ll write more about this later as I have tried it out a bit more.
The relationship between yourself and the agent is a weird one where you might become quite friendly, but at the end of the day it is a professional relationship in which the other one can get you work. So always showing yourself from your best side would be the preferable default, even when you attend somewhat informal interviews.
Keeping the agent sweet seems to be important, and when the agent I had been in contact with seemed to be wavering in slight annoyance of my early morning call, I followed up with a polite email thanking her for the help she had given me so far and it seemed to be a good move.
It is probably better to use recruitment agencies as only one facet of your multi-pronged job hunting approach. If you think all that’s needed is to sign up online and then the phone will start ringing with offers, you’ll probably be disappointed (unless you’ve got an engineering degree – everybody loves hard science). If you just reserve, say one morning, every week or two to call the agents you are in contact with, after a while that perseverance might pay off.
Might not be final solution
Recruitment agencies might not be able to get you a full-time job or a permanent contract, but they can give you temporary work that might come in handy later on if you are just starting out and in need of some work experience.
The high street ones cater for a much bigger audience and will often spread across lots of different sectors. The reviews I’ve read online tend to be quite varied and many with bad experiences of not getting paid etc. I registered with one and they emailed me back with ‘an exciting new opportunity’ – chugging wholly on commission..
Looking around for the right kind of recruitment agency for the area of work you are interested in is a good way to home in on the kind of experience you want to get. REC (Recruitment and Employment Confederation) is good site for finding specialised recruitment agencies for different sectors (UK only).
I’m getting back in touch with the recruiters I’ve used so far after new years and will write updates as I go along. Some of the ones I’ve found useful focus on third sector and charities, on bilingual work and with a graduate recruitment branch.
Picture by mercurialn
recession graduate 