Recruitment Agencies

Former Member

Anybody been involved with agencies? I have been temping for about a year and a half doing admin stuff, in that time i've signed up for three agencies, they've all promised the world and delivered f**k all! Really need to vent about this! On signing up, i got all the usual agency lines like "yeah we'll get you temping, then we'll constantly be ringing you up about all the great permanent jobs we have coming in". Seriously, i've had about three phone calls in 6 months. One of the agencies got me a job in a call centre, which would be great if i hadn't told them from day one that i wanted nothing to do with call centre's. One of them rang me up saying this company loved my CV and definately wanted me for a permanent job, then rang me three days later saying the vacancy had been filled internally! Can you bloody believe that?! Everytime i call them, and ask if there's much going at the minute, they always say "no, the market's a bit quite at the moment", then you walk past their shop window and it's filled with perfectly suitable jobs! These people are using, money grabbing b*stards - as long as they've got you temping some crappy job somewhere and are making their money out of you, they don't give a crap.
And to top it off, at the moment i'm stuck with this temp job i hate, they keep piling loads more work and responsibilities on me that nobody else wants - because i'm just the lowly temp, it appears they can give me all the crap and do whatever the hell they want with me. All i wanna do is quit - if i had any money, i'd probably walk out today!
Anybody else got any agency stories? Would be interesting to hear if they've ever done anything useful for anyone...!

Former Member

The big national temping agencies to tend to be like that, with the notable exception of Office Angels. The big firms have so many people always there, and they have such a good website, that they don't need to try and match temps to jobs because their books are always full regardless.

Reed in Sunderland was a tiny office and they did a good job, but all my other encounters with Reed have been shocking.

The smaller independent ones always tend to be better, the temping agency I worked with always did return my calls, they did actively find me work, and they always asked how the wife was. They don't have big enough books to turn away people with bad customer service. Even when I went back after a gap of six months they knew who I was, asked after the wife, and found me a job within two weeks. It's the little things that count, sure they'd noted it on their system and didn't really remember me, but they did go to the effort to do that- many don't even do that. That's good.

And the jobs they found me were always great, too.

Other friends of mine have had similar experiences with small local firms. I'd try the local firms, they're always advertising in the jobs papers in the area.