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BBC exposes dirty tricks used by some recruitment agencies

Published on May 18, 2009 |

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A BBC Scotland investigation has highlighted some of the naughty things some recruitment agencies get up to.

The programme, The Investigation: Employment Agencies, which aired on Monday, exposed some of the dirty tricks which are used within the industry (although those involved are at pains to point out that only a minority of agents are guilty of such behaviour!)

Some of the tricks, familiar to many contractors, and mentioned in the programme, include:

1) Advertising jobs which simply don't exist (this seems to be a very common practice)
2) Collecting CVs with sole intention of inputting the details into the agency database (and rarely writing back to the applicant)
3) Collecting electronic CVs with same purpose as above (often auto-generating a 'thank you' message to the applicant).
4) Stealing job adverts penned by competitor agencies.

IT contractor Ian Sinclair told the BBC that the practice of replicating other agency's adverts "can be easy to spot as some spelling mistakes are simply cut and pasted from one advert to the next."

Sinclair also said that one agency even tried to recruit him for a contract role, when he was already doing the job they were attempting to recruit him for!

You can read more background to the programme on the BBC site.