Who are recruitment agencies there for?

One undeniable advantage of having a blog is that people notice you more. Sometimes someone approaches me with a job offer. I don't see anything wrong with that, and it's always handled quite properly. Sometimes you're the target of a recruitment agency.

If you're looking for work, an agency can make a pretty good intermediary. If you aren't actively looking, you might expect a little more humility from an agency that approaches you. It follows from a simple fact: I'm not looking for work, and yet you want to find me a job.

I don't know how widely known this is, but a recruitment agency usually makes around three times a candidate's starting salary. The agency sets up an interview for you with Company X. You get the job and start at Company X with a salary of CZK 50,000. The agency gets CZK 150,000 from Company X. That's a pretty good business, don't you think?

That's exactly why I'd expect a recruitment agency to value me and treat me with tact when I am not actively looking for work. Unfortunately, I've found that some agencies see things differently. In fact, I've come away with the firm impression that some think you exist so they can interview you.

That strikes me as rather backward. I'd expect to look through a set of offers and make my own choice before the agency did anything else. Then I would decide if I wanted to pursue any of the offers. If so, we could talk about how to do the interview.

One unnamed recruitment agency took this to absurd lengths, at least in my view. I put up with its headhunter spamming me about every three months. The crowning achievement of these headhunters, and I use the term deliberately, came when they told me on Monday afternoon to come to an interview on Tuesday or Wednesday. They even said I could choose. Fortunately, they must not have recovered from my assertive reply, which boiled down to this: Was that a joke? That's not how this works, folks. I'll be the one making the choices!

Here's my advice for dealing with a recruitment agency.

Be assertive with recruitment agencies every time and under all circumstances, whether you're looking for a job or they've approached you. They're there for you. If an agency doesn't show enough humility and won't make a reasonable effort to accommodate you, walk away. And don't worry about being left on the shelf. The famous saying still applies: business is business…

What you may not know about the term “headhunters”

Besides being a “derogatory” name for recruitment agencies, Head Hunters is a name willingly adopted by the infamous hooligans of London's Chelsea and by units of the U.S. Army's 1st (Airmobile) Cavalry in Vietnam.