Agents Can’t Read

Not that anyone is going to be surprised by this, but it seems that a number of recruitment agents have problems with basic reading skills.

This morning I got three emails from agents containing details of potential jobs. In two of the three cases they were actually quite good matches for my skills. But, of course, I’ve just started a three month contract at the BBC and I’m not looking for work right now.

To make life easier for agents (and, in theory, myself) I maintain a web page which has up to date information about my current availability and the list of skills that I’m interested in using. The theory is that an agent will have the address of that page in their database and they’ll check it before contacting me about work. That way they don’t waste their time contacting me unnecessarily and I don’t waste my time replying to their email.

So I wrote back to all three of them pointing out that I wasn’t available and giving them the address of this useful page. I’ve just heard back from one of them who said:

Thank you for getting back to me. Anything changes, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Well no. Did you even read my email? The point is supposed to be that I don’t need to get in touch with you when my circumstances change. When my circumstances change I’ll update the web site and the next time I come up in the results of one of your searches you’ll check the page and see that I’m now looking for work.

Moron.

I swear that one day I’m going to snap and spew so much bile about recruitment agents all over this blog that none of them will ever deal with me again. Hopefully I can hold off from doing that until I’m rich enough to never have to work again :-)

Update: Just got a reply from one of the other agents. As I mentioned above, my email to them pointed them at a web page where they can always get my latest CV. This new reply simply said:

Please send word doc cv Thanks

My web page does has the CV in a number of formats. Including a Word document.