What is it with these guys? Do any of them actually understand what consultants do for a living?Does anyone know of any reputable agencies that actually have half a clue about what the job entails?Thanks,Rach xx

Hi Rachel. Like with most industries, there are the good, the bad and the ugly in the recruitment sector. We ask the Top-Consultant readership to vote each year on the recruitment firms (and individual recruiters) they have had the best experiences of working with. Could be a good shortlist of reputable firms for you to approach - you can download a copy of the results at:<a href=http://www.top-consultant.com/recruitment_report.asp>http://www.top-consultant.com/recruitment_report.asp</a>Hope this proves helpful.Rgds, Tony Restell (Top-Consultant.com)

yawn!

Answer: Don&apos;t use them.

you know, that people are the same where ever we go. There is good and bad in everyone. We learn to live and we learn to show each other what we need to survive, together alive.

Most of them are truly awfulI seem to have gotten on some sort of a phone list now, and some public school sounding chappy regularly calls me up, introducing himself as a "Head hunter" (ALARM BELLS) to offer some "ideal" career opportunity.That&apos;s the point at which I ask to be removed from their phone lists and slam the phone down on poor Nathaniel / Alexander / Tarquin

Just like managment consultants

Too true Dave. Please see also: Rip-off!: The Scandalous Inside Story of the Management Consulting Money Machine (Paperback) by David Craig (Author) Quate: " a majority of consultants continue to delude themselves about what they are really doing"

there seems a determination to write of a whole industry based on a few bad experiences. There are some truly awful recruiters and some excellent ones. It has been rightly pointed out in the past that the barriers to entry are not high (nor are the barriers to exit as it happens!). When you reach the upper end of the scale as a candidate you become interesting to the upper end of the recruitment industry and begin to know the sector better. You consequently have a better experience. Also you are senior enough to be a client, which any sensible recruiter will remember when dealing with you. Remember that a recruiter&apos;s fee is usually calculated against the salary of the candidate. If the candidate is junior, the recruiter needs to make more placements and the whole business becomes commoditised. Senior vs junior level recruitment is a bit like comparing the service you get at McDonald&apos;s with the service you get at the Ritz. The higher calibre recruiters will usually deal only at the upper end of the industry where the salaries (and fees) are higher. If the deal size is higher the recruiter can invest significantly more time and energy in the candidate. A strategy firm would not send its partner to run a project for the local corner shop. Equally, the recruitment industry does not use its best people on junior candidates.

What is wrong with these guys? Do any of them actually know anything about the industries they "consult" into? Does anyone know any reputable strategy consultancies, which charge sensible fees and position industry experts onto projects?Sister of Rach xxxx

Ha ha. Touche.I think the answer to both Rachel and Clint&apos;s questions is that firms that have consultants with high content knowledge do exist, but only for a given niche. The big names who you are more likely to come into contact with tend to provide a generalist service. If you are looking for help within a niche or are highly skilled in that niche yourself, that is when you tend to go out of your way to find or be found by a specialist.

Where&apos;s the defence? Has anyone reading this thread ever received a job through the assistance of a recruitment agent? I know I have. We&apos;re always quick to talk about the negatives but the fact that it&apos;s a multi million pound industry indicates that there are some positives associated with them too.

I&apos;ve been with a number of major consulting firms in the last weeks, discussing their hiring patterns. Most of these firms conceded that they are still making a significant proportion of all their hires through recruitment agencies - so shun them at your (career) peril.Tony RestellTop-Consultant.com

Exactly.

Recruitment agents who called themselve headhunters are LIARS, CHEATS and THIEFS. Headhunters recruit CEOs and CFOs and normally take 12-24 months to make a placement.We (candidates) are a product and at junior levels a commodity - recruitment agents are like the Tescos of this world. They command a significant advantage as they control the supply chain. At the end of the day, we dont pay them for their service, employers do - they provide a service to them, not to us.So most of the recruitment agents will screw us whether we like it or not. Some do it honestly and nicely and say thank you afterwards and are a pleasure to work with - these are few and far between. The rest are crooks of the highest order and part of the same club as politicians, used car salesmen and telemarketers.

Oooooooh!!!!Did the "weeds" stop you getting a job?

To ‘Wake Up’ Jeez...Here we go...Recruitment Agents don&apos;t &apos;screw&apos; candidates. If you are suitable for a job, ie; you match the requirements which have been given by a client you will be sent to that client. If you don&apos;t match what they want, you won&apos;t be sent. If agents repeatedly send candidates who are not suitable, the client stops using them. Just because you haven&apos;t been sent to a job doesn&apos;t mean you have been &apos;screwed&apos;. It’s very easy to place blame at the door of the agent if you fail to get a job. Which, I suspect is what you do. Repeatedly.

If I can be a little pedantic here... a &apos;headhunter&apos; or &apos;search consultant&apos; or whatever you want to call us, is someone who proactively identifies, qualifies and approaches potential candidates whether or not they are looking to move; a recruiter simply posts an ad and waits for the response and then manages the response. If you don&apos;t like dealing with headhunters/recruiters then simply don&apos;t. Should be a no brainer for a MC! The headhunter/recruiter can then move on to talk with people who are a) receptive to a well timed and informed conversation and b) professional enough not to take everything personally if they are not quite what the headhunter is looking for and c) not abusive. The amount of time spent by otherwise busy MCs on this forum debunking the very industry which enables many of them to move confidentially, negotiating package increases, and generally smoothing the process of taking up a new role they didn&apos;t need to find (as it was brought top them, talk about service!), is incredible. Oddly if you were to check out a recruiter discussion board you would find most of it is about how to improve the experience of candidates and clients, how to go the extra mile etc.As for being &apos;weeds&apos; you might want to rethink that - do you work with the expectation that you either achieve x, y and z or bang goes the mortgage etc? No you probably don&apos;t. There are no weeds in headhunting I can assure you, and some of us actually decided against being an MC after graduation because we liked the idea of being a headhunter - I did, and have been doing it for years since.

... although quite a few car salesmen and telemarketers end up in recruitment!

Nice to hear from Mars a Day. I share your views and am equally horrified by some of the childish and frankly brainless remarks I read on this forum where the entire staffing industry is seemingly discredited with such utter ignorance based o na few bad experiences. I am sure like me, Mars a Day would be able to show you vast numbers of testimonials from satisfied clients and candidates. As someone who has C-level access within some of the clients you serve as strategy consultants, I even find myself defending (and explaining) the work conducted by strategy consultants on quite a regular basis. I think it is fair to assume that most of those who make these sorts of remarks are generally not those we would be proactively approaching. I will admit that I have been extremely offended by some of the personal abuse I have received from the strategy consulting sector, which insults me all the more because I have signed testimonials from the very top end of the industry.My suggestion is this. If you work for a strategy consulting firm and you do not wish to be contacted by any member of the recruitment/search industry, please identify yourself through this thread. Although this will not completely rule out the chances of your being contacted, you will at least not receive a call from a recruiter who reads this forum. I will add a note on a weekly basis to this thread to ensure that the list of names is regularly put to the top of the list of threads. This way all recruiters reading this site will have a clear view of the candidates they should not contact.

Good idea Debate Rages - how about a national Top Consultant Register of MCs who do NOT want to be contacted? One point about these abusive candidates though - how many times have we had that call from the rude individual, when their circumstances change and they need to access the market quickly through a reliable channel? The attitude changes with the market I find - given the boom market they can afford to be dismissive of headhunters (which oddly I have found to be a rare attitude in either banking or industry where they see headhunters more positively). Maybe these people don&apos;t realise that just as MCs talk about recruiters not to talk to (or even don&apos;t talk to them at all), so too we have our blacklists, and I for one never go back on a blacklisted name regardless of how suitable they are for a client. I have my professional pride, its not all about the money.

Hold on a moment there, Mars, surely the MC company (ie your employer, indirectly speaking) is paying you to find the best candidate for the job, regardless of any pathetic personal grudges that you might hold?I can&apos;t imagine any of your clients would be too happy to learn that you are in the habit of turning away promising candidates, whatever the reason...

Come on James - are you being serious? We get paid only when you accept a job. It is therefore not in any of our interests to blacklist you if it&apos;s not necessary. What most of you don&apos;t comprehend is that this industry is INCREDIBLY small. I never EVER want to represent someone that my client thinks is rude or unprofessional and to be quite honest if you can’t simply say to someone, “I’m very happy and not looking at the moment please don’t contact me for the next x months / years” then I doubt your interpersonal skills are up to scratch and I don’t want to jeopardise a relationship that I have worked very hard to build. I speak to my clients EVERY day, know everything about them and have looked after them countless times when they’ve had too much to drink. They call me and either laugh at or praise what you say in interview and from this I am constantly learning what they do and do not want to hear. They listen to me when I say I know it says X on the CV or it implies Y but the candidate is excellent for Z reason and you should meet them. We are the ones that enable a certain percentage of you to get the meeting in the first place. I would never tell my candidate if this were the case as I would want them to feel confident throughout but I would undoubtedly coach them on what the interviewer wants to hear and imply what needs to be said to overcome initial reservations. You should realise that without that initial dialogue all an employer sees is a job diary.

So, how bad is it on your books guys when a candidate accepts a good offer but shortly before the start date pulls out because they&apos;ve got a better offer elsewhere? I am sure it&apos;s quite bad for you not to mention the affected employer. Is the candidate destined to be the scorn of the recruitment industry?

Unlikely. It all depends on the individuals involved but if you are a good match to a role then chances are you will be put forward (so long as you didn&apos;t mess anyone around in the first instance). You certainly wouldn&apos;t be blacklisted in the recruitment industry and to be honest I&apos;ve no idea how any candidate could have his/her name blackened across the industry as recruiters talk less to other recruiters than they do to unsuitable candidates. And we all know how often they get called.

Candidate - it&apos;s no issue at all if you accept a better job elsewhere, be it for role, career opportunities or salary.If I was doing my job properly I would know everything you had on the go and I would be working with the client on salary expectations etc ensuring where possible that these were met.If the position is a better one, more fool me for not covering it if it&apos;s in the consulting industry and if it&apos;s in industry, I learnt long ago to be resilient.

This is more like it - an engaging and interesting discussion at last around the recruitment industry, albeit one of the more unpleasant aspects - blacklisting. I would not advocate blacklisting across the industry (impossible anyway) but I do - very rarely - blacklist someone for my own purposes and it has to be an extreme case for this. But if I have to I will, and do. James made a good point - where lies the duty of the headhunter/recruiter? To be honest there is never 1 sole person right for the role, and how could I confidently and honestly champion that candidate, collaborating with them to put them in the best light (ie to show their worth) if right from the start the relationship is one of disrespect? It is that which leads to the commoditisation of candidates, not the industry generally.

in response to James and co. remember that we are often asked by clients what a candidate&apos;s personality is like. We are duty bound to answer that question honestly. So yes, James, you could suggest that we are holding a "pathetic grudge" or you could say that if we tell our client that you are a decent, honourable, professional, well spoken, articulate balanced individual and you turn out to be as short-sighted, ignorant and rude as we knew you actually were, our client is not going to value our opinion in future. In terms of helping candidates, we do represent the client and not the candidate. However, an honest, decent candidate who values my opinion will inevitably get a bit more help and advice than the rude and abusive candidate. This is not deliberate, it is just inevitable. Frankly, there are a lot of candidates out there - we are under very little pressure to work with people we do not want to - and we will tell our clients why we do not want to work with them.

James.... by the way, I was not suggesting you are arrogant rude etc, the "you" referred to an unpleasant candidate!!

to the person who refers to the weeds and such, it sould be pointed out that head-hunters who take 12-24 months to recruit a CEO/CFO are probably smoking too much of whatever you are smoking. While the client side can take a long while, realistically, 6-8 weeks for the search is ususally more than ample. To the person entitled "peed off by these jokers", has it occured to you that if you are a grumpy git on the phone to a recruiter, that you may end up having your number passed to every new graduate who starts a job at that firm. "Call this guy, he would be perfect" as the team laughs in the background......

Ive gone all misty eyed with nostalgia...