Thursday, April 25, 2019

Veterinary Recruitment Companies

I know some people have had great experiences with recruitment companies but knowing the way they work, I chose to avoid them.

Recruitment companies advertise jobs, recruit and screen applicants then forward the CV's of suitable applicants to a practice for them to interview; for doing this they charge the practice several thousand pounds.
The great thing about this is that their websites are often a one-stop-shop where you can filter jobs by sector (Small, Farm, Academia), location and various other things. They give you an overview of what jobs are out there and can be great for finding jobs. As a practice it's handy because they screen all the applicants and present you with a couple of suitable people to interview.

Their websites rarely give details of the practice, though if you know the area you can usually work it out, as they don't want you to approach them directly and cut out the recruiters. This can make it difficult to research jobs and see if it would be a good fit for you.
This works well for many industries where there are lots of varied applicants applying for the same role like Tech, Engineering etc but I know lots of people who have been put forward for vet jobs that are completely not suitable, because the recruiter just wants their £X,000 commission.

A friend of mine who graduated last year was really excited to get several interviews, the recruiter got her really excited in that she was exactly what they were looking for and offered her all kinds of things she was specifically looking for. She travelled for interviews (which can be expensive in itself) and realised once she got there that her and the practice weren't compatible at all but the recruiter just needed the figures.
It's so easy to get caught up in the excitement of your first job interviews and they're telling you everything you want to hear that you get swept away and then it turns out to be a waste of everyone's time.

I naively gave my email address to one recruitment company (it's common for exhibitors to scan your conference badge to enter their competitions etc) at BSAVA Congress in 2017 and once they had my details I got weekly emails and a couple of phone calls as they'd found the perfect job for me, in far flung regions of the UK ...I wasn't even applying for jobs back then!
I asked them to stop, which they did for a while, but then they picked up again when one of their employees set up his own company and stole my details and those of several others I know.
Clearly a breach of GDPR and it ended up going to the ICO but that's a whole other story...

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