It’s that time of my life again, where I search for jobs, apply and hear nothing.
I’m looking for a Newly Qualified position as an Employment Solicitor/Lawyer in the Cardiff and Bristol area, and would be prepared to commute as far as Swansea, Gloucester, Cheltenham and Bath, as I am due to qualify on 27 May 2007.
I don’t like the way they recruit solicitors. Most law firms recruit using recruitment agencies, and there are literally hundreds of them specialising in legal recruitment. Advertisements are usually anonymous, so you don’t know which firms you’re applying to. If a law firm is advertising through multiple agencies, you don’t know whether you’re applying for the same position in the same firm.
When a seemingly new position that I’m interested in pops up in my searches, I apply, and then I hear nothing. Communication is non-existent. If I apply for a job through a recruitment agency that I haven’t had contact with before, they usually ring me up the next day enthusiastic about my potential, get a few details and send me a letter in the post asking for a copy of my passport for ID purposes. I do as requested, and then hear nothing from them.
There are a number of positions I am particularly keen on, but I don’t hear anything, and as I don’t know the name of the firm, I can’t contact them to check whether they’ve received my application. How do we really know that the recruiters are actually submitting our CVs? It scares me to think that I could be missing out on opportunities.
I really don’t know how to handle this. I guess I’ve just got to plow ahead and hope that my luck will come in one day soon.
Recruitment agencies should be made illegal. I have no faith in them at all, and think about it. In MY case as you know, I work in IT. There’s a lot of technological “buzzwords” that’s invloved in terms of job searches – and how could I expect a recruitment drone to understand them? For example there’s two technologies that’s work more or less the same way, but have different names – I name one of them, the job name another one.
In that case, the company would give me an interview anyway due to the fact that it’s basically the same thing, but a recruitment drone? It’s different…
I imagine it’s the same with law.
Furthermore, with many companies having to meet disabilities requirements – sometime often have to guarentee interviews if you are disabled (ie, you’re deaf(!)) – I make use of this…it’s a dog eat dog world so I use all advantages where I can possibly but how can a recruitment agency do the same?
They are pure evil – if you must use them – bother them all the time – call them 20 times a day, email them 100′s of time etc etc – keep your name stuck in their brain so that they’ll just give you a job to shut you up.
Or better still, try where possible to go DIRECT to the firms themselves.
Have you tried getting into the firms via Employment Opportunities? I did this and worked for Slaughter & May and a local law firm. It’s another way in.
What is “Employment Opportunities”? Not heard of that organisation.
http://www.opportunities.org.uk/
Joe is absolutely correct. You got to pester them into submission. I was an employment adviser before and agencies were a nightmare in terms of accessbility, attitude and deaf awareness. The main reason is because agencies’ employees have targets to meet and dealing with deaf candidates over typetalk or email will slow them down or they weed out candidates they think they will have the most success with. This is not fair practice as most juicy jobs go through agencies these days whereas JobCentre get the crappy ones. In effect, there is an invisible job exclusion zone for us deafies.
Tony “the eternal optimist that the next deaf-uk-jobs email to land in my inbox WILL have a job opportunity in my hometown (and it is NOT in London!)” Barlow