Recruitment Consultants

Since last Friday I have applied for 7 jobs, via various recruitment agencies, and as of today I have been put forward for 3. Now I’m waiting to see if I get any interviews. Please God, don’t make me speak to any more recruitment consultants. How useless are these people? Has there ever been a single recruitment consultant that knows more than how to list of a bunch of acronyms? Generally, they will phone up, tell you about an amazing position, say they’re going to put you forward, and then all of sudden the job doesn’t exist anymore, and sometimes the person you originally spoke is impossible to get hold of. 

The main recruitment sites like Monster.co.uk and Jobserve.com are full of listings entered by employment agencies. It’s very rare that an employer itself posts on these boards. If you want, like me, only web developer type jobs listed directly by the employer check out 37signals Job Board, CrunchBoard, CSS Monster and Jobs @ JoelOnSoftware. Out of these niche job boards, only JoelOnSoftware allows you to filter jobs by country. All let you subscribe by RSS feed.

Here’s a plea to employers: Forget the large recruitment sites and please stop using employment agencies. They charge far too much for their services (not that I have to pay) and, like all middlemen, do nothing useful except create beaurocracy and get in the way of the task at hand. Instead, find a job board that caters for the particular niche you want and advertise directly and accurately.

I’d put recruitment consultants in the same bracket as estate agents. Useless, but a necessary evil.

Ikea

Our last trip to Ikea was on May 14th. This and each previous visit haunts me still. I’ll do anything to avoid a repeat visit to the Sweden’s second worst export.

This man has adopted the right attitude:

Ben Adetimle, 31, from Leytonstone, added: “I bought a sofa but when I turned my back someone stole it. I’m not upset. It’s just furniture, not worth dying over.” – ThisIsLondon

Exactly. Ben was speaking of his experience of a riot prompted by the opening of a new Ikea store in Edmonton in early 2005.

Who wants to go

traipsing around the labyrinthine displays. Hours lost hunting for furniture not in stock. Further hours spent queuing. Being charged to use a credit card. The ridiculous delivery fees (when you find you’ve bought too much for the boot). The hour’s journey back home. That’s before you have to build the things. And above all, you just get the impression that Ikea doesn’t care. Clagnut.

Ikea in Iceland is nothing like it is here in the UK, so says Steinunn. So I say the next time we visit Ikea we will be in Iceland.

Cassette Covers

I have about 200 audio cassettes taking up prime shelf space at home. I don’t listen to the cassettes much anymore, they have become ornaments, ugly ornaments.

Today I’ve started to box them up and have kept only a few of the non-labelled cassettes out as I’m intrigued to find out what’s on them. May be there’s a long lost gem that my band recorded back in its heyday. No really, I was in a band, and no, we never had a heyday but its always fun and self-indulgent to listen back and wonder what if… what if we had some talent.

I was gonna scan all the covers of the cassette singles, just the ones that came in a cardboard sleeve rather than a plastic cassette box, but the scanner wouldn’t do its magic autocrop function because the scanner lid was too high above the scanning element. In the end I just scanned the cassettes I got free from the Melody Maker, NME and Vox magazine. These tapes got a serious amount of playtime in my walkman and on my dodgy Aiwa stereo.